The Second Wind of Change: What Happened to Britishness

I wonder what the rest of the world made of the hospital beds. There they were, in the middle of the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony, wheeled across the stadium while nurses danced and children bounced on mattresses. Above them rose three enormous letters: NHS. Every country had been invited to introduce itself to the planet, and Britain had decided to put on a ward round. I rather liked it. It was gloriously eccentric to present the National Health Service as a national treasure, although viewers abroad might have wondered whether the next act involved a dental appointment.

Danny Boyle, the ceremony's director, had chosen an institution that said something profound about Britain: falling ill should not depend on whether you can afford help. It was an unmistakably affectionate portrait of the country, confidently presented to an audience of millions. But I wonder how many Britons watching at home would have picked the same picture. Boyle's Britain was recognisable to plenty of people. It was never going to be the only Britain in the room.

For somebody else, the obvious choice would have been the monarchy. Not just a crown and a balcony, but the extraordinary machinery of ceremony surrounding a family whose principal qualification is having been born into it. Deference means granting respect because somebody occupies a position, whether or not they have earned it. The country that mocks its rulers can stand respectfully through a royal procession and argue how to address a duke. I can see the appeal of continuity. I can also see why bowing to a stranger strikes other people as an odd way of celebrating freedom. Politicians have made that difference another loyalty test.

Or perhaps the perfect picture would be a Sunday lunch. Roast potatoes subjected to a family inquest, somebody insisting the gravy is too thin, and an argument about what time lunch was supposed to start despite everybody having received the same invitation. No constitutional expert is required to explain why that feels British. Such rituals survive because people recognise themselves in them. Nobody needs a department in Whitehall to certify the Yorkshire pudding.

Another person might choose the armed forces, the industrial cities that built so much of the modern world, British science, football on a wet Saturday or the familiar pleasure of laughing at a situation that would horrify somebody else. I might favour one of those pictures today and another tomorrow. National identity is lived in more than one place.

Politicians make a mess of it by brandishing favourite portraits of Britain, then blaming people who see something else. Someone can admire the monarchy without admiring deference, love the NHS without trusting its management and treasure a Sunday lunch without believing everyone should eat one. None of those people has mislaid their nationality. They are recognising different parts of the same country.

Yet Britain has developed a habit of treating that ordinary difference as a national emergency. Hardly a political season passes without another inquiry into what being British means. Ministers announce British values. Commentators argue over British culture. Campaigners offer to restore the country, usually without agreeing on which version is missing. I work in political commentary, a profession rarely accused of leaving questions unanswered, and I find the repetition exhausting.

You don't hear France endlessly asking whether Frenchness exists. The French disagree passionately about immigration, religion, politics and what their republic should become. They don't need every disagreement to begin with a national identity questionnaire. There is a recognisable sense of France in its language and public life, and people can argue within it. Britain's argument too often starts one stage earlier: what exactly is the thing everybody is arguing about?

The embarrassment is that Britain isn't short of answers. There are traditions to inherit, achievements to celebrate and habits that make one Briton recognise another. But those answers don't settle into confidence. A country capable of presenting itself so magnificently to the world seems oddly uneasy when asked to recognise itself at home. Why does Britishness require constant explanation from the very people who are supposed to inhabit it?

For an answer, I return to a prime minister with a warning. In February 1960, Harold Macmillan delivered a speech in South Africa that became famous for three words: the “wind of change”. He was talking about the growing demand for independence among African peoples whose countries had been ruled by European powers. The old imperial order was coming apart, and those who had been governed were asserting the right to govern themselves.

But the most important words in Macmillan's speech weren't the poetic ones. They were “whether we like it or not”. This growth of national consciousness, he said, was a political fact. Governments had to accept it and shape their policies accordingly. No amount of nostalgia could reverse that arithmetic. Pretending the world would remain as Britain remembered it was no strategy. I have heard enough politicians promise to turn back the clock to admire the unusual courage of one acknowledging that the clock has a mind of its own.

Macmillan was describing change that Britain could neither command nor cancel. Its influence had rested partly on an international order in which London governed territories across the globe and regarded itself as one of the world's principal decision makers. That order was disappearing. Peoples were demanding independence for themselves, not awaiting Britain's convenience.

The question left behind was enormous. When a country has long understood its importance through its power over events abroad, what happens to its understanding of itself when that power retreats? Britain had been given a warning that the world was moving. In fact, four years earlier, the world had delivered something rather less polite.

In 1956, Egypt's president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, nationalised the company controlling the Suez Canal, the waterway connecting the Mediterranean to the Red Sea. Prime minister Anthony Eden regarded the move as a challenge Britain could not tolerate. Britain and France secretly coordinated with Israel, whose forces entered Egypt, before the two European powers intervened under the pretence of separating the combatants. A complicated arrangement, particularly when the people claiming to restore order had helped arrange the disorder.

Eden intended to demonstrate that Britain still possessed the authority to impose its will. Instead, the United States opposed the operation. Britain's currency came under pressure, and Washington withheld the financial support needed to steady it while the intervention continued. Britain halted the campaign and withdrew. The country that had tried to issue orders in Egypt discovered that its closest ally could effectively order it home.

Suez was a brutal public demotion. Spin couldn't disguise it. It exposed a truth that years of patriotic rhetoric could not conceal: Britain no longer possessed the independent reach of the imperial power it imagined itself to be. Britain's power had diminished, but no minister could pretend otherwise. The humiliation took place with the entire world watching.

An empire is not simply a collection of possessions on a map. For generations it had furnished a story about Britain's place in history, its reach and what it was capable of doing. That story was deeply unequal for those living under British rule, but it had helped generations at home understand their country's standing. Britain lost more than overseas authority when that arrangement ended. It lost the familiar international role around which much of its self-image had been built.

Yet Britain hadn't waited for empire to disappear before rebuilding itself. During the same period, another account of the country was already being built at home, one that people could recognise without consulting a map coloured imperial pink. The National Health Service, established in 1948, offered a promise as ambitious in ordinary life as imperial grandeur had been abroad: illness should not become a financial catastrophe simply because your family lacked money.

The BBC, founded earlier, offered a different kind of connection. People in distant towns could hear the same news, watch the same national occasions and disagree about the same television programme at work the next morning. The country entered its own living rooms, occasionally with questionable entertainment. A national broadcaster did not make everybody agree; it gave people common things over which to disagree.

Other institutions carried the same sense of belonging. Trade unions gave workers a voice at the bargaining table. Local party branches let voters argue with the people seeking to represent them. Churches, schools and voluntary associations provided places where neighbours met and obligations became something more substantial than a ministerial speech. I have little appetite for romanticising every committee meeting in British history. Some probably achieved less than an especially argumentative Sunday lunch. But people could participate in institutions through which their country took shape.

Here was a durable new source of national confidence. Britain could recognise itself through public obligations and shared experiences, rather than through obedience demanded from overseas. Those institutions became part of the answer to what Britishness meant. Flaws provoked anger precisely because citizens cared. Their importance wasn't confined to the services they delivered. People believed they had built and owned them. When Boyle brought dancing nurses into the Olympic stadium, he was reaching for precisely that sense of ownership.

Then the relationship between citizens and their institutions changed. The NHS still carried its founding promise, but patients encountered systems and decisions over which they had almost no influence. The BBC still broadcast nationally, but its executives could no longer assume their understanding of Britain was shared by the public.

Successive governments and institutional leaders have claimed to empower the public while moving more and more decisions into managerial systems that ordinary citizens can neither direct nor meaningfully challenge. They tell people that the NHS is theirs, that the BBC belongs to the nation, that public bodies serve the public. Then they run those organisations as though citizens were customers fortunate enough to have reached the complaints department. Apparently, national ownership comes with a reference number and a ten-working-day reply.

A customer can complain about a service. An owner is supposed to possess some meaningful authority over its direction. Of course, nobody expects patients to perform surgery or television viewers to edit the evening news. But it is not unreasonable to expect institutions funded and sustained in the public's name to be answerable to the public in more than ceremonial language. Being consulted after a decision has effectively been made is not the same as having power over it. And feedback forms cannot substitute for genuinely accountable leadership.

The retreat went both ways. Party branches shrank, union membership fell and plenty of citizens stopped attending the associations through which earlier generations exercised influence. Nobody listens at a meeting you never attend. But responsibility is not equal: citizens have less time and authority than the professionals running enormous public organisations, and the people with that power cannot simply blame the audience for withdrawing.

This is why the anger runs deeper than disappointment with services. The NHS can still inspire affection while failing to feel accessible. The BBC can still matter while no longer seeming familiar. Institutions that once made Britain tangible now leave many citizens feeling like strangers to their own inheritance. When the things that held a country together cease to feel like yours, what remains to hold on to?

One answer has returned to British politics with renewed force: ethnonationalism. The idea is simple. It makes ancestry, inherited descent and a connection to a historic people central to deciding who truly belongs to a nation. That differs from citizenship or participation. You belong because of the people from whom you descend.

The attraction follows from Britain's history. Empire has vanished. Industries that sustained entire communities have closed or moved. Institutions once treated as national possessions appear increasingly remote. Even familiar customs become contested. Ancestry cannot be outsourced or reorganised by a consultant. Your grandparents remain your grandparents, whatever the latest British government announces.

I understand why permanence appeals when so much else feels temporary. Immigration concern is not automatically ethnonationalism; neither is pride in English history. It is an explanation for why a harder definition of belonging becomes politically attractive when less absolute answers have lost their authority. People searching for continuity discover that a family tree offers one form of certainty no public institution can provide.

But there is a political sleight of hand hidden inside that promise. Ancestry can tell a person where their family came from. It cannot make a hospital listen, restore public control of broadcasting or provide a strategy for the industries their children might work in. And when descent becomes the measure of authentic Britishness, a citizen born here to parents from elsewhere can be told that the country of their birth is somehow less theirs. A shared nation cannot be governed as somebody's private family inheritance. Yet someone must decide where to draw the boundary. How far back must your family go? Who gets to decide? Your ancestors stay the same; the rules can change overnight.

Its appeal exposes Britain's insecurity. Britain is reaching for an identity that cannot change because its public sources of identity have become so unreliable. Unfortunately, the world is about to make standing still even less realistic.

The first Wind of Change exposed the collapse of an international order in which Britain knew its rank. The second is changing what national power can accomplish, and it is arriving rapidly. Globalisation has connected British work,

investment and trade to decisions taken far beyond Westminster. A firm can design here, manufacture abroad and sell worldwide. Capital can depart more quickly than a minister can organise a press conference explaining why it shouldn't. Government retains power, but cannot direct the country's fortunes entirely from within its borders. An employer can move production, a global company can change its supply chain and an international financial decision can affect what a British family pays for its mortgage. A country still debating what it is cannot afford to neglect what it is capable of doing.

Artificial intelligence will make that question even harder to avoid. Software is beginning to perform tasks once reserved for trained professionals, from drafting routine documents to analysing complex information. It will change work, skills and where businesses operate. Some jobs will be transformed, new ones will emerge and established careers will have to adapt. A young person entering the workforce today deserves a better national ambition than being told to retrain whenever the next machine learns another task.

There is a name for part of this change: the market-state. The traditional nation-state offered its citizens a measure of collective security, with governments expected to protect employment, welfare and a shared national direction. In a market-state, governments increasingly organise conditions for investment and opportunity in an economy they do not fully control. People are offered choices, but the decisions shaping those choices may be taken by businesses and networks operating across borders. The promise shifts from collective guarantees to individual opportunities, even when those opportunities depend on forces nobody locally elected can command. Britain has to decide what it still intends to build together, rather than merely which opportunities it hopes the market will provide.

Britain cannot retreat from the world or stop technology with a stern speech. The world is moving whether Britain likes it or not. What troubles me is a country confronting extraordinary decisions about its future while still uncertain about its own purpose. Britain is still being buffeted by the first Wind of Change, while the second arrives before the country has found its bearings.

And so the question keeps returning. What does it mean to be British? The Olympic nurses offered an answer, as does the monarchy, and so does a family gathered around a Sunday roast. None belongs exclusively to a politician. But a collection of familiar images is not a direction, however fondly people regard them.

Britain is a nation without a rudder. That rudder is a confident national identity, connecting its inheritance to what it wants to become. Without it, every sudden change feels like another threat to a country already unsure where it stands. Politicians can promise restoration, institutions can invoke their history and campaigners can point to ancestry. None of those gestures tells Britain where it intends to go, or what it is for.

I don't believe a country needs to agree about everything before it can recognise itself. It needs enough confidence in its own identity to disagree without treating every argument as an existential crisis, and enough purpose to decide what it will defend and what it will build. Macmillan understood the world would change regardless of Britain. Another wind is already rising. Britain cannot spend the whole voyage debating the name painted on the boat while somebody else chooses its course.