Nick Spencer explores what people across the UK believe is important when they think about British identity. 19/06/2026

Summary

Ten years ago, the UK voted to leave the European Union. The referendum drew on and then intensified the debate about what it meant to be British, a debate that has, if anything, deepened over recent years, as concerns around immigration, asylum, the rise of Islam, the rise of China, and the alleged decline of Europe and the West have come to dominate the news cycle.

As part of Theos’ work exploring the rise of Christian nationalism in the UK and Europe, this essay explores perceptions of Britishness, among people living in the UK, today.[1] We commissioned research into the relationship between nation and religion from RED C, technical details of which can be read here.

We found that the more lurid concerns about the UK sliding into exclusive forms of “ethnonationalism” have not been born out.

Britain remains strongly characterised by forms of civic, cultural and emotional belonging, with Britons leaning heavily towards achieved (and inclusive) identity when it comes to being “truly” British.

Based on new research commissioned by Theos and conducted by RED C, four factors are especially important to the UK population when it comes to their perception of what makes one truly Britishness, namely (in descending order):

–       obeying the law

–       being committed to democracy and freedom of speech

–       speaking English

–       contributing economically

More recent anxieties about the UK being gripped by Christian nationalism are also overblown. Levels of belief that you need to be Christian in order to be British are low compared to other Britishness factors, as low as those that say you need to be white to be British.

However, there are some causes for reflection and perhaps concern.

While “respecting the authority of parliament”, one of the pillars of political/ civic identity, is widely considered to be important for Britishness, it is very rarely considered the most important factor. This is noteworthy given how central parliament is to our political/civic identity. This presumably reflects widespread political disaffection at the moment, which, if left unchecked, could threaten to erode that commitment to political/ civic identity more generally.

Conversely, while ethno–nationalistic identity is rarely considered important, the importance of natal identity is thought somewhat higher (45% agree that being born in Britain is important for being truly British) and is judged to be the most important factor by nearly a third of those people. In other words, many of those who are inclined towards natal identity as a characteristic of Britishness, are strongly inclined that way.

Those who have an ethnic/ natal or a political/ civic idea of Britishness are intensely exercised by a handful of (different) issues each.

–       The ethnic/ natal group are particularly focused on the level of immigration, the number of Muslims, and the number of asylum seekers but also, notably, the cost of living today, and the issue of national ID cards.

–       The political/ civic group are particularly anxious about the level of racism, climate change, the rise of the far right, and the anti–vaxx movement.

–       By comparison those who have primarily a cultural or emotional conception of Britishness are less intensely exercised by these (or indeed) issues.

Contents

1. Summary
2. Contents
3. Introduction
a. Seven dimensions of national identity
b. Conducting research
4. What does it mean to be British? An overview
5. What’s the most important factor in being British?
6. What issues preoccupy different ideas of Britishness?
7. Conclusion

Introduction

Seven dimensions of national identity

There are different ways in which people in a country can feel and express their national identity and loyalty.[2] The most familiar is the distinction between ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ national identity, the former focusing on commitment to political institutions, the latter on birth and ancestry. The divide runs deep. It maps onto debates about whether countries are, on the one hand, created or “imagined”, or, on the other, natural and inherent. It also maps onto contemporary concerns about the nature and possibility of social cohesion, with ‘civic’ identity considered more “achieved” and therefore inclusive, while “ethnic” identity is more “ascribed” and therefore exclusive.

While this distinction is foundational, it is also incomplete or at least inexact.  There are various factors, not least cultural ones, that can blur the boundaries of the civic and the ethnic. Celebrating national customs and traditions, for example, are, in theory, civic identity markers, open to everyone. But because such customs and traditions are often deep–rooted and historically embedded, they are not necessarily easily or quickly “achieved” and can feel more ascribed. The ex–pat Briton who moves to Japan is unlikely to become a connoisseur of the quintessentially Japanese tea ceremony in quick time.

For that reason, it can be helpful to disambiguate the drivers and sources of national identity beyond the ‘civic/ethnic’ divide. In our research, we picked out seven different dimensions of national identity.

1.     Political/ civic identity. To be British, means to have a commitment to certain political/ legal/ constitutional arrangements and institution.

2.     Ethnic/ natal identity. To be British, means having been born here or being white.

3.     Cultural identity. To be British, means participating in and celebrating British customs and traditions.

4.     Religious identity. To be British means having a commitment to the historically dominant religious tradition of the country, meaning Christianity.

To these four (and relatively familiar) factors, we have added three others, which are often overlooked but play a serious role in debates around national loyalty.

5.     Geographic identity. This is a relatively thin form of belonging, entailing nothing more than simply inhabiting the country. Nonetheless, it is important to include as 5.5 million (or 8 per cent) of British citizens live abroad, something often overlooked in debates around Britishness

6.     Economic identity. Very often, the immigration debate is framed not so much around how many immigrants come here but what they do when they are here and, in particular, whether they contribute economically. Public opinion is, not surprisingly, rather different according to perceptions of whether they do.

7.     Emotional identity. Finally, simply the way that people feel about their country is vitally important, and an important subjective factor to place alongside the other (slightly) more objective ones.

Conducting Research

In order to measure these different forms of national identity, we asked people how far they agreed or disagreed with a series of 12 statements about being British, that covered the seven different dimensions outlined above.[3] These were, “To be truly British you should…

In the first instance, respondents were asked whether they agreed (on a five–point scale from strongly agree to strongly disagree) with each statement. In the second, respondents were asked to select the single “most important” factor that defined Britishness.

What does it mean to be British? An overview

The first pass at this question generated the following results.

Figure 1: To be truly British you should… (levels of agreement)

The first observation to note here is that there are clearly two separate categories of identity when it comes to public opinion. Political/ civic, cultural, geographic, economic, and emotional conceptions of identity are all relatively high, getting 60–80% agreement by UK adults, whereas ethnic/ natal and religious forms of identity are seen as comparatively less important. The only mid–way exception is the ethnic (specifically natal) form of identity (having been born here), which 45% of people agree is important to be “truly” British.

Of the more widely recognised dimensions of identity, political/ civic is seen as most important with 83% of people agreeing that to be British you need to obey the law, and 77% that Britishness requires being committed to democracy and freedom of speech.[4] The only (slightly) weaker element in this category was “respect[ing] the authority of parliament”, with only 60% agreeing, arguably reflecting current widespread political disaffection.

Cultural and economic identities are also seen as significant, with 77% of people agreeing that speaking English is an important dimension of Britishness, 68% “sharing national customs and traditions” and 77% saying that contributing economically was important to being truly British.

Religious and ethnic identity on the other hand, were only deemed important to being truly British by a minority, just 17% of people in each case.

Overall, therefore, it is clear that Britons lean heavily towards achieved (and inclusive) identity and loyalty when it comes to being “truly” British.

Further clarity can be acquired on this issue when we factor in not only levels of agreement but also the level (and strength) of disagreement on these issues. For example, it is salient that nearly half of all people strongly disagree that you need to be white to be truly British. By applying a rating score to people’s views on this issue,[5] we can evaluate overall balance of public opinion.

Figure 2: To be truly British you should… (balance of public opinion)

This calculation shows that four factors – one economic, one cultural, and two political/ civic – are particularly important to the UK population when it comes to their perception of what makes one truly Britishness, namely:

–       contributing economically (1.1)

–       speaking English (1.13)

–       being committed to democracy and freedom of speech (1.15), and

–       obeying the law (1.31).

Conversely, two factors – one religious and one ethnic– are especially unimportant:

–       being Christian (–0.73)

–       being White (–0.86)

While this should not altogether dismiss the existence of religious and ethnic identity in the UK, it should contextualise it within a broader landscape of other dimensions which are considered more important.

What’s the most important factor in being British?

One challenge that might be levelled at the question just analysed is that it allows people to hedge their bets. Looking at the raw numbers, there were almost three times as many answers (12,599) agreeing (strongly or slightly) with the options available than disagreeing (4,400) with them.

In some instances (religious and ethnic identity, most obviously) people do feel sufficiently strongly as to disagree vigorously with their being important to Britishness. But with others, the picture is one of generally positive citizenship, and so generally amenable to positive opinion. In effect, many of the factors listed here could be seen as necessary rather than in any way sufficient to being British. Obeying the law, for example, might be a basic responsibility if you want to be British, but that may not mean it’s a key characteristic of being British.

To probe this element further, we asked respondents which from the list was the single most important factor for being truly British. The responses are given in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Which ONE of these factors is MOST important for being truly British

This data broadly preserves the priority ascribed to the factors already discussed.

Commitment to democracy and freedom of speech is considered the most important factor for being truly British by the largest proportion of people (15%) instead of obeying the law, which had the highest balance of public opinion (1.31), but obeying the law is still considered the most important factor for being truly British by 10% of people.

At the other end of the scale, being Christian and being white are considered the most important factor for being truly British by just 1% of people, which is where one would expect those factors from the agree/ disagree data discussed earlier.

In other words, there is broad correlation between a factor being generally agreed to be important and it being considered most important. There are two noteworthy exceptions, however, which can be seen in Figure 4.

Figure 4: The correlation between a Britishness factor being considered important (“agree”) and it being the “most important”.

Figure 4 plots the percentage of people who agree (slightly or strongly) that a factor is important to being truly British (red bar) and the percentage of people who say that it is the most important factor to being truly British (blue bar) – both measured on the left–hand scale. It then also measures what proportion of the former think the latter, i.e. what proportion of people who think a factor is important actually think it is the most important. It charts this with a green line, on the right–hand scale (and has data labels).

For example, 78% of people think that being “committed to democracy and freedom of speech” is important to being British, and 15% think it is the most important thing (right–most bars). That means that nearly a fifth (19%) of those who agree that commitment to democracy and freedom of speech is important, think it is core, or “most important”.

At the other end of the scale, 17% of people think that being Christian is important to being British, but only 1% think it is the most important thing, meaning that around 1 in 20 (6%) of those who agree that Christianity is important to Britishness, think it is of “core importance”. The same proportion applies for being white.

This measure is helpful because it draws out how big the core to any view is; in other words, so to speak, what proportion of people who have an opinion here are prepared to die on that hill. For most factors it is between 10% and 20%.

However, there are some outliers. Comparatively few people consider Christianity or being white as core to Britishness, and even fewer (5%) consider defending the country when people criticise it as being core. It appears that Christian nationalism, ethno–nationalism, and “my country right or wrong” nationalism are rarely considered core to being British.

Similarly, only 3% of those who agree that this is important for being truly British, think it is the most important factor. The unpopularity of parliamentary politics (and possibly the rise in nationalist movements across the UK[6]) is visible here and while this is hardly news, it is still noteworthy. Preserving the strong sense of political/ civil identity and loyalty that still dominates feelings of Britishness is made harder when ever fewer people respect the keystone of that identity.

There is another outlier, in the opposite direction. While 45% of people think that being born in Britain is important for being truly British (the third lowest figure), nearly a third of them, or 14% of the population overall (the second highest figure), think it is the most important factor for being British. In other words, a disproportionately high number of people who favour some form of natal identity and loyalty believe it is the core issue when it comes to Britishness. It seems that this, rather than any older and more familiar kinds of (white) ethno–loyalty is where the more “ascribed” nationalistic sentiments currently reside.

What issues preoccupy different ideas of Britishness?

Finally, how do different concepts of national identity and loyalty map onto political and social concerns today.[7]

We simplified the dimensions outlined above into four distinct categories, each of which had a sufficiently large sample base on which to conduct analysis. (The other dimensions of identity discussed above – geographic, economic and religious – do not have large enough sample sizes to test.) The four categories selected were:

We then analysed people’s current social and political concerns according to their conception of Britishness. The top three issues for each of the four kinds of national identity were as follows:

Table 1: Top three issues of concern in UK today (very concerned by conception of Britishness)?

“The cost of living” was the topmost concern for all different groups, but after that there was a marked difference between the concerns of political/ civic nationalists (who were concerned about the rise of the far right and the level of racism, and other groups, whose concerns were asylum and immigration.

We then examined which issues different groups felt very concerned about compared to other groups.

Table 2: % very concerned about [issue] for Britain?

Table 2 above records what percentage of each group (plus what percentage of the total) said they were very concerned with an issue. Different figures have different shading to give an indication of how to read each ‘footprint’. More precise definition can be read in this footnote[8], but in essence

–       Red indicates a strong level of difference between the opinion of the group on the issue to hand, and the opinions of all three other groups.

–       Orange indicates a strong level of difference between the opinion of the group and those of two other groups.

–       Yellow indicates a strong level of difference between the opinion of the group and that of one other group.

–       Grey indicates no meaningful difference at all between groups.

A number of points can be made about these results.

First, there are only a handful of issues that elicit no meaningful difference at all between people according to their understanding of Britishness. These issues are shaded in grey: gender identity (e.g. the trans debate), public finances and debt, the threat from Russia or other hostile states, and mental health problems among young people. Note, this does not mean people are not concerned about these issues but rather that their conception of what it means to belong to Britain does not appear to affect how concerned they are about this issue.

Second, those who have an ethnic/ natal or a political/ civic idea of Britishness are intensely exercised by a handful of (different) issues each. The ethnic/ natal group are particularly focused on the level of immigration, the number of Muslims, and the number of asylum seekers but also, notably, the cost of living today, and the issue of national ID cards. Rather differently, the political/ civic group are particularly anxious about the level of racism, climate change, the rise of the far right, and the anti–vaxx movement.

By comparison those who have primarily a cultural or emotional conception of Britishness are less intensely exercised by these (or indeed) issues. To be clear, it is not that cultural or emotional nationalists are unconcerned by these issues facing Britain today, but rather their conception of what it means to be British does not correlate with any particularly strong social or political anxieties at the moment. Where they do, as indicated by the prevalence of yellow boxes on the two right hand columns on the table (and more specifically by the letters next to the statistics), the cultural or emotional nationalists are marked out as being different from the civic/political nationalists, rather than the ethnic/ natal ones. In effect, holding a cultural or emotional concept of Britishness inclines you in the same direction as holding an ethnic/ natal, but with less intensity.

There is an intuitive logic to much of this. Ethnic/natal “nationalists” are more concerned about who is living in the UK, and are more inclined to reject outsiders. Political/ civic “nationalists” are not concerned with who lives here but they are with how they get on with one another, and are especially worried about factors that they consider to be divisive.

Beyond that, however, it is worth noting that:

–       Although ethnic/natal “nationalists” are not especially bothered about economic inequality, they are disproportionately concerned with the cost of living. In other words, there is likely to be an economic dimension to their ethnic/natal concerns.

–       There is almost no co–incidence between the felt concerns of ethnic/natal “nationalists” and political/ civic “nationalists”. These two, at least, do feel like two tribes.

–       Over a third of Britons prefer neither an ethnic/natal nor a political/ civic idea of Britishness, but instead favour a cultural or an emotional form of identity and belonging, and if these feel like softer forms of “nationalism”, it is probably because they are. People in these categories are far from indifferent but also less animated about social/ political affairs than those in other groups. In other words, while there are political tribes at work in relation to different conceptions of Britishness, that does not mean the whole landscape is tribal.

Conclusion

The Brexit vote, and the ensuing three–year parliamentary hokey–cokey, was a difficult and tense time in British public life, with many sensing or prophesying a decisive shift in our idea of Britishness, away from a civic/political model and towards a more exclusionary ethnic/ natal one.

In reality, things were always more complex when it came to British identity (the question of English identity is very different of course, and no less complex). When British Social Attitudes measured conceptions of national identity more than twenty years ago, splitting identities according to civic and ethnic ideas, they found that just 23% (in 1995) and 32% (in 2003) of people had a civic–only understanding of Britishness.[9] The majority of people – 63% in 1995, 58% in 2003 – had a mixed ‘civic and ethnic’ idea. (Very few people had an ethnic–only conception). In other words, the lines between these well–established conceptions of identity are vaguer and more permeable than might appear to be the case in theory, or indeed from the above data on the apparently incompatibly different concerns of ethnic/ natal vs political/ civic groups. Something of that blurring is captured when you factor in those who prefer to hold to more cultural or emotional forms of national identity.

Either way, the data presented in this essay strongly suggest that the civic/political conception of Britishness remains predominant, in spite of news stories that have stoked anxieties about the slide towards angry, exclusive, ethnically–flavoured nationalism. We should be aware of this before we sound apocalyptic trumpets about the state of society.

All that noted, and factoring in the point just made about the permeability of boundaries in this whole debate, while the differences between ethnic/ natal and political/ civic categories are real and clear, the two categories are not unrelated.

Some people will have immutable opinions on what it means to be British, and nothing will change that. However, many will not and it is quite possible, for example, to imagine that some, who once held a more civic/political idea of Britishness, could relinquish it because they feel that national politics is no longer functioning as it should, and therefore no longer a satisfactory source of identity, belonging or pride.

Were that to be the case, these people might not slide all the way from a civic/political idea of Britishness to an ethnic/ natal one, but move to a more moderate and less intense emotional or cultural view of the nation. That may be what we are seeing.

Either way, however much the public still favours a civic/political idea of Britishness, and however much the lurid anxieties of public life being transformed by a tide of ethno–nationalism after Brexit were overdone, it would be wrong to assume that the civic/political identity is secure. Because of its very nature – an achieved rather than an ascribed identity – it needs to ‘perform well’, and could therefore be seriously eroded by waves of political frustration and anger.

Interested in this? Sign up to our mailing list to be the first to hear about Theos’ work on Christian Nationalism.