The Saturday Essay: What does it mean to be English today?

Our patriotism is too often a narrow, unintelligent insularity which rightly surprises other nations

LONG AGO, at school, we used to write on the front of our exercise books our names and then: Hunslet, Leeds, Yorkshire, England, Great Britain, The World, The Universe. We knew what we were and where we were; incidentally, hardly anyone included Europe.

In America for a year, our young son, at four years old, looked up after a few weeks and said: "I'm English, and I ought to be in England." He too knew what and where.

Now, in old age, I am usually not quite sure what I am and, in particular, whether I wish to be "British" or "English", or both. No wonder foreigners are often confused or sniffy about our various nomenclatures. They don't usually relate "Briton" to the early Britons. Many Americans think that "Great Britain" is a typical boast instead of, in the 1707 Act of Union, an invention, what Defoe called "A union of policy, not of affections" (as Linda Colley recalls in her admirable Britons).

US Immigration Officers tend to look sardonic if they note once again the pompous and metallic declaration at the front of our passports, that "Her Britannic Majesty's Secretary of State requests and requires on behalf of her Majesty" that we be allowed in freely.

The Welsh and Scots have a clearer field. They know they are Welsh or Scots, and if they wish can care little about other official titles. The Scots rightly resisted "North British", which used to be the name of Edinburgh's premier hotel. Luckily, the Welsh have escaped "West Britain".

To settle unthinkingly for most uses of "Britain" and "British" is now becoming unusual. However far back forms of them may reach, for most of us they have much younger connotations. The Oxford English Dictionary recognises this by saying "British" is: "Now chiefly used in political or imperial connections." That fits: it feels official, invented, administrative.

At my working class Elementary School, the "imperial connections" were much stressed. History was largely a recital of the achievements of "The British Army" in creating "The British Empire" by feats of arms over the lesser breeds. They couldn't be called the English Army or the English Empire; too many Scots, Welsh and Irish fought in, and for, those. Nevertheless such appellations, even in our school years, gave the word "British" auras we did not like.

Contemporaries, who went to public schools, whether major or minor, tell similar stores. History as cricket-and-Empire, the OTC, Newbolt. Chauvinism usually finds its strongest home in things called "British". Oddly, Henley, just as gung-ho patriotic as Newbolt, unhesitatingly gave all his warlike praise to "England" not to "Britain". Little Englandism. Now we have the British Commonwealth, a tricksy late flowering. And, of course, the BBC; which just passes.

That story was also riddled with class connotations. The upper and middle- classes were assumed to be the architects of the Empire's victories, though ably supported by those splendid chaps, the Tommies. Kipling spotted that pattern, and both derided and supported it. Edward Thompson rejected it by insisting on the place of working-class people in our history. Chesterton put in for "the people of England, that never have spoken yet".

Today, the pool is even more muddied, mainly by the emergence of "ethnic" into common use; and, more often, misuse. Broadcasters commit all kinds of solecisms with it, especially over Kosovo and "the ethnic Albanians", which after various efforts is the favoured formulation they have arrived at. Are there "unethnic Albanians"?

Generally, "ethnic" is taken to mean here "people of other racial groups than our own" (and probably a bit lower in the world's pecking-orders): immigrants, blacks, browns and yellows. Who has heard of "ethnic English" or "ethnic British"? "Ethnic Concerts" in the community centre would never be Morris dancing. We are not ethnic; we are what we are - English, Scots, Welsh; or even British. This is blank, unrealised jingoism; the sooner we stop using "ethnic" to distinguish groups outside the privileged "us", the sooner we might realise that we are all "ethnics" of one sort or another: and neither better nor worse for that.

So I will settle for being "English", though accepting without pleasure the use of "British" where it still has administrative and formal uses. But how do I distinguish Englishness from Welshness and Scottishness, let alone Frenchness, Italianness, and all the rest?

This is an old game in all countries, and usually self-serving and self- flattering. We all tot up our virtues and others' limitations; and all cook the historical books. I like to quote Orwell on the English as "a family", but always add his coda, "with the wrong members in control". I enjoy tracing the intricate network of neighbourliness and voluntary good works in every English town. Yet I believe Auden was mistaken when he claimed: "The English have a greater talent than any others for creating an agreeable family life." Nice; but a rare moment of nodding off by him. The Italians, Chinese, Jews, and many other peoples have close, warm, familial feelings, at least as powerful as ours.

I am glad if people from elsewhere praise English "tolerance and fair- mindedness" (even when they are sometimes meeting only our phlegm, based on the assurance of effortless superiority). But the good sides of all these qualities do exist, and at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris lead many nations to propose English members to chair their committees. It ties in with our reasonable claim to be the mother of democracies and a long- standing upholder of human rights, and our centuries-old recognition that "the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as much as the greatest he". It is not an accident that we have invented some of the more humane, simple, demotic institutions: public parks, allotments, public libraries, the Open University.

I also know that racism, whether as to colour or as anti-Semitism, is still rife here, with various intensities, in the majority; as is readiness to accept a return of the death penalty. Our respect for human rights has emerged from individual humane thinking over the centuries, not from plebiscites yesterday or - if they were held, and it is as well that they are not - that would emerge today. This aspect of partial-democracies we prefer not to recognise.

Compared with the French we are generally not only non-intellectual, but positively anti-intellectual. Almost all of my more rigorously intellectual friends are from Jewish refugee families. Our own deep-rooted populism is all too obvious in the tabloid press; more sophisticated forms appear in the broadsheets, and across even public-service broadcasting.

One could go on, and not always up. We manage to combine an often bitten- in puritanism with an extremely rough sexuality. We repeatedly tell ourselves we have now equalled the rest of Europe in our public cuisine. Any north Portuguese village restaurant will easily surpass us in providing substantial, well-cooked, fresh food. Our mass catering is still a disgrace.

We have three saving graces. In spite of our educational shortcomings, we still manage to produce some superb scientific, artistic and generally intellectual minds. Our literature over centuries has been magnificent. And when we look at the nature of societies, at the life around us, we are pragmatic, rooted in "thisness", rather than builders of theoretic structures. We tend either to dismiss French theorising, or borrow its more fashionable parts. The French are more open; they try to discover what they might learn from us. I am sorry to offer a personal example but it is at least contemporary. Some of my own work, especially The Uses of Literacy (La Culture du Pauvre), is used in France explicitly as an illustration of ways of looking at things which they feel they might learn from.

If we do have dominant, but never unique, decent as distinct from mean, qualities, they include: a fair amount of live-and-let-live, much charity and neighbourliness (so long as our household gods are not mocked), a nice bloody-mindedness towards pretensions , which can co-exist with accepting class-snobbery from the lower-middle-class upwards, and putting up with rank inequality in major social matters - or why would we tolerate the by-now solid dividing of the National Health Service into two, based on the ability to pay. We can deploy a comedy of language and situations which elevates cocking-a-snook into a national prophylactic, a dry ironic capacity for taking pomposity down a peg or two. On the other hand, we have recently had the Diana phenomenon; and that should make us feel like rewriting, largely unhappily, all the essays written on English characteristics.

The moment we make lists such as those, we have to face the questions; do no other nations practice voluntary good works or neighbourliness? Or respect human rights? Or have an ironic wit? Of course they do. What we may decide to call the "national character" is not composed of qualities uniquely held by this nation or that. In each nation, those characteristics, that whole culture, is composed of some elements to be found across all societies, but in each according to a different psychological and social pattern, and so with different strengths across all parts. Looked at in this way, one may begin to talk about qualities as typically English or French or German or Italian or Scots or Welsh without engaging in disguised chauvinism.

I said at the start that when children in my generation made lists of their "belonging" we always omitted Europe. Nothing invited us to include it. We were fed, and not only at school, the conventional stereotypes: the French were excitable Froggies, the Germans humourless jack-booted villains, the Italians rather slimy ice-cream sellers. Very crude, all that, but not far out as a picture of the popular substitutes for thought. Which have by no means disappeared. If you doubt this, look around a Sunday ferry for France full of day trippers, and listen to the ignorantly prejudiced talk of the groups of young men getting drunk as quickly as they can.

We should do better at defining our combination of qualities, good and bad, and so try to live better with them; beginning with qualifying our "patriotism" by recognising that it is all too often a narrow, unintelligent insularity, which rightly surprises other Western European nations. If there is one thing I have learnt over all these years, from living on the continent, from reading and from talk, it is that we are not only English (or Scottish or Welsh), but also and always and ineradicably European.

Most of us (including the multitudes of modern "executives') ignore this, are indeed entirely unaware of it. But any adequate definition of an English person, any civilised conception of such a person, must recognise that he or she will be English/European. Over centuries of thought and art about the nature of the individual and of society, about first and last things as expressed in philosophy, literature, music, painting, sculpture and all the rest, we have been and are part of Europe, contributors to and sharers in an immensely rich and living common culture; one (and this is not a boast of continental-chauvinism) of exceptional breadth and depth. If I were a boy today, my exercise book list would start: "Hoggart, Yorkshireman, Englishman, European..."

Back to elements of Englishness. Naturally, we find them unforgettably expressed in literature. Here are three examples, each I like to think embodying aspects of Englishness.

First, Dr Johnson's acquaintance, Oliver Edwards, avoiding all the big attitudes in favour of the quirky: "I have tried in my time to be a philosopher; but, I don't know how, cheerfulness would keep breaking in." Then the poignant old lady who felt left on the shore, lost without friends and the comforts of neighbourliness: "Since Penelope Noakes of Duppas Hill is gone, no-one will ever call me Nelly again." Last, Shakespeare's Justice Shallow recognising the inevitability and solemnity of death, but moving easily also into the down-to-earth, the everyday: "Death, as the Psalmist saith, is certain to all; all shall die. How a good yoke of bullocks at Stamford Fair?"