Will the Union be a victim of multiculturalism?

One of the more striking statistics in yesterday’s Policy Exchange report on multi-ethnic Britain is the revelation that only 25 per cent of white Britons identify as British. This low figure may reflect people not wishing to fill out two boxes (that’s what Alex Massie says, anyway), but it certainly follows a noticeable trend of recent years – the decline of British identity in England. In contrast 64 per cent of white Britons in this report called themselves ‘English only’.

With the arrival of post-war migrants a great deal of effort was made to make the British identity less racial, more welcoming, and rightly so. But one of the unintended, although not very surprising, consequences of this is that white Britons have sought out an identity for themselves (understandably, as ‘white’ isn’t a particularly nice way of describing oneself, loaded as it is with baggage, and anyway I’m more the colour of a sunburned pig).