Waning

FOR Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the exchequer, Britishness encapsulates such laudable values as fair play and an “unshakeable British commitment to liberty”. Mr Brown has been calling for a national debate on what the Union Flag represents for several years, and often seems to be doing most of the debating himself. His most recent contribution was to describe a campaign for English votes on English laws, which would also disenfranchise the MP for Kirkcaldy & Cowdenbeath and prime-minister-in-waiting himself, as “a Trojan horse” for the separation of Scotland from England, leading to the break-up of Britain.

Unfortunately for Mr Brown, his timing looks poor. A string of recent polls has shown increased support among English people for separation from their northerly neighbours. And the most recent edition of the annual British Social Attitudes Survey, published on January 24th, provides further evidence that a more general sea-change may be taking place.

For one thing, the commitment to those very British civil liberties seems to be declining fast. In 15 years there has been a large fall in the number of people who think it is worse to convict an innocent person than to let off a guilty one: from 62% in 1990 to 52% in 2005. The number who think the police should be able to question suspects for up to a week without giving them access to a solicitor has risen from 9% to 25% over the same period, and support for compulsory ID cards from 37% to 54%.

The notion of Britishness itself is losing favour. Decreasing numbers of the residents of the island of Great Britain now regard “British” as their primary national identity. Part of the reason is that since devolution in 1998 the Scots and, to a lesser extent, the Welsh are keen on expressing their new political independence. But not all of it. Those living in England also see themselves differently. There has been an increase in the number opting for the label “English” as the one that best describes their nationality (see chart).

Respondents not only embrace a British identity less readily than they did but also have trouble ascribing a distinctive meaning to it. When asked what it meant by pollsters, most struggled, then fell back on such banalities as “the stiff upper lip” and “drinking tea”. Those who described themselves as British were no more likely than others to express an attachment to such British institutions as the monarchy or the system of government. This week Alan Johnson, the education secretary, proposed teaching Britishness in schools.

For some groups, Britishness has a particular importance. “English” seems to convey an ethnic, rather than a civic, identity. One of the useful attributes of the British label is that minorities often prefer it. In 2002 pollsters at MORI found that only 9% of ethnic minorities strongly identified with England, Scotland or Wales, compared with 39% of the general public.

Other sorts of social identities too are in flux, including class, political affiliation and religion. All are declining. Although as many people as ever think of themselves as belonging to a social class, this is no longer correlated with a set of beliefs about such things as the merits of income redistribution. Class warfare is out of fashion, the ideological line between Britain's two main parties has blurred and voter turnout, at 61% in the 2005 general election, is near a post-war low. Even those who identify with a particular party do so less strongly than they used to.

The most marked change is in the number of people who say they are religious. In 1964 nearly three-quarters of Britons not only belonged to a religion but attended services; by 2005 only three in ten did.