Do you consider yourself ethnically “British” or ethnically “English”, “Welsh”, Scottish", “Irish”, “Jamaican”, “Pakistani”, etc
Regardless of whether you consider yourself to be a proud and loyal citizen of the United Kingdom?
I’d say that anb awful lot of English don’t think of themselves as an ‘ethnic’ at all and would need to be pressed on it - but you’d find that almost all would mention their regionalism - such as Londoner, Geordie, Yorkshire - in fact its almost a definitive test of being integrated into the main population that your firt thought is for your hometown or region
Quite a few of the rest of the English would have a dual identity - hometown/region and perhaps ancestral.
Just so I’m clear…Are you English or British? Are the two synonymous?
If you’re English, you’re British, since England is one of the constituents of Britain and the UK.
But each of us may identify ourselves in different ways at different times for different purposes, depending on who’s asking and why. For most of us, there isn’t a 100% either/or identity, even at any one time, let alone over time. Those people who insist on doing so as the be-all and end-all, for themselves or for others, tend to be associated with some extreme politics.
As for being a “proud and loyal citizen”, how do you mean? It’s not a question that need arise for most of us. We don’t, apart from a few special occasions, feel the need for pledges of allegiance, singing the national anthem or wrapping ourselves in the flag. “The UK” is a fact of our lives, it’s the framework we live in: though no doubt there are many debatable ways it could be made less ramshackle, it’s ours - we don’t feel the need to make a public song and dance about it all that often.
One can be both a proud British citizen, Happy to be British and also a proud Englishman, Scotsman or Welsh, Jamaican, Nigerian, etc.
Its not either or…or maybe it is in the UK
That’s my point exactly. We just don’t think about it that much.
So why is there a Scottish independence movement?
I confess I was being Anglocentric, since the last question posed was about being English rather than British. In different ways and at different times, it has been more contentious in Scotland, Wales and (above all) Ireland. Many Scots clearly now feel the UK as a structure has had its day and want out, as most of the Irish did.
But of course it’s also possible to feel one belongs both to a distinct ethnicity (or more than one) and to be British. There isn’t a particularly strong movement for total political independence in Wales, for example.