It is in poor old times like these that wordsmiths turn their minds to the collective state of the nation. We are driven to ask ourselves who we are, and who is 'them', and who is 'us'. Who is Britain? Are you? Am I? While the Right proclaims a new nationalist project - to make Britain great once again - and in so doing invokes a notion of 'we' who share the same stake in some imagined national redemption, the Right's critics are driven to the backyard of the nation where we will find, not the national 'we', but a miscellany of difference, where speech, circumstance, colour, sex and class suggest the experiences of exclusion, of otherness.

LRB 4 June 1987 | PDF Download