Demos Debate the British Identity Crisis

This is painful to watch.

The report "A Place for Pride" can be read here, but to be honest I really wouldn't bother.

From a nationalist perspective all you really need to know is this:

A lack of sensitivity to the nuances of the post-devolution UK state is apparent throughout the report. A survey poll on British institutions and cultural icons asked respondents to agree with statements such as ‘I am proud of David Beckham as a symbol of Britain’. The former captain of the English football team is an unlikely candidate to induce pride across the whole of the UK. Similarly, the idea that Shakespeare and the singing of ‘Jerusalem’ are primarily aspects of British rather than English pride is myopic at best. Whilst the authors misguidedly claim Scottish citizens are less adept at combining their Scottish identity with their British identity, they readily conflate Englishness and Britishness without acknowledging its implications.

The presence of competing Scottish, Welsh and English national identities also raise conceptual and rhetorical challenges in articulating an organic patriotic Britishness. The solution is revealingly retrogressive; each are described as ‘sub-patriotisms’ that are ‘politically regional identities’. The casual dismissal of Scottish, Welsh and English nationhood and citizenship is couched in the language of the past but has no place in a modern multi-national state such as the UK.