Yes, I tend to think of my parents’ heritage, as The Two Ronnies put it - “I’m from the third world - Yorkshire…”
British people don’t have much patience with this line of thinking. If you weren’t born there, and have never lived there, you AREN’T Scottish. ‘Plastic Jocks’ don’t get much fellow-feeling from real ones here.
My point was that separate countries or states, they’re all part of a larger union, and I’d have imagined that the identity might be somewhat bifurcated, in that someone can be Welsh and British simultaneously, in much the same way that someone can be a Michigander and an American simultaneously.
Ah, okay. Yes, I think that’s true, but the trouble is that because of the numbers, it becomes difficult to distinguish “British” from “English,” to the extent that “British” identity gets read as “English” and vice versa.
Nobody in this threat has mentioned the Secretary of State for Scotland / Wales / etc., which is what I believe used to be called the Home Secretary for Scotland / Wales / etc. Clarification as to what these are called and what role they play in running the respective countries from an actual British person would be welcome.
Home Secretary runs the Home Office, which approximates the Ministry of the Interior in most countries, and has historically had responsibility for immigration & naturalisation, framing new criminal laws, gun control policy, prisons, some secret service work, narcotics policy etc., in England, and in some areas of policy for UK-minus-Northern-Ireland. Some of these have recently been hived off to other ministries .
The Scottish Office, which doesn’t have a lot to do these days since devolution, used to run Scotland but that is mostly done by the Scottish Executive (which has taken to calling itself the Scottish Government) and the Scottish Assembly (which has taken to calling itself the Scottish Parliament). It still has a Secretary of State for Scotland, but it’s a fairly unimportant post now. The Welsh Office, likewise is a shadow of its former self.
The SoS for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland administer the central government funds and programmes that aren’t within the sole responsibilities of the devolved governments. Which gives them the opportunity for some politicking:
The SoS for NI also has to pick up the reins (and the pieces) when, as at present, the devolved government is stalled/collapsed because one or another party walks away.
“The Scottish Government” is now its official title under UK legislation such as the Scotland Act 2012.
“The Scottish Parliament” has been the official title since the start of devolution in 1999 - there has never been a “Scottish Assembly”.
They possibly had some theoretical reason for saying that but they’re not speaking for everyone in the independence movement. It’s obviously a daft thing to say when we all still have UK (aka “British”) passports.
I think it was just a sort of combative-extremist thing where everyone has to be ‘with us or against us’
My enemy’s enemy is my friend?
I suppose that’s related in that they both arise out of black-and-white binary thinking.
That’s kind of unusual; most nationalities/ethnicities that I’m aware of are much more concerned with descent, rather than location.
But it’s not about “descent” at all, it’s about shared experience (which could be influenced by one’s descent, of course—cf. living in America if society says you are not white). Not about the British Isles, but I heard secondhand about a girl who was born in Japan, is a citizen of Japan, whose parents are Japanese, speaks fluent Japanese, etc., but it seems she lived in Paris for a couple of years of high school. Now people tell her to her face that, sorry, she is not really Japanese.
NB that’s extreme compared with the attitude in Britain. She obviously does know all about Japanese culture, politics, geography etc. Temporarily living abroad would never be seen as rescinding your English, Scottish or Welsh identity.
Sure, but let’s say that some Polish people moved to the UK and had a baby, and the kid grew up in the UK. For the sake of argument, let’s say he grew up in Oxfordshire.
That kid might be British, in the sense that he’s a British national, but ethnically speaking, he’s a Pole, not English. Same goes for say… an American kid who grows up in Wales. He’s not Welsh- he probably won’t speak the language, and so forth.
Nor would an English kid growing up in Houston count as Texan or American except maybe in a legal sense.
If he wants to declare himself to be English, he is English. If he says he is Polish, no one but the far right would argue. This point is very important to understand in the context of large scale post WW2 migration to the UK from the Commonwealth, and the extreme racism that those immigrants and their descendants have suffered.
The point that was being made upthread is about people who have one or 2 great great grandparents who left Auchterfeckit for North Carolina in 1879. They will be welcomed with open arms if they’d like to come and see the site of great great granny’s hovel, but they know nothing about modern Scottish life and people will snigger if they declare they are, in the present tense, “Scottish”.
Just want to say, people who cheer anyone who is playing the English national team will have no problem with English clubs, individual England players, English musicians, English actors, English writers, many will have friends who are English…
And also it isn’t just England. I have to tell you that Scottish football fans are absolutely gloating about Wales’s humiliating defeat last night. And while Scottish rugby fans might have a bit more time for the Welsh rugby team, we all laughed as much as Brian Moore did when they fecked up their grand slam in the last minute in 2021, for reasons specific to the way that that season had played out.
That’s absolutely not true. Ethnically speaking, he’s a Pole if he has some combination of: speaks Polish, eats Polish foods, has Polish family, practices his religion as the Poles do, has Polish values, etc.
Some children of immigrants very much retain their heritage ethnicity, while also taking on the ethnicity of the place they grew up: bicultural. But others retain very little of their parents’ ethnicity, and do not identify with it. “Ethnicity” isn’t genetic, it’s cultural, and needs to be practiced to count. You absolutely can have two Polish parents from Poland and be ethnically English.
This happens all the time in America: children and grandchildren of immigrants assimilate. Personally, I think it’s important to pass on your cultural heritage, but a lot of immigrants do the opposite, fearful that any trace of foreignness will harm their kids’ future.
As for Wales, kids get Welsh in school, and quite a lot of first-generation Welsh are fluent, whether their parents are from Poland or Syria or even America. In that particular case, a child who in Wales who is fluent in Welsh will almost definitely be considered ethnically Welsh by the community.
That may be the way it works in the UK, but I’m not sure the rest of the world thinks of it that way. That being said, most people who are ethnic here in the US tend to identify with a hyphenated “-American” sort of tag.
So my friend Dave is a Mexican-American. Another is a Ghanaian-American. And so forth. They could call themselves straight American, and probably would if they weren’t in the US. But here, they take pride in their background and don’t want to give it up.
I actually think a lot of that is due to the fact that “white American” isn’t really an ethnicity or nation when it comes right down to it. Not yet, anyway. So people here like the idea that they’re part of a “people” that has traditions, native dress, unique foods, and so forth, instead of the sort of homogenized “white American” culture, which seems to be about 70% English, and 30% German/French/Irish.
That’s also I suspect is why people who were raised in states or areas with specific identities - Cajuns, Texans, German-Texans, Czech-Texans, and so forth, are so fiercely proud of those identities- they represent something more like being part of a “people” than mere generic white American.
Doesn’t make them actually Irish, Scottish, German, Czech, etc… but gives them something larger to be part of.
IANA expert, but that is a radically different way of defining that term from what I’ve ever understood, read, or heard anyone else say.
IME = “Ethnicity” is genes, “culture” is what you behave or learned or practice. So in the terminology I’ve familiar with, your exemplar kid would be 100% indelibly ethnically Polish, but could possibly be culturally English if he really assimilated far more than most and affirmatively rejected the culture of his parents.