Anthony Heath’s research while affiliated with Nuffield Trust and other places

British and English national identities have long been considered to have porous boundaries whereby English individuals consider the terms more or less interchangeable. However, there is no empirical evidence to demonstrate whether primary feelings of either Britishness or Englishness are highly fluid within-individuals or whether individuals are consistent in their perceptions of their British or English identity. This is especially relevant in the post-Brexit referendum context where national identity is highly correlated with Brexit attitudes. Using panel data, we demonstrate that there is a notable degree of fluidity between identifying as British or English. This is higher than the fluidity between other national identities in the UK as well as more fluid than moving between any partisan or EU referendum identities. Remainers are more fluid than Leavers in their Englishness, whereas they are similar in the fluidity of their Britishness.

In post-Brexit and post-devolution Britain, relationships among the four nations appear fragile. This article aims to discover where British citizens draw the symbolic boundaries that define in-group and out-group members between nations—in particular, England, Scotland, and Wales—and within England. Within England, we also examine class divides and the North–South divide. We operationalize symbolic boundaries through a set of new innovative measures administered in an online survey in 2019. Questions ascertain agreement that the various groups “share my values,” are “people I could get on with,” and are “straightforward and honest.” Results of our descriptive analysis suggest that boundaries are blurred between the British and the Welsh but sharper for the Scottish. We also find sharp but asymmetrical boundaries within England, between the working class and the middle class, and between Northerners and Southerners. Regional differences in perceptions of Southerners map closely onto those of how well Westminster looks after regional interests, which suggests that power imbalances reduce social cohesion.

Ever since its foundation by the Romans in the first century AD, London has been distinct from other cities within the UK politically, commercially, and socio-culturally, reaching its apogee in the mid-nineteenth century but recreating itself anew in the late twentieth century. Migration has played a major role in this story ever since its foundation, both with internal migration from other parts of the British Isles and with international migration especially from other parts of the Roman and subsequently British empires. In the post-war period, this migration helped revive the inner city and contributed to the emergence of a cosmopolitan political culture. However, this cosmopolitan culture coexists alongside continuing racism and inequality.

This paper uses the British Election Surveys from 1979 to 2019, together with the 2016–2019 CSI Brexit online panel, to explore how nostalgia has changed over time. Our interpretation of the data is that there was a shift in the content of nostalgia from regret about the decline of traditional ways of life and family values toward regret over the rise of inequality and the emergence of social media. At the same time, we find continuity in the kinds of people who are likely to feel nostalgic: they tend to be members of older generations and to be less well educated (which we take as a proxy for being “left behind” culturally and economically). However, we also find that, on the items for which we have comparable time series—on immigration, same‐sex relations, ethnic equality, and gender equality—both age and educational level have reducing explanatory power over time. In contrast, for these items, there is a trend toward greater politicization and an increased influence of an English national identity. Political divisions show increasing explanatory power as sociodemographic divisions decline.

This chapter explores, both theoretically and empirically, the relationship between political values and two main types of political participation, namely electoral (turnout in national or local elections) and non-electoral types ( such as signing a petition, attending a demonstration or contacting a government official). The chapter focuses on left-right, libertarian-authoritarian, traditional, postmaterialist, and democratic values, and their relationships with electoral and non-electoral forms of participation. Democratic values prove to have strong associations with both forms of participation, while postmaterialist values have a particularly strong association with non-electoral participation. Left-right, libertarian-authoritarian, and traditional values also have significant negative associations with non-electoral participation, right-wingers, authoritarians and traditionalists being less likely to engage politically outside elections. Left-right and libertarian-authoritarian values also have U-shaped relationships with electoral participation, people who hold more extreme positions on these values being the most likely to turnout and vote. At the same time, the political context also matters, with the level and strength of the relationships differing between democracies and autocracies. Levels of participation (both electoral and non-electoral) are much lower in autocracies, while the strengths of the relationships with values tend to be stronger in democracies.

The central question in this article is whether there was greater discrimination against European applicants in the labor market in those English regions where public opinion was more strongly in favor of Brexit. Using a field experiment conducted immediately after the Brexit Referendum, we provide causal evidence that applicants with EU backgrounds faced discrimination when applying for jobs in England. On average, applicants from EU12 countries and applicants from Eastern European member states were both less likely to receive a callback from employers than were white British applicants. Furthermore, in British regions where support for Brexit was stronger, employers were more likely to discriminate against EU12 applicants. This finding, though, is driven by the more favorable treatment reserved to EU12 applicants applying for jobs in the Greater London area. Eastern Europeans, on the other hand, did not benefit from this ‘London advantage’. Administrative and legal uncertainties over the settlement status of EU nationals cannot explain these findings, as European applicants, both EU12 and Eastern Europeans, faced the same legislative framework in all British regions, including London. Rather, London appears to exhibit a cultural milieu of ‘selective cosmopolitanism’. These findings add to the still limited literature on the relationship between public opinion on immigrants (here proxied by the referendum vote) and the levels of ethnic discrimination recorded in field experiments.

The integration of immigrant minorities is a major concern for diverse societies–with major implications for the well-being of those affected, social cohesion and group relations, and economic and social progress. In this paper, we give a comprehensive description of long-term migrant integration in Western Europe to investigate theories of migrant assimilation and integration. We take a multidimensional approach, looking at 10 indicators measuring social, structural, political, civic and cultural integration. We take an innovative approach to measuring minority background by using two complementary measures: generational status, distinguishing first and second-generation migrants from the third and higher up ‘natives,’ and self-reported ancestry, separating those with autochthonous-only ancestry from those with various kinds of allochthonous ancestry. Using interaction effects between these measures, we can test whether generational change is faster or slower for some ethnic groups than for others, i.e. whether different groups integrate at differing speeds. Using the pooled samples of all Western European countries included in the European Social Survey rounds 7 and 8, we run multivariate regression analyses to estimate the effects of migrant background on the 10 indicators of integration. Compared to migrants with autochthonous ancestry, respondents of Middle Eastern, North African & Central Asian as well as Sub-Saharan African ancestry are less integrated on all dimensions of integration except the political and civic ones. The South & South-East Asian group is also substantially less assimilated socially and culturally, but not so much structurally. They are closely followed by the South East and East European groups, following the same pattern except that the latter are less integrated politically as well. We only find substantial interaction effects between ethnic group and migrant generation for two integration indicators, namely citizenship and homophobia, for which speed of integration thus appears to differ across ethnic groups. For all other indicators, integration speed does not appear to differ across ethnic groups, supporting straight line assimilation theory, with social integration in terms of interethnic friendship potentially rather following a ‘bumpy-line’ pattern.

Ethnic minorities fare less well on average in the labour market than their white British counterparts. Experimental research shows that employers discriminate against ethnic minority applicants while hiring, but it is impossible to say from these studies how much of minorities’ overall disadvantage – which reflects compositional differences and search behaviour as well as hiring – is due to discrimination. This article connects results from two UK-based field experiments with ethnic penalties estimated from comparable samples of the UK Labour Force Survey and Understanding Society to show the relation between hiring discrimination and labour market penalties, for several ethnic minority groups. Higher hiring discrimination is indeed associated with worse ethnic employment penalties, but similarly discriminated against groups do not necessarily face the same ethnic penalties. We provide a discussion of possible reasons for this variation. Our research points to socio-economic resources and supply-side differences among ethnic groups as plausible explanations.