Here are three questions for a Christmas quiz about England for my fellow citizens to ponder over. 1. Who do you call if you want to call England? 2. Three men, a left-winger, a right-winger and a centrist, went into a pub. They were known as Cummings, Corbyn and Starmer. What is the name of the pub they drank in? 3. Why is it if you’re an English-born liberal or progressive who reads the New Statesman you almost certainly don’t “feel English”?
I’d like to set about answering these questions in reverse order. The last is most baffling and I can best illustrate it with a story. In the aftermath of Brexit, I joined up with the psychotherapist Susanna Abse to discuss what had happened at a gathering in the Tavistock Clinic. I talked about how Brexit was an English vote and that the only route back to Europe was by England becoming a normal country in which its citizens embraced the diverse traditions of their own nation. The discussion that followed was heartfelt and sensitive, but as far as my main argument went, I completely failed to convince. Time and again people stood up and said they did not feel English, or that England’s colonial history was something they could never embrace, or that Englishness was intrinsically racist, and they could have no truck with it or nationalism.
Listen to the New Statesman podcast
Content from our partners
