This article is taken from the April 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
As the failure of Britain’s mass migration experiment becomes more apparent by the day, proponents of a “values-based” national identity look increasingly outdated. According to commentators such as Fraser Nelson, “Britishness” is about nothing more than subscription to a handful of loose, propositional values — tolerance, pluralism, democracy. Buy into these simple ideas, and anybody can become British, or so we are told.
In truth, these “British values” are not about articulating a coherent model of national identity
But if that’s the aim of a loose, propositional national identity, it doesn’t appear to have been very successful. Far from representing an “integration miracle”, British society appears hopelessly divided, with different ethnic and religious groups advocating for their own interests and their own special institutions. Nor does it seem descriptively accurate as these modish “values” do nothing to distinguish us from our European neighbours, and would actively exclude many of our forefathers. These “British Values” are not found in the Laws of Alfred, Magna Carta, or the Acts of Union. But that isn’t the point.
In truth, these “British values” are not about articulating a coherent model of national identity. They exist to provide a loose framework for an increasingly multicultural society; the ultimate aim is not the maintenance of the base national culture, but the preservation of peace and orderliness, with conflict between groups kept to a minimum. For proof of the folly of this approach, look no further than the de facto segregation which characterises many of our towns and cities, and the increasing preponderance of openly sectarian political candidates.
Unfortunately, most alternative models of national identity are unappealing. Too often, patriotic Britons fall back on mere material expressions of nationhood — fish and chips, cricket, Shakespeare, Elgar. Our contributions to art, sport, and the culinary sciences are worthy of celebration, but are they really what makes us British? At risk of sounding like Otto English, should we really hang our national consciousness on shared fondness for a Victorian dish, brought to these shores by Portuguese Jews? Where does that leave us when tastes change, as they inevitably will?
So, if neither values nor material markers are sufficient, perhaps the political right has a favourable alternative? Political conservatives often retreat into a sort of “institutional nationalism”, which attempts to build an identity around shared loyalty to our supposedly ancient constitution. At face value, this is appealing. After all, Parliament and the Crown have been around for a long time, and constituted a useful rallying point for the generations which came before us — perhaps our institutions are what made us great?
But in the age of the Blairite constitution, with its commissions, experts, and special representatives, “institutional nationalism” has the pernicious effect of encouraging loyalty to institutions which do not necessarily reflect widely-held British interests. Our “ancient judiciary” has been co-opted by activist judges, while our “Rolls-Royce civil service” is now staffed by the worst sort of bureaucratic bean-counters. Like it or not, the progressive left now occupies these institutions, wearing their trappings like ghoulish skinsuit and using their historic reputation to encourage loyalty to the current dispensation.
Anyway, wouldn’t we still be British if we scrapped these bodies altogether? If we scrapped Parliament and all of its outgrowths, Britain would not simply disappear from the map. In truth, it is not our institutions which define our people but our people who create the institutions.
Nor does Protestant Christianity seem to provide a sufficient foundation for national identity, when a minority of modern Britons consider themselves Christian. Actual church attendance is even lower, with around 2 per cent of the population regularly attending Church of England services. Were Alexander Pope or John Henry Newman any less British than their Protestant peers? Are avowed atheists today inherently less British than their parish-church-attending countrymen?
Mere Christianity does not seem to capture what makes Britain unique and successful, given that we share little common cause with majority Christian nations such as Tonga or Namibia. Christian ethics have clearly played an important role in shaping our national norms — but do we really exist as part of a shared civilization with Haiti or Zambia?
Instead of building our national identity around transient expressions of the nation, perhaps we ought to build our national identity around the nation itself, and the people who constitute it. What are the peculiar habits, customs, behaviours, and norms which make us truly unique?
To that end, we have plenty to work with. In fact, the British people are very strange — and the English are the strangest of them all. Take an anthropological look at the peoples of the British Isles, and you will soon find that they have innumerable distinguishing features, many of which have endured through centuries of constitutional, religious, and economic change.
Just ask Emmanuel Todd, the French historian and anthropologist whose global model of family systems identifies the English as one of a small handful of cultures which exhibit the “absolute nuclear” model of family life. Combined with John Hajnal’s work on the “Western European marriage pattern”, Todd’s work paints a stark picture of English family life, which differs considerably from that of our European peers. For at least 750 years, the English have been a nation of small families, who buy and sell land, and who marry relatively late. Our parents expect us to leave home for paid work, we owe relatively few obligations to our extended kin, and we have relatively high freedom to select our own spouses.
This low-obligation family culture also enables an unusual degree of economic mobility, and it encourages a culture of bourgeois saving and property ownership. After all, if we are tied to neither our parents nor the land, it becomes much easier to migrate internally in search of improved prospects. The work of historians such as Alan Macfarlane and Peter Laslett supports the idea that the peoples of the British Isles have been unusually mobile. Medieval records of land transfer indicate a high degree of internal economic migration as early as the 12th century, with cities like Bristol, Norwich and London growing quickly according to economic headwinds.
This high degree of internal movement has been coupled with a relatively low level of external migration. Save for a few Norman nobles, a handful of Huguenots, and a smattering of Flemish wool merchants, the population of the British Isles has remained remarkably stable for the past millennium or so — that is, until the second half of the 20th century. The relative stability of our population has enabled our norms to work on their own terms, ensuring cohesion despite domestic population churn.
Of course, no man is truly an island — so how does a nation of individuals regulate interpersonal relationships? A mixture of economic mobility and loose kinship ties mean that the English — later British — could not simply rely on family networks for sustenance and support. Instead, we developed norms which enable people to trust strangers. Arcane rules around politeness, public space norms, and meritocratic selection are all tools designed to help society run smoothly in the absence of kinship networks.
We should dare to embrace the real roots of our national character
So too did our political and legal institutions emerge as a means of settling disputes between individuated strangers. The law of tort and strong contractual protections provide a legal framework for mutual engagement between free individuals — the state acts not as enforcer but as referee, providing a framework for the public resolution of private wrongs. Those who show their inability to behave according to the terms of our individuated society were punished harshly, with exile or execution, a brutal method of ensuring that those who remained in society were honest and trustworthy.
It also produced a flourishing civic society, in which individuals could associate with one another according to mutually agreed-upon terms. These are Edmund Burke’s “little platoons”, a much-misrepresented idea which is often used to justify state intervention in the name of “community”.
In fact, a proper understanding of Burkean mutual society should lead us to be less interventionist, not more. The state ought to do less to regulate the terms on which people associate — even if that means permitting discrimination. Likewise, housing policy should be based around the idea that people ought to be able to relocate based on their personal needs.
Combined with our intellectual tradition of empiricism, it was these underlying norms which helped to produce the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions. A mobile population and the absence of inter-clan conflict made us well-suited to producing dense but relatively orderly urban centres; meritocratic selection allowed British companies to succeed where many of their peers failed.
For centuries, these norms have proven to be remarkably durable, because they do not stem from mere philosophy or political expediency — they are the deeply ingrained habits of the British peoples. The mistake of the “British values” crowd is not in assuming that Britons are united by common threads, but in assuming that these common threads are what make us Britons.
Instead of defaulting to easy tropes about what defines us, we should dare to embrace the real roots of our national character. An individuated, mobile population, which prefers meritocracy to nepotism, and which conducts itself according to pre-agreed norms that allow strangers to place their trust in one another.
This simple formula, combined with tight borders and the removal of dangerous elements from society, created the Britain that we know today. A rediscovery and reapplication of these norms would serve as a far healthier foundation for our society than modish values or creaking institutions.
