‘Britishness is an incredibly flexible identity’

Dr Peter Olusoga is a Chartered Psychologist, Senior Lecturer in Psychology and host of the Eighty Percent Mental Podcast. His brother, David Olusoga, is a historian and broadcaster. Peter and David discussed his new series, Union, and the psychological themes within.

David, you're a well-respected historian and established documentary maker, and your films and TV series have covered a range of topics. What was the motivation for focusing on the Union for this latest one?

I'm afraid it wasn't romantic or creative… it was about the pandemic. We were making a series about the empire. At the heart of that story was India and China, and we couldn't go there. We had to put that one on ice – we're restarting it right now – and whatever new project we did had to be based in the United Kingdom.

So it was a very simple calculation… what are the big issues in which history is alive? Where is it shaping debate, and decisions, and our lives in the 21st-century? Where can you trace the history and see it causing effects? Unquestionably, one of the histories that falls into that category is that of the four nations in the union of United Kingdom.

You talked there about the history of the union in shaping debate, people's lives, opinions. Watching the series, one of the things that stood out to me as a psychologist was the theme of identity, which came through in a number of different ways. Our identities, our self-concept, the beliefs and ideas that we have about ourselves, are defined and influenced by a number of different things. A specific set of physical, psychological, and interpersonal characteristics that are just ours, not shared with anyone else, but also the affiliations that we have to different groups, based on race, gender, sexual orientation, class, but also the social roles that we inhabit – parent, athlete, coach, politician, bus driver, historian, psychologist.

What is your perspective, as a historian having just made this documentary, on the factors that really shape how we see ourselves? 

One of the first things to say is a great number of people feel very ambivalent about these forms of identity, or very confused or conflicted about them. I think that's particularly so in England. Englishness has become in some ways the default of the United Kingdom. Englishness is an identity that doesn't need to call itself into question often, but I think it's very different in other parts and among other communities even within England. And there are a great number of people in Britain who have a strong sense of identity which is built around community, built around religious identity, and built not just on history but on interpretations of the history. And that's in all four nations… particularly I would say in Ireland, both sides of the border, but it's there in Scotland, it's there in Wales and it's there in parts of England.

One of the great ironies in British history is that you have a nation that defines itself in opposition to Catholicism – and very often opposition to Frenchness – and sees itself as Protestant, and then becomes one of the least religious nations on Earth. That is a huge factor in the story. There are a lot of surprising nations that have a higher level of irreligiosity, and even anti-clericism among some Catholic nations, but Britain is a nation that built itself by saying 'we're Protestant, not Catholic'. This identity of Britishness is built around Protestantism. To then have that religiosity fade away rather rapidly poses a big identity problem for a great number of people. And those who cling on to that identity, in which Protestantism is at its centre – particularly the Ulster Unionist community in the north of Ireland, but also many people in Scotland and other parts of the United Kingdom – they have a sense of identity which is much more rooted in a version of the history and much more clear and defined and central to their lives than many people in Britain.

Most people, because it's a wealthy country with lots of interpersonal freedoms, have identities that are pulled from all sorts of different places. History is just one of those places. It's often a very vague sense of history, and you can see that even in this word 'union'. If you tell somebody in Scotland, 'I'm making a TV series about the union', they know exactly what you're talking about. If you say that in Northern Ireland, people know exactly what you're talking about, but they're thinking of the union of 1801 that brought Ireland into United Kingdom, rather than the 1707 Union that joined England, Wales, and Scotland. If you say that in England, people might think you were talking about trade unionism, or one of many other uses of that word, because this process by which other nations were brought largely into England's sphere of influence is much more vivid in those countries. They're places where people are much more likely to grab onto bits of history and say 'this is a foundation stone for my identity'.

In Northern Ireland it is astonishing. Whenever I go there, it is astonishing to me how alive the 17th century is. The 17th century feels very over in Bristol where I live, or in Manchester where I teach. Whereas 1600 dates in Ireland – they're on murals, flags, t-shirts, they are part of people's lives. Those wars of the 1680s, which mean very little to people outside of that part of the world, are very clearly part of people's identities.

The result is this extreme of ambivalence, and in some ways disinterest in the union, and a carelessness out it. The arguments against Brexit that it would damage the Union got very little attention, made little headway. Contrast that with people for whom this history, or their interpretation of this history, is alive and central to their sense of who they are.

So history important in shaping identity, but also place…

Absolutely. These are geographically specific identities. To be Welsh in the north of Wales is a very different identity to the south of Wales. The north-south divide in Wales is every bit as important as the one in England. The north-south divide in Ireland is obvious and clear and has a border running through it. There's an East West split historically in Scotland. The east of Scotland used to be where the wealth and the power was concentrated; the industrial revolution and the access to what was then formally the English empire brought Glasgow and the west into a period of economic dominance.

So these countries have regional divisions and splits and again, that shapes identity. It's where you are, what happened there, but it's also how it's taught. Remember, we don't have a universal shared history curriculum. There are multiple curricula from different exam boards in the different nations. All of that shapes the extent to which history – interpretation of history – shapes people's sense of identity.

That sounds challenging for a historian.

Linda Colley has written some of the most important books ever written about the story of the union of the nations. All historians can do is present the history, and they need to recognise that people's relationship with that history, or interpretation of that history, will not always be things that historians agree with. It will not always bear the weight of the historical evidence. That creates a very difficult job for the historian, which I think is to complicate things. Our job is to say 'you may have built an identity on that bit of history, but actually it's more complicated. You may associate with this group having this characteristic and this backstory but actually it's less clear cut'. And trying to make television which is immediate, with no footnotes, over in 58 minutes, with that weight of identity resting upon this history, and the history doesn't always reinforce and support that identity… that is a challenge both for the programme makers and also for the viewer.

The documentary spans several hundred years, and you've just talked about the changes in national identity and the make-up of the Union… I'm interested in how those shifts are reflected in where we are now, in what you see today.

When you look at people's relationship with Britain today, what you see is the complexities of a multi-nation state. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, to give it its proper term, is a multi-nation state. There isn't a singular identity, and the one that we have – the UK – is one that in all sorts of ways is problematic and complicated.

Most people don't have strong emotional feelings when you say the UK. Very often our romantic identarian relationship with country is smaller than the actual nation state that we live in. People don't think of themselves as UK citizens. There is no UK equivalent to Britain or Scot. And I think that speaks to the complexity.

One of the difficulties is that we don't often speak the language of this complexity. We use the word 'nation', 'state', 'country', interchangeably. I also think it is possible – much more so in England than for other nations – to be rather unaware of this history, of the fragility of this nation. It is by no means unique… there are all sorts of multi-nation states with borders and linguistic and historical and religious differences. It's not unusual. But I think we tend to see ourselves as a much more simple nation, with a simple story, a single flag… Spitfires, and the Second World War, and Churchill. There are other stories of people that aren't thought of much in England, but that are deeply embedded in people's sense of identity in the other nations. Most people in England couldn't tell you who the kings and leaders were of these islands in the 17th century. I don't think the Stewarts and the Glorious Revolution, and the Williamite War are very vivid in the minds of people in England. I don't think Edward I means very much to people in England, but he means a hell of a lot of people in Wales, because he began a process that stamped English power on the landscape. And of course Scotland has a whole panoply of Scottish kings and Scottish leaders right up into 1603 who have stories and who have legends associated with them. It's very easy to not really notice that if you live in England.

One of the other big changes is demographic. In the middle of the 19th century, when the whole of Ireland was part of United Kingdom, a third of the subjects of Queen Victoria were Irish. So England's dominance wasn't as apparent as it is today. With dominance comes thinking your story is the only story, that it is the default.

What would we do to strengthen the union?

For me, it's about making sure that everybody understands these complex histories. The fact that we don't have a module – probably in civics rather than a history module – that explains how these four nations were brought together, I think that is a profound weakness.

One of the reasons I wanted to do the series is that I was brought up in England went through an English education system: GCSE History then A-level History, and on to an English university. At that English University, because it was Liverpool, for the first time in my life I had Irish friends from both sides of the border. Liverpool in many ways is the one English city where the history of Ireland is unavoidable. And what I realised in my first term of my first year was I knew more about the United States than the United Kingdom. In Irish history we had done home rule which is mainly about it as a political problem of Gladstone and Westminster Prime Ministers. A little bit about Parnell, we'd done a tiny bit of partition in '22 and '23 and that was it. I didn't understand that in the early 17th century, Scottish and English settlers were sent to Ulster to colonise, that the land was confiscated from the local people, and the consequence of that through the 17th century. I couldn't have given you the date of the battle of the Boyne. I didn't really understand who King Billy was.

So that English default version of this history, in a state made up of four nations with different histories, is a profound danger and destabilising force. It also makes people feel like their identity is marginalised. If this a Union, a union of equals, then that's not a healthy position for the state to be in.

Image: Peter and David Olusoga, circa 1980

It's interesting that you're talking about this simplistic version of history. You and I were asked to speak to the England men's football team just before the World Cup in 2018. We talked to them a little bit about identity. Historically, that's a team whose identity has been very much tied up with a very specific and very particular imagery... a cultural attachment to not only a non-complex version of history, but to things that have very little meaning to a group of people born in the late 1990s. An attachment to a history that may or may not really exist. History, or interpretation of history, is important in forming our identity… but also there are things that we need to let go of?  

I'm probably a bad person to take a position on this, because I am what former Prime Minister Theresa May referred to as a 'citizen of nowhere'. That's not because I was born in Nigeria and moved to Britain, it's also because I'm from the north but I live in the south, it's because I was brought up in what was a financially very working-class environment, and I now live in a middle-class part of the country and work in a very middle-class profession. I have an accent the people can't place cause there's bits of it from all over. I'm a dual national. In all of these clear definitions about class, region, nation, I'm somebody who has a fragmented identity, an identity that's a palimpsest of different bits.

But there's a great strength in recognising that things that you associate with, or things that you disassociate with, can change. The England team is a great growth example. The average age of the current players is 26 or 27, which means they were born in the late 90s. What happened to me and you in the 80s, what the flag of St George was associated with on leaflets that were put through our door, doesn't mean anything to them. There's a point when bits of your identity stop becoming building blocks of who you are and become baggage. It's liberating to say, 'well, that's changed, maybe I can have a new relationship with that symbol or that story, or that word or that identity'. A fluidity about identity is really important.

One of the most striking things about what's happening in the north of Ireland at the moment is a demographics shift that is absolutely stark and historically enormously significant. Northern Ireland was created from the six counties, designed to be demographically dominated by the Protestant community. It was a country... a nation... I'm not sure either of those definitions work for what Northern Ireland is… but it was in some ways demographically engineered to be majority Protestant. And now it isn't. Last year, for first time ever, the Catholic community outnumbered the Protestant Potters community. I think a lot of people thought 'well, that means a united Ireland is round the corner, wait til the kids are 18, and that's what's going to happen'. But we're also seeing a rise of political parties, movements and organisations that are secular and non-sectarian. I think people have had enough of the dark side of identity, that led people into what was a civil war within our lifetimes in our nation. And a lot of people, in a much more challenging environment than anything I've known, are taking bits of their identity that they were brought up to hold as important, and challenging it, and questioning it, rejecting what community, what even family have traditionally associated with those events, symbols, dates, and stories. That flexibility – in even the most remarkably difficult of circumstances – that's quite fundamental.

People talk about identity, about holding an opinion. You're supposed to reach an opinion. But it's not a destination. If that were the case, then you'd think what you were thinking when you were first thinking about the world in your teens. The idea that opinions and identities can be fluid, and that there's a health both for society and the individual in that… I don't think we talk about that enough. That letting go of some of this stuff is really important.

Talk to me about patriotism and nationalism.

I think we confuse the two. You can have a love of nation that is healthy and also be capable of criticism of your nation. It can be a sort of affectionate frustration as well as a romantic affection. But nationalism is very different. Nationalism is not just affection for your nation, it's an opposition to other nations. John le Carré in an interview – I was gonna say before he died, but obviously his interviews were mainly before he died, the quality's dropped off enormously since! – said 'nationalism needs enemies'. Trying to find forms of affection for country that are about the country and about the people, rather than their association with other people or their wars with other people, or what marks others out as different – that's really healthy.

That takes us back to football. An example of trying to find new ways of having an identity built on contested histories and heritages is the essay about England and Englishness that was written by Gareth Southgate. I think it is really striking that it is the England manager and the England team who are exploring different ways of imagining Englishness. 13 of those players that played in the last World Cup are dual national and their stories span the entire story the British Empire. Literally from Ireland in the 17th century through to the Caribbean to West Africa and the colonies acquired at the end of 19th century. Their heterogeneity in some ways is inevitably the demographic future of Britain. Gareth Southgate is a remarkable, unusual figure all sorts of ways, but it isn't perhaps so surprising that it is in football – one of the few places where young people are at centre of public life – that we are seeing big questions and answers even about identity, Englishness, and Britishness emerging in the 21st-century.

You spoke earlier about your own identity, and you've spoken before about how you identify as British, Black-British, or Black British-Nigerian, but that you don't particularly identify as English, even though we both have one English parent, you've lived most of your life in England... what are some of the things that shape your identity?

It's partly because Britishness is there. Britishness is an incredibly flexible identity. It's one of the great advantages that Britain has had since that identity emerged in the 17th century – that it is, by its nature, inclusive. It's an umbrella identity and it's allowed people to him to hold onto their old identities, to still feel Scottish Welsh, Irish, English, but to have a new identity as well.

So partly, it's there and it's convenient. They're the pull factors. But the push factors are that for my childhood, if I had said I was English in public, in most settings that would have been met with hostility and rejection. You understand the psychology of identity far better than I do, but I think people are very frightened about having an identity they claim rejected by others. I think people go out of their way to try and avoid this. Now I don't have the report that it comes from, but I think it was around 10 per cent of people today felt that Englishness was an ethnic rather than a civic identity. So there are a significant number of white English people and white British people who regard Englishness as an identity that can't be adopted by people who aren't white.

This is ethnic nationalism as opposed to civic nationalism...

Yes. Much more so when I was young, but even now there are people who genuinely do not think that someone who is not white can ever see themselves as English. I, like most people if there's an alternative, don't put forward or associate with identities that others feel I have no access to.

What is interesting is, and this is anecdotal, but talking to Black Scots and the ethnic minority membership and leadership of the SNP, a lot of people of colour in Scotland feel much more able to claim Scottishness than English people of colour feel able to claim Englishness. David Lammy has been pointing out that there is no Black and English box to tick in the census. Even an official process such as gathering census data didn't recognise Black Englishness as an identity, but did recognise Black Welshness, Black Scottishness.

I do think that there is still a demographic in England who wants to fight for Englishness as a racial and ethnic identity rather than allowing it to be a civic one. And they're quite happy to yield the ground on Britishness. One of the great challenges that we face in England, in a world where the union collapses, is what happens to those people who are very comfortable seeing themselves as something British – Black British, Jewish British – but wouldn't really feel welcome or want to see themselves as English? I wrote a book Black and British, and I wouldn't have felt comfortable with Black and English because that would've been a very public claiming of an identity that a great number of people feel like I'm not eligible for. It speaks to both the power and the flexibility of Britishness and lingering ideas about race, and nation, and nationality and identity, that we haven't got rid of.

To bring it back to the documentary, in one of the episodes you visited our Great Great Great Great Great Grandfather's grave just outside of Edinburgh. You talk about his life, his experience in the war and coming home from the war and his identity. In what ways are our own identities shaped by just simply having knowledge of our personal histories, knowledge of our ancestors?

I've been giving this so much thought. I'm so interested in this. We filmed at the farm outside Tranent, not far from Edinburgh. I was there a few weeks ago and took my daughter and my partner there and we walked around the wheat fields that my ancestors, our ancestors, used to farm. Our five times grandfather was a ploughman… he would've known every undulation of those hills all too well. The cottages where they lived were renovated in the 19 century, but the stables are still there. That sense that a part of the world that I've driven past dozens of times and felt nothing for, that I now know that I have ancestors who lived there... I'm still trying to process what that means. Is this something that I'm projecting because I'm seeking some sort of identity? Is there something real and emotional that's taking place and I'm trying to make sense of it? I can't work it out.

The reason I wanted to use our own family in the documentary is because I knew they had moved from Scotland to England, and one of the most important things to show is that in the story of identity and nationhood, millions of us have crossed borders. The percentage of people who call themselves English whose ancestors are Irish is absolutely enormous. And throughout the 19th and 20th centuries even in the years of the Windrush, the overwhelming majority of people settling in England were Irish. The relationship between those two countries, demographically, is huge. The idea that you can hold an identity in one of the nations, but your ancestors would've felt differently, had different accents, and felt differently about the same historical events – that complexity was important to get across.

Sounds like it has opened up lots of questions for you.

Yes, real questions that I'm enjoying working through. Like all people who think about these issues of identity and history, I'm experiencing things and analysing my experiences of them and then questioning them.

I was actually looking yesterday at some photographs that my partner took of me with my arm around my daughter in the cabbage field that my ancestors would have ploughed, and I did feel something, about my daughter being on the pieces of land where a long line of her ancestors spent decades earning their living. So I'm experiencing and trying to analyse my experiences of it… not very scientific, but I'm thinking about it quite a lot.

Union starts on BBC Two on Monday 2 October.