Has the term ‘British’ lost all meaning?

We’ve been filling in our son’s school application form this week. Below his name, date of birth and gender – which I’m horrified to see only has two options, despite the form clearly stating that it is indeed 2017 – is ‘ethnicity’. I suppose I’m meant to put ‘White British’ although I dislike the phrase. Nine-times out of ten when I see the W-word used in the media it’s as an insult or gripe, usually followed by ‘privilege’ or – shudder -‘feminist’.

Of course, there’s another term we could use instead: English. According to the Guardian: ‘English patriotism is on the rise at the expense of a sense of British identity, with voters in England increasingly likely to describe themselves as solely English, according to research.’ The study found that almost a fifth of people describe themselves as English not British, up 5 per cent from 2015, with more than a third of those surveyed describing themselves as either solely English or more English than British. The YouGov data showed that the number of people who described themselves solely as British fell in 2016 from a year earlier.