Britain’s narrowing horizons carried all manner of implications for its constituent ‘four nations’ — none more crucial than a heightened awareness of their separate existence. The Kenyan Asians crisis of 1967-8 was a particularly resonant moment, at once highlighting the no-man’s land occupied by holders of UK passports issued overseas, while subtly magnifying the finer distinctions between England and Britain on the home front. The sudden urge to close the perceived ‘loophole’ of a liberal, capacious, expansive Britishness prompted a resignification of the category of Englishness in a newly circumscribed nation. It was an ingenious, if largely unselfconscious means of discounting the bona fides of those Asian families who ‘beat the ban’ in March 1968, while avoiding the overt stigma of ‘racialism’. In this way, the looser, empire-derived affinities of Britishness could be downgraded without relinquishing the badge of ethnicity available only to the ‘true-born’. But repatriating the frontiers of nationhood in this way raised implicit questions about what ultimately bound the constituent parts of the Union together — questions that would become increasingly explicit as the shared global projections of Greater Britain receded into the past.