Who are yer?
by Charlie Tims
So the national identity debate's trundling into action again. We explored some these issues a while back at TateBritishness and further back still in Britain TM. Debates and discussions (a bit like the one in Prospect this month) tend to fall foul of either trying to dictatorially point what it is to be British, or end up characterizing values so opaque that they end up being more about humanity than a particular nation. The bigger issues about the systems of governance and power structures that make the construction of our identity possible as individuals, too often gets overlooked in the constant search for who we are as a whole. In anycase, on a lighter note it seems an apt moment to point out that figures published by the British Phonographic Industry this week clarify that Britain buys more music per capita than anywhere else in the world (3.2cds per head ' and that's before you get into downloads).
And here is the Implicit Association Test (IAT) that helps you appraise the extent of your nationalism in a slightly different way.
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/uk/selectatest.html