Friday 26 February 2010

Desire The Right

Treacherous Obama, eh? Er, no, actually. There is nothing new about any of this. America has always been opposed to British sovereignty or even influence anywhere in the Americas, and indeed anywhere beyond England, Scotland and Wales.

A lot of the British passport holders on the Falkland Islands these days are Saint Helenian. Attention to a British Overseas Territory is most useful in the debate about what it is to be British. Being British is not and has never been an ethnic identity. However reduced it may now be in these terms, being British is an imperial identity, transcending ethnicity as surely as Saint Paul's Roman citizenship was wholly compatible with the fact that he was a Greek-speaking Jew from present-day Turkey.

In view of the entirely voluntary constitutional status of each of the places in question, to be British is now to be not just any, but at some level all, of English, Scots, Welsh, Irish, Manx, Channel Islander, Mediterranean, North American (they are that, not West Indian, in Bermuda), Caribbean, South American, Southern African Creole, Indian Ocean Creole, and Polynesian.

1 comment:

  1. Being British, to me at least, has never been anything other than a global identity; to define oneself as 'British' is to express a connection with others throughout the world who regard themselves in some way as British.

    So I think most of us who are British think of ourselves as British and something: I'm British and English (with parentage and grandparentage all of which would have considered itself British, but not all English).

    I think this is where Tebbit's infamous Cricket Test rebounded on itself: supporting England is no more of a measure of Britishness than supporting India or the West Indies. It may be a measure of Englishness, but not of Britishness. If anything, it measured the smallness of Tebbit's conception of Britishness, rather than the Britishness of any of his targets.

    And these identities are malleable and interweavable; British Indian grandparents may have sons and daughters who feel themselves a mix of Indian and English, and grandchildren who consider themselves more English than Indian, most of the time. Similarly the Northern Irish in me surfaces occasionally; it doesn't stop me being British, but at times it sees some aspects of Britishness differently.

    But that, to me, is almost a defining characteristic of Britishness: that it absorbs into itself, usually gently and fairly slowly, the cultures with which it deals, and at the same time infiltrates them with its own sense of identity.

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