When the Archbishop of York declared on the front page of Saturday’s Daily Telegraph that English identity needs to be understood, I agreed with him. England needs to start recognising that it’s England. Where it was once the cockpit of the biggest empire in human history, now it’s just another country.
There is a tendency among some English people to try to pretend away their Englishness. Rather like a certain kind of white liberal pretending not to see race, they try to ignore their location in the international system of nation states – a system that not only constructed England but which, in large part, England invented; a system that does so much to decide who is rich and who is poor and, as the pandemic reminds us, who lives and who dies.
You don’t need to be proud to be English to accept that you are. I’m not proud to be straight, white, male, cis, posh or Scottish. I’m not ashamed either. I just am.
