What will British identity mean in 2050? The leap is so immense, and the perils of this particular age – the climate crisis, chiefly, but also the insistent rise of fascism and the turmoil it tends to bring with it – so vast, that it feels audacious and borderline dangerous to even conceive of the nation 30 years hence, let alone predict the notions binding the people within it.
However, holding that petrifying thought in my head, I was ambling up the stairs of a primary school, looking at the posters a bunch of kids had been forced by some Goveian idiocy to make about “British values”. This is part of what our collective identity boils down to – the beliefs we share to an exceptional degree. . And given that a faith in our continued existence is a prerequisite for thinking seriously about anything, it is reasonable, and not tempting fate, to ask: what will hold these adults of 2050 together? What hand-me-downs, if any, will they still be wearing?
One of them had made a collage from bits of newspapers, with the words “rule of law”, “democracy”, “riots” and “arrested” cut out and pasted on to a rough-hewn and rather beautiful union flag. Charmingly, he had taken “rule of law” to mean that what we were most proud of was that, when we rioted, we (almost) always got arrested.
Overall, the rule of law and the institutions of democracy come up a lot in our collective self-fashioning. When the Guardian raised this question in 2004 – what would 2020 look like? – the think-tanker Tom Bentley wrote of our “grand institutions” all being in retreat: he lumped together membership of trades unions and churches with trust in “the monarchy, the legal system, the church, the civil service or parliament”, and saw it all in terminal decline, on a downward trajectory that had been set since the mid-80s.
This was only half-right: leaving the monarchy aside for the moment, certainly trade unions and churches have seen their memberships fall off. Democracy, however, remains core to the British identity: while trust in politicians is low, belief in representative democracy remains high, according to the most recent Social Attitudes Survey. It looks like a paradox, but it isn’t. You can hate your doctor, but still believe in medicine. Parliamentary democracy is fundamental in the way cricket is – we might not be the best at it, but at least we invented it.
What we have learned from very recent history, though, is how fragile things are when you don’t write them down. Parliament can be prorogued; the executive can move against the legislature, with the courts as the first, last and only line of defence. The structures that make us British can be upended by our own delinquent elites, under the cover of the more intense Britishness-in-the-moment of a posh accent.
The glaring omission in all our predictions from 2004 was that we would end up at war over conflicting identities, because that is what this crisis is: which is more quintessential, Jacob Rees-Mogg’s top hat, or the sovereignty of parliamentarians? The hostile environment or multiculturalism? It is unlikely that it will be resolved without some kind of constitutional overhaul. What was once a pride in the history of these institutions will become, if it survives as such, a pride in their ability to innovate, adapt, grow and codify.
There was also an early-21st-century certainty that civic engagement was on the wane. “Apathy” and “lethargy” were the giant evils, particularly afflicting young people. The most optimistic take was that new groupings would spring up to replace old ones – “online communities, sports clubs, issue-based campaigns or neighbourhood associations” – and you will notice that these are mainly local and apolitical. In fact, the revivification of civic life has most noticeably come from issues that are intensely political and often global – the climate strikes, the women’s marches (this is mirrored on the right, of course; Steve Bannon-style ethno-nationalism is peculiarly multilingual, considering how obsessively bordered it is). The idea of Britishness as an organising principle for civic engagement had a brief, “ironic” reboot with Cool Britannia and hipsters joining the WI, but that masked the more interesting development: the principles of universalism and shared global objectives starting to bolster national identity rather than undermine it. To make that more concrete, I’d expect the union movement to be reinvigorated by transnational actions against global corporate foes. I’m not sure this would work for the Church of England.
Brexit will change the way we orientate ourselves towards the EU and the rest of the world – but not, I would posit, in the direction the Conservatives expect. As we saw in 2016, the values case for international cooperation was undeveloped: we could see the trading case, but we hadn’t connected any grander ambitions – to curtail climate change, to strengthen workers against employers, to extend opportunity, particularly in education – with anyone abroad, fighting for the same things. If anything, the way the rest of the world slotted into a belief system related to Britishness – it was as a set of supplicants or victims. We conceived our role in terms of debt jubilees, aid budgets, protective foreign policy (or failures thereof, cf Syria). Broadly speaking, we took confidence in this historically ridiculous notion of ourselves, if not as the world’s policeman, at least as part of its police force. I expect to see that recede after (hopefully only) one hooligan Conservative term, to be replaced by a much more fundamental sense of cooperation and mutuality as part of our core. (This would, of course, be quite a familiar iteration of the British sense of self, from the postwar years.)
It is impossible to discuss British identity without considering the possibility that the United Kingdom will no longer exist, now that there is no longer any chance of averting Brexit. There are some die-hard optimists who think the size of the Conservative majority will lead them towards a softer path, now that they don’t have Faragists to placate. Yet it is just as likely that a hard, Singapore-in-the-North-Sea deal is what Johnson now intends, in which case it would be surprising to see the union survive even in the medium term. The unionists no longer have a majority in Northern Ireland, which, coupled with the disregard by Westminster, makes a strong case for reunification. Scotland, meanwhile, is unlikely to slink back into obedience. At any event – the UK staying together or breaking apart, or breaking up and then getting back together again – we will have to see a re-evaluation of what binds its four parts. We have lived our entire lives on the assumption that this union simply was – that much blood was shed in its creation, and here it is, a fait accompli. To be forced to examine that as a marriage in jeopardy, rather than one that is comfortable and unassailable, will be as ugly as any near-divorce in the short term. Yet in the long term, it must force a more nourishing and respectful evaluation of these four nations and what they mean to one another. Either that, or they break apart – and why stop there: why not an independent London and a new king of Wessex?
At the primary school and far beyond, The Great British Bake Off is huge in the shared consciousness. The great decline of the water-cooler moment – TV that we all watched together and talked about the next day – never arrived. Perhaps I’m being myopic, but I cannot see Strictly being any less popular in 30 years than it is today. In this era of ceaseless, intense culture wars – vegans against 4x4-drivers, feminists against Trump fans, etc – one sphere has remained curiously immune: that of popular culture. Nobody ever claims I’m a Celebrity for the left or right (though I did once argue that Bake Off had a leave aesthetic but a remain sensibility).
Every now and then, there will be a sharp moment when one half of the nation is laughing at a joke the other half doesn’t get – Mrs Brown’s Boys, Michael McIntyre – but, speaking generally, it is amazing how solidly we hold together on this axiomatic, existential matter of what’s funny and what isn’t. This is particularly striking when the moment didn’t start out as deliberate comedy at all – Boaty McBoatface, the flurry of reviews left by pretend-diners at the Woking Pizza Express. British exceptionalism is obnoxious, so let’s not say we outdo all other nations in our towering sense of humour, and are marching into a future defined by ever better jokes, but arguably, we are peculiar in how deadly serious we are about it, in how much store we set by the togetherness of mirth, in how much more meaningful that is than the pomp events, the national anthem, Remembrance Day, the explosions of performative patriotism that read as nostalgic even as they are happening.
The main threat to the flag-waving arm of British identity is that its raison d’etre, the royal family, probably won’t maintain its current position. I would guess in 30 years they will voluntarily have become more like the Belgian or Spanish royals, largely freed from public duty, photographed only when one of them is surprisingly good looking. They survived a huge amount of falling from pedestals – all that divorcing in the 90s – but the pincer pressures of Prince Andrew’s disgrace, from one direction, and Harry and Meghan’s attempt to force progress from a position defined by stasis, from the other, will do for them as a muster point for national pride.
The way we worry about children, the culture they consume, and the cultural behaviours they exhibit, tells us a lot about our anxiety for the future. It’s interesting that, even in 2004, we were fretting about their addiction to phones – there wasn’t even much going on with a phone back then. Now they contain the sum of all human knowledge. I wouldn’t draw a significant warning from it; I bet if Wordsworth had had a smartphone, he would have spent 45% of his time looking at it, and still written poetry. Maybe not as much, but arguably, some of his poems could be shorter. However, the infinite accessibility of knowledge and culture inevitably broadens horizons; I can’t remember us being very interested in Korean pop 30 years ago. The sense that this is driving a global homogeneity, so that ultimately everybody will consume the same sort of everything – food, music, sitcoms, memes, hate figures, unrest – has to be set against that very homogeneity driving a human need to differentiate. The more connected we are, the more intensely we feel our distinct identities. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a subtle intensification of regional identity, coexisting quite naturally with an increasingly global perspective.
What really struck me about the predictions we made in 2004 was how dispiriting many of the conversations were: it was all ageing populations, individualism, consumerism, society reduced to the social life, morality reduced to manners, community reduced to the family, families reduced to the nucleus, institutions drained of relevance, ideologies abandoned by an increasingly atomised populace, who might come together over brand loyalty or gardening. Or they might not.
There was very high consensus around things that simply weren’t true: that the large questions of politics had been resolved, and our debates in the future would be largely technical; that solidarity was dated, ambition was personal; that people’s dreams would hereafter be very simple: a home, a hearth, a partner, some stuff. This made the most realistic future the one that largely resembled the present, any notion of seismic change centring mainly on technology – faster stuff. Turbulent times also throw off our readings, of course: it’s possible that we overestimate the pace of change in the future, when things change so fast from week to week right now. But a national crisis, whether political, social, environmental, economic, or all of them at once, also underlines the necessity of radical change, and cracks open the possibility that it might be radically for the better.
