The train from Birmingham to Oxford last Friday evening was a paltry four carriages. As a consequence, it was stuffed to the gunwales.
Passengers filled every cranny. There were even people standing in the toilets.
I had just left the annual conference of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK at Birmingham’s National Exhibition Centre, and was on my way to the conference of the British-Irish Association (BIA) at the University of Oxford, that great bastion of English élan.
A night and day spent among Farage’s flag-waving culture warriors, while knowing that national identity would be discussed at the BIA, ensured that the topic was already on my mind as I departed. It usually is in Brexit Britain.
Few places exude Oxford’s quintessence of the English nation, or an Irishman’s stereotype of it. Photograph: Henry Nicholls/AFP/Getty Images
I’d have thought about it some more only for the fact that, now, I had nowhere to stand, let alone sit. Finding a square inch of real estate to call my own was my only concern as I clambered over the limbs of innocents sitting on the floor to reach the front of the train.
Things were bad, but hope sprang eternal. I was banking on the endurance of typical English respect for hierarchy and class systems. I reckoned that, whatever the carnage elsewhere, the first class carriage would still have space. I was right.
The three carriages behind it resembled a zombie apocalypse, but first class was like an airy Garden of Eden as economy passengers obediently stayed outside.
Shamelessly, I plonked down at a table. I didn’t have a first class ticket. I didn’t care. If the good staff of CrossCountry wanted me to move, they would have to send in the army. This was my own private rebellion against the infuriating UK rail network that many train-loving Britons now see as a microcosm of their nation’s decline.
The obedient watched on sullenly from just across the first class border. It was like the pigs’ dinner scene of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, but on a jam-packed train.
Eventually, because of the congestion, the train manager declassified the service – anybody could now sit in first class for free. Crucially for me, he declassified it before any of his colleagues had demanded I pay for an upgrade.
It felt like a victory. Maybe this class system that the English love so much could be beaten after all.
I exited at Oxford and walked to the BIA event at Pembroke College, through streets filled with history and honey-coloured buildings. I ambled past quaint bookshops and little English teashops and the unmistakable Tom’s Tower at Christ Church.
Few places exude Oxford’s quintessence of the English nation, or an Irishman’s stereotype of it.
Next morning, the conference dived headlong into national identity. The BIA event, attended by senior politicians, academics and civil servants, is held under the Chatham House Rule: you can reveal what was said, but not who said it nor their affiliation.
Suella Braverman, the London-born Reform UK MP who is the daughter of immigrants of African-Indian origin, has said that she will ‘never be truly English’
Panels crackled with debate about what it meant to be English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, Northern Irish, nationalist, unionist. One wise old head from the Republic asked what does it actually mean these days to be British, and crucially how that differed in England from being English. He never got a proper answer.
A Welshman got a laugh quoting Gwynfor Evans, the late founding father of the nationalist party Plaid Cymru: “Anybody can be Welsh, they just have to be willing to accept the consequences.”
An Irishman, musing over the British Museum’s unveiling of the Bayeux Tapestry depicting the Norman invasion, asked mischievously “just how French are the English?”
Everybody agreed that the effects of Brexit are still queering the pitch over identity.
There was debate over whether it is ever possible for an immigrant to “become” English. After all, there is no such thing in law as it pertains to a person: their passports say only that their nationality is “British”.
One sage with knowledge of the lives of immigrants surprised everybody by saying that he felt only the descendants of new arrivals could really call themselves English. Britishness, on the other hand, is more about a set of values that anyone can adopt.
Research suggests that the people, and their devolved governments, in Scotland and Wales are far more open to the idea that immigrants can take on the national identity of their new home. But overall, many immigrants prefer to call themselves British.
Suella Braverman, the London-born Reform UK MP who is the daughter of immigrants of African-Indian origin, has said that she will “never be truly English”. She has suggested it could take the descendants of newcomers five or six generations to credibly claim it.
Census data shows that in Scotland, 65 per cent of people in 2022 identified as “Scottish only”, not British. That means only a third of Scots accept the national identity on their passports. In 2021 in Wales, 55 per cent identified as “Welsh only”. Britishness is meant to include the smaller nations, but it seems only an English majority agree.
Meanwhile, it turns out that 35 per cent of Oxford residents were born abroad, compared to 19 per cent in Britain. Part of it is all those foreign students. It may be the epitome of Englishness as seen by an Irishman, but Oxford’s reality is more complex.
Identity was back on the agenda last weekend in Dover and Portsmouth as protesters chanted about stopping the boats.
But who is going to fix the overpacked trains?