Who are we? British identity in 2024

What a fascinating new poll tells us about Britishness

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How patriotic are you? This is what the British people were asked this week in a fascinating new poll. And the results are striking.

While nearly six in ten Brits, 58%, say they are ‘very’ or ‘fairly’ patriotic, just over one in three of them, 35%, say they are ‘not very’ or ‘not at all’ patriotic.

And, as usual, there are some enormous differences beneath the surface.

While Conservatives, Brexiteers, and men are far more likely to feel patriotic, Labour voters, Remainers, and women are much less likely to feel the same way.

And nor are these differences small; while 85% of Conservatives say they feel patriotic, only a minority of the Labour Party’s voters, 44%, feel the same.

But what I find most striking in all this are not the political differences but, instead, the generational differences —which are simply enormous.

Consider this. While 81% Britain’s pensioners and 69% of the over-50s feel patriotic, among Britain’s 18-24-year-olds this figure completely collapses to just 39%.

Patriotism, among the young, is a minority sport.

In fact, the young Zoomers from Gen-Z, who were born in the late 1990s and early 2000s, are by far the most likely to reject this patriotic attachment.

Remarkably, nearly half of them feel openly say they are not patriotic (48%), which is significantly larger than the share who are (39%).

What’s going on?

While it might be tempting to dismiss this as 'just one poll’, as I explain below it actually reflects something much deeper, something about how our views of British identity, of who we are, are rapidly changing over time.

So, today I wanted to take a step back from day-to-day politics to look at these longer-term trends which will, one way or another, upend the country in the years ahead.

Drawing on some of the most reliable data in the country, from the British Social Attitudes surveys, I want to explore just how differently Britain’s older Baby Boomers and the country’s younger Zoomers think about Britishness in the 2020s.

And the results, like that poll, are fascinating.