PART I The UK Remembrance calendar
PART II World wars
PART III Nations’ selves … Britannia
PART IV Reports this year
PART V New writing, 1
The remembrance of wars
The other: U-boats, Hiroshima and fire-bombing Tokyo, Guantanamo Bay
War and peace … Israel and Palestine
PART VI New writing, 2
The national self and the other: the distribution of UK opinion
A distribution: not united, not divided
Groups: the gaps and overlaps between distributions …
… the probability of agreement … means, differences, significance, effect size
… logistic regressions
Conceptual and statistical summary
The two reports
PART I The UK Remembrance calendar
Today is Remembrance Sunday …
… 11th November is Remembrance Day, marking the First World War armistice on 11th November 1918. It is a special day in the UK, one of just a few major national days commemorating key wartime events in British history, the others relating to the Second World War: the Normandy landings; VE Day; and, less emphasised, Hiroshima Day and VJ Day.
“Eighty years on. Victory in Europe was the ultimate triumph of hope over despair.”
“Xi and Putin are brothers in arms of force for Victory Day.”
The Times, May 8 2025: 25 (Editorial); 28.
“Eighty years ago this weekend, on Sunday 11 November 1945, King George VI joined the newly minted Labour prime minister Clement Atlee in laying wreaths on the Cenotaph in London’s Whitehall.”
“We failed to build a new Jerusalem.” Anthony Seldon. The Observer, November 9 2025: 31.
PART II World wars
World wars are global events but …
… may not affect everywhere
… are locally experienced and remembered.
‘Local’ may be national experience and remembrance …
… and ‘national’ may be a certain conception of the nation …
… and conceptions may differ and be political.
GO TO
World Wars I and II (extracts from the 2014 and 2015 Yearbooks)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Dt9G_bv5Ue5-WfaaD0PVpgSL3rutbe4s/view
‘Our values’: nationalism and remembrance, pp 5-8
Universalism? Global war and local remembrances, pp 8-11
The Russian Empire, pp 14-18
The British Empire, pp 18-19
1945: Japan, USA, China and the Pacific, pp 19-20
1945-2015: the United Nations, pp 20-22
PART III Nations’ selves … Britannia
The national self … empires in Europe … the Ottoman empire
Click: The national self … empires in Europe … the Ottoman empire
This is part of Nations and world: variation and self.
A certain conception of the nation: Britannia … the Conservative party
In the UK, the notion of Britannia has involved a certain conception of Britain. It has been associated with the Conservative party.
“Churchill’s Ghost. The war leader’s words and Ukraine’s courage lent poignancy to the VE Day parade …
… The King was, like his grandfather George VI, attired in the uniform of Admiral of the Fleet, and like him took to the balcony of Buckingham Palace to acknowledge the crowd.”
The Times, May 6, 2025: 23.
GO TO Chapter:
2 VE Day: Winston Churchill and George VI on the balcony
In draft online book:
Britannia: Three Prime Ministers and a Queen
The Britannia variable … a two-group system … the Britannia group
The Britannia variable is a hypothetical variable which correlates with a cluster of variables and is revealed in the correlations between the variables and would correspond to a factor or component in an appropriate statistical analysis (not carried out here).
The members of the Conservative party have varied in the strength of their commitment to the notion of Britannia. Over time parties have formed with a strong commitment to Britannia: UKIP, the Brexit Party and now Reform. The parties sympathetic to the notion of Britannia can be considered as a group, the Britannia group, Group A, with other parties belonging to a Group B. So UK politics can be thought of as a two-group system.
In preparation: The UK Reform Party, 2025
PART IV Reports this year
West moving east; and east moving west … memories and histories
. West moving east; and east moving west … memories and histories
USA power: self and other; positive and negative
. USA power: self and other; positive and negative
The European empire system … Iran … parallel histories
. The European empire system … Iran … parallel histories
Power and one-sided negative action:
… Hiroshima, Holocaust, Gaza, Ukraine … Niall Fergusson
. Power and one-sided negative action: Hiroshima, Holocaust, Gaza, Ukraine … Niall Fergusson
West moving east; and east moving west … memories and histories
. West moving east; and east moving west … memories and histories
Part 1
West moving east; and east moving west
Trump and Putin
The range of opinions, 17 March 2025
The value status of memories and histories
UK, France and Turkey: 1854 and 2025
Baltic: the book
From the Baltic to the Black Sea; St Petersburg and Sebastopol
Poland, 1612 and 2025
The front pages, weeks 7 to 9
Part 2
Ideas, actions and relationships … historiography
The truth status of memories
Ideas about the past
An imaginary aftermath of October 7 - an allegorical cameo for the novel
To Kill The Truth - the novel
The Island of Missing Trees – a novel
DeepSeek
Who did what when on October 7?
Reports, January-March 2025
Happiness and love: other positive
USA power: self and other; positive and negative
. USA power: self and other; positive and negative
1 Trump’s remarks at the World Economic Forum: a golden age
2 USA territory, now and in the Gilded Age: self v other
3 USA trade, now and in the Gilded Age: self v other
USA tariffs, 1841 and 1870 … Andrew Carnegie … (and me)
Generalising the Richardson model: trade war … reciprocation, interaction
4 The air crash: systems thinking and negative other thinking as a default option
5 “The price of Trump’s power politics …”
6 Trump and The Times
7 Trump and the world
8 UK opinion: democracy and dictatorship
9 Power: self and other; positive and negative …
10 … the death penalty – USA and UK opinion
11 Information sources in the USA
The European empire system … Iran … parallel histories
. The European empire system … Iran … parallel histories
The European empire system …
… Scotland and slavery
… The Palestine Police Force, 1920-1948
… the Aden Emergency, 1963-1967
… the making of modern Asia
… Iran; and the British and Russian empires
USA: most Olympic golds; biggest bombs, 1945, 2017, 2025
USA bombing of Iran …
… USA, Iran, UK, France, Russia, China, UN
War and world society (my report June 2024)
Controversial history … parallel histories
Power and one-sided negative action:
Hiroshima, Holocaust, Gaza, Ukraine … Niall Fergusson
. Power and one-sided negative action: Hiroshima, Holocaust, Gaza, Ukraine … Niall Fergusson
1 Hiroshima, 6th August 1945
2 Holocaust, 1941-1945
3 Fergusson’s article
Gaza and Ukraine
Gaza
Ukraine
What Palestinians think
Opinions in and about Israel and Palestine (2023-2024)
A Palestinian state
Fergusson’s world view: the West and its foes
4 Sophisticated discourse
5 Conceptual framework
One-sided action in a sequence of actions … in a sequence of rounds … in a system
6 Links to my writings
PART V New writing, 1
The remembrance of wars
The other: U-boats, Hiroshima and fire-bombing Tokyo, Guantanamo Bay
War and peace … Israel and Palestine
The remembrance of wars
People kill and people die.
In wars people kill one another and people die on all sides.
“Thou shalt not kill.”
The self shall not be negative towards the other.
The other: U-boats, Hiroshima and fire-bombing Tokyo, Guantanamo Bay
The self has a natural tendency to think about the self. Thinking about the other, particularly thinking about the other from the other’s perspective, sometimes comes as a bit of a surprise. From a British perspective, the following are ‘the other’.
Wolfpack. Inside Hitler’s U-Boat War. Roger Moorhouse. William Collins. 2025
“ ‘What nerves these U-boat boys have’ … Hitler’s submarines were feared, but no one can doubt the great courage of their crews … Of all the armed services in the Second World War, U-boats had the greatest loss rate.” Neil Tweedie. The Times. Saturday Review. November 1, 2025: 13.
Hugh Miall has responded to a piece I wrote saying the Hiroshima bomb had brought about the end of the war with Japan:
“With regard to the example of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where your text (or maybe it is one of your sources) says ‘ The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs had brought the war with Japan to an end – whereas US involvement in the war had started with Japan’s one-sided attack on Pearl Harbour.’,
There are question marks about the assumption that it was the atomic bombs which ended the war, or the Soviet entry into the war. Ramesh Thakur’s recent Toda paper is good on this:”
A sceptic’s view of the nuclear bomb. Ramesh Thakur. Toda report 239. August 2025.
“Tomiichi Murayama. Japanese prime minister whose enduring legacy became a television address in which he publicly apologised for his country’s actions during the Second World War. … he was a witness to Tokyo’s firebombing in 1945. The war left him a sworn pacifist.” Obituary. The Times, November 4, 2025: 47.
The USA is an ‘other’ which is sometimes quite close to Britain. How does the USA ‘self’ relate to some of its ‘others’?
Guantanamo Bay. “Dick Cheney. Controversial US vice-president who persuaded George W Bush to invade Iraq. … As much as anyone, it was Bush’s wily arch-conservative deputy who persuaded him … to incarcerate terrorist suspects in Guantanamo Bay while subjecting them to what most people would describe as torture ...” Obituary. The Times, November 5, 2025: 46-47.
War and peace … Israel and Palestine
“For peace to last, Hamas must admit defeat. Once the militants see they can gain no more by killing, Israelis should seize the moment to forge a shared future.” Daniel Finkelstein. The Times, October 15, 2025: 23.
Finkelstein discusses the Israel-Palestine question in relation to the general issue of war and peace, citing in particular A J P Taylor’s How Wars End.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22249089-how-wars-end
Also: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/03058298970260031001
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._J._P._Taylor
“My grandfather spent much of the 1920s in Berlin, before disaster engulfed him, in a political argument with Zionists. He worried that if Jews created a state in Palestine there would never be peace there. The Zionists replied that if Jews stayed in Europe they would all be killed. All my life this thought has haunted me – what if they were both right?”
But something else about Taylor’s account of past conflicts struck me. The beginning of the end came with at least one side realising that it could not continue with war. That it had essentially lost.
Anybody who does not appreciate why the Palestinian Arabs resisted the creation of the state of Israel with arms in 1948 lacks imagination. Palestinians had their own national ambitions, their own experience of oppression and being governed by strangers. I understand completely their desire to assert their own nationhood and their resentment that the international community was asking them to share what they saw as their own land.
I see also why they felt that their chance of driving out the Jews from Palestine was large enough to be a realistic ambition. They had enough local support from neighbouring states and they thought they could win. But the moment for this has long passed. It has been clear for decades that such a victory was impossible.
For decades now launching war against Israel has just been an organised orgy of pointless death.”
Finkelstein then condemns Hamas for its violence and for its failure to understand this pointlessness. “And yes, there arose in Israel a war coalition, including vengeful and obnoxious individuals seeking the eradication of neighbours they saw as enemies.” Finkelstein then criticises the protesters for not genuinely wanting a ceasefire. He calls on Israelis to “show that as ferociously as you resist violence, so magnanimously do you seek peace.”
See also:
Israel and Palestine: self and other, positive and negative; 2023
PART VI New writing, 2
The national self and the other: the distribution of UK opinion
A distribution: not united, not divided
Groups: the gaps and overlaps between distributions …
… the probability of agreement … means, differences, significance, effect size
… logistic regressions
Conceptual and statistical summary
The two reports
The national self and the other: the distribution of UK opinion
Two recent reports provide some insight into how people in the UK see the national self and how they see others. Here we consider:
the national self
the internal self and the other … internal tensions
the national self and the incoming other
the national self and the external other
The national self
There is a distribution of opinion about the national self …
… in particular about whether the individual agrees that they are proud of their country. The distribution is single-peaked with a mode at ‘agree’; a median at ‘neither agree nor disagree’; and a mean of 0.31 on a scale of -2 to +2, closer to ‘neither agree nor disagree’ than to ‘agree’. The standard deviation is 1.1.
strongly agree 16%
agree 30% (mode)
neither agree nor disagree 27% (median)
don’t know / prefer not to say 3%
disagree 17%
strongly disagree 7%
… also about whether the individual agrees that they would like their country to be the way it used to be. The distribution is single-peaked with both the mode and the median at ‘neither agree nor disagree’; and a mean of 0.5 on a scale of -2 to +2, midway between ‘neither agree nor disagree’ and ‘agree’. The standard deviation is 1.2.
strongly agree 23%
agree 25%
neither agree nor disagree 27% (mode and median)
don’t know / prefer not to say 4%
disagree 14%
strongly disagree 7%
Internal self and other … internal tensions
There are internal groups … internal selves and others … and resultant tensions. There is a distribution of opinion about internal tensions, in particular about the amount of tension between Remainers and Leavers. The distribution is single-peaked with a mode at ‘not very much’; a median at ‘a fair amount’; and a mean of 2.25 on a scale of 0 to 4, in the middle between ‘not very much’ and ‘a fair amount’. The standard deviation is 1.2.
a great deal 15%
a fair amount 39% (median)
don’t know / prefer not to say 4%
not very much 40% (mode)
none at all 2%
[Note: I have combined the Remain and Leave percentages given in the original report. They are much the same for both groups.]
The national-born self and the incoming other
There is a distribution of opinion about internal tensions, in particular about the amount of tension between immigrants and people born in the UK. The distribution is single-peaked with a mode and the median at ‘a great deal’; and a mean of 3.35 on a scale of 0 to 4, between ‘a fair amount’ and ‘a great deal’, but closer to the former. The standard deviation is 0.9.
a great deal 55% (mode and median)
a fair amount 34%
don’t know / prefer not to say 2%
not very much 9%
none at all 0%
[Note: I have combined the Labour and Remain percentages given in the original report. Apart from Remain, the modes and medians for the other parties are ‘a fair amount’.]
The national self and the external other
There is a distribution of opinion about the national self and the external other …
… in particular about whether the British Empire is something to be proud of or ashamed of. The distribution is single-peaked with the mode and the median at ‘neither’; and a mean of 0.11 on a scale of -1 to +1, corresponding also to ‘neither’. The standard deviation is 0.7.
something to be proud of 34%
don’t know / prefer not to say 6%
neither 36% (mode and median)
something to be ashamed of 23%
… and also about the amount of sympathy with Hamas. The distribution is not quite single-peaked with the main mode at ‘not at all’ and the median at ‘hardly’; and a mean of 1.14 on a scale of 0 to 4, corresponding also to ‘hardly’. The standard deviation is 1.3.
Question: Some groups have engaged in activism or violence in pursuit of political aims. To what extent do you sympathise with each of the following – if at all – and the goals they claim to represent? Do you sympathise with Hamas …
very much 6%
somewhat 9%
neutral 28%
hardly 7% (median)
not at all 49% (main mode)
Note: The Arch10 study. The sample size was 2,576; made up of 626 public sector employees and 1950 “wider public”. The above percentages relate to the whole sample of 2,576.
A distribution: not united, not divided
Is opinion in the UK united or divided? It is certainly not united: there is variation of opinion and the standard deviation gives the amount of that variation. Sometimes ‘divided’ is used to refer to a separation between two distinct groups. The distributions which we observed above do not exhibit any clear separation on the opinion continuum. In this sense the population is not divided. Rather than thinking about ‘united’ or ‘divided’ it is better to think of the situation in terms of the distribution.
However the notions of ‘united’ and ‘divided’ are common in discourse. The headline in The Times uses the word “divided” and the Arch10 report is entitled “Two Britains” (see later section).
It so happens that one of the surveys seeks opinions on this matter. What is found is that there is a distribution of opinion about whether the nation is united or divided. The distribution is single-peaked with both the mode and the median at ‘somewhat divided’ and a mean of -1.1 on a scale of -2 to +2, corresponding to ‘somewhat divided’. The standard deviation is 0.9.
very united 1%
somewhat united 5%
don’t know / prefer not to say 3%
neither united nor divided 12%
somewhat divided 41% (mode and median)
very divided 38%
[Note: I have combined the white and ethnic minority percentages given in the original report. They are much the same for both groups.]
Groups: the gaps and overlaps between distributions …
The previous section concerned the opinion distribution for the whole population. We now consider the opinion distributions for groups within the whole population.
“State workers lean towards Britain’s rivals.” The Times, October 17 2025: 1, 2.
The main aim of the Arch10 report was to compare public sector workers and the wider public.
“Of all survey questions, we observed the largest difference between public sector workers and the wider public on the question of support for Hamas, the terrorist group. Public sector workers were significantly less likely than the wider public to say they had no sympathy at all for Hamas. Just 34% of public servants said they had no sympathy at all, compared with 54% of the wider public – a gap of twenty percentage points. At the other end of the spectrum, one in ten public sector workers described themselves as very sympathetic towards Hamas, double the proportion in the general population (10% against 5%).” (page 15)
Question: Some groups have engaged in activism or violence in pursuit of political aims. To what extent do you sympathise with each of the following – if at all – and the goals they claim to represent? Do you sympathise with Hamas …
. wider public public sector
Very much 5% 10%
Somewhat 8% 14%
Neutral 27% 33%
Hardly 6% 9%
Not at all 54% 34%
Note that we considered the responses of the whole population to this question in the previous section.
The overlap between two distributions
It is worth noting that there is an overlap of 80% between the wider public distribution and the public sector distribution: we can match up the two distributions in the following way:
. wider public public sector
Very much 5% 5%
Somewhat 8% 8%
Neutral 27% 27%
Hardly 6% 6%
Not at all 34% 34%
. 80% 80%
The gap between two distributions
This leaves a gap of 20% between the wider public distribution and the public sector distribution: 20% in each of the two distributions remain unmatched in the following way:
. wider public public sector
Very much 0% 5%
Somewhat 0% 6%
Neutral 0% 6%
Hardly 0% 3%
Not at all 20% 0%
. 20% 20%
The gap and overlap between two distributions
It is important to acknowledge both the gap and the overlap. A sole focus on the gap leads to thinking of a divided society as is indeed the case here with the Arch10 authors entitling their report “Two Britains”. The existence of a substantial overlap suggests a different conceptualisation of the situation.
… the probability of agreement
Imagine random encounters between two people. Will the two people agree in the sense of choosing the same option to the Hamas question? From the above percentages we can calculate:
The probability of two public sector people agreeing is 0.26.
The probability of two wider public people agreeing is 0.38.
The probability of a public sector person agreeing with a wider public person is 0.29.
The similarity of these three probabilities is a reflection of the similarity of the two distributions.
Means, differences, significance, effect size
The standard approach to comparing two distributions involves looking at the difference in the means and calculating the statistical significance of the difference, taking into account the standard deviation. However the bigger the sample size the more likely it is that the difference is significant. Instead one can consider the effect size, namely the difference in means relative to the standard deviation.
In the case of the question about sympathy with Hamas, the scale ranges from 0 to 4. The public sector mean is 1.57 and the wider public mean is 1.04. The difference is 0.53. (So the difference is 0.13 of the scale range.) Dividing this difference by the standard deviation of 1.29 gives an effect size of 0.41 – in other words the difference between the means is 0.41 of the standard deviation. (Here I am using a fairly crude version of effect size.)
… logistic regressions
The public sector variable is just one of several variables which might affect people’s opinions. Which variable has the largest effect? What is the combined effect of the variables and what is the relative importance of the different variables in that combined effect?
In order to answer these questions, the Arch10 study carried out logistic regressions and the resulting coefficients are presented in Section 8, Appendix A, pages 42 to 46 of their report. The age variable repeatedly has the largest coefficient. In contrast the public sector variable has quite low coefficients and is sometimes not significant. In other words the variable which is the prime focus of the report is not the variable which has the strongest effect.
The table below gives an abbreviated account of the results. For example the logistic regression for sympathy with Hamas has six significant variables (not including the intercept); the range in the modulus of the coefficients is between 0.3 and 2.3; and the coefficient for the public sector variable is significant but small. See the first row below. The tables in the report refer to the logistic regression for the Hamas variable and also for the other variables. Note below that the number at the end of the row refers to the coefficient for the public sector variable and is small compared with the preceding number which is the highest coefficient in the logistic regression.
Hamas: 6; 0.3 to 2.3; 0.3.
Services: 4; 0.4 to 1.3; NS 0.1
BBC: 10; 0.3 to 1.4; 0.3
Crime: 8; 0.3 to 0.7; 0.3
School: 6; 0.3 to 1.2; NS 0.1
UK harm: 6; 0.3 to 1.4; 0.3
UK harm: 1: 0.5; (NHS 0.5)
Iran harm: 8: 0.3 to 1.5; NS 0.1
Patriotism: 5; 0.2 to 1.0; 0.2
Conceptual and statistical summary
This report has discussed relationships between nations and relationships within nations. Of concern are negative relationships. Typically these involve the reciprocation of negative action with each actor having a positive conception of the self and a negative conception of the other. In particular this characterises a certain conception of the national self and an example of such a conception is the notion of Britannia.
With this broad conceptual framework in mind, we have analysed the results of two recent reports on public opinion in the UK. We have distinguished between
the national self;
the internal self and the other … internal tensions;
the national self and the incoming other;
the national self and the external other.
Looking at the whole population, opinion is not united, nor is it divided into two or more separate groups. Rather it is distributed and spread over an opinion continuum usually in a single-peaked distribution, with a fair amount of spread (the standard deviations range between 0.22 and 0.37 of the scale range).
Looking now at groups within the whole population, the groups have overlapping distributions - the size of overlap O and the size of gap G are of interest (O+G=100)%. Associated with the amount of overlap is the probability of agreement between groups. There are different group dimensions.
There are several variables which might affect people’s opinions. Which variable has the largest effect? What is the combined effect of the variables and what is the relative importance of the different variables in that combined effect? In the Arch10 report age had a more strong effect than did public sector employment.
The approach adopted here in this present report is different from the approach in newspaper articles or indeed in the original reports on which the newspaper articles are based. Whereas the original reports discuss selected percentages, the present report has looked at the percentages in the whole distribution, has quantified the scale of the question options and has calculated standard statistical parameters such as mode, median and mean and standard deviation.
The quantification of the scales has been of two types depending on which option might be taken to be zero. In one type of scale, the scale is entirely positive and, in the other type of scale, the scale is negative and positive with zero in the middle. Elsewhere I have carried out two further steps: reducing the scales to either 0 to 1
or -1 to +1; and regarding the options as intervals and using the mid-points of the intervals as scores.
The two reports
The KCL Policy Institute report:
“Nation more divided than ever, even as Brexit wounds heal.” The Times, November 7, 2025: 7.
A survey by Ipsos for the Policy Institute of King’s College London
UK’s sense of division reaches new high as culture war tensions grow, study finds.
The Arch10 report:
“State workers lean towards Britain’s rivals.” The Times, October 17 2025: 1, 2.
The report, Two Britains: https://www.arch10.co.uk/two-britains
The data:
Arch 10: https://www.arch10.co.uk/
Gordon Burt, November 2025
THE END