Why are you proud to be British?

Introducing a tub-thumping op-ed in the Mail yesterday, Robert Jenrick quoted Orwell: ‘England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.’ Mr Jenrick’s thesis is a familiar one. It is that ‘England’s political and media elite’ (he didn’t get ‘metropolitan establishment’ in the text but it was supplied in the headline) ‘seem to actively disapprove’ of their nationality, and that this will not do. ‘I can’t stomach such lofty arrogance,’ he declared, calling instead for a willingness to ‘confront complex issues of identity’ while at the same time being unreservedly ‘proud to be British.’

In support of his call for complexity he reeled off a Ladybird History list of national achievements (invented parliamentary democracy; had the Industrial Revolution; ended the slave trade; ‘stood alone against Hitler in Europe’s darkest hour’) of the sort that elites can be supposed to disapprove. He acknowledged, admittedly, that almost everyone in the UK has an additional identity.