The Essential English (Whatever That Means)

After decades of immigration, “what does it mean to be English and who gets to call themselves English? JB Priestley assumed that anyone who came here would buy into certain things – Shakespeare, Magna Carta, free speech and so on. He had not envisaged that there would be people who would look beyond these shores for their identity, and he would have had great difficulty grappling with the notion that some people’s identity would be bound up in religion.”