A natural confusion

‘English, I mean British’ – this familiar locution alerts us immediately to one of the enduring perplexities of English national identity. How to separate ‘English’ from ‘British’? The reverse problem is nowhere as acute. Non-English members of the United Kingdom rarely say ‘British’ when they mean ‘English’, or ‘English’ when they mean ‘British’. On the contrary, they are usually only too jarringly aware of what is peculiarly English, and are highly sensitive to the lordly English habit of subsuming British under English. For them it is a constant reminder of what they perceive to be – rightly, of course, – England's hegemony over the rest of the British Isles.

One has to say immediately though that the problem is not one solely of or for the English.