The flag of St George on Eston Nab, near Middlesbrough, on 1 January 2021. Photograph: Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty Images
if Labour wants to foster a progressive Englishness, as urged by Andy Beckett (Brexit may spell the end of the tabloid version of Englishness. Can Labour redefine it?, 8 January), it will be pushing at an increasingly open door. Over the past decade, contrary to popular myth, Englishness as seen by the English has become markedly less defined by race, or by fears about immigration and diversity.
That this more liberal Englishness still lags behind multicultural Britishness is in large part because the left has shunned English identity or promoted reactionary caricatures of it. Where British multiculturalism combined grassroots demands for inclusion with state endorsement, Englishness has had no such support. The surprise is not how little Englishness has changed, but how much. But it has too often been left to sports