Taking the collective mood of Britain in 2024 is an exercise fraught with danger. There is little shared popular culture anymore, and national identity is something we feel anxious probing, let alone expressing. And so, in this vacuum, we are pitched a series of vague but unifying moments. The Euros? An Oasis reunion? But nothing ever quite seems to stick.
Still, yesterday a piece in the Guardian tried to bring us all together, and succeeded – in provoking a unified onslaught of contempt. “BritishCore: 100 experiences that define and unite modern Britons” set out to demonstrate that the “true joy of British culture lies in its everyday banalities”. By lunchtime it had become a viral phenomenon. And, instead of defining a collective, the list achieved the exact inverse, bringing an almost unthinkable coalition running from left to right under one banner: this might well be the worst thing ever written about the British people.
The “BritishCore” list wasn’t just unfunny, it was disturbing. For this was a Britishness of purported ordinariness and familiarity no one seemed to understand, let alone have experienced. One of people raving about crisps in Londis, people referring to Sainsbury’s as “Sainy B”, and your dad drunkenly admitting to wanting to shag Kevin McCloud off Grand Designs. Where Monster Munch dust is brushed off charity-shop Barbours, and ten-minute discussions are had about pigeons cooing. Stitching this together was nostalgia for a Noughties paradise lost: N-Dubz, Jamie T and David Dickinson.
Part of the negative reaction, I suspect, was the terrifying sense that someone had put time into trying to create a relatable world that had ended up so alienating and weird. It had the dead sheen of marketing copy; the nervous hand of a writer trying to navigate his way through a scarred and repressed national psyche. Much was therefore made of the ingredients that had gone into this grotesque sausage: a noticeable streak of the 21st-century British Twee, America-facing clichés about weirdness and eccentricity, and a pastiche Nineties working-class identity that has been most recently revived by the Oasis reunion. The voice in your head while reading it was the nasal pitch of a forgotten comedian on Mock the Week, or Chris Morris’s Nathan Barley.
But the list is not unique – bizarrely this concoction has emerged as a distinct national standard, projected worldwide. A decaying star of nostalgia and irreverence that has sucked in the post-war British mood of self-deprecation and “muddling through” and radiated it back out as a global social media brand. It has found its way onto mugs, board games and comic polemics about English history. It champions banal but obvious values and curios, things even a fleeting Chinese tourist at Kings Cross might identify: queuing, tea and Harry Potter. It is a sign of a country in the midst of an existential crisis for which Bill Bryson travelogues and episodes of Doctor Who are the smelling salts.
Signs came yesterday that everyone might have had enough. The trend had incubated on TikTok, mediated through the deadening lens of algorithms and social media. But something about it being codified in a broadsheet and posed as cohesive glue evoked a reaction of revulsion. The subject is after all a touchy one: what does unite us? It was never this. The list was a classless, ahistorical melange that could feasibly have been churned out by ChatGPT fed Peep Show scripts.
But, in its subconscious, the list did oddly provide some insight into the actual national mood. The new England it tried to observe is after all bad-tempered, fragmented and adrift. It is governed by yet another government whose priority seems to be bossy fiscal housekeeping. This is a strategy to taint the Conservative brand on the economy, essentially doing what the Tories did to Labour at the start of their 14-year stint. But this is not 2010, and the strategy has provoked fatigue and grumbling, rather than the sensible spirit of austerity. On the continent, by contrast, populists are preaching national renewal. Civic identity, history and a distinct turn away from a homogenised, global culture are back on the table. Politics is once again toying with the idea of identity that goes beyond culture-war skirmishes. The emptiness of British Twee, a style long associated with this country’s centre-left, is becoming exposed.
Eventually then, just like our maligned Guardian journalist, Starmer and the new Labour administration will have to brave this vacuum of identity. And to some extent those adjacent to his project have already toyed with BritishCore ordinariness as a narrative concept. “Ordinary hope”, is posed by Marc Stears and Tom Baldwin as a cohesive glue. But what does that look like for the classless mass of “working people” Starmer claims to represent? Is it a cynical political ploy designed to bring together a focus group? Or is it rooted in genuine values of class, history and the ongoing experience of national decline? In a time of pervasive cynicism, the public is developing a beady and unforgiving eye for those who pretend to understand the country when they don’t. At least Labour now have a helpful guide of 100 things not to say.
