Understanding the difference

Tweet

 

The Foreign Secretary isn’t the first English politician to get confused over the difference between English and British, and he won’t be the last. Perhaps he does, however, deserve some sort of award for the speed with which he moved from one to the other in an article he wrote for yesterday’s Sunday Times (referenced here in today’s Guardian). The far right rioters, he wrote, have “forgotten about what it means to be English”, before going on to say that they “need to integrate back into Britishness”. The values from which he claims that they have opted out are thus, according to him, English; the society of which they have ceased to be a part is British. He probably sees no difference between being English and being British, and he’s far from being alone in that. But being unable to understand the difference is precisely the point – understanding anything about modern culture and identity in the UK requires a basic understanding that there isn’t one single universal definition. It’s an understanding whose absence he has so clearly demonstrated.