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What do we think we are? 42 Activity Organisers
By which I mean, we Brits, of course. For example, what do we call ourselves –British, English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish or Northern Irish? Or are we not British at all, but merely from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland? I will not include here the inevitable complexities of the nationalities of immigrants in the United Kingdom. There is enough confusion when England play Scotland at Hampden Park or Wales play Ireland at Lansdowne Road, before we ask, ‘Do you support England or India at Lords?’. For a start, politically, ‘Britain’ does not include Northern Ireland, nor the Crown Dependancies of the Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey. And the term ‘Britain’ is NOT the ‘preferred’ terminology in British Government documentation where ‘United Kingdom’ or just UK is preferred. But every one of her embassies and consulates around the world are called British. And ‘Team GB’ at the Olympics DID include athletes from Northern Ireland, and since 1910, the legal National Identity Plate for vehicles from Northern Ireland has been ‘GB’, while the Crown Dependencies have their own plates (GBM, GBJ and GBG).
We must remember that the British Isles is a geographical term, not a political one, and includes the whole archipelago from the Scillies to the Shetlands, including the island of Ireland.
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And what about the British Overseas Territories? (That’s how the leftovers of the British Empire are now referred.) The largest of these is the British Antarctic Territory and the other thirteen territoties include Bermuda, Diego Garcia, the Cayman Islands, the Falklands –and, yes, Gibraltar. Curiously, all citizens of the British Overseas Territories are British and as recently as 1983, the term ‘Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies’ was changed to ‘British Citizen’.
Gone are the days when we speak of the British Empire, but references to Her Britannic Majesty, slogans like Cool Britannia and national names like The British Virgin Islands may also be doomed to extinction.
