Is Britain the world’s most self-loathing nation?

How would a tourist prepare for the culture shock involved in a visit to the British Isles? “You’ll probably find in Britain that people apologise much more frequently than they do in the United States,” reads one American travel guide to the strange rules of English etiquette.

“Brits tend to apologise for things that aren’t even their fault,” it continues. “Understand that they’re not genuinely expressing that they’re at fault and need to be forgiven; this is just a British quirk!”

For anyone raised in Britain, this trait will surely come as no surprise. But is this really just a benign eccentricity, or more a revealing habit? These days it’s as though everyone in Britain thinks they’re constantly in the wrong, apologising for out-of-hand mistakes or qualifying personal successes with self-deprecating humour.

Case in point: earlier this week, tennis star Emma Raducanu described her latest Wimbledon victory against Mexico’s Renata Zarazúa as an ugly win. “It doesn’t need to be beautiful; it doesn’t need to be perfect,” the 21-year-old explained, despite her sweeping triumph over her much more experienced opponent.

Raducanu was inspired by England’s gritty win over Slovakia, she added, while many other football fans were critical of the side – even though they still won. Wales and Scotland too are similarly eager to criticise their own football teams, even though neither are generally expected to make waves at an international level: one Scottish fan called manager Steve Clarke “useless” on X after the team was knocked out of the Euros, while Wales booted out their own manager after his team failed to qualify for the tournament.

Where else is this British habit of self-loathing setting us apart from the rest of the world – and just how alien is it to those in more self-affirming countries?

Football

Like Raducanu’s self-disparaging comments on her own performance, self-critical too has been the reaction to England’s performance in this summer’s Euros tournament.

“What the hell is wrong with England’s players?” asked Piers Morgan just 40 minutes into the match on June 30. Even after midfielder Jude Bellingham scored the team a victory and sent them into the next round, the reaction was tepid. “How did we go from England fans wearing Southgate waistcoats to beer cups being hurled towards him?” one post-victory Sky headline read.

England isn’t the only side to perform underwhelmingly this summer but at least they are still in the game. Italy lost to Switzerland 2-0 on June 29, and the team feared that they might be pelted with tomatoes on their return, as happened after their 1966 World Cup defeat. Instead they were met only with indifference, Italian media reported, with football fans in the country disinterested rather than outraged.

Even in Slovakia, where the national team was knocked out by Gareth Southgate’s side this weekend, the team’s manager hit out at our country’s “scared” team rather than his own players. “In extra-time it was one-way traffic, we pinned them back and they relied on time-wasting and obstructionism,” he said. Perhaps for the sake of our own performance we could take a leaf out of their book.

Politics

In Britain there is no one we love to hate more than a politician – and the more powerful (read: successful) they become, the more we take pleasure in lambasting them.

Of course there is good reason to be critical of both the big parties and their leaders. But all we need to do to feel grateful for our own situation is to glance across the pond, where in contention for the presidency are a convicted felon and a senile octogenarian. In their most recent TV-faceoff the two argued about who had a better golf swing, before Biden called Trump a “child”.

It’s almost heretical to entertain such a thought, after seven painful TV debates of our own, but don’t the two men leading Britain’s two main political parties deserve at least some credit? Our current Prime Minister was chancellor during the dark days of the Covid pandemic, hardly an enviable job, and the current contender for the top spot headed up the Crown Prosecution Service, a mammoth (and an under-appreciated) task.

Even though American media takes aim at both Trump and Biden, the drive to cut down politicians seems a very British thing. As an article in The Atlantic by UnHerd political editor Tom McTague recently pointed out, the closeness of British media outlets with politicians means that newspapers can turn on leaders with a “fraternal fury rarely seen in American print”.

Perhaps that’s why American outlets have struggled to budge Trump and Biden from positions of power. Clearly it leaves politicians here with a sense of dread. The day after his D-Day debacle, Rishi Sunak barely showed his face, refusing to answer press questions and cancelling appearances on TV.

French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal could not have behaved more differently on July 1 after the first round of voting in France’s election came through, showing significant gains for Marine Le Pen and a devastating defeat for him and the rest of Macron’s centrist party. The 35 year-old shared a selfie snap on BeReal just hours after the result was called – looking deflated, but not the slightest bit embarrassed.

History

These days there is no one more ashamed of their history than the British. It’s good to correct the historical record, but you have to wonder whether all this has gone too far.

The Welsh government, for example, has recently mandated that the country’s museums must offer a “decolonised” view of the past that recognises “historical injustices”. The ruling has fallen even on the Big Pit National Coal Museum – where teaching material must now take on the themes of slavery, empire and colonialism, despite the fact that the vast majority of people who ever suffered “historical injustices” at the mine’s hands would have overwhelmingly been Welsh men.

In England things are not quite so bad, though many universities – such as the University of Exeter – now push students studying science and maths to take modules on decolonisation.

Other countries with a colonial history manage to look back at their past without such an outsized sense of shame. In Belgium, where King Leopold II ruled over what’s now the Democratic Republic of Congo with extreme cruelty, children have been taught about their country’s imperial history for decades, yet aren’t encouraged to feel shame for it.

Should we follow their example and wind back on the self-hatred, even while coming to terms with the past? No one here is suggesting that modern-day Italians should be wracked with guilt for the fact that the Romans wiped out scores of Celts in Britain, after all.

Art

Similar might be said of our attitude to art. London might be home to the world’s most extraordinary collection of art and archeology – and has made it free to visit – but the British Museum is still constantly decried as either too woke or not woke enough.

A number of Britain’s leading historians have called for the museum to hand the Elgin Marbles back to Greece, even though multiple sources suggest they were taken with permission from the ruling authority at the time, likely saving them from ruin in the process.

Climate activists throwing tins of beans and soup at priceless paintings is also a British invention: ever since Just Stop Oil activist Phoebe Plummer hurled Heinz at Van Gogh’s sunflowers in the National Gallery in 2022, museums and heritage sites around the world have stepped up their security. After a tourist keyed his name on the Colosseum in Rome last summer, for example, authorities now cover the city’s historical sites with warnings against vandalism.

Even Britain’s pensioners, a generation you might expect to be more pragmatic, seem to regard our treasures with short shrift – which might explain why two octogenarians launched an attack on a Magna Carta exhibition at the British Library in May.

Food

British food is so often disparaged by continental Europeans and Americans alike as bland, boring and beige. Why do we do so little to defend it? The UK is home to nine Michelin-star restaurants and the Old Stamp House Restaurant in Ambleside is ranked the third best restaurant in the world on Tripadvisor. But what are the dishes we’ve exported as quintessentially British? Fish and chips, roast dinners and fry-ups.

In France, though, people are still fiercely defensive of their culinary traditions, even though last year just four per cent of its restaurants presented diners with meals made from scratch in their own kitchens.

Italians too are extremely protective of their national dishes – even though many of its most famous were in fact created (or embellished on) in the States: spaghetti bolognese, caesar salad, marinara sauce and round, cheesy pizzas, to name a few.

“Italian cuisine really is more American than it is Italian,” said controversial food history professor Alberto Grandi in an interview last year, in which he implied that his countrymen’s obsession with their cuisine stems from an insecurity over their national identity. It prompted outrage, and no wonder – on the same day the interview was published, Italy’s ministers of Culture and Agriculture officially entered Italian cuisine into candidacy for UNESCO World Heritage status.

Weather

The British famously love to moan about the weather, but is it really all that bad? Sure, we don’t get as many sunshine hours as California or the same breezy warm days enjoyed in the south of France, but things here are temperate, calm and (usually) predictable.

Maybe this is why we have such an extreme reaction when it rains or shines. A spell of 25C days is a Mediterranean-style “heatwave”, as one newspaper declared the other week; meanwhile there were fears of a “total washout” after the sun failed to appear in the first few weeks of June.

In fact, the UK is one of just five countries that has the “favourable starting conditions” to survive truly catastrophic levels of climate change, according to the Global Sustainability Institute. Take that, Florida.

Music

“Again?” came the response when it was announced that Coldplay would headline at Glastonbury for the fifth time. Surely this should be a point of pride, not embarrassment – few other bands could draw revellers from around the world to watch them take to one of the most important stages in music history.

How many other British acts could we name that have shaped modern pop and rock? The Beatles; Amy Winehouse; Elton John – it goes on and on. Maybe Britain doesn’t have as many modern superstars as America, or as many operatic artists as Italy, but we’ve long had a history of producing reliable, crowd-pleasing hits. Surely, that’s something to be proud of?