Sub‐state national identities among minority groups in Britain: a comparative analysis of 2011 census data

Abstract

Using data from a new question in the 2011 UK census, national identities across minority ethno‐religious groups in England, Wales and Scotland are compared. The findings not only substantiate earlier work showing high levels of British identification among minority groups but also demonstrate that this does not extend to sub‐state national identities. The extent of sub‐state national identification varies between different minorities, but the nature of this variation also depends on the specific (sub‐state) national context. The findings may be understood in relation to key biographical ‘markers’ of national identity. These markers help explain variations in sub‐state national identities to a much greater extent than British identity, but their effect also varies across the different nations. The analysis demonstrates the importance of examining sub‐state as well as state (British) identities and heeding differences in the ways in which these identities might be conceived and asserted across national borders within the same state.

The relationship between political and ethnic identity among UK ethnic minority and majority populations

“…That is, it comes into relief under specific local, temporal and political conditions (Kenny 2014). Contemporary English identity expression has been linked to a specific 'sense of the nation' (Bond 2017;Leddy-Owen 2014;Kumar 2003); and across Europe, we see that national identities are being reconceived. Instead of civic constructions of nationhood (Smith 1991), the ethnic roots of national identities (Wimmer and Glick Shiller 2003) appear to be finding increasing expression within the associated movements in countries such as Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, The Netherlands and the UK, with corresponding implications for cohesion and solidarity (Reeskens and Wright 2013) and anti-immigrant prejudice (Pehrson, Vignoles, and Brown 2009).…”

“…In the UK, political parties have aimed to mobilise such ethnic nationalism by linking ethnic and political identity explicitly among majority (white) populations (Wyn Jones et al 2012;Bechhofer and McCrone 2014;Bond 2017;Henderson et al 2017). The rise of the anti-immigration UK Independence Party (UKIP) in the years up to 2016 was implicated in a particular construction of national identity, linked to nostalgia for an imagined past of traditional values and certainties, which invoked specific cultural understandings of Englishness (Kumar 2003).…”

Embodying Britishness: National identity in the United Kingdom

“…Yet, for working class Scots, the probability of selecting Murray was 0.44! The strong support for the 2016 Olympic and Wimbledon tennis champion suggests that Murray embodies Scottish national identity (McCrone, 1997), or ‘substate’ Scottish identity (Bond, 2017, p. 543) for working class Scots.…”

Identities in flux? National and other changing identities during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…We assume that respondents attach the same meaning to these identities, which they may not, but it is not obvious that any such heterogeneity of meaning will bias our results in a particular direction. With regard to RQ3, in line with previous research we examine the influence of the demographics of age, gender, race, class and education (Bechhofer and McCrone, 2014;Bond, 2017;Huddy and Del Ponte, 2019;Henderson and Wyn Jones, 2022). We also control for party identification (partisanship) (Van Bavel et al, 2022) and for political knowledge (political sophistication) as a distinct measure from education: if the importance of identities such as with the nation are in part contingent on perceptions of government performance (Chan et al, 2021), knowledge of what government is doing could be an influence.…”