Britain's class divide: the Cutteslowe Walls of Oxford.

 

Cutteslowe Walls Oxford

The English nationalism of people like Rupert Lowe, the former Reform UK MP, hardly bears scrutiny. I don't feel I have anything in common with Rupert Lowe at all. I'm not a multimillionaire and didn't go to a public school like Radley College.

Is there really such a thing as a British national identity? Have we all got the same identical interests - socially, politically, economically? Very often the British can't get on with one another. Regional and social class identities are often stronger in England than a British national identity. We have the Scouser, Geordie and the Tyke. A Scottish lorry driver, who once gave me a lift, said to me that as far as he was concerned, you could bomb everything south of Birmingham.

The Irish author and playwright, George Bernard Shaw, wrote: "It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth, without making some other Englishman hate or despise him."

In North Oxford, the Cutteslowe Walls, stood for a quarter of a century before they were demolished in 1959. They were built on an estate in an area known as Summertown, to divide the English middle-class residents from the working-class residents. The walls were seven feet high and topped with rotating iron spikes.

They say that in Berwick upon Tweed, some of the inhabitants consider themselves Scottish and some identify as English. Some inhabitants don't identify with either and consider themselves 'Berwickers' first.