Lesson 20: Modern Britain — Identity and Future

The Britain of the 2020s is richer, older, more diverse and more uncertain than the country that joined the European Community in 1973. The monarchy has changed hands for the first time in seventy years; the Union is questioned in Scotland and quietly reconfigured in Northern Ireland; and the country’s identity — what “British” now means — is argued about in every census release. This final lesson surveys modern Britain and practises the skill the whole course builds towards: using evidence, including statistics, to support a weighed judgement about the present.

Timeline and key terms

Multiculturalism — the coexistence, and official recognition, of multiple cultures within one state. Net zero — balancing greenhouse gas emissions with removals; the UK legislated the 2050 target in 2019. Census — the ten-yearly official count of the population, run by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

One kingdom, four nations

The United Kingdom is a union state under strain. England holds 84 per cent of the population but has no parliament of its own. Scotland voted No to independence in 2014 (55–45) after being promised further powers, then voted Remain in 2016 and was taken out of the EU anyway; the SNP dominated Scottish politics for a decade on the argument that the union no longer delivers what Scots vote for, though the independence question stalled after the Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that Holyrood cannot legislate for a referendum alone, and Labour recovered Scotland at the 2024 election. Wales has a settled parliament of its own and a smaller nationalist movement. Northern Ireland’s position is the most fluid: the Brexit settlement keeps it aligned with the EU on goods, giving it a foot in both markets; demographic change and the consent principle in the Good Friday Agreement keep a future border poll — on Irish unity — in permanent speculation, with Sinn Féin now the largest party at Stormont and in local government. Whether the Union survives the century is a genuinely open question, argued with evidence about economics, identity and consent — exactly the themes of this course since 1707.

A changing people

Britain’s population tells the story of its empire coming home and its economy opening. The 2021 Census recorded the most diverse England and Wales ever counted: about one in five people identified with an ethnic group other than White British, London is a world city where no single group forms a majority of some boroughs, and the largest non-Christian faiths — Islam (6.5 per cent) and Hinduism (1.7 per cent) — are permanent features of national life. Immigration has continued in new forms: the Windrush generation, post-2004 European migration, Hong Kongers arriving under the BN(O) visa scheme from 2021, Ukrainians fleeing the 2022 invasion, and record net migration (over 900,000 in the year to June 2023, later revised and then falling) driven by health and care visas and international students. Integration’s record is mixed evidence, honestly held both ways: diversity at the top of politics (a British Asian prime minister in 2022, a Black foreign secretary and a woman of Nigerian heritage leading the Conservatives by 2024), alongside the persistence of ethnic pay and health gaps, the Windrush scandal’s injustice to the empire’s own citizens, and the 7/7 London bombings of 2005 — home-grown terrorism that forced a national argument about belonging which has never fully closed.

The monarchy adapted as the country changed. Elizabeth II’s death on 8 September 2022, after a reign of 70 years that had spanned decolonisation, the EU era and Brexit, closed the long Elizabethan age; Charles III’s coronation (May 2023) consciously presented a multi-faith, slimmed-down monarchy. Republican sentiment exists, especially among the young, but the institution’s habit of reinvention — visible from Bagehot’s Victorians through the crises of the 1990s to today — has so far outlasted its obituaries.

Economy, environment and the open questions

Post-imperial Britain earns its living differently: services are about 80 per cent of the economy, the City remains a global financial centre, and universities and creative industries are world-class export earners. The weaknesses are equally distinctive: productivity growth has stagnated since 2008, leaving real wages barely above their level of that year; housing supply has lagged demand for a generation; regional inequality is among the widest in the developed world. The environment is the newest arena of the oldest British story — the industrial nation that began the fossil age also legislated first for its end: coal power, which once produced half Britain’s electricity and whose ending came in September 2024 with the closure of the last plant, at Ratcliffe-on-Soar; the Climate Change Act framework and the net zero target of 2050 pose the century’s industrial question — whether Britain can pioneer the next energy transition as it pioneered the first. Foreign policy seeks a post-imperial role: AUKUS (2021), support for Ukraine after 2022, and the argument about “Global Britain” versus European reintegration continue the debate this course began with empire.

The student of British history should end where the historian always is: with arguments that evidence can discipline but not settle. The Union, multiculturalism, Britain’s place in Europe, its economic model and its carbon future are live questions — and the skills practised in this course (chronology, causation, source criticism, weighed judgement) are precisely the tools for thinking about them without myths.

Working with sources — Source A

Source A is a table of headline results from the 2021 Census for England and Wales, published by the Office for National Statistics, showing how residents identified their ethnic group:

Model answer — “How useful is Source A for an enquiry into how British identity changed between 2011 and 2021?” [8 marks]

Source A is useful because it measures the change with unique authority: a census covers everyone, so the shift it records — White British down from 80.5 to 74.4 per cent of the population, every minority category growing — is not a sample’s guess but the population itself, corrected and audited by the national statisticians. That completeness makes it the benchmark against which all other claims about diversity are checked. Its limits lie in what counting identity means. Ethnic categories are boxes people tick, not descriptions of felt identity: the census cannot tell us how strongly anyone identifies as British, English, both or neither; the categories themselves change between censuses, so some “change” is reclassification; and a national table hides the geography that makes identity concrete — London’s 46 per cent ethnic-minority population and the much less diverse picture in parts of the North East are both inside the same average. Source A therefore proves the demographic fact of change beyond dispute, but for the question’s real subject — identity, with its feelings and politics — it must be read alongside surveys, elections and lived testimony. Demography is the stage; it is not the play.

Why this reaches the top level: it grants the source its proper authority (complete coverage) and then specifies exactly the claims it cannot support (belonging, belonging’s intensity, local variation) — statistical literacy applied to a modern question.

Common mistakes

• Treating headlines as the census. “London is majority-minority” uses one definition, one geography. Specify the category and the place before concluding anything.
• Present-day narrative. Modern topics tempt storytelling; examiners still want causes, evidence and judgement, with dates.
• Forgetting the counter-case. Every claim in this lesson — diversity’s success, the Union’s fragility, stagnation — has evidence against it; top-band answers include and weigh it.

Exam Experience

Question — “Devolution has made the break-up of the United Kingdom more likely.” How far do you agree? [16 marks]

Model answer (extract):

The case that devolution built the staircase to break-up is formidable. Before 1999 Scottish nationalism had sentiment but no state; devolution gave it a parliament, a government, a budget and a platform from which the SNP governed for seventeen years, normalised the idea of a Scotland run separately, and delivered the 2014 referendum that came within six points of ending the Union. Institutions create interests: Holyrood’s politicians need distinctively Scottish policies, its civil service plans for a separate state, and every policy divergence — tuition fees, prescriptions, Brexit alignment — rehearses independence in miniature. In Northern Ireland devolution entrenched the consent mechanism that both communities understand as a possible road to a border poll.

Yet devolution was designed as the Union’s safety valve, and much evidence says it worked as one. In 1997 nationalism was rising on grievance that Westminster ruled without a Scottish mandate; devolution answered the grievance, and when the test came in 2014 a majority chose the Union. Wales shows the model working without drama: powers grew by negotiation, independence support stayed a minority taste, and no Welsh referendum looms. Even Scotland’s trajectory since 2014 — the stalled referendum demand, the SNP’s fall at the 2024 election — suggests a devolved nationalism that can be beaten at the ballot box inside the Union. The deepest drivers of break-up risk may lie elsewhere: Brexit, imposed on Scotland and Northern Ireland against their votes, strained the Union more in one referendum than devolution did in twenty-five years.

Overall, devolution made break-up more imaginable and more institutionally possible, but also more governable: it turned a revolutionary question into an electoral one. On the evidence so far, it has delayed break-up more than it has hastened it — though by building the machinery, it ensures the question never finally closes.

Marking notes:

• Level 1 (1–4 marks): simple statements for or against, with little evidence.
• Level 2 (5–8 marks): developed points on devolution’s effects (SNP government, 2014) with detail.
• Level 3 (9–12 marks): analysis of both effects and counter-arguments (Wales, the safety-valve case) with a judgement.
• Level 4 (13–16 marks): sustained weighing with distinctions (possible versus likely; machinery versus momentum) and a qualified conclusion, as in the model.