But we were all required to take one class called "British Life and Culture" and the subject I remember most vividly was the idea of who holds onto the term British. Basically they argued it was Protestants from NI because they didn't want to be Irish as that meant Catholic, and non-White Brits because they weren't truly accepted as "English" or "Welsh" etc no matter how many generations they'd been there. (This wasn't being taught as justified, but a horrible reality we should understand to truly understand the culture. Same as the lesson on how class based British society is complete with a broke dude with a BBC accent, and a rich woman from the East End).

I'm curious what your take is on that. How much you think that's changed in the last 20 years, and how accurate it was/is in general. I feel like with my younger British friends it's def not true, but boy is it if you talk to their parents. O.o

That's an interesting one, and one I'm probably not qualified to answer in its entirety. Although I can certainly give the Welsh perspective.

English people will not fucking stop referring to Britain as England. To them, those are synonyms. And Britain already suffers from a breathtaking amount of Anglocentrism. Like, I remember watching the news a few years back - the national news, before it flipped to the local news of the day. There were two major stories they were covering.

The first was about England's upcoming plastic bag charge, and what difference it would make, and how it would affect real people, and how we just didn't know the full impacts.

Wales had already been doing it for a year at that point.

The second story was about sport - I forget what football competition it was because I don't care, but let's say the Euros. England had just crashed out. Is there any point then, the newscaster asked, on national news, in still watching it now, if there's no England to cheer on?

Wales were still in it.

And that wasn't intentional on the part of those journalists, but like... you can see exactly what has happened there. England counts, Wales does not.

So 'British' is very important to Celtic nations, because otherwise, we don't get included (and even then...) Like, I will not be called English. I will not. I have literally in my life been spat at by English people and told that I should be used to it because that's what my language sounds like. My parents were denied housing in Birmingham for three months because of my dad's Welsh name. That's the tip of the iceberg. That's not my country, that's not my identity.