What Does It Mean to Be British Anymore?

The Broken Promise of Multiculturalism

Multiculturalism was meant to be a beautiful idea: a celebration of difference and a way to honour the rich tapestry of backgrounds and beliefs that comprise a modern, liberal society. However, in the UK today, that promise has not been fulfilled. What was once presented as tolerance has turned into a troubling form of indifference to responsibility: the prioritisation of rights, coupled with a refusal to ask anything of anyone for fear of appearing oppressive or, worse, racist.

We now live in a country where people are allowed in with virtually no expectation of assimilation. They can live here for decades without learning the language. They can reject the norms of British civic life, including, in some cases, equality before the law. Furthermore, our institutions, particularly the police, have become unable to enforce those norms. They have been hollowed out by years of cuts and paralysed by political cowardice.

Theresa May’s tenure as Home Secretary decimated the police, eroding manpower and morale. Consequently, we witness a demoralised force, frequently too overstretched or intimidated to confront those who flout the law. Even when the will exists, the political support is rarely present. Ask a police officer today what occurs when they attempt to enforce public order in so-called “sensitive communities.” The truth is grim: they are often told to stand down, not escalate, and avoid offending cultural sensibilities.

This is not tolerance; it is a retreat, and it is racist. Not in the cartoonish sense of political extremes, but in a much more insidious way, because it implies: we don’t expect the same of you as we do of ourselves. We don’t expect integration or shared norms. We will allow you to live apart, speak apart, and act apart. It represents the soft bigotry of low expectations, applied on a national scale.

From Diversity to Division

What we are left with is a country swiftly approaching a balkanised status. Too often, groups live side by side, but not together. There is minimal interaction between these communities because there is often no shared cultural foundation to rely on: no common language, no common customs, no common identity. When the only thing that binds people together is geography, not values, all that is needed for tensions to explode is a spark.

A new elite class provides the intellectual scaffolding for this through the lens of post-colonial Marxism: oppressor and oppressed. Instead of being based on class or power, this binary is now structured almost entirely around skin colour. If you are white, you are part of the oppressive structure; if you are not, you are automatically a victim of it. Nuance is gone. The individual is irrelevant. Identity is everything.

What this worldview produces is worse than simple division: it is tribalism. It encourages people to see others not as fellow citizens but as avatars of historical grievance or systemic guilt. The result? A politics of resentment, not solidarity. The dream of multicultural harmony is replaced by ethnic enclaves and imported conflicts.

You can see this clearly in our politics today. We now have sectarian voting blocs electing MPs not based on local issues, not even on national ones, but on foreign policy grievances such as Gaza. This is not democracy. It is the tribalisation of politics, and it makes a mockery of the idea that we share a common civic space.

The Cultural Amnesia of Modern Britain

I was a senior lecturer at Sandhurst, where the British Army trains its future officers. In our culture seminar, I would ask officer cadets to define British culture. The responses were always revealing: they struggled to do so. There were the usual clichés: cups of tea, queuing, complaining about the weather. But beyond that? Silence. Or a hundred different answers. Because what does it mean to be British today? Is it about liberal democracy? Tolerance? Rule of law? Most people cannot say, and that’s part of the problem. Culture is the stories we tell ourselves and the world about us. If we can no longer tell our story, we have a problem.

We have become a nation more defined by what we are not than by what we are. We embrace cultural stereotypes of others. We are not those brash Americans. We are not the strike-loving French. We are not nationalistic. We are not confrontational. However, this negative identity leaves a vacuum, and in that vacuum, other, more assertive cultures rush in. Without a confident national identity, we lack the moral and cultural clarity to say: this is who we are, and if you want to live here, you should be part of it.

Multiculturalism, at least as it has been practised in the UK, is not just failing; it is fuelling the very divisions it was meant to heal. Unless we find the courage to speak honestly about culture, identity, and integration, we will continue to slide further into a future where coexistence is confused for cohesion and proximity for unity.

Britain needs a common story again. One that transcends background, colour, and creed. One that says: we are not just a collection of communities; we are a nation. If we do not start telling that story, someone else will write one for us. We might not like how it ends.

Andrew Fox

Research Fellow at Henry Jackson Society | Ex British Army

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