National identity and internationalism

We turn now to examine what people think about Britain’s relationship with the outside world and, in particular, the extent to which there is support for Britain adopting measures to ‘protect’ itself from external threats. These are timely questions. Few weeks go by without this issue hitting the news; the example at the time of writing being Pfizer’s attempted takeover of AstraZeneca in spring 2014, as well as ongoing debates about the role of foreign-owned firms in Britain’s energy market, the globalisation of the English Premier League, and the impact of foreign ownership on London’s housing market. 

We can assess public opinion on this issue by looking at responses to the set of questions described in Table 4.9. Overall, nearly six in ten think that international companies are increasingly damaging local businesses, and a similar proportion think they take away power from the British government. Just under half express support for limiting imports to protect the British economy. Far fewer however support banning foreigners from buying land or giving preference to British films and programmes on British television. It is also notable that opinion has softened
since 2003; the two questions associated with the highest agreement in 2013 are down by between 6 and 8 points
on their 2003 readings, both in an internationalist direction. 

We used factor analysis to check that all these questions measure the same underling concept and then used them to create a summary measure of ‘internationalism’.[4] In this summary measure a value of 1 means a person who is entirely focused on Britain while a value of 4 indicates someone who is very internationally minded. Table 4.10 shows the relationship between a person’s views about Britishness and how they feel about Britain’s place in the world. In 2013, but also in 2003, we see that those who think ethnic elements matter when it comes to British national identity are by far the most likely to be Britain-focused in their outlook on the world; 25 per cent fall into this category, compared with just 4 per cent of those who have a civic view of national identity. 

To look at these relationships in more depth we, once again, relied on multivariate regression analysis and tried to identify the key predictors of a person’s view about internationalism. The results are presented in the Appendix to this chapter and show that while controlling for all other characteristics, people whose view of national identity is entirely civic are considerably more likely to be internationally oriented than those who take an ethnic and civic view of identity.[5] The regression also shows that, while controlling for a range of other factors (including identity), those who think that “feeling British” is important for “being truly British” are less likely to be internationally minded. Internationalism also increases with the level of education received.