Article

Community

Culture

Nationalism

Politics

2 March 2025

5 min read

Nationality can never unite a nation

For countless people, it’s a complicated thing.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A montage of two conversation participants side-by-side.

Fraser Nelson and Konstantin Kisin.

Triggernometry.

What does it mean to be English? A debate has broken out on this thorny question, sparked by a conversation between Konstantin Kisin and Fraser Nelson, where Kisin, a British-Russian social commentator suggested Rishi Sunak, as a ‘brown Hindu’, was British but not English, and Nelson (a Scot) said that it was simple – if you’re born and bred in England, you’re English. End of story.

The video on YouTube got 4 million views. Since then, Suella Braverman has weighed in with her instinct that despite being born and raised in England, she will never be truly English. The debate has generated more heat them light over these past weeks – just read the comments after Nelson-Kisin YouTube video to get the gist.

Now this is something I've thought about all my life, as it's been a bit of an issue for me.

I was born in England, have lived most of my life in England, my dad was English, I speak with an English accent, and love it when England beat the Aussies at cricket.

However, my mum was Irish. She was born and grew up in Limerick, met my dad in Dublin after he had moved to Ireland to train to be a Baptist minister. I never knew my father's family, as his parents had both died before I was born. So, the only family I knew in my childhood were Irish. Family summer holidays were spent in Dublin or most often in County Clare in the wild west of Ireland. Growing up, I felt at home in Bristol where we lived, with my English friends, supporting the mighty Bristol City at Ashton Gate. Yet the place where I felt most secure and rooted, at home in a different way, surrounded by grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and people who had known my family for generations, was Ireland.

While my dad liked football, and we cheered when England won the World Cup in 1966, my mum was a big rugby supporter. So when it came to the Six Nations (or Five Nations as it was in those days) there was no question of who we followed, driving to Cardiff Arms Park or Twickenham, festooned in green scarves, cheering on the boys in green. I still do support Ireland, rooting for Peter O’Mahony and Caelan Doris as well as players in the team less Irish (at least by descent) than me, like New Zealanders James Lowe and Jamison Gibson-Park, the Australian Finlay Bealham, or the very un-Irish sounding, yet hero of the nation, Bundee Aki.

Of course, my story is far from unique. The Irish diaspora is everywhere. Irish people for centuries have left Ireland to find jobs, to see the world, or like my mum, following a spouse to different shores. There are loads of us, part-Irish, living in England, caught in our nationality somewhere in the middle of the Irish sea.

So am I English? Or am I Irish? I have held both passports, long before Brexit. I can sing God Save the Queen and Amhrán na bhFiann. The truth is that I'm a bit of both. Sometimes my Englishness comes to the fore, sometimes my Irishness. I remember being at school in the 1970s during the IRA bombing campaign and getting abuse and graffiti on my school locker for being Irish, then spending holidays in Ireland and being teased for sounding English. Such is the fate of the half-breed.

So for me, and for countless other people who have a mixed heritage, nationality is a complicated thing.

When nationality becomes the primary location of a person's reason for being, that's when it can become dangerous.

There are many different factors involved in a person's national allegiance: where they were born, where they grew up, where their parents or ancestors came from, where they decide to settle later in life. It can also be affected by emotions as varied as gratitude for a welcome received or resentment for rejection. Centuries ago, when people didn't travel much, and most didn't travel far from the place where they and their parents were born, the nation states that emerged in Europe and across the world out of the great empires of earlier times were relatively stable entities and could claim a degree of settled character, and a claim to loyalty. The twentieth century, with two world wars fought largely over nationality and race showed us the dark side of absolute loyalty to country or ethnic origins.

In today's hyper-mobile world, and especially in the UK, which is a magnet for people all over the world, there are probably very few people with simple, pure national heritage. Most of us have some migrant blood in our veins, stemming from some ancestors who moved from their home at some point in the past, seeking a better, or a different life elsewhere.

Being nationalistic or patriotic by supporting a sports team, learning a language, or being proud of one's origins is a good thing. Life would be a lot poorer without the possibility of rooting for your national team, taking pride in your national culture or history, feeling rooted in a particular place on this good earth. We were made to put down roots in a place, to care for it and take pride in it.

Yet nationality is too fluid and imprecise a concept to provide a firm sense of identity. When it becomes the primary location of a person's reason for being, that's when it can become dangerous. That's when we begin to fight wars over national sovereignty, identity and superiority.

Nationality can never become a strong enough centre to unite a people. It’s why the debate on ‘British values’ never quite lands. Even if we could decide what they are, is the implication that they are better than other values? And if they are does that give us the right to feel superior to other nations who don’t share them? And even if we could identify them, I imagine the French, the Germans or the Swedes would probably recognise a lot of them and claim them as their own.

To have a firm sense of identity, a centre around which to gather, requires a stronger and more unshakable foundation. I may be part English, part Irish, but I am wholly a child of God. Even more deeply rooted than my Irish mother and English father, the place of my birth or my family roots, lies my identity as someone whose true origin comes not from them but from the God who made me, continues to love me, and will hold me until my dying day and beyond. And unlike national identity, this identity can be true of anyone, therefore it’s not something I can ever use as a badge of superiority over anyone else.

That is who I am. Nothing can disturb or change it. And only something like that – something unshakable, independent of our changeable feelings and shifting allegiances can provide a firm basis for belonging and cohesion.

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Review

Culture

Music

Politics

25 July 2025

6 min read

As the congregation gathers Bruce Springsteen leans hard into hope

Chords of confrontation and communion

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Bruce Springsteen crouches down and holds a hand out to a sea of outstretched hands

Springsteen plays Manchester.

Brucespringsteen.net.

I finally got to experience a Bruce Springsteen concert recently. Which is to say, for three hours, I touched a land of hope and dreams.

We walked along a canal to get to the arena – my husband, my father-in-law, and me –Manchester shimmered with the arrival of summer, and light bounced off red brick and still water. We neared the arena and the air felt dense with anticipation. T Between us we carried heartbreaks, elections, hopes, failures, and a collective return to music that had accompanied and clarified it all. We were drawn by loyalty and nostalgia and joy, but also I sensed by a hope that Bruce would meet the moment — the frayed, furious, anxious now — with something that mattered.

We found our seats and gripped our drinks as the lights dimmed. Thousands of people stopped individual conversations, and hushed, and then joined voices into a deep and reverent chant. “Bruuuuuuuce”. To my right, the glow of a screen, the woman holding it sending a text – “yes babe, 1pm, lovely” – and it seemed incongruent and true. In the tension before the release, in the dark before the light, we hold our breath even as the ordinary carries on. The ordinary carries on even as the world fractures and glows. The ordinary is what Bruce often sings of, it is one reason why fans feel heard and seen by him. That night though, all the ordinaries he sang of formed something extraordinary.

Then there was light, and Bruce walked slowly from the side to the front of the stage, his guitar suspended across his body, his face a relaxed, broad smile, his bandmates and companions beside and behind him. Then there was music. No videos, no pyrotechnics; just old songs that felt as if they existed for the now. My City of Ruins, Death to My Hometown, Land of Hope and Dreams, The Promised Land. The song Long Walk Home was introduced as a “prayer to my country”. It is a country that he embodies, despairs of, and loves. He sings of his home with fury, sorrow, tenderness, and love.

Riffs and rhythms that were decades old were being made urgent again. Springsteen’s music holds both grit and glory, and hard-won joys leave space for sorrow. I write this and lines by Mary Oliver come to mind: “We shake with joy, we shake with grief / what a time they have these two / housed as they are in the same body.” What a time they had, joy and grief, that night with Bruce.

The evening unfolded not as spectacle but as liturgy; all of us involved in something like devotion – in part to Bruce, but also to moral clarity, to the power of poetry, to the promise of who we could be. At times the crowd seemed silent, ushered into something deeper – not entertainment or escapism, but something like confrontation and communion. We were being offered the joy of music and memory, but also an opportunity to reckon with who we are.

Between songs, Bruce spoke. He apparently rarely does so in his gigs. His voice slowed and deepened – not chit chat, not to entertain, but to bear witness and stand defiant and call us to the best versions of ourselves. “I’ve spent my life singing about where we’ve succeeded and come up short in pursuit of our civic values,” he said. “I just felt that was my job.” He proceeded to describe how those values are being torn apart, and why they matter. The crowd roared. He was making civic values shine, speaking about them with urgency. He acknowledged both the dream and the failure, but still he believes in the promised land and he asks us to as well. Before he belted out Rainmaker, he said, “when conditions in a country are right for a demagogue, you can bet one will show up.” He spoke of America, and really of the world – what it is, what it is becoming. His honesty and poetic rage situated us, then became a map for how to keep going.

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts.

I found myself wondering: why is it that Bruce can sing and speak about justice, warped politics, and who we are becoming, and be met with cheers, while so many churches avoid doing so, preferring instead to whisper in neutral tones while the world burns? That night, I stood in a crowd of thousands and I heard a kind of moral clarity that orientates the soul and made me cry. It wasn’t partisan, it was human. Why can it feel riskier to speak specifically and prophetically in a sermon than in a stadium? I wonder if it’s because Springsteen has always rooted his politics in people’s real lives – in work, family, grief, memory. He doesn’t gesture toward abstract ideologies for fear of alienating people, or in the hope of retaining fans: he tells stories and gives names to problems and injustices, singing about crooked institutions, boarded-up factories, buses that never come, lovers who don’t come back.

The evening felt, for me, like the kind of church I long for and sometimes touch: no tidy answers, no insincere lyrics, no vague calls for justice, but rather honesty and specificity and the chance to stand alongside strangers and feel something challenging, beautiful, true.

I scribbled a question as the music soared: can a chord be mystical? Because that’s how it felt. As if there are progressions – minor then major, dissonance into harmony – that can reach past language and speak directly to the part of us that longs for love more than cynicism, to the part of us that still dares to hope even when there is very little obvious reason to do so, to the part of us wondering how to be truly alive.

Near the end, Bruce quoted the American writer James Baldwin:

“In this world, there isn’t enough humanity as one would hope. But there’s enough.”

There’s enough. It was a small phrase but it hung in the air like incense. For Bruce, there is enough humanity to keep singing for, and about. Now, he seemed to ask the crowd, what will you do with that enoughness, with that humanity?

In the final stretch, Bruce leaned hard into hope with songs like The Rising and Born to Run. The energy in the room felt like resistance – not against something, but for something. He didn’t pretend everything’s fine, but he sang anyway. “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts. Gladness is being asked to stand its ground now, and to do something with our improbable aliveness. For the final song, Bruce played Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom. It is a song about lightning and exiles and freedom, about the trembling of the soul and about a sky that “cracked its poems in naked wonder.” He sang it slowly, tenderly, like a prayer – which can also be a trembling of the soul, a song of naked wonder. Perhaps he prayed to God, perhaps to some other sacred thing: our better angels, or the fragile hope of who we might yet become.

In a BBC documentary about Bruce Springsteen’s history with the UK, someone says “there’s something in Bruce fans, you know you can implicitly trust them.” As we filed out of the arena, it felt like 25,000 of us briefly knew each other, trusted each other, could take on the world together. Perhaps we just had.

Soon it was just me, my husband, my father-in-law, and the silent dark canal as we walked back into the night. We were tired, we were awake. I thought of Bruce’s belief in the promised land, and of Baldwin’s line: there’s not enough humanity, but there’s enough. These are beliefs that can feel risky. So can belief in God. But enough is plenty. Enough can turn up the volume and let the spirit be our guide. With 25,000 other people, I’d turned that volume up and I could hear the spirit defiant, unifying, guiding. It is – has always been – time to go and sing of it, despite everything.