England. Britain. What's the difference?

[Hendog]

What is the difference between England and Britain. Are they interchangeble names. Can you refer to the English or the British just as easily as one or the other? There must be some historical reason to this but I not familiar.

[imcarthur]

Wiki knows all: Terminology of the British Isles

Britain is merely a short form of Great Britain which is the island. And on & on & on as you will see in Wiki.

Ian

[The Gaijin]

England is England.

Britain is the isle of England, Wales and Scotland. Pretty much the same as "Great Britain".

The United Kingdom is all that plus Northern Ireland.

The Welsh and Scottish are (genetically anyway) pretty much the same thing, but they have their own histories and can be quite nationalistic.

[johndglynn]

If my wife and I are having an Irish vs English chat, the easiest way to really freak her out is to call her British. And then run

[Pazuzu]

Originally Posted by johndglynn

If my wife and I are having an Irish vs English chat, the easiest way to really freak her out is to call her British. And then run

Eh, you're lying.



No one can run fast and far enough to escape the ire of an angry Irish wife

[stomachmonkey]

Originally Posted by johndglynn

If my wife and I are having an Irish vs English chat, the easiest way to really freak her out is to call her British. And then run

Yeah, I've made the English, British, Irish mix up mistake a couple of times. They are very touchy about it.

[cashflyer]

Originally Posted by johndglynn

If my wife and I are having an Irish vs English chat, the easiest way to really freak her out is to call her British. And then run

Originally Posted by Pazuzu

Eh, you're lying.
No one can run fast and far enough to escape the ire of an angry Irish wife

+1 to both of you gentlemen!!

To really understand it, Hendog, read some about the history of England. What they were doing at different periods of time had an effect on the terminology.

As mentioned above, the term United Kingdom is shortened from the official title The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

England is part of GB. GB is part of the UK.

[Hendog]

The Wiki link by Ian describes it well...with pictures to boot!

[Jeff Higgins]

Originally Posted by cashflyer

England is part of GB. GB is part of the UK.

And Ireland is not...

[cashflyer]

Right.

[Porsche-O-Phile]

Originally Posted by Pazuzu

Eh, you're lying.



No one can run fast and far enough to escape the ire of an angry Irish wife

You got that right!

[johndglynn]

Originally Posted by Pazuzu

Eh, you're lying.

No one can run fast and far enough to escape the ire of an angry Irish wife

She's the English one. You'd want to be one complete eejit to call an Irish woman British...

British and English are not interchangeable terms - looking at a map doesn't really explain the way the words are used. My experience is that the English are English first unless they are from certain parts of the country with strong regional identities, in which case they will tell you which county they hail from, like my great uncle was first and foremost a Texan. I dunno too many Yorkshiremen who would say they were British before they were English.

There you have it - clear as mud

LOL

[Dottore]

I came across a nice piece from Julian Barnes the other day.

In it the characters were asked to list three “characteristics, virtues or quintessences” which the word “England” suggested to them.

The results were then reduced to 50, and I cut and paste them here as follows:

1.Royal Family 2.Big Ben/Houses of Parliament 3.Manchester United Football Club 4.Class System 5.Pubs 6.Roast Beef 7.Robin Hood and his Merrie Men 8. Cricket 9.White Cliffs of Dover 10.Imperialism 11.Union Jack 12. Snobbery 13.God Save the King/Queen 14.BBC 15.West End 16.Times Newspaper 17.Shakespeare 18.Thatched Cottages 19.Cup of Tea 20.Stonehenge 21.Phlegm/Stiff Upper Lip 22.Beatles 23.Marmalade 24.Beefeaters/Tower of London 25.London Taxis 26.Bowler Hat 27.Monty Python 28.Oxford/Cambridge 29. Harrods 30.Red Double Decker Buses 31.Hypocrisy 32.Gardening 33.Perfidity/Untrustworthiness 34.Rolls-Royce 35.Homosexuality 36.Alice in Wonderland 37.Winston Churchill 38.Marks & Spencer 39.Battle of Britain 40.Francis Drake 41.Trooping the Colour 42.Whingeing 43.Queen Victoria 44. Breakfast 45. Beer/Warm Beer 46.Emotional Frigidity 47.Wembly Stadium 48.Flagellation/Public Schools 49.Not Washing/Bad Underwear 50.Magna Carta

[Seahawk]

I'm one half Spanish, the other half Scottish. Interesting book review:

Scotland Since the Sixties
by Murray Pittock
Reaktion, 224 pp., $24.95

The question asked by Murray Pittock in his title is the question that has been asked increasingly throughout my adolescent and adult life, to the extent that there is nowadays almost no other political question asked by--or posed to--Scottish voters. Even the English, in numbers undreamed of only a decade or so ago, find themselves considering seriously the option of the United Kingdom breaking up, to the extent that many in Britain's southern and vastly more populous kingdom now say to the Scots, with more than a hint of weariness and exasperation in their voices: "If independence is what you want, in the name of God, go."

How could the continuation of the United Kingdom, arguably the most successful union of two former enemies the world has ever seen, be threatened, as it most assuredly is today? After three centuries--301 years to be precise--the maintenance of the union between England and Scotland is no longer a given.

(The principality of Wales was seen as part of England when England and Scotland united their parliaments in the 1707 Treaty of Union, 104 years after the Union of the Crowns when Scotland's James VI succeeded Elizabeth and became England's James I. Ireland joined up in 1801 and then the 26 counties of the Free State, now the Republic, of Ireland went their separate way in 1922, leaving the six counties of Northern Ireland as still part of the United Kingdom.)

The root cause is
almost certainly the fact that, for a great many people, being "British" doesn't mean anything in the 21st century. Just as I've seen people scribbling "USA," rather than the continental catch-all "American" in that part of hotel and other registers that ask for a declaration of nationality, so "Scottish" is the designation of choice for most of my compatriots when traveling abroad. (Interestingly, the 'B'-word is also more and more disliked by the English, too.) Scots, who used to be simply irritated when the terms English and British appeared to be interchangeable, now protest loudly.

Foreigners are perhaps most guilty of this confusion; they are easily forgiven as they know no better. But the London-based, and thus English-dominated, media are deemed to be the worst culprits. A recent independent report criticized the BBC for being too English, too concerned with what happens inside the M25 "Beltway" and for ignoring the Scots, Welsh, and Northern Irish. Another huge irritant is the media's often careless labeling. For instance, Jackie Stewart, a Scot, is deemed to be a "British" world champion Formula One star, but Nigel Mansell or Damon Hill, also F1 champs, are "English."

Young Scots--those in the 18-25 age group, which opinion polls suggest is where most support for the separatist case lies--don't see London as their capital city, but merely as another big city in another country. And it is no longer necessary for Scots to go through London to travel abroad, given that there are direct flights, now, from Scottish airports to virtually every part of the world. This may be a welcome bonus for holidaymakers and business travelers, but it militates against a feeling of Britishness; in fact, I'm often surprised how few and how infrequently young people of my acquaintance travel to London.

[Seahawk]

Loss of empire, too, has helped the separatists' cause. Scots were happy to subsume their nationality inside the British carapace if there were new lands to conquer (often literally) and vast tracts, on which the sun never set, to administer and govern, for the most part efficiently. The Scots' military tradition and their generally better standard of education meant that they were ideal colonial pacifiers, administrators, and, as in the case of Andrew Carnegie in the United States, Max Aitken (Lord Beaverbrook) in Canada, Rupert Murdoch (in Australia), and the Jardine Matheson clans in the Far East, successful entrepreneurs and merchant-venturers. But there are no geography classes nowadays, as there were in my schooldays, where much of the globe was colored pink--signifying allegiance to the British Empire or Commonwealth--to inspire enterprising Scots to further their ambitions beneath a British parasol under a blazing tropical sun.

The rapid downsizing of the Royal Navy, Royal Air Force, and British Army after two world wars left a bankrupt Britain only too eager to divest itself of its colonial responsibilities, and this has also impinged on the Scots' association with a British identity. A Scottish accent was virtually the only regional variation of Standard English tolerated--certainly in the officers' mess--in the armed services, but the historic Scottish regiments have been so amalgamated and abolished over the years that there is now only one left: the Royal Regiment of Scotland, even if its five regular battalions all still retain some of the famous old names, such as the
Black Watch and the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders.

Murray Pittock is the A.C. Bradley professor of literature at the University of Glasgow, and charts the changes, often dramatic, that have occurred within the constituent parts of the U.K. within the last half-century and does nothing to conceal his sympathy for the view that something has got to give, following the significant devolution of powers from Westminster to an Edinburgh parliament, as well as the lesser transfer to the Cardiff and Belfast assemblies, during the last decade.

That "something" is, of course, the English. They are everyone's villains. It is their numerical dominance in the British Isles that skews the relationships between the constituent parts, and it is their refusal to accept the changes that devolution has wrought, Pittock argues, that threatens ultimately the maintenance of the Union. Only some form of federal structure, he believes, will save the United Kingdom, a policy long advocated by the Liberal Democrat party--and also, incidentally, recently volunteered to me by a sympathetic (to my Unionist worries) visiting American politics student. However, this federal solution, says Pittock, may not arrive in time because the British (English) government "continues to act as if devolution hadn't happened."

I'm not so sure. The English generally get a bad press, not least by the Scots, and I have a great deal of sympathy for the patience they've shown in recent decades as the caterwauling from my countrymen has increased. The Labour and Liberal Democrat parties believed that devolution would buy off, or even finish, the nationalists. John Major, the last Tory premier, however, said that it was a recipe for "sleepwalking towards independence." Last May the Scots elected a nationalist administration in Edinburgh, and there's now no mystery as to whose analysis was correct.

The English have also shown remarkable tolerance--coming to an end, I'm bound to conclude--about public spending in Scotland at roughly $3,000 per capita per annum more than that spent in England, and about the fact that Scots members of the Westminster parliament can vote on English domestic issues (such as health and education) while English MPs, by virtue of the responsibilities of the Edinburgh parliament, have no influence over similar issues north of the border.

Nationalist politicians--that is, those who would break up the United Kingdom and set up a completely separate and independent Scotland--put their desire to be "free" of the supposed shackles of London rule at the heart of every policy. Thus, they say, Scotland would not be suffering from the current downturn in the world economy, or at least not as much as it is, because the Scots would have the benefit of "their" oil. The North Sea oil fields, discovered in the 1960s and developed in the succeeding four decades, are "Scottish" not "British," they say, and should be used for the benefit of Scots, not Britons, say the Nats--just as the Norwegians, on the other side of the North Sea from Scotland, have used their oil tax revenues to underwrite their public expenditure.

No longer, in such a circumstance of "freedom" from Westminster, says Alex Salmond, the leader of the Scottish National party and the first nationalist to hold the office of first minister in the nine years of devolution, would some Scots have to pay what are claimed as the highest pump prices in the world. In the Outer Hebrides, the archipelago off mainland Scotland's west coast, a gallon now costs the equivalent of $13, and it's still going up.

The same goes for business taxation. An independent Scotland would be modeled, at least in the economic sense, on the Republic of Ireland, where corporate tax is 12.5 percent, compared with the United Kingdom's (and hence Scotland's) 28 percent. That way Ireland's economic miracle of the last 15 years, creating the so-called "Celtic Tiger," could be matched by a Scottish "Celtic Lion." And if international companies with headquarters in London are thinking, as some are reputedly doing, of moving to Ireland, then why not to an independent Scotland?

No one disputes that Ireland's recovery has been fueled, in part at least, by her enthusiasm for European Union membership and the regional subsidies that have flowed therefrom. Why not Scotland, ask the nationalists? An independent Scotland could become the 28th member of the EU. The fact that the SNP has, as one of its main policy planks, withdrawal from the EU's Common Fisheries Policy, whose restrictions on deep-sea cod and herring fishing have systematically decimated the Scottish trawler fleet, is glossed over by the nationalists. Nevertheless, it is inconceivable that an independent Scotland would be granted entry if it tried to opt out of such a fundamental part of EU policy as the Common Fisheries Policy.

Salmond is riding high in the polls. His party has the most seats--47 out of 129--but no overall majority in the Scottish parliament. In spite of this handicap he reigns supreme over a shell-shocked and demoralized Labour party, which has lost control of Scotland for the first time in 50 years, and the largely irrelevant Scottish Tories. An experienced and skillful politician, he is cannily playing all the best cards--scrapping university tuition fees, ending bridge tolls, freezing local property taxes, saving local hospitals from closure, phasing out charges for prescription medicines--and all the while saying to the Scottish electorate: "Look how good it is now. Imagine how great we could be with complete independence."

He plans a referendum in 2010, and wants to make the question as bland as possible so as not to frighten the voters. If he gets his way there will be nothing on the ballot paper about Scotland being a "completely separate Country outside the United Kingdom"--which, in a recent opinion poll, attracted only 19 percent support. This state of affairs may be what his party has stood for since its birth in the 1930s, but, instead, he will merely ask for permission from the voters to begin discussions with the U.K. government to make Scotland independent.

Most interesting of all, at least to my mind, but not mentioned at all by the author in this book, is Salmond's attitude to the monarchy. He leads a party that, until recently, was often stridently republican in tone. No longer; he has a good working relationship with the queen, and he and other nationalist leaders have spent weekends with her majesty and the prince of Wales at their rural retreats in the Scottish Highlands. With a majority of Scots still favoring the continuation of the monarchy, Salmond has now pledged that Elizabeth Windsor would remain Queen of Scots after independence and that Scotland would retain its "social union" with England.

Professor Pittock has fairly accurately chronicled the road we've traveled in these islands, and is sympathetic to the aims and aspirations of those who wish a significant transformation in the relationship between the constituent parts of this Union. The fact that Alex Salmond was guest speaker at his book's official launch party may have been pure coincidence, or maybe not. But Pittock does ignore the bland--and to my mind disingenuous--assertions made by this accomplished politician. Instead of the United Kingdom, as presently constituted, Salmond says we'd have the United Kingdoms, bound together by the same monarch, by custom and practice and a shared love of the same TV soaps, but not by law or politics.

And so there we'd have it. After three centuries, says the nationalist first minister, this hugely successful union, whose empire once dominated the world, and whose influence still counts for something at the conference table, would be smashed asunder by the addition of the letter s.

Doesn't sound like much, now, does it?

[Dave L]

you say tomato I say tomato

Hmm, it doesnt really translate well into text.



Im with Seahawk on this one because it it clear, based on the length of his posts, that he must be right.

[creaturecat]

Originally Posted by Dottore

I came across a nice piece from Julian Barnes the other day.

In it the characters were asked to list three “characteristics, virtues or quintessences” which the word “England” suggested to them.

The results were then reduced to 50, and I cut and paste them here as follows:

1.Royal Family 2.Big Ben/Houses of Parliament 3.Manchester United Football Club 4.Class System 5.Pubs 6.Roast Beef 7.Robin Hood and his Merrie Men 8. Cricket 9.White Cliffs of Dover 10.Imperialism 11.Union Jack 12. Snobbery 13.God Save the King/Queen 14.BBC 15.West End 16.Times Newspaper 17.Shakespeare 18.Thatched Cottages 19.Cup of Tea 20.Stonehenge 21.Phlegm/Stiff Upper Lip 22.Beatles 23.Marmalade 24.Beefeaters/Tower of London 25.London Taxis 26.Bowler Hat 27.Monty Python 28.Oxford/Cambridge 29. Harrods 30.Red Double Decker Buses 31.Hypocrisy 32.Gardening 33.Perfidity/Untrustworthiness 34.Rolls-Royce 35.Homosexuality 36.Alice in Wonderland 37.Winston Churchill 38.Marks & Spencer 39.Battle of Britain 40.Francis Drake 41.Trooping the Colour 42.Whingeing 43.Queen Victoria 44. Breakfast 45. Beer/Warm Beer 46.Emotional Frigidity 47.Wembly Stadium 48.Flagellation/Public Schools 49.Not Washing/Bad Underwear 50.Magna Carta

top 50 ? Doesn't even mention bad teeth !

[Aerkuld]

There is a lot of history tied up in it all but...

1. The English are British and prefer to be called English. They generally don't mind if they are called British.
2. The Scots & Welsh are British also but they don't like being refered to a British at all. They will likely become quite violent if you call them English.
3. The Irish are a little more complicated as you have;
a) Northen Ireland which is probably closest to #2, and
b) Southern Ireland which is a seperate country in it's own right and not part of Britain. They probably don't care too much what you call them as long as you're buying the round.

[johndglynn]

That is a weird list - no irony, no fish n chips, no Twiggy/Joanna Lumley, no Mini, no flags, no punk, no Daily Telegraph.

Every so often there is a bit on British TV that perfectly sums up Englishness for me, here's one from many years ago:

[Steve PH]

35.Homosexuality

I thought it was the Greeks that invented this past time? I thought our special sexual deviance was good old S&M?