by Harley Manning

Created on: October 18, 2009   Last Updated: October 20, 2009

How important is the term "Britishness"? In order to identify its importance, you must first clarify the meaning of the word Britishness. It is a word with multiple meanings and each have different prominence to different people. To some Britishness is about it's history and glory of the Empirical era, to others, Britain is a symbol of liberal democracy, a place of refuge in a dark world and yet to others it's a symbol of fractured, war mongering nation. To me, it is elements of all the above so surely there is no fixed definition of Britishness.

The government, especially the current Labour regime under Gordon Brown, finds Britishness to be incredibly important in it's manifestos and plans, smothering leaflets and conferences in the flag of union, a flag which itself is questionable in its validity seeing as it was the current Labour regime that in 1997 decided to enhance British democracy by introducing devolved powers to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

However, these gestures of democratic growth may have seemed to increase British unity in its pride of democracy, the people of the home nations do not see this as a similarity amongst them and more tend to look at their cultural differences and rivalries from the history books. The most notable example of this is the growth of the S.N.P (Scottish National Party) vote in Scotland. The growth of nationalism across the U.K since devoltuion may seem self-explanatory, yet the extent of its effect became severly apparent in the 2007 Scottish parliament election, where the S.N.P gained twenty seats, making their overall number of seats in Holyrood grow to 47, thus the largest party in in parliament. All in all, it is fair to say that devolution has weakened the union of British nations.

Britishness may have lost its importance politically, yet is still important culturally. Britain, although one of the most mulitcultural spots on Earth, does have common cultural values and practices which make it distinctly "British". The growth of pride in Britain occurred due to the history of impoerialism and innovators in the industrial revolution creating a sense of pride in British industries. Another major point of unilateral British values it its belief in right and freedoms, especially freedom of speech. This view of freedom makes Britain people very understanding as a whole in beliefs and ethics in general. A third example of British culture is communcal culture: in the sense of coming together and spending time together. Most would call this "pub culture", but in modern Britain, people tend to spend more time socializing at resturuants, festival, house parties etc, which is strange, considering the majority of British citiznes do not feel safe outside thier own homes (YouGo 2005).

In my opinion, Britian is a union that exsists to stop internal conflict between home nations and to make all nations play by the same rules, thus making Britain a military and political union, not a social or cultural union. However, Britain to me is important in the sense of its Democratic values and social freedoms and its institutions, such as the N.H.S, a symbol of a long-lived society.

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