Absolutely, as laid out in the Good Friday agreement. I don’t think I fully understand Unionists, but my impression is they think they’re British? Hasn’t stopped many of them getting Irish passports, post - Brexit.
Perhaps I should rephrase: only 200 years until the Irish think the Ulsters are Irish. Either way, I was being facetious for humorous effect.
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Yes? But there is British and then there are specific ethnic identities within Britain? Like you can be British and Scottish or British and Welsh or British and Irish (any of you folks from the UK and/or Ireland feel free to correct me on that, btw, you know who you are). And one can be an Irish citizen, but of non-Irish ethnicity… English, Welsh, Indian, Arab, etc. Let’s not conflate ethnic identity and national citizenship.
Passports are evidence of citizenship, not ethnic identity, though.
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I’d say the tendency to call oneself British mostly applies to the English or when one has to fill in any bureaucratic form as there aren’t often a whole lot of choices. The Welsh, Scottish and Irish would tend to describe themselves as of their own country, United Kingdom be damned, although in my experience Northern Irish people have described themselves as English, but probably more so to piss off the Irish folks further south.
As with everything, the country you claim doesn’t have to have anything to do with ethnic origin. The fact that a lot of the muddled-up ethnic mix of the UK is thanks to a thing cheerfully called The Commonwealth, whereby the Queen’s family loots a place but shares a flag then invites a few of the overthrown to have a scrap next door and repeat until rich, is often overlooked. Let’s pretend we invited them in because we’re nice, not because we fucked up their countries.
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Yes, that’s true, although it feels more and more unusual these days. Maybe it’s just the nationalists that shout loudest.
Ironically in Britain when you are asked your ethnicity for equality measuring you can’t claim to be Welsh, Scottish or English, only “White British”, but you can be “White Irish”.
Not because we needed cheap labour.
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Now now, we offered them a dynamic future as an integral part of a thriving economy and an opportunity to improve the lives of millions!
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Yeah, this. It’s also important to note that these are national identities and not ethnic identities. You can be Scottish or Welsh without being born there. It’s an idea based on residence and willing participation in the nation, not the discredited old ideas of blood soil and language.
You can absolutely be born in England and consider yourself Scottish, just as you can be born in Scotland and not consider yourself Scottish at all..
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Makes sense… but I’ve always understood that British was meant to be the catch all for citizens of the UK, but I can imagine that the English use that interchangeably with English… But of course, it was an english imposition in the first place…
We could even bring the mess imperial project into this, and note how Britishness was promoted as the ideal that all colonial subjects should strive for, in order to shift from subject to citizen…
Right, and even that is often mixed up in culture, too and has a strong political dimension.
Which, if you read above, I did. 
it was actually one of my clarifying points to @noobdood.
[ETA] BTW, I don’t know if everyone here has seen the show, but the BBCs Derry Girls is an excellent show that is set in Derry/LondonDerry in the 90s towards the end of the Troubles and follows some Catholic school girls. It actually does a good job of being funny while dealing with growing up amid ongoing violence…
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In Official Language™ we are all British, which is most likely a hangover from the Imperial Days when everything was marvellous, like the Raj, where some of those Indian chaps were almost good enough to be British!
Unions are an awfully handy way to share an identity without giving away your own. A Commonwealth citizen could claim to be British, even if they lived thousands of miles away, even be welcomed to live in the UK, but there’s always that racist little undercurrent that they’ll never quite be seen as English. British, but never English…
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Am I getting my wires crossed here? I thought I was agreeing with @anon59592690, and clarifying that Scottish, Welsh et al are not ethnic identities. Some people have those as well as their national identity.
If that’s what you were saying before, then I agree. It looked like you were saying that Scottish and Welsh were ethnic identities to be added onto British national identity and I was attempting to clarify. Sorry if my attempts at clarification have actually muddied the waters.
Further Edit- Yes, Derry Girls is awesome. Half of my team at work have watched it so much that they can quote it.
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*cough* CHANNEL 4! *cough*
(The BBC is great, but so is our other state-owned broadcaster.)
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It is. And while @anon59592690’s comment is largely accurate, you do get some non-English Brits regarding themselves as primarily British, and not just among the DUP types in Northern Ireland. I know a rather left-wing Scotsman who considers (or considered, anyway) himself more British than Scottish, possibly from a socialist conviction that humanity’s destiny is to unite rather than divide. I suspect the attitude was a lot more common before the Thatcher and Major governments. (And before Braveheart, of course.)
Rangers fans will of course still bust out the Union Jack at games with Celtic, but that’s more to do with the west of Scotland’s frankly bizarre importation of Northern Irish sectarianism.
Yes but no but yes … arguably at least part of the blame lies with the thoroughly Scottish James VI & I, who declared himself King of Great Britain and tried to rebrand Scotland and England as North and South Britain respectively.
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Yes. I was just pointing out I said that as well.
Glad we all agree!
Oh! Derp! Sorry!
isn’t that because some of their ancestors moved there?
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I was being at least partly facetious. But yes: the nineteenth century saw significant numbers of both Irish Catholics and Ulster Protestants move to Scotland, especially the west.
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An older Irish-American friend told me he was twelve before he learned that FuckingEnglish wasn’t one word.
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