A note on terms: This essay is about England and Englishness. I use “British” where the institution or legal category is British - the state, citizenship and the passport - and “English” for the cultural inheritance I am trying to describe.
The Question of England
George Orwell once described an England of old maids cycling through the mist. Roger Scruton wrote of schoolmasters and Anglican hymns. I recognised parts of both Englands, but neither was mine.
For years, that did not trouble me. My English identity felt secure. I had no need to prove it, still less define it. We were all here. Why would we need to explain it?
The question of Englishness and the English looms large in 2026. Something which should not be contentious is showing up deep divisions across the country. This essay is my attempt to give a shape and some meaning to what it is to be English and what England is.
Englishness is an inheritance. It’s a way of inhabiting this place through language, custom, memory, tradition, duty and judgement. It’s not sealed by blood, but it’s not just some magic words or a piece of paper. It is open, and should be, because it can be learned. It has survived through generations upon generations accepting it and the duty to pass it on.
So, where to begin?
The problem I kept coming up against was a definitional one. How does one prove that they are English? Can a lawyer prove he is a lawyer? Yes: a professional qualification and an official register. Can I prove I’m a West Ham fan? Yes: I have a season ticket; I am miserable a lot of the time. Can I prove I’m English? Well, yes, I can trace my ancestry back hundreds of years. I can show you that one of my ancestors was married in what is now Southwark Cathedral in 1747. Does that mean that Ian Wright is not English? Born in Woolwich to Jamaican parents in 1963, 33 caps, 9 goals for England1.
OK, do I have an English passport? Well, they don’t exist exactly, I have a British passport, but this is a legal document, it says nothing of participation or belonging.
England’s detractors will point to these difficulties and argue that this proves that either it is ethnic, intractable and closed, or that it is civic or administrative and anyone can join. It is neither.
The Doom Loop
The logic is this:
You cannot define what it means to be English. Therefore there is no such thing as the English. Therefore anyone has as much right as you to decide what happens here. And if you try to define it, we will contest the definition. So you cannot win.
There’s another claim that is used here:
England stole everything, its food, its music, its culture, from the rest of the world, and therefore has nothing of its own to protect.
I couldn’t get out of it, I could not make a good enough case until I realised that no definition was ever going to be good enough. That’s OK, the demand for a perfect definition is the problem.
As I was thinking this over during the recent (disappointing as ever) World Cup, a familiar refrain came back to me:
England ’til I die / I’m England ’til I die / I know I am, I’m sure I am / I’m England ’til I die
No one ever questioned it, we didn’t sit around discussing what it meant, we just knew and that’s a perfectly fine place to begin. It’s the English place to begin.
It’s how we’ve always worked best: not through large, radical changes (although we did chop a king’s head off that one time), but by working things through, figuring them out as we went and muddling along. Correct the course a little bit. Does that look about right? Yeah, that’ll do.
English common law gives us a good framework for this: we do not need to define Englishness exhaustively before we can judge particular cases.
Two quick thoughts I keep in my head when trying to wrestle my way out of the doom loop.
Ask: is this applied to another culture or people? Has anyone tried this with the Japanese or Nigerians or even Americans? If it’s not applied universally, then it’s not a philosophical move; it’s political.
Ask what other things have imprecise definitions but are still valid. Love—we all know what it is, but it’s too big and broad to have a finite definition. A woman’s love for her husband is not the same as her love for her children or her friends. They are all valid and all different. You know what I mean when I name each one.
This doom loop is not new, Orwell pointed out something similar in his 1941 essay The Lion and the Unicorn:
In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution.
Orwell identified this as a pathology rather than a philosophy 85 years ago.
So, to a framework of sorts. You’re welcome to say “yeah but” and “what about” — you should, and if you want to go for a pint and discuss it, great. The pushback doesn’t invalidate anything. It proves the point: this is genuinely complicated and difficult to define, and that’s fine. My aim is simply to be able to say, “Yeah, that looks about right.”
You know it when you see it.
So Common You Can’t Even See It
The English common law has been taken across the globe: Australia, Canada, India and the USA, but it’s one of those peculiarly English institutions that is so embedded in society that we don’t even notice it is there.2
English law grew from several places: custom, courts, judges, juries, royal authority and Parliament. It developed through decisions, argument and precedent, but it is not set in stone. Judgements can be challenged and mistakes corrected.3
Englishness, like common law, can be thought of in a similar way. It can be recognised and judged through examples we accumulate, customs we build on, without first having to have a complete definition.
A Deeper Level of Understanding
There is a level of knowledge that is not conscious. We could call it subconscious knowledge, gut instinct or reflex. For example, when I am driving a car, at no point do I think, “Push the accelerator a bit harder, foot on clutch, move hand to the right and up” — that would be weird. As I was learning to drive I had to think about these actions because they were new. Now I’ve learned them, I don’t need to think about them.
The philosopher Michael Oakeshott wrote about the differences between technical and practical knowledge4. Technical knowledge can be written down as rules, instructions or principles. Practical knowledge is acquired through experience, imitation and participation. We learn the “how” rather than the “what”. So, a recipe can list the steps, but it cannot make someone a good cook. A rulebook can explain football, but it cannot teach judgement on the pitch. In the same way, a list of “British values” cannot by itself transmit English manners, obligations or belonging. People learn these by living among others who practise them: taking turns, keeping promises and observing how breaches of these are judged.
These concepts help explain the truth inside “you know it when you see it”. Culture has written rules, but it is not exhausted by them. We pick up on cues and know we’re in the right place. Take the Great British Queue. It is not simply a line of people. It contains fairness, restraint, reciprocity, self-policing, respect for invisible order and mild collective shame when someone breaks the code - it is much more than the sum of its parts.
Now, this has two sides. It’s possible that something can feel wrong because it violates a custom, but it could just be unfamiliar to us. Take joining a new sports team or starting a new job where everyone knows each other and has their own rituals, grooves and slang. It’s not necessarily wrong; it’s just new.
The English answer to this is not a ministry with a checklist issuing definitions, but closer to common law: compare cases, give reasons, test judgements and then correct mistakes if necessary. This allows us to let a standard accumulate. Englishness doesn’t need to be perfectly defined, but if you tell me something isn’t English, or shouldn’t be, you’re going to have to tell me why. The instinct is a starting point, not a conclusion.
The Family and the Familiar
England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare’s much-quoted message, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relations who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income. It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks. A family with the wrong members in control—that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.
― George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn5
There is something specific to this place that you feel when spring comes and you smell cut grass for the first time, or when the season changes from summer to autumn, the first day back at school in September, or the chill in the air on bonfire night. You do not get it in the same way anywhere else. You might get something adjacent in France or similar latitudes, but the particular quality of the English climate - the light, the rhythm of the seasons, something in what it does to you to be here. It’s part of what England is and part of what it means to belong to it, they are bonds that connect us, to each other and to the land.
England is a place consecrated by custom, passed down slowly over hundreds of years, the words of Shakespeare, Keats, Larkin, were shaped by their predecessors and continue to shape language even now. From the Norse language we have “sky”, “knife” and “they.” The Normans gave us “beef”, “justice” and “parliament.” From the Indian subcontinent we got “bungalow”, “pyjamas” and “thug.” Words came in, from conquest, from trade, from contact and necessity. They were taken into our language. The words didn’t remain French, or Old Norse or Indian, they became English. That is what England does (or did, but more on that later) with what arrives. It made our language and therefore discourse, writing, conversation the richer for it.
The richness this provides is another one of these features that is not obvious until you look from the outside, like the rituals and phrases your own family has, the English people have that at scale. My favourite is the alleyway, a walkway between two things, you wouldn’t think it needs more than one name, but you have the ginnel from Manchester, the snicket, from Bradford and the jitty from the Midlands, there are many more, I will let you investigate.
One last example is the swearing, I don’t think there is a World Championship for it, but I think we’d be in with a shout of winning if there were. The English, although certainly the Scots and Irish too, have turned profanity into somewhat of an art form. The depth and breadth of the swear words is magnificent on its own, but they can be used not only for insults, but in some cases, terms of endearment too, depending on the situation and the context - again, you’ll know which one is which when you hear it.
Orientation, Not Origin
“We do not merely study the past: we inherit it, and inheritance brings with it not only the rights of ownership, but the duties of trusteeship. Things fought for and died for should not be idly squandered. For they are the property of others, who are not yet born.”
— Roger Scruton, How to be a Conservative6
Patriotism has become a dirty word, associated with jingoism, nationalism and racism, but, once again this is a false premise, language co-opted for a particular purpose.
Orwell makes a distinction between patriotism and nationalism in Notes on Nationalism:
“By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power.”
— George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism7
And there’s a famous quote by Samuel Johnson, “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” often used to derogate the notion of patriotism, but this is a mistake. Johnson’s biographer Boswell assures us that Johnson was referring to someone who used patriotism “as a cloak for self-interest.” 8
In The Patriot (1774), he says this
“A patriot is he whose publick conduct is regulated by one single motive, the love of his country; who, as an agent in parliament, has, for himself, neither hope nor fear, neither kindness nor resentment, but refers every thing to the common interest.”9
That is almost the opposite of the anti-patriotic meaning commonly attached to his famous remark. Johnson was not condemning love of country. He was condemning scoundrels who used its language as cover, as I’m sure he would condemn those manipulating his meaning now.
How to be a patriot? Well, England should be open to anyone who participates in its life. Conversely, origin without belonging does not work. My little heuristic is this, although it reads like a sort of marriage vow:
Do this person’s words and deeds show a duty to England as an inheritance — to keep what is good, repair what is wrong and pass the whole thing on?
It doesn’t take long to find people with English ancestry going back hundreds of years whose words and deeds would indicate that they do not take this vow. It also does not take long to find people who do not have that ancestry yet love this place deeply. We have no exhaustive definition, no certificate of Englishness. Short of a court of souls, a person’s words and deeds show us enough.
So to the civic case, the legal documents that make you British. The passport gives you legal membership, but that is as far as it goes. It says nothing about your relationship to the country. Take football again. Supporting a team requires participation, you need to watch your team, that doesn’t mean going every week, it doesn’t mean watching every single game, but it requires more than just checking the scores. It requires duty and effort. When things aren’t going well, when you’re losing week in and week out you don’t give up, you’re there through the good and the bad.
The family is the same: it requires something of you, and you of it. In none of these cases can belonging coexist with passivity, nonchalance, detachment or hostility.
The key here is the appreciation and understanding of the inheritance, good and bad, about what has come before and what needs to be passed on.
I’ve used quotations throughout this essay from Orwell and Scruton, a democratic socialist and a conservative philosopher. The fact that they agreed on this, despite coming from different political traditions, is not a coincidence.
England Expects
On 21 October 1805, before the Battle of Trafalgar, Nelson ordered the signal: “England expects that every man will do his duty.”10 During the battle Nelson stood on deck wearing his usual admiral’s coat and decorations, his officers feared that this would make him conspicuous and draw the enemy’s fire. It’s impossible to know why Nelson did this, but from everything that’s known about his words and deeds, this seems like his duty, to stand alongside his men, not hiding out of the way of danger.11
Most duties England asks of its people are less dramatic. They are performed not on a quarterdeck but in jury rooms, parish halls, football clubs and lifeboat stations.
A person belongs not only by ancestry or sentiment, but by taking part in the obligations of the place. More football I’m afraid. Coaching a football team takes time, energy, dedication and a duty to the children you are coaching, you have to put effort in, but the rewards are more than worth it. It’s not (or should not be) about winning entirely. Watching them develop and grow, not just as footballers, but as people. Learning to communicate, to adapt, cope with disappointment and joy are crucial skills for a rich and rewarding life. Being a part of that development is truly a privilege.
This duty and belonging are not written, or codified in most of these institutions, they are learned, inhabited and practised by each successive custodian. This becomes tradition, it’s not exclusive to England, but these clubs and societies and their ways are particular to this place.
The Man With One Home
During the build-up to the England v Ghana match at the recent (again, disappointing) World Cup the rapper Stormzy was asked what result he wanted to see: “I’m a Ghana boy. I’m an English boy,” he said. “I’ll be honest, a nice 1–1 draw.”12 Two inheritances, honestly expressed - at the time I was a little disappointed: “But surely England is your favourite?”
Leaving aside the legalities of dual nationality a person can be English-Ghanaian, British-Indian, Jewish-English, Yorkshire-English or European-English (probably a dying breed). It’s OK to be more than one thing, we all are in many parts of our lives.
There should be a two-way agreement here, If I chose to settle in Spain, I would learn Spanish. I would not expect Spaniards to conduct their public life in English for my comfort. Spain would owe me equal standing; I would owe it the effort to participate - this is not complicated.
A serious country can explain this and is entitled to expect it, The British state has forgotten how to. It has assumed, often without asking, that every inheritance sits as comfortably as every other, but that is not always the case. Perversely it has shone its torch of suspicion on the man with only one home, treating affection for England with contempt.
The Englishman with no second home is entitled to say that this asymmetry matters, there is no other inheritance, no other place he could call home. This doesn’t give him any greater rights than any other citizen, but at the same time it does not give the country a reason to treat his attachment as a pathology while other inheritances are celebrated.
The problem here is not that newcomers and their children were encouraged to remember where their families came from. In its best form, it makes the country all the richer for it. It is that the white working-class Englishman was increasingly taught that remembering where he came from was something darker: nostalgia at best, prejudice at worst, a malign influence sowing division across the country.
Emily Thornberry’s 2014 tweet13 of a white van and a house covered in England flags - not far from me, in Rochester - became notorious because people recognised the disconnect between England’s citizens and the political class. Over a decade later, YouGov14 found that majorities of Labour, Lib Dem and Green voters believed the St George’s Cross had become a ‘racist symbol’. The identities of the Scots, the Welsh and the Irish are celebrated, but the Englishman needs to explain himself if he wants to celebrate his.
This imbalance has deepened division in England and Britain more widely and made people suspicious of the state’s motives. That suspicion may not be justified in every interaction a citizen has with the state, but it does show a loss of trust, and governments that permit such a loss have failed in a basic duty.
In case this was not already clear, let me state it plainly: do not make the mistake of blaming the immigrant, or the children of immigrants. Blame lies chiefly with the institutions which failed not only to provide the tools for integration, but to offer anything substantial to integrate into.
The Empty Vessel
The state did not just abandon national identity, it emptied it out, it poured it down the drain. Governments and public institutions will speak about Britishness, integration and shared values, but they are empty words. Any mention of language, history, custom, memory and duty might have excluded someone so they pretended they didn’t exist. The irony here is that some of the very things that migrants came to be included in, are being erased in the name of... inclusion.
Instead of saying, “This is what we have inherited; come and help us carry it,” they acted as though England was an empty vessel, a blank slate upon which anyone could project whatever they liked.
The clever managers in Whitehall produced four “values”. These were taken, not from a long discussion on what it meant to be British, but from a strategy to prevent terrorism15, not necessarily bad ideas, but a strange place to pick values from.
“What do we believe in?”
“Er... not blowing things up?”
It’s not that these “values” aren’t worth defending, they are. The problem is that France, Canada or the Netherlands could adopt the same ones without changing a word. They describe the minimum conduct expected in a liberal democracy, they don’t tell anyone what Britain or England is.
This is liberalism wrapped in the Union Jack: a national identity stripped of nation. It includes everyone, not by creating a home for them to belong in, but by asking them to inherit almost nothing.
Newcomers were told to integrate to a hollowed out shell, a room painted in magnolia, a doctor’s waiting room of a country. The native population, meanwhile, was taught to treat its own inheritance as an embarrassment, a history of shame. A common inheritance, boiled down to banal rules. Ordinary people were then blamed when the rules failed to create belonging. Everyone looking around surprised when a passport wasn’t enough to bind us together.
But Matt, we’re not saying the passport is the only thing, we have the Life in the UK test16.
Well, again, this is the empty vessel. A citizenship test can establish only that someone has revised a book and supplied enough right answers, I did this for my driving theory test, GCSEs and any other test I’ve ever taken, it shows you can study, nothing else.
This should be obvious by now, but I don’t want an exam of belonging. I want a country that can say, honestly and without embarrassment: this is the inheritance you are joining. Here is the language, memory, custom, landscape and duty that made us. You can bring your own inheritance too; no one’s going to ask you to erase it. But you must participate in this one, to help carry it and, in time, to pass it on.
The test is a stamp on a form, but a quiz can’t make a people. It can’t teach someone why a village hall matters or what Remembrance means.
That is the emptiness at the centre: not that Britain asks too much of newcomers, it doesn’t ask anything other than a test, an oath and a list of banal universal rules.
They tried to create equal standing, but got it confused with cultural emptiness, called it inclusion, and then left little common life to be included in. The next time someone in government talks about division, ask them: from what, and into what?
Pride and Shame
We are right to be proud of what we have collectively built - abolition, suffrage, the welfare state, the moments when we defended the weak. We are equally obliged to be honest about what we got wrong: the slave trade, the famines, what empire cost the people inside it. These are not competing claims. They are the same obligation, to be honest about what has come before. We cannot change it, but we can learn from it.
We inherit the knowledge of what was done in our name. This gives us our duty, as it has done for everyone who came before us. Keep what’s good, repair what can be repaired and hand it on, truthfully and without self-loathing.
Anyone who will only carry the pride, or will only carry the shame, has not come to engage with England. We win together and lose together, through good times and bad, ’til death do us part.
It’s hard to overstate the damage that has been done, not only to our potential new countrymen’s perception of the country they wanted to join, but also to more than a generation of people born in this country who know it only by the mistakes it has made, the wrongs it has committed. I was one of the lucky ones, I know about the mistakes, but I was also taught to ask questions and understand that there’s nuance, that human life and decisions are complicated and that if anyone tells you that there is only one answer, they’re almost certainly lying.
I was taught an England formed by Shakespeare, Keats and Tolkien; Darwin and Hawking; Bevan and Nightingale; Nelson, Wellington and Churchill; Handel, Clapton, Jagger, Harrison and Mercury.
Not every name in that list was English by birth. That is the point. Each of them, and countless others, helped shape the England I inherited. Their words, discoveries, service, courage and music became part of our inheritance - and part of what we now have to pass on.
Inheritance - Conscious Participation
England is still there. I see it every day in small ways: in grassroots football and gatherings on the local heath; in a nod and a smile on the morning school run; in the pride and wonder in Bellingham’s eyes as the crowd sings “Hey Jude” to him; in the old boy getting his papers on a Sunday morning in a suit and tie. It does not have to end.
I never even got to talk much about the landscape and wildlife. Our place can be seen as dull and damp, but in another way we are incredibly lucky. We don’t have hurricanes or earthquakes - well, not many. There are no funnel-web spiders, no rattlesnakes or tsetse flies. We have the beauty of the Cotswolds, the Yorkshire Dales, the Garden of England and the Cornish coast.
Any one of these things can be taken in isolation. The French swear. The Americans stand up for their country. The Japanese understand custom and form. Other peoples queue, joke, mourn, remember and muddle through. But they do not have this: not in this combination, in these proportions, in this landscape, with this climate, this language, this history, under this sky.
And yes, it changes. Of course it changes. But England changes best when it changes as England has usually changed, slowly, through consent, absorption, argument, precedent and use.
We must start to teach this inheritance honestly, the truth, not just the bits that suit a purpose. We need to hold on to the places where we share duties and build communities. We must create a home where newcomers can build a life as part of ours.
This is a precious inheritance. If we don’t remember it, no one will remember it for us. It will be lost. There is so much we owe to our ancestors and to those who are not yet born.