This is an interesting one!!!! Yes I do consider myself as British. I have a lot of Welsh blood in me and feel that I am British and not English because of this…… As to the concept of shared values….. I no longer know what they are. What I believe in is tolerance & openness.

Ramblings of an old man.
In many respects I find it hard to accept that we can have shared values when I live and in a work in a white dominated community. I also think there may be something in the argument -What is Britishness/ British values. As far as i know there is nothing written down and if there were , would we need to keep updating it every few years with the imputs of the next set of immigrants. (This should not be read I am against immigrants. It is a fact that throughout our history we have been an open door for people to settle herein times of trouble e.g.polish settlers because of the 2nd world war, French settlers because of the French Revolution.)
As I understand it I ‘values’ have been taken from the Romans ,the Saxons,the Vikings,and the Normans. We have absorbed activities from our time as a colonial power and embedded them as part of our culture and value system.
Going back to the qestion -am I British? I suppose I can claim to be british in that I was born in Britain , both my parents and Grandparents were all born in Britain. I have a British passport. Oh and I also support the England rugby and football teams ,(but not the cricket team -they are rubbish.)I also support the british Lions and Great Britain athletics /and olympic team. All in all this way of thinking may mean i have a Britishness and therefore uphold british values

I find this whole issue rather confusing at times. When i think about how i feel about “Britishness”, I conjure up all sorts of feelings given the current climate of political correctness, as in “should I really be celebrating my Britishness, will it be seen as racist”. This may sound extreme, but i think we have become so afraid to say who we are, for fear of being perceived as being prejudice to who we are not. On the other hand I feel “who cares about being British”, i am just me, and why should it matter where I was born and where I live. Does this really shape the person that i am? Well of course it does to a certain extent, as I am moulded in my everyday life by the environment and circumstantial experiences in which I find myself in this country i.e. the media, society etc. But do I really feel that I wouldn’t be the person I am today, if i had been born in America or Japan? I would hope that I would still uphold the same morals and principles regardless of where I come from. Therefore for me, to be British, simply means this is where my citizenship exists, I live here, and this is where I was born. If later on in life I move away to another country, knowing that I am British would simply be a way for somebody to identify where I originate from, not to counter a sudden feeling of homesickness so that I still feel like I belong somewhere, or moreover, I hope that suddenly I wouldn’t be stereotyped as “the British lady”. I think for me I have been lucky in life that I have never encountered any prejudice about where I come from, or who I am. I do feel however, that when someone has encountered prejudice, this is when your nationality or origins become more relevant to how you feel about yourself, as they are being used as a way of measuring who you are as a person. Something which I think is totally wrong, but I would be stupid to say that it doesn’t still exist, and heavily in this country. Maybe it is because certain small minded people in this country suddenly feel threatened that the meaning of British doesn’t necessarily mean “White” and “middle-class”, that this is the real reason we are experiencing this whole so called “dilemma” of Britishness. Frankly, I think there are more important issues in life, even politically today, so maybe if the government spent less time worrying about Britishness, and more about resolving WAR and the home office, perhaps we wouldn’t be in the mess we find ourselves. Our country is the way it is not by accident. This is evolution, and I think we should worry less about Britishness and more about society as a whole.

Thank you some excellent viewpoints, anyone else, including students, willing to join the debate before I provide my few point of view?

Thanks M Wright, a very thoughtful response with a local twist.

For me, Britain still remains a relatively new, somewhat artificial, political and economic union rather than a country with a set of shared cultural values. I think for many people, the ideas of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland have more resonance and it’s to those separate areas of the island that regional cultural identity is to be found. Funny how there’s no patron saint of Britain or a football team.

Sadly, I am always rather embarrassed by my Britishness when I meet people from continental europe. I would like to see myself far more as European rather than British, although I do rather like the positive reaction that Americans still display when you go there!

But it’s not all negative - the great strength of the British Isles is its ability to assimilate different cultures and traditions. I love travelling to London, Leicester, Bradford and Birmingham and visiting the British Asian areas of those cities. I like the growing cafe culture and the more enlightened attitude towards licensing hours. Even the food is improving in some places! The amount that the British donate to charities is astounding and, certianly where I live, there is a strong sense of a community spirit.

The real problem of Britain for me at the moment is the legacy of 1979 and the pursuit of wealth and the ownership of things as the only measure of worth and success. I’m not sure that this is purely a British phenomenon, however, it’s just a little further advanced here.

I have never felt comfortable calling myself British or English for that matter. I have always had this strange feeling that being British is just an accident of birth. I could have been placed anywhere when I was born and it just so happened it was here. I didn’t choose to be British and therefore in a way I feel I can criticise it’s failings. When I travel I can see the wonderful things each new country has to offer - the brilliant linguists in Holland, the cafe culture of France, the organisation of the Germans, the cleanliness of the Swiss, the optimism of the Kenyans, the sport of the Australians and New Zealanders. These can make me jealous sometimes, but something always pulls me home. Home to the wonderful seasons, to the sense of humour, to the hills and coasts, to the justice sysetm and governement and to the people I love. And so regardless of my opinion I am British and despite all its faults and failings I love to be British and who I am.

[...] After this will discussed Gordon Brown’s idea for a revival of Britishness and the teaching of Britishness in schools. We looked at a couple of sources to draw out what might be such values, we used some of the staff feedback and a news clip of children discussing the issue. Our values weren’t too far from Gordon Brown’s ideas [...]

Thanks Allan for your comments, though I respect your freedom of speech to express your own opinion, I do disagree with your comments over the ‘Islamification’ of large parts of England, I don’t think this has happened, but I do feel there is an issue about reaching out to some communities that instead of integrating, have become more insular.

There is also a discusssion to be had over the loss of traditional working class heritage, one of the areas I feel strongly about. For me, the Thatcher years succeeded in weakening the working class and its identity, which is why I feel that today, some young people feel alienated or divorced from society, because effectively they have no roots…. or common heritage. Long-gone are the community bonds associated with industry, such as trade unions and working mens clubs, the issue is the working class to rediscover a common sense of community, based on the struggles of the past.

As an educator I believe that we should enlighten our students to the culture and heritage of others, but we should also discuss our own, which is the object of this task.

What we discuss and how we present it, is a contested area.