Does David Beckham's foot tell us more about Britain than the Queen Mother's death? Richard Weight tells Huw Richards that the countries of Britain aren't what they used to be.
Richard Weight is about to learn a lot about critics. His first book as sole author, Patriots: National Identity in Britain 1940-2000 , comes out today and he awaits the critical response with the debutant's mix of excitement and trepidation. But whatever the critics say, they cannot accuse him of lacking courage. Most young historians start by publishing their doctoral theses - generally a piece of micro-history about which they know more than anyone else.
Weight, 36, has taken a more ambitious route, attacking a huge subject of immense public and academic interest with as many opinions, most highly committed, as there are commentators. His publishers have upped the stakes with glowing quotes from heavyweight historians - Peter Hennessy says Weight "takes over where George Orwell left off with The Lion and the Unicorn ", while Norman Davies calls Patriots "a lively and original exploration of the most important issues in Britain today".
One reason for this high-profile debut is the contingency of personal history: "In 1995 I was set to be a lecturer. I was lecturing at Royal Holloway College, but then Peter Hennessy recommended me to Edward Heath as the researcher for his memoirs. I spent three years working for him and came to respect him enormously."
That held up more conventional academic progress, including any thought of publishing his University College London doctorate, "The Promotion of National Culture in Britain in the 1940s". As well as putting him in touch with Heath, Hennessy - the internal examiner for his doctorate - also suggested that Weight should attempt something more broad ranging. The advance secured by his agent allowed him to focus on Patriots for three years: "If I had not been able to focus on it full time, it would have taken me ten years rather than three," he says.
But there is more than contingency to this sequence of events. Weight is one of nature's macro-historians, attracted to big themes. This does not make him dismissive of micro-history. "I certainly haven't left it behind. There are a number of micro-history subjects I'd like to do, although my agent tends to glaze over when I mention them." But his explanation that one of these is a history of religion in 20th century Britain, a subject most would regard as pretty macro, suggests someone who instinctively thinks big.
He is also prepared to aim high: "I'd like to see Patriots as a complement to Linda Colley's Britons . She wrote about the forging of Britishness in the 18th century, and my concern is its disintegration in the 20th."
It is said without a trace of arrogance. But Weight has long had the assurance of knowing he is highly rated - UCL thought it worth bringing David Cannadine, then at Columbia University, across from the US to examine his doctorate. And while appreciating the time and space provided by the book advance, he liked academic life. Academic parents are doubtless a factor - his mother, Angela Weight, is keeper of art at the Imperial War Museum, while his late stepfather, Phil Strong, was a medical sociologist. But he adds: "This is a lonely business. And I enjoyed the human contact, the interaction and debate with colleagues and students. I miss the teaching."
He is open to offers, rather like a star footballer whose contract has concluded. Some historians might be offended by the comparison. Not Weight, who argues that mainstream historians have overemphasised political economy and underrated the importance of popular culture. "Social scientists, who have a more theoretical perspective, have been allowed to dominate the study of popular culture. Historians have tended to regard modern cultural history - as opposed to that of earlier periods, which is taken seriously - as ephemeral and not worth serious attention."
This is, he argues, in part a consequence of the British intellectual's distaste for mass culture. "It comes out in attitudes to commercial television, the heritage industry and package holidays, foreign or domestic." It is a particularly serious handicap when studying national identity. "Sport in particular has taken the place of church and crown as the main source of identity," asserts Weight. The response to the Queen Mother's death, far from contradicting this view, strengthened it. "People were affected by the Queen Mother's death, but it was clear that it was one specific British tribe - white, middle-class and southern English. Far more people were concerned about David Beckham's foot."
His own tribe is white, middle-class and southern English. But he learnt to see beyond it when his stepfather took a job at Aberdeen University in the 1970s. "I became aware of the distinctiveness of Scotland and Scottishness," he says. Reviving Scottish nationalism impinged on his consciousness in the form of a ten-year-old playmate telling him: "My dad says your dad is stealing our oil."
At 12 he returned to London: "The school I went to was 50 per cent Afro-Caribbean, 10 per cent Asian and 40 per cent white. It made me aware that there was more than one possible variety of Englishness. And I realised how ignorant most English people were of Wales, Scotland, Ireland and their distinctiveness."
This was hardly surprising when he considered much written "British" history to be "hopelessly Anglo-centric, failing to acknowledge very real differences". "You'll find frequent discussions of the cultural revolution of the 1960s and the growth in home ownership in the 1980s as though they apply to the whole of Britain. But homosexuality was illegal in Scotland until 1982, and Scotland continued to have far lower levels of home ownership than England," Weight says.
He is particularly keen to challenge the assumption that Scottish and Welsh nationalism were a product of the 1960s. "There was a strong cultural nationalism in the 1940s, before it was arrested by the second world war. And the fact that the English did not take early political nationalism seriously does not mean it did not exist. The British state ignored Welsh and Scottish nationalism during its period of prosperity and full employment. That is typical of the mismanagement of the British state."
He is impatient with romantic views of Celtic nationalism - he points out that Scottish attitudes to homosexuality counter any idea that the Celtic nations are more liberal, and that one factor impeding the progress of both Wales and Scotland has been a reluctance to make effective common cause against the centre. And he may ruffle Scottish cultural sensibilities with his striking revisionist view that the Swansea-set film Twin Town was superior to Trainspotting .
But he is much more critical of an English refusal to recognise that the Celts might have legitimate grievances and that Britishness might not be simply the same thing as Englishness. This, he argues, has been particularly damaging for the English. "While Wales and Scotland have developed dual identities with which they have become comfortable, England is still floundering."
At the same time, he emphasises his view that Britain is a much better country than it was in 1940: "It is less sexist, racist, snobbish and xenophobic than it was. The welfare state, wider affluence and the social legislation of the 1960s are all huge improvements." He believes in the possibility of a national identity in keeping with that cherished by Orwell, whose Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters were an 18th-birthday present from his stepfather. "I fell in love with Orwell, not so much with the witty, lucid prose, which in itself is rare enough on the left, as with the idea that there could be a radical left-liberal patriotism in this country."
But, taking thinking big to a logical conclusion, he does not believe that the union will endure. "As we get closer to Europe, a European identity will be grafted on to Britishness, but it will not extinguish it any more than grafting Britishness on has extinguished the identities of Wales and Scotland. Eventually I expect to see England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland as independent countries within the European Union. I do not believe that is anything to be scared of. Several hundred years of shared history would mean that we remained very close to each other."
Patriots: National Identity in Britain 1940-2000 is published this week by Macmillan, £25.00.