James Kirkup James Kirkup

Euro 2020 and the search for a new Englishness

England's Raheem Sterling (Getty images)

A soccer contest is upon us. I know nothing of football as a sport, but even a dunce like me knows that these things are about more than 22 men chasing a ball for 90 minutes. Big sporting events such as Euro 2020 matter, especially for England and Englishness.

Any big England game is a rare chance for people to fly the flag and briefly talk about Englishness. But we need to do more than talk about this when the football team is playing. A proper national debate about English identity is overdue and badly needed. New polling from British Future this week showed that only two thirds of BAME people think ‘Englishness’ is open to them. Worse, 14 per cent of white English people still think only white people can be English. That’s better than it used to be, but still captures the idea of a country that is not aligned with its entire population.

For all Gareth Southgate’s eloquence and the example set by a multi-ethnic national team, football alone cannot build an inclusive national identity. Just ask the French about what happened after their Black-Blanc-Beur team won the 1998 World Cup. Better to look to Scotland, which has built a national identity capable of accommodating (for instance) Asian heritage while consistently fielding all-white national sports teams.

Instead of hoping that some jolly faces in a stadium will sustain a national identity, other people need to do some heavy lifting. That means we need politicians to go beyond their current ‘twice a year’ approach to Englishness (once when the football team is playing; once on St George’s Day) and talk a lot more about what it is to be English. We need cultural leaders and institutions – the monarchy included – to help develop ideas of Englishness that are simpler bigger, capable of including multiple identities.

We are all used to the idea of hyphenated identities: some of us are Black British, or British Asian.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in