Pride in Britain? It’s history

A poll out this week found that only 41 per cent of those aged 18 to 27 are proud to be British. Frankly I’m surprised the figure is that high. After all, if you add together the immigration of recent decades and the concerted effort to demoralise the population that has gone on, that is exactly the sort of result you would expect.

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It has been achieved in a remarkably short space of time. In 2004, some 80 per cent of young people in the same age cohort said that they felt proud to be British. So within 20 years we have managed to halve our sense of national self-worth.

What explains it? Perhaps I should get the most dangerous explanation out of the way first. One reason why a lot of young people won’t say that they’re proud to be British is that they’re not British – at least not in any meaningful sense. As of June 2023, around 18 per cent of the population of England and Wales was born outside of this country. So almost a fifth of the population is not from here. And that is before you get into counting the people who are second- and third-generation migrants to the UK.

One of the great pretences of the UK and Europe for a couple of generations has been that once someone has the paperwork and becomes a citizen, they are as British as anyone else. It is a nicety partly borrowed from America, but a nicety nonetheless. If my parents had chosen to emigrate to Pakistan in the 1970s and I had been born in Pakistan, would I really feel Pakistani? Would I take pride in my identity? Would I feel the same pride as people whose families had lived in the country all their lives? I would have thought not, and I think most Pakistanis would agree with me.