'National pride is earned by good governance.' Henry Nicholls/AFP/Getty Images.
Should we get there, it’s strange to imagine Gen Z in our twilight years. Will our women, scraggly stick-and-poke tattoos blooming over wrinkled arms, still call each other “diva” in their knitting circles? Will the men, swapping gurning to EDM for glacial aquarobics sessions in the local leisure centre, still have their mullets? Will everyone die from vaping at 50?
And, most unknowably, will we import our globalised, post-MeToo, post-BLM politics into the 2070s and beyond? I suspect not. The newest crop of pensioners, who came of age in the late Seventies and early Eighties, was as ever far more likely to vote Conservative than their younger compatriots in last year’s general election. Though each successive wave of bus-pass-holders is likely to be more tolerant — or less baffled, at least — on social issues, the inevitable slide Right is a product of shifting priorities, towards pensions, winter-fuel payments and the ability to secure a doctor’s appointment. Gen Z will not be an exception: a cynical view is that the politics of self-interest always supersede voguish causes, such as quibbling over the definitions of identity, as one heads towards the Stannah stairlift.
So what, then, will become of our most hot-topic political feeling: alienation? This is particularly apparent when it comes to questions of nationhood, as one shocking study conducted by The Times found last week. In it, we learned that just 41% of young people felt national pride, crashing down from 80% in 2004. A number of Gen Zs gave quotes to the paper about what can only be described as a sense of national cringe, with one 22-year-old woman reporting that, when she went abroad on holiday: “I sort of try to be quiet because I don’t want people to know where I’m from.” The vision of this young woman skulking around Seville, only communicating via gestures and whispers for fear of being outed as a tea-sipping, marmalade-chomping Brit abroad is really rather pitiable; after all, these are not sentiments shared by the throngs of Spanish teenagers who foghorn their way around central London every day of the week.
It’s mostly pitiable, though, because it carries a sense of being cowed. The real shamers are not, as our hushed holidaymaker might suggest, the locals in your quaint holiday destination of choice (only the French hate us so viciously as to make it clear to paying tourists) but our peers. I’m unsure how I would respond to a survey question posed in this way — “Would you say it is true or untrue that you’re proud to be British?” — because if we’re honest, saying “it is true” is freighted with the charge of being unchic. A straw-poll survey of a few of my peers threw up similar anxieties; most of the responses were sardonic, fixated on the coolness or otherwise of the British identity; “I would rather be French”, “Everyone’s ugly”. Others cringed at the “self-obsessed” nature of patriotism, with our national “small-man syndrome” speaking to a country in managed decline, harking back to its grand but irreplicable imperial past. The vision of a proud Brit conjures sunburn, obesity, baldness and racism — basically the satirical X personality Big Rob, who hails from “norf ingerland” and punctuates his bigotry with “simple as”. What horrified thinkpieces in the wake of The Times survey have missed is that there is a question within the question here: what we are really asking is not “are you proud to be British?”, but “are you by any chance an uneducated, unfashionable swine?”.
This elision is a huge problem. Firstly, it makes such surveys essentially meaningless; most Gen Zs, asked how being British fares compared with most other nationalities on specific issues, would answer positively — about our imperfect but at least democratic political system, our comparatively tolerant values, our creaking but free-to-use NHS, our distinct national sense of humour, and so on. And secondly, it sneeringly patronises those who do take the question at face value, and who answer earnestly that they are proud to be from the same place as the Industrial Revolution, the Beatles and Bakewell tarts. Yes, young people now are more concerned with the evils of empire — and our meddling in wars in the Middle East — than they were in 2004, when that comparison survey showed four in five were proud to be British. But I suspect these facts have far less bearing on the 2025 responses than the fact that, in a way that would be considered ridiculous 20 years ago, patriotic sentiment has become a marker of class: of course you, intolerant, pink and provincial as you are, are proud of being from this racist, rainy island. You don’t know what I know from my three years reading Noam Chomsky at Bristol, then smoking rollies outside my minimum-wage barista job in Clapton: that we suck and being proud is contemptible. Nigel Farage’s Reform has itself exploited this class-patriotism nexus by suggesting that effete, detached progressive elites “don’t care” about Britain; those progressives themselves would argue that bullish Right-wingers don’t care about anything else, a Little Englander stereotype dripping in disdain. Is it surprising that Gen Z are reluctant to pin their colours to the mast?
All this is to say that the terms of the question of national pride are not neutral: there is a right answer and a wrong answer, and the reputational stakes are increasingly high. The only way that the closeted patriot might circumvent social suicide is by cloaking their feelings in self-hating irony, as was on full display in that god-awful viral Guardian article about “Britishcore” in the autumn. This view holds that Britain should be proud of its quintessential shitness, and that arming yourself with twee Gavin and Stacey-esque patter might soften the blow of being on a perennially sinking ship.
But Britishcore’s hyperspecificity is also its downfall. If Gen Z’s patriotic apathy continues into old age it will not be because of deeply felt spite for British culture, but its having been swamped by globalisation. The Americanisation of youth culture — our politics, our tastes in food, even in the most extreme cases our accents, has reinforced a vassal-state mentality in which everything British is small, crap and has bad teeth; the glamorous, bombastic and earnest pull of American culture, and in particular its politics, has engaged its conservative youth in a new MAGA wave, in a way that would be impossible to replicate here.
A further reason why Gen Z cannot grasp nationhood is because we live our lives on the internet. Online worlds are more integral to youth culture than ever; they are not so much boundaryless utopias as separate provinces of vaguely American values, of hopeless materialism and obsession with individual identity. Why would Gen Z Britons feel particularly united with their countrymen when they spend half their lives clocking up screentime on American influencers via a Chinese shortform video app? It should not be surprising that they feel more connected with others of their generation of what we once called “digital natives”, who share their online slang, meme quotability and profound sense of alienation.
Life moving online also means we are unanchored from place: we work from home rather than schlepping into town centres to mix with our communities; many move abroad and retain remote jobs, ever more disconnected from hometowns. In this, again, national pride’s class valence matters: those in blue-collar jobs are moored alongside their fellow citizens, while the ever-growing tranche of corporate, remote graduate workers are bound only by the strength of their WiFi, having no need to get out of their silk pyjamas and talk to “real people”. They are sucked further into the monoculture of the internet, divorced from the office, tea-break canteen and post-work pub in which you develop local, then greater, loyalties.
So, will we still be ashamed of being British when we’re old enough to covet a Saga cruise? It depends almost entirely on whether we remain anchored to those deracinating online worlds — and whether being British will benefit us. There are many reasons why Gen Z feels let down by this country: the housing crisis and the job market have created a generation of aimless, overeducated graduates who stayed inside for two years during Covid to protect a generation of wealth-hoarders, then emerged into made-up email jobs, half of the earnings from which will go to protect their grandparent’s triple-locks. Politicians have much to offer us to address this imbalance; if they manage to do so, by the time we reach our comfortable fifties we might feel that we also have a stake in Britain. Only if we land on our feet after a period of social and economic uncertainty, and only once we inevitably grow out of caring what other people think of us, will people begin to say that they feel proud to be British. National pride is earned by good governance; if Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch, both of whom commented on my generation’s concerning lack of patriotism this week, want to bring us back into the national conversation, they must make it worth our while.
18 to 27-year-olds must have been reading the Daily Telegraph, or watching GB News. People who go on and on about how bad Britain is, and who are not always wrong about that, react with fury when, in particular, the young agree with them, and do so not because of school, at least in the sense of what was formally taught, but because of life.
There are nine Labour MPs who were born after 1995, and while one of those is Nadia Whittome, are the others in the Reserves? Is the 26-year-old Liberal Democrat, whose party has only once its 37-year history seen a war that it did not like? Their contemporaries rightly do not fancy being sent to their deaths by people who would never go.
And if only 11 per cent of them would trust the Police if they were victims of crime, then they must have been listening to Nigel Farage, Richard Tice, Lee Anderson and Rupert Lowe, all of whom have denounced two-tier policing on the floor of the House of Commons, while their party’s other MP appears to be mute in general, although his past life makes it fairly easy to guess his opinion on this issue.
Gen Z, by contrast, Extremely Proud or Very Proud to be American about 45%. Source https://www.statista.com/statistics/1359532/share-adults-proud-american-generation-us/. Yes we see it on the streets.
Leaving 55% who are not terribly proud.
I wouldnt characterize the Moderately Proud as “not terribly proud”. Anyway numbers reflect a different mindset than that of UK
The impression given with the US, is not so much National shame, as it is white shame. In Britain, whites are British and non whites are only British when it suits. Plus the shame that we should feel is for the actions of our white ancestors, because apparently all white British people financially benefited from the trans Atlantic slave trade. Personally, those young Brits that believe that nonsense should be ashamed of their ignorance of British History. Look to the Mills and Mines and ask why they weren’t being worked by slaves?
British history has always largely ignored the working classes, instead basing almost everything on the experiences of the tiny elite majority who actually had a voice.
45% is enough if they love their country.
Sounds like in the USA they were given a sliding scale to mark their ‘proudness’ on, whereas the poll under comment here was binary. As I was reading the piece I wondered how it would look if given a more nuanced possibility of answer – no doubt we would all speculate on that from our own subjectivity, so I shall refrain from doing so.
That was a very enjoyable essay, imo.
The author didn’t break new ground; the insight that a young generation deprived (cheated?) of a meaningful future will reject the society that fails to nurture them is hardly original, but she writes compellingly and from the perspective of the young.
This old codger agrees with her.
Most remarkably but justifiably the article ends with a mention of the housing market. Thatcher understood that she needed to give the majority of people a stake in capitalism by allowing them to buy their own homes. It was the toffs that followed her, who did not understand how crucial this is.
The other aspect that Poppy did not outline sufficiently is that many in this generation have been encouraged to spend 3 years doing a degree that will not help them earn a living and are then told that they are in debt to society.
By selling off council houses Thatcher kicked off a process which led to the housing crisis of today. Council houses acted as a dampener on house prices and provided homes for people who couldn’t afford to buy. None of those who followed have done anything to stop house prices getting further out of control – indeed they have often done the opposite. The majority of those ex council houses are now owned by private landlords.
This was a one off gravy train ride.
House prices correlate only with four things: strongly with household income and the cost of debt, and very loosely demand and supply. Council houses were never a moderator of demand because as soon as anyone could afford to buy a house they tried very hard to do so, leaving tens of thousands of council houses empty by the late 70s.
What did happen was this. The last 70 years saw a huge growth in married women working, and progressing to higher salaries. The last 50 years saw a trend of falling of interest rates. And nice property in great locations was always and remains an almost fixed supply.
Firstly, households used their higher second incomes borrow more and bid up the price of property .
Secondly, households used lower interest rates to borrow more and bid up the price of property.
These trends are now in reverse. Interest rates have now reached bottom and family formation is in decline.
Only supply and demand props up prices, which is one reason why Western governments are keen on immigration to avoid a mortgage debt collapse. But also why house price growth is slow relative to the 70s and 80s.
Thank you for reminding me of those halcyon days of “gazumping”, “bridging loans” etc.
Now of course even so called Tory Councils are imposing a 100% surcharge on Council Tax for second home owners! The triumph of spite and envy, and pure marxist tosh! Homes for the poor indeed!
*Should one have the misfortune to own a second home in what is now called Wales it can reach a staggering 400%! (Slightly better than the 350 unsolved arson attacks of the 1980’s/90’s.)
You can’t help yourself can you? You live in a place where nearly half are immigrants. You have a right to be proud of your history but absolutely nothing to be proud of now. Living in past glories is like not living.
Speak for yourself Mr Wheatley.
Living in the past again, I think.
Surely you don’t deny Wales is an absolute disgrace both on and off the field these days?
And you a former Englishman at that!
Wales is a disgrace but you can have good holidays there.
It’s as if our country belongs to someone else. My son is coming back home as his private flat rent goes up and up. I have told him to leave the country and come back in as an illegal immigrant. That way he wouldn’t have to worry about housing needs.
Are you yourself in favour or not of large-scale immigration? I’m not sure.
More specifically, I think penal levels of taxation are most unlikely to produce any improvement in housing supply at all, so if that is the Welsh government policy I don’t agree with it. But it is your country.
Btw I feel it is completely reasonable policy is to require children being educated in Wales to learn Welsh to a certain level. However, given that whales is still a mostly English-speaking country, requiring people to speak Welsh for government jobs is taking it too far.
The welsh council tax rises are against second homes, as many people have holiday homes and locals are being priced out of their home towns as a result. If it makes owning multiple houses less attractive financially then that is a good thing
Correct. Or you could also say prices correlate with how much can be borrowed.
That also points at another element of the problem. After Thatcher, banks focused on selling ever more debt. The higher the asset prices, the more debt they could sell, the more debt they sold, the higher higher the asset prices. Central banks stimulated the borrowing even more by lowering interest rates. Minsky predicted that this would result in “Ponzi borrowing”, ever more exotic ways to pump up the bubble. Until one day the growth stops and the entire thing is revealed to be a pyramid scheme. During the 2008 crisis this is precisely what happened and it extended far beyond the housing market.
After the crisis, instead of serious reset, central banks essentially reinflated the Ponzi in a way that disproportionately benefited the rich. During the pandemic they did it again. Because of this the upper classes slowly but surely suck all the wealth out of the middle class. Because even if you own a house that doubled in value, you (or your children) cannot compete with someone who owns 50 houses and a major stock portfolio, which doubled in value as well. I think this slowly radicalizes gen Z and also many millennials.
You forgot to mention the ramping up of demand by means of continuous mass immigration.
Another significant driver of demand was the increase in singles rather than couples buying, particularly more single women could afford to.
The real guilty man in all this was Gordon Brown who removed housing costs from the metrics used to determine interest rates and then flooded the market with printed money in an attempt to win the 2010 election. The consequence has been the largest upward transfer of wealth in history.
Rubbish
House prices are dictated first by demand and then by the ability to borrow.
The primary driver of house price inflation has been millions of legal and illegal immigrants
There are multiple drivers of house price inflation as NC points out above. One of his key points is that housing where it is most wanted is always in limited supply – so that the housing market will always be imperfect.
Houses available at low rent act to dampen house prices because there will be a point at which it makes more sense to rent than buy. And this effect will spread through the market. I think I’m drawing on Ricardo for how this works.
The problem wasn’t selling off council houses; that was a great idea. The problem was preventing councils from using the proceeds to build new council houses.
On that we agree.
Selling off council houses doesn’t alter the overall availability of housing in any way. We might possibly also look to the numbers of foreign born people who occupy social housing, which is over 40% in London.
No, it wasn’t the selling off of council houses in the 1980s that caused today’s real-estate price spike. It’s that your maniacal planning boards won’t let you build new housing. If there is no legal way of reining them in, you might try whacking away at them as best you can with your officially-dulled butter knives.
None of those things are specific to Britain though. Most Western countries have a housing crisis. And in hindsight we know a house does not give you a stake in capitalism, it gives you a stake in a credit driven Ponzi.
There were plenty of “toffs” that understood what Lady Thatcher was about. Unfortunately they were too slow* to prevent her regicide by the likes of the ‘traitors’, Hesseltine, Major, Howe, Hurd etc.
Thus the country has never recovered from that catastrophe, and we have been saddled with nonentities ever since.
* That ‘draft dodger’ the late Alan Clark did make a spirited attempt.
It was positive that Margaret Thatcher allowed people to own their own homes but she did not replace the homes she sold and consequently created the housing crisis we are experienceing today. We need social housing as well as private housing.
Not only are they in debt to society for useless degrees; they’re also in debt financially with huge loans to pay off for the rest of their working lives. This massive burden also counts against their credit rating for things like mortgages. Their generation sure has been shat on, especially when you consider how Covid affected their education and their encouragement by the Woking Class elites to self-indulge in mental health ‘issues’.
Seconded, rather sadly!
I’m not convinced Gen Z (stupid term!) “hates” Britain. They may have been infected by the virus of victimhood, hopelessness and individualism, but offered a sensible and inspiring alternative vision for the future they would soon learn resilience, pride and personal responsibility.
And who is available to offer such a vision?
Just over a century ago, young kids were being conscripted to die in the war by the thousands (or rather male kids, suffragettes were selective about equality) , were otherwise forced to live in grim unhealthy housing or work in dangerous mines / factories, with minimal social benefits.
They didn’t “reject society.”
The reason young kids – with extensive free healthcare and education, 50% going to university and usually a relaxed few years of “studying”, massive welfare and benefits etc – reject society is the same reason possibly the smallest British army in centuries is struggling to fill ranks, why they don’t marry and have kids, etc.
It’s simple. You don’t fulfil your duties and responsibilities or feel grateful to society and country based on what you get.
You do it because you have pride, self respect and gratitude for what you have received.
While not going as far as saying abroad is bloody and all foreigners are knaves I think Gen Z ‘s problem is they don’t travel. If they did they’d like Britain more.
British national pride seems to go in and out of fashion. There wasn’t much among the young when i was one of them in the 80s. It was sort of ‘in’ in the 90s, though it was on the surface mostly. The 60s children must’ve had national pride in some ways but not in the same way as the war generation.
So it will change again this time too I expect. Those that have a bit of pride are just keeping quiet about it but if Reform continue their rise in popularity thay won’t need to be so quiet.
Was about to say that the attitudes described were also widespread in the ’80s.
My generation felt very similarly but many of us changed our views as we got older.
I would be proud of Britain if Reform became government. Right now I am ashamed of our country.
One problem is they f**k you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had and add some extra, just for you.
But guess what, they were fucked up in their turn by fools in old-style hats and coats, who half the time were soppy-stern and half at one another’s throats.
Let’s face it, the lesson is that man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, and don’t have any kids yourself. But I guess I don’t need to tell the author that.
Get out? Die?
It’s difficult to take any pride in, or indeed feel any sympathy for a country that scorns you and make your life more difficult at every opportunity for no good reason. The powers that be will have us living in cubicles and endlessly scrolling on dating apps long into our sixties if we ever give them the chance.
Have you seen the new prefabs from Elon Musk?
Pride is very different from gratitude.
Is Gen Z grateful for what Britain has given them or allowed them to be? The D-Day and VE Day commemorations are at heart about gratitude. No one feels gratitude to celebrate Trafalgar Day anymore.
From today’s perspective, Lord Summerisle’s barnet makes him look like a London hairstylist rather than a pagan revolutionary sacrificing representatives of the British state to inaugurate the cultural revolution of the 1960s.
On the other hand, Lord Sumption is certain that Gen Z would be like the generation of 1936 who resolved not to fight for king and country but who eventually did in 1939. Oh dear.
By the time that Gen Z are in their seventies they will be worrying about the Alphas and the Betas, the ones who never were able to regulate their emotions having been exposed to screens from day one after birth.
While I would like to be proud of Britain, and think I could be, I am honestly struggling to think why I would be right at this moment.
To be honest, if someone is talented and able and could move somewhere else where they would earn more, be able to buy a house, or hand over less of their salary to a greedy landlord – maybe even have a family – then I would advise them to do so.
More and more these days, I think:
To have grown up in 90s Britain can be regarded as great fortune; to have left in 2004 was a stroke of genius.
I agree with you 100% but it doesn’t help in Britain, does it? The problem is that if everybody is fighting to be one of the big fish, the small fish suffer. It didn’t used to be that way because the big fish would build a factory to employ 1000 minnows, who would in turn aspire to great things. Now, the big fish can leave the country, taking all of their gains with them.
I used to work in the Midlands with a company owned by 4 entrepreneurs who bought a factory through a management buy-out. When they wanted to retire, their children weren’t interested in working in a dirty, smelly factory. So they put the place up for sale. They had many good offers from finance companies who wanted to move the whole business offshore. But they wanted to help the community, which had helped them, so they trained their own workers to buy them out, thereby keeping the local jobs.
An entertaining though rather long-winded way of telling us that the attitudes of Gen Z are driven by the same uniquely British combination of petit bourgeois snobbery and fashion victimhood as ours were at that age. The pressure to conform is even stronger now – dissent and you stand to lose not just your friends but even your livelihood.
But massively worsened by online “content” and habits. It’ll be a long four years or so of bingeing The Trump Show with a certain amount of envy but it looks like you’ll get your Farage and others riding the Reform wave. Maybe their slogan can be National Pride and Unity: Or Else.
I agree with Citizen Diversity that pride isn’t needed to have gratitude, nor a bit of perspective. Where else would anyone in the Anglosphere rather live? Yes things are far worse than they could or maybe should be but look around the globe and the across the pages of History.
The rub: Convenience and material comfort abound but loneliness and disillusion are rampant among the young, middle, and old. We’ve lost faith in ourselves, as well as patience with neighbors and those farther afield. Huge generalisations and you’ll correctly point out I don’t get the whole UK story, but I’m quite sure this is a major current that crosses the Atlantic these days.
Incidentally: Have you personally been threatened with jail or other severe punishment for something you said or posted? This seems to be a very sore point with you. If so, I’m sorry that happened and I don’t agree with policing speech, even in Germany. Outright incitement to violence is something different but the bar for that should be kept high.
This seems to be a very sore point with you
Certainly is. I never thought I’d see an elected UK government proposing to re-introduce blasphemy laws and imprisoning people for being insulting to horses.
I am not Gen Z but I am not proud of Britain either. I am proud of Britain’s history but that is different. What should we proud of in today’s Britain?
To my way of thinking, only young people can have the energy to make a change. But without energy and effort, nothing will change. If Gen Z doesn’t like Britain, only Gen Z can do anything about it.
When I was young there was no expectation of buying or owning a house. But if you worked or used a lot of energy, you perhaps had a chance. It was all about energy. Yes, the young today have things stacked against them, yes there are too many old people because of the success of the NHS, yes Government actions have encouraged house purchase as an investment making it into dream for most young people, yes people are encouraged by parents to get useless degrees, yes we have potholes everywhere and huge queues in hospitals…but only the young can change it.
After that long and accurate litany of negativity I was expecting a twist at the end. I salute your optimism though.
I disagree, it’s simply much, much harder today to buy a house compared to yesteryear. A family with a single average breadwinner could expect to buy a basic family home without too much difficulty provided they didn’t p1$$ all their wages up the wall, whereas now young families even with two full time workers struggle.
The older generation could work knowing that over the years their financial situation would become ever more comfortable, which isn’t the case if you’re stuck in a grotty rental. If you’ve no chance of improving your financial security then any hope and inclination would soon disappear
I agree that becoming a first time buyer is now just impossible for many. But that doesn’t mean it was always easy in the past.
I think younger people now believe that home ownership was a doddle in years gone by, but I remember it being a huge financial struggle and a great risk for homeowners in the 80s.
I’m not saying it was a doddle, but it’s much easier to save the deposit on a house 3x your salary as opposed to one 9x, and thats before we start talking about record rents while you’re saving
Pride is a sin, the most grievous since all others spring from it.
Self Pride is a selfish thing, but pride in your country is a kind of gratefulness.
Not pride in country but love of country, patriotism minus the jingoism.
Britain has been destroyed by its universities and the model of multiculturalism preferred by its political clas.
So true. They appear these days to stand for everything awful. Employers are far more careful about them these days as they wonder whether they will be good workers. There is a lot of truth in the words educated Idiots these days. Common sense is not too common now.
In my old boomer days, the university-groupthinked English used to outcompete even their celtic-fringe British neighbours in fashionable self-hatred. As in this piece: The English…how best to characterise them? Well: theirs is a land of poets and dreamers; a land of fiercely independent gritty people who know how to take their drink and dance a jig. And you just can’t help but love to hear them sing. Then there’s the food of course – the marvellous food. And so sexy; with that famous dress sense, such gorgeous specimens of masculinity and femininity the English are overall.
If all – or any – of the above was passed through some AI software it would grunt out “Does not compute, does not compute!” Why is this so? If the English are pricked, do they not bleed? When they party do they not dance and sing…and cook great meals? Do they not compete on reciprocally equal terms with Irish, Italians, French and Americans in the international romantic bonding market? Why, in short, has Englishness failed to garner its own version of the self-flattering national mythology of so many other nations?
Humility?
What could possibly go wrong with raising people to hate their country and culture. That poll could well yield similar results in the US, where the young are told are forebears are the cause of every single bad thing that the Brits didn’t allegedly do.
Also, if national pride is earned by good governance as the author suggests, the current situation may be owed to its opposite. But who’s going to vote for a serious change to the status quo. For better or worse, we have ours.
There’s nothing inevitable about tolerance. Blasphemy laws, non-crime hate crimes, social media siloes and Islamisation due to simple demographics will make sure of that. The most notable thing about Gen Z, if it even earns a note in history, will be its failure to reproduce.
The last sentence says it all, and nicely describes a deeply felt sense of entitlement.
No doubt there is some ‘fashion’ element to it. After all Orwell identified this in the 1930s. But is it really a generational thing per se? I am not patriotic about Britain today. I don’t recognise it. I didn’t feel like this in the 1960s nor 70s, nor 80s, nor 90s. Things began to change after Iraq and have just got worse and I’m 72.
Conscription. History lessons. A new social compact. Life long local service. Phones out of schools.
Unfortunately Poppy is of that opinionated class of person having no idea of the thoughts of people outside her bubble.
The less patriotic person is that of the Millennial and Gen X age range. (My sons for instance.) They have spent their school days being brainwashed and believing it!
The Gen Z person is now seeing the result of this and is thus moving back to patriotism.
Poppy correctly identifies the housing and work problems but fails to recognise that they are suffering because of untrammelled immigration and the unravelling of social cohesion.
I can assure Poppy and the readers of this article that, as a veteran Nationalist, Patriotism among Gen Z’s is alive and well and growing.
Surprisingly well thought through for a Gen Z’er.
Your appalling grammar hurts my brain. Please stop.
This is an insightful article, well written and honest. I’m old so appreciate the view from a young person.
“…National pride is earned by good governance; if Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch, both of whom commented on my generation’s concerning lack of patriotism this week, want to bring us back into the national conversation, they must make it worth our while..”
One of the things Brits miss, as do Europeans, is that you should never look to politicians, nor government in general, to solve problems which, let’s face it, they create. The overarching premise of being governed is that citizens are governed only by consent. If citizens don’t give their consent then they are no longer citizens but serfs. Badenoch and Starmer cannot “make it worth your while” you must make it worth their while to carry out what you consent to at the ballot box.
I’ve always loved England – her history, her beauty – and so I’ve always regarded myself as a patriot, but I have to distinguish my England from the dreadful British state, the “Yookay”, which has brought England to ruin. For that I have only loathing.
At nearly 80 I can hardly speak for the young, but I do wonder if many of them have that same feeling of living in a fallen state – why should they be patriotic, let alone fight for, the Yookay?
As for the young of the earlier 2004 survey, that was a very different and much more optimistic time – the heyday of Blair, Cool Britannia and all that stuff. I didn’t like it even then, but there was undoubtedly a different feel about the country.
Poppy has talent and she uses her talent to write content that is simultaneously fun to read and almost perfectly nonsensical. Her style reminds me a little of the poetry of Russell Edson whose work could be rollicking and musical while conveying all of the coherence of a person rambling out of heavy anesthesia. Poppy’s brain is powerful and wild and yet to be constrained by reason, research or experience.
I am not sure that house ownership is the main criterium for the question. House ownership on a mass scale is relatively new in our history. Patriotism isn’t. I am more inclined to lay the blame, if blame it is, on education and various media. With the internet the world has shrunk, foreignness is just, well less foreign and so their perspective has changed from ours. Furthermore the question itself is a bit limiting. “Proud”? You can be patriotic and believe in a nation state with borders without being proud necessarily.
One thing Poppy does get right is the influence of the internet and the online bubble they live in. My daughter went on numerous BLM protests and no amount of discussion could shift her from the view the British Police were as bad as their US counterparts… indeed the whole racism thing is quite different on either side of the Atlantic.
We are far from perfect but the US has a very different history, they had slavery on their land and we didn’t… their legacy is different to ours, but this gets lost in the international zeitgeist on the subject.
Not saying we are perfect, just different.
We may not have have had (m)any slaves on our land, but we had very many slave owners living in the UK, and shipowners who made fortunes from shipping slaves. Not least in Bristol and Liverpool. This is not a past to be proud of, but it is in the past.
The main reason why the question is a silly one is that it makes no sense to be proud of something in which you had no hand.
It’s a pity as I feel proud of British Z gens. But based on the 3 neighbourhoods I spend most my time in I like Britain. I do feel there are huge challenges coming up and I really am annoyed about the difficult housing situation which I hope will be fixed soon.
Just ignore them until they reach 34, and are willing to work 40 hours a week (not ftom home). I won’t employ anyone under 30 these days, not anyone from a difficult sub-set.
If the question that precedes whether to be patriotic or not is, “What’s in it for me?” rather than “Who am I?,” then I don’t see much hope for Britain.
When the call to arms for Britons to defend Ukraine with boots on the ground the silence will be deafening.
The survey question (“Would you say it is true or untrue that you’re proud to be British?”) carries the same no-win freight as “When did you start beating your wife?” Both are known as False Dilemmas, and whereas the former hides its intent better, it still strikes the anxious, peer-conscious young person as a choice offered by ol Hobson.
I think highly of the British people that I meet, but they vote for very poor leaders.
Your last few choices have involved Trump, Biden, Harris and Clinton. You yanks have had just as awful choices as us
It’s not just the young who ‘hate Britain’. I have lived here for over 30 years, so longer than Gen Z. When I first arrived in the 1990s, Britain was a great place, a place that was confident and one that was not scared of its own past. Fast forward to 2025, and it could not be more different. I truly believe that ‘Britain’ – whatever that stands for now other than a political border – is broken. It is neither a good nor nice place to live. I am looking to leave as soon as I can. My son, who is a Gen Z’er (and centre right leaning) said that he’d struggle to accept the idea that he should go to war and potentially sacrifice his life for this country. Why? Because he says, quite rightly, what would I be fighting for? A grotesquely bloated, woke state machine that hates and derides at every oppotunity the nation’s proud history; one that tells him, if he dare questions it, that he has no ‘legitimate or respectable right’ to exist in ‘modern Britain’, especially if he does not capitulate, without question, to gender ideology and Critical Race Theory interpretations of who he is and his place in British society. Here is my challenge: who, reading this, would put their hand up and say ‘ yeah, I’m willing to sacrifice my life for that’?! This is the problem, and why the likes of Russia and China will walk into Britain, eventually, without having to fire a shot – because no one, let alone the hard-Left goons who got Britain into this mess, will be willing to defend it, because they will know in their heart of hearts that there is nothing left worth defending. It’s very sad.
“A number of Gen Zs gave quotes to the paper about what can only be described as a sense of national cringe, with one 22-year-old woman reporting that, when she went abroad on holiday: “I sort of try to be quiet because I don’t want people to know where I’m from.”
Cre.tin. the issue is they have been brainwashed by a leftard education system to believe one side of the argument: the one propagated by the former USSR and its intellectual descendants.
Poppy is an excellent young journalist I make some very good points. However I don’t think it’s right to talk about patriotism in that entirely transactional way “make it worth my while”!.
Of course there is a very strong ideological component to this: we had generations of people who were vastly poorer and today’s generation X who were very patriotic indeed. Different times. Let’s be clear today’s Russians and Chinese are also very patriotic, so this is another element fundamentally weakening the West.
I would go a bit further to say that the “thick” unfashionable white people from Clacton etc, the young men of whom often are the people to join the armed forces, are cottoning on to the dripping disdain of their metropolitan compatriots. So quite likely they will lose their patriotism as well! “Why will I volunteer to support a wussy, feminis feminised, woke and useless state!”
An insightful article that resonated with me. I have two daughters in their 30s and the eldest a teacher has only just managed to buy a shared ownership house. My wife bought her first house at 21. Houses are too expensive for anyone on a modest salary.
The observation that stood out was that the youth are more connected to America than the UK and live their lives permanently attached to online media. The influence is staggering.
Unless main stream UK politics starts being relevant and impactful positively to their lives they will continue to be influenced by questionable philosophies imported from the US
The second half of this essay is the key IMV. The sapping of any sense of loyalty or purpose by the digital vortex means Britain is just the backdrop to an online life for many.
Are they proud of anything at all in the real world?
The same applies everywhere. On my travels I don’t get the sense any of the young are proud of their country – which is why so many come to London. And of course their relationship to the UK is then fleeting and transactional.
“The Americanisation of youth culture — our politics, our tastes in food, even in the most extreme cases our accents”
I have begun to notice pitifully fake American accents being affected usually by fat middle-class kids in woke paedo romper suits flirting with trannyism.
The British are like the Curate’s egg – good in parts. And we are thankful for those parts.
Luxury beliefs are of course a status symbol.
Author is correct that it is snobbery that drives radical progressivism.
If you’re parents are hard working lower middle class people – thrifty, with modest aspirations..
Then they have to be symbolically destroyed & disavowed so you can self-actualise and metamorphose into a metro urban cool kid.
It’s all very Jane Austen in fact.
Great article. The correlation of place, class, and patriotic feeling rings very true.
It does take Unherd writers a lot of words to attempt to skewer the target – No mention of mass immigration seems odd.
You can be proud of your achievements. But since where you were born is not under your control, it makes no sense at all to ask “are you proud to be British?”.
Where does national pride come from? Maybe a sense the nation with its virtues and achievements are intrinsically part of you and in some way you contribute to it. That those you consider your community are part of that and share that sense. The degree to which your life is invested in the community and nation and others share that investment in a common cause. The notion that it is well rooted in yourself and ancestry.
The reasons for such sensibilties are much diluted now and less commonplace than a few decades ago. Social cohesion has fractured significantly. The Anywheres are replacing the Somewheres.
I can understand the British astonished reaction to such blatant self-loathing by a vast majority of GenZ-ers: what used to be a fixture of British teenage subcultures like Mods or Skinheads – the Union Jack – is on the way out as nowadays such quintessentially British youth cultures no longer exist…
The ‘Anywheres’ have won against the ‘Somewheres’.
For Schadenfreude purposes, I can tell you that in France patriotism among young people has all but vanished since at least… 1945!