How the British are perceived overseas

[plodder]

f.ck me. The question is how is Britain perceived. How.

If you were doing your GCSE coursework and wrote a big essay on “it might be positive, it might be negative, here is a number that took 2 seconds to google” your kindly teacher would give you a B- and gently explain that the word ‘how’ normally implies that there’s an opportunity to expand the question to engage multiple perspectives and that an imaginative approach would be fruitful.

I am not a kindly teacher and you are f.cking idiots.

[sheldrake]

But so far all you’ve done is go digging for negative things. How do you expect to build up a holistic picture without looking at data (noisy though it will be, as with all social questions), or making just as diligent an effort to look for positive things too?

The amount of post space wasted on people trying to dispute that net immigration flows between countries have some relationship to where those people would like to live, and how that relates to how they see those countries is quite frankly absurd.

A sensible discussion might involve people saying ‘its a bit noisy, but i see that. However there is a specific issue with X, heres my data’. But no, not here. And that is why we cant have nice things.

[Bird on a Fire]

Don't know if the example you chose was the best for that discussion, plods.

The UK is in the position of being both pretty good generally, and massively backsliding. Imagine a jazz singer who's just discovered crack.

[plodder]

Don't know if the example you chose was the best for that discussion, plods.

The UK is in the position of being both pretty good generally, and massively backsliding. Imagine a jazz singer who's just discovered crack.

That's all jazz singers.

[plodder]

But so far all you’ve done is go digging for negative things. How do you expect to build up a holistic picture without looking at data (noisy though it will be, as with all social questions), or making just as diligent an effort to look for positive things too?

The amount of post space wasted on people trying to dispute that net immigration flows between countries have some relationship to where those people would like to live, and how that relates to how they see those countries is quite frankly absurd.

A sensible discussion might involve people saying ‘its a bit noisy, but i see that. However there is a specific issue with X, heres my data’. But no, not here. And that is why we cant have nice things.

OP: What have the Romans ever done for us?
You lot: Metric = 1.3. No, metric = 1.2 and falling. No, and metric is incorrect. Improved metric = 1.6 and rising.
OP: What about sanitation, and aqueducts, and Monty Python?
You lot: Silence. Metric war must be won.

[lpm]

The problem with this thread is the dud opening post. It was both too broad and very narrow. And it wasn't even spelled right.

Obviously 7 billion people are going to have 7 billion different perceptions. So there needs to be some metric. Even if it's just "how do you rate the British on a scale of 1 to 5".

[plodder]

The problem with this thread is the dud opening post. It was both too broad and very narrow. And it wasn't even spelled right.

Obviously 7 billion people are going to have 7 billion different perceptions. So there needs to be some metric. Even if it's just "how do you rate the British on a scale of 1 to 5".

It's entirely helpful and interesting to pick interesting perspectives and go hmm, that's interesting, how's about this one that's very different? Oh yes, how interesting. Or this one, bet you never thought of it this way. Oooh, that's a good one etc.

Anything else is obviously completely ridiculous and you end up with bogus reductive b.llsh.t. There is such a thing as qualitative data.

[dyqik]

The problem with this thread is the dud opening post. It was both too broad and very narrow. And it wasn't even spelled right.

Obviously 7 billion people are going to have 7 billion different perceptions. So there needs to be some metric. Even if it's just "how do you rate the British on a scale of 1 to 5".

It's entirely helpful and interesting to pick interesting perspectives and go hmm, that's interesting, how's about this one that's very different? Oh yes, how interesting. Or this one, bet you never thought of it this way. Oooh, that's a good one etc.

Anything else is obviously completely ridiculous and you end up with bogus reductive b.llsh.t. There is such a thing as qualitative data.

Yeah. You're basically trying to come up with an objective metric for "bl..dy Yanks", Canadians all apologizing, or the British equivalent.

[sheldrake]

The problem with this thread is the dud opening post. It was both too broad and very narrow. And it wasn't even spelled right.

Obviously 7 billion people are going to have 7 billion different perceptions. So there needs to be some metric. Even if it's just "how do you rate the British on a scale of 1 to 5".

It's entirely helpful and interesting to pick interesting perspectives and go hmm, that's interesting, how's about this one that's very different? Oh yes, how interesting. Or this one, bet you never thought of it this way. Oooh, that's a good one etc.

Anything else is obviously completely ridiculous and you end up with bogus reductive b.llsh.t. There is such a thing as qualitative data.

There is certainly such a thing as qualitative data, but the best social and commercial research tends to combine the two. Starting with a clear perspective on where people want to live, and where they want to get away from, is one useful signpost amongst many. Collecting qualitiative data properly also involves careful steps to try and avoid selection bias.

I understand that stories can be more illuminating though, so I'll tell you what my immigrant mum (Irish) thought. There's obvious selection bias here because she was an Irish person who chose to marry and brit and raised a culturally british child, but it's still data.

She found English people to be socially awkward, as if the whole country was a notch more introverted and shy than her cultural norms. Sometimes, she could find this funny and charming, but sometimes she found it cold and rude, like when she tried to strike up conversations with strangers at bus stops, sometimes they'd react nervously as if she was somehow threatening. That is not how she remembers Irish people in her childhood Dublin behaving, ever.

She also thought the English could be tight-fisted and inhospitable to guests. The themes coming through are anxiety, isolation and a kind of selfish cautiousness. But she also understood that this was just a kind of surface layer that you could work your way through, and if you made the effort you'd eventually get to know some of the most steady, decent and loyal people.

The British in Ireland had undeniably behaved like bastards, and I was told stories about the Black and Tans growing up. She didn't have any interest in violent solutions to the unification of Ireland and she knew perfectly well that this British policy had little to do with most ordinary English people (especially the more bohemian or labour-voting types like my dad and his friends who she was perfectly happy to accept as good people). She was vehemently opposed to me or any of her other relatives raised in the UK from ever joining the British Army though. She very rarely used bad language but she actually described the British Army with the phrase 'Scum of the Earth' on many occasions. That said the only English person I actually saw her take a personal dislike to was an upper-middle class Tory relative who talked down to Irish people in a very obvious way and never bought his round at weddings.

She saw England as a cultured, genteel place for all its faults and loved our concerts, theatres and museums.

[sheldrake]

This quora answer has some first hand perspectives on how Jamaican people view Britain and the British

https://www.quora.com/How-do-Jamaicans- ... he-British

There's a lot of positivity undermined by a genuine and understandable sense of hurt around what our govt. did recently in the Windrush fiasco.

[Woodchopper]

There are lots of quantitative metrics.

You can see how the UK compares in terms of 'soft power' to a basket of other countries here: https://softpower30.com/country/united-kingdom/
Over the last few years its been placed at 1 or 2.

There's a similar execrcise for Scotland which compared it to a group of regions, https://scotland.britishcouncil.org/sit ... 1636724669
Scotland comes second to Québec.

You can also look at surveys which ask people in other countries what they think of Britain, and again it scores highly:
https://www.visitbritain.org/britain%E2 ... e-overseas
Britain scores highly on things like having vibrant cities, sport and it being a good place to work and study.

Here's another survey of people in G20 states. Britain is viewed positively by all, though only just by Saudi Arabia and India
https://www.ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/en-uk/ ... -uk-abroad
The same survey shows that Britain has the highest rating in all the G20.

This discussion is a bit like the discussion on national identity. People living in Britain seem to be mostly unaware of the global significance of British culture. But Britain is second only to the US in terms of its success in spreading its culture to the rest of the world.
English is the global language, and pretty much everyone learning English will read British authors at some point. Switch on a TV in anywhere from Finland to Indonesia and sooner of later you'll see something British, perhaps a comedy show, a documentary or the football. London is one of a handful of genuinely global cities. Very many people come to Britain to study or work, and most enjoy the experience.

As I've mentioned earlier, that doesn't mean that everything is positive, and there are negative impressions as well. People should take those seriously.

[IvanV]

There are lots of quantitative metrics.
...etc

Finally, a really good post on this topic. Thank you.

I think we have mostly understood the main interest of this question to be attitudes to the British in the land they live in, and what they have created there. And for people in their own lands perceiving us from afar, and visiting us, then relevant questions are of the kind, Would you like to go and visit it, What you do you like and dislike about it, Would you like to go and live there, What do you think of the influence of the British in the world, Do you value the British products and services you buy, Do you want to eat their food? Woodchopper cited references to cover most of these kinds of thing very thoroughly.

There is that other question, What do you think of the British people who turn up where you are, as tourists, as business people, as soldiers, as aid workers, etc?

[plodder]

Good question. The Brits abroad feels like a thing to me - the language barrier is very important.

I’m a bit worried that a lot of the “what do you think of British food” style data is just marketing tat used for promotional literature. If Ipsos Mori had found that 85% of foreign visitors were appalled by e.g. our lack of interest in learning other languages, Visit Britain would be highly unlikely to publish it. More to the point they wouldn’t pay for the question to be asked in the first place.

Similarly with official G20 data etc. There must be loads of political wrangling over the precise wording of the questions, the design of the surveys etc. None of the big players want to come out as losers. We’ve mentioned Soft Power - this is an ideal opportunity for us to use it.

[sheldrake]

Good question. The Brits abroad feels like a thing to me - the language barrier is very important.

I’m a bit worried that a lot of the “what do you think of British food” style data is just marketing tat used for promotional literature. If Ipsos Mori had found that 85% of foreign visitors were appalled by e.g. our lack of interest in learning other languages, Visit Britain would be highly unlikely to publish it. More to the point they wouldn’t pay for the question to be asked in the first place.

Similarly with official G20 data etc. There must be loads of political wrangling over the precise wording of the questions, the design of the surveys etc. None of the big players want to come out as losers. We’ve mentioned Soft Power - this is an ideal opportunity for us to use it.

If we’re going to look for bias in sources I would be just as happy to say that almost everything you read in the indie, guardian and blogs found using certain search terms will be skewed too.

You should consider the other possibility that you’ve formed an impression of how Britain is viewed based on a particular set of sources, and those sources dont represent a broad enough spectrum of opinion. Its not really a surprise to me to find that people who dont live here yet are broadly positive about the country despite its flaws because most of the world lives under some kind of autocracy where opponents of the ruling junta are regularly beaten up or go missing.

The g20 survey was posted by me on the first page initially and you did your very best to ignore the data tbh. Be a bit more open to things that dont fit with your starting worldview. The uk isnt perfect but its pretty much utopia compared to a big swathe of the rest of the planet. You have to get into pretty fine-grained comparisons with a small set of other highly developed democracies to find places most of us might agree are nicer places.

[Lew Dolby]

and there shelly goes again - having a dig at the guardian 'cos the telegraph, mail, express, etc are all so honest and unbiased.

[Woodchopper]

The g20 survey was posted by me on the first page initially and you did your very best to ignore the data tbh.

Apologies, I should have mentioned that in my post.

[sheldrake]

and there shelly goes again - having a dig at the guardian 'cos the telegraph, mail, express, etc are all so honest and unbiased.

I think they’re all biased Lew.

[sheldrake]

The g20 survey was posted by me on the first page initially and you did your very best to ignore the data tbh.

Apologies, I should have mentioned that in my post.

No worries, I’m not anxious about who ‘takes credit’ for things I just want people to look beyond the slightly snearing, self-loathing internationalism being spread through left wing media these days.

[Woodchopper]

There is that other question, What do you think of the British people who turn up where you are, as tourists, as business people, as soldiers, as aid workers, etc?

That's also a good question.

The biggest effects will be from mass tourism and yes, or course some British tourists behave badly. But even then those effects are limited to a fairly small number of locations - mainly Mediterranean beach resorts and a few European cities (eg Barcelona, Prague or Dublin). Even there the effects are very localized. In Mallorca for example you can drive inland from the airport for half an hour and find yourself in a town where the restaurants and cafes are mainly full of locals, and the tourists come from all over Europe.

[sheldrake]

There's a good chance that many people encountering brits because aid is being distributed in their country often don't know they're British (if they're working for an international org) and see them through the lens of race.

[Bird on a Fire]

As it happens, in spending this weekend with three friends from my international Erasmus masters, on which I was the token Brit. All three of them did their dissertations in the UK.

To complement Chopper's data trove with extra anecdotes:

Like Sheldrake's mum, they thought English people are generally decent and friendly, but somewhat awkward and repressed, except when drunk when they become extra friendly - except for an unusually large minority who start fights and vomit. My friend was also surprised that you only see people singing when drunk. They found it odd that they'd see people in campus and barely get a grunt of acknowledgement, but later in a pub they'd be full of smiles and chat.

But compared with some other countries I won't name, the UK (well, England) gets fairly decent reviews from most people I know who've lived or studied there (except for its government).

There's a lot of perfunctory food, and the good stuff tends to be expensive. Beans at breakfast is weird, and while they liked pubs they thought they seem like a weird dining environment.

University education seems to a very high standard, in terms of treating students like junior academics rather than big kids.

Obviously British culture has a huge reach - from the Beatles and the Stones, Python, Bond, Bean, Harry Potter, plus some modern stuff I'm too out of touch to have heard of. How many foreign countries can you name five decades of pop culture from? The UK's monarch is probably the most widely recognisable too.

They also reckoned it was less overtly racist and segregated than many other places.

The weather is sh.t.

What I would say is that I don't think British people perceive the same positives and negatives as foreigners - they take a lot of good stuff for granted, but can also be blind to unusual faults.

[Bird on a Fire]

England has the best crisps. (This is 100% accurate)

English people don't generally start meaningful conversations socially, but are generally receptive if you do.

[temptar]

England has the best crisps. (This is 100% accurate)

English people don't generally start meaningful conversations socially, but are generally receptive if you do.

Ireland, RoI, invented crisps and nothing you have improves upon Tayto Cheese and Onion, Dublin version as opposed to NornIron version.

[Bird on a Fire]

England has the best crisps. (This is 100% accurate)

English people don't generally start meaningful conversations socially, but are generally receptive if you do.

Ireland, RoI, invented crisps and nothing you have improves upon Tayto Cheese and Onion, Dublin version as opposed to NornIron version.

I didn't know that! Intriguing. I've not tried those (and tbh I'm not much of a cheese and onion guy normally), but I'll keep an eye out.

[sheldrake]

Ireland, RoI, invented crisps

Are you sure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kitchiner ?