If you listen to how we talk about British identity at the moment, you’d think it had disappeared.

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Over the past year, debates around immigration, integration and national values have come back round again and again. Small boats, protests, policing, what “British values” even mean now. The tone has been tense, and at times, all over the place. We keep asking who we are, but no one seems that comfortable answering.

I don’t think that’s because we don’t know, instead I think it’s because we don’t want to say it out loud. What’s being made clear is that Britain doesn’t have an identity crisis. It has a confidence crisis.

Most people in this country have a pretty clear sense of what Britishness looks like in practice. It’s just gone a bit quiet, and the space has now been taken over by two extremes. One that tries to pin British identity to a narrow and backward looking version of the past, and another that avoids defining it altogether, as if even attempting to is a problem in itself.

The majority of people sit somewhere in the middle........

© LBC