It must be a great feeling – at once warm and calming, a sense of profound belonging, of inclusion into the greater group, and through that to the very land itself. At the same time, it must be a rousing feeling – stirring, even – especially when certain key cues are introduced: flapping flags, largo music, marching men, a familiar profile on a reviewing stand. I can see for myself that the reaction is Pavlovian: the eyes water, the heart fills, the head swims. There must be a sense of justness – that you’re a component part of a great and ongoing historical development, one that can only progress towards a kind of civic perfection. Yes, it must be a great feeling, this patriotism of which people speak; and yet, for myself, I’ve never experienced it. My own compromised nationality may be to blame, at least in part – my father was British (at least to begin with), and my mother American. I was born in the old Charing Cross Hospital in central London, and for most of my life I’ve cleaved to my identity as a Londoner, rather than any other. My mother registered me as a US citizen at birth – but I never made any use of this status until after 9/11, when it became nigh impossible for those such as myself (with minor and very old convictions for drug offences) to get a visa on a British passport.

At JFK airport they questioned my citizenship with this fructuous question: 'Mr Self, are you an apple or a pear?'

I well remember the deputy head of immigration at JFK airport in New York questioning my citizenship with this fructuous question: “Mr Self, are you an apple or a pear?” And when I replied that, as far as I was concerned, I was a dual citizen, he snapped back: “I don’t care if you choose to live in London; I don’t care if you travel on a British passport when you’re abroad. But when you come here, to the United States of America, you are an American!” Rousing words, but although I did indeed acquire a US passport, I’ve never felt the least thrill when the stars and stripes unfurl – something I’d probably be advised to keep quiet about, since Americans take their citizenship not just seriously, but sacredly. Just as you can become a Muslim by a simple profession of faith, so you can recuse your US citizenship with a speech act; this alone seems to underscore its sacerdotal character. The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard described America as “hyper-real”, on the grounds that “it is a utopia that has behaved from the very beginning as though it were already achieved”. But my manifest destiny was never to participate in this collective reverie: my mother regarded herself as something of an exile from McCarthyite America, and while she never took British citizenship, nor can I recall her ever evincing the slightest patriotism.

And then there was her Jewishness – again, something she made very little of, adjuring me on occasion not to mention it publicly, on the grounds that we “passed”. I can pass – until I mention my Jewish heritage, that is, whereupon British gentiles tend to glance at my nose, their heads a little on one side, then say, “Oh, yes … of course.” My mother’s take on British antisemitism was acute: “In the States, they hate you because you’re black, a woman, or a Jew – but here they hate you personally, and only incidentally because you happen to be black, a woman or a Jew.” I wasn’t brought up either culturally or religiously “in the faith” – and yet my Jewishness remains, another distancing factor from a nation that, lest we forget, has a national church helmed by its head of state. My father’s case was more complex: he was as tweedily, pipe-smokingly, bitter-beer-gluggingly, Holy-Communion-attendingly English as anyone could be, but I still have no memory of him ever singing “God Save the Queen”, or, so far as I can remember, indulging in any kind of patriotic display. I think he felt that, having been a conscientious objector during the second world war, it ill-behoved him to make obeisance before a state he had refused to defend. He emigrated to Australia in his 60s, and took Australian citizenship a couple of years before his death in the late 1990s.

It’s time to question our notions of Britishness and patriotism Read more

I only go on about my background at such length because, while the political convulsions of the last couple of years may have been typed as value-free “populism”, behind this there lies the thick and agglutinative ideology of patriotism. When I attended grade school in upstate New York in the 1960s, we used to stand by our desks each morning, hand on heart, and recite: “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” I wouldn’t be surprised if David Davis announced that all British schoolchildren will soon be required to chant a similar catechism, one aimed at securing all the wayward lambs in their patriotic pen. In my youth, principled anarchist that I was, I railed against all states: for me, to be a citizen was ipso facto to assent to an organisation that exercised a monopoly on violence – and to pay for its maintenance. But as I grew older (and paid more of it), I came to see progressive taxation as the essential underlying mechanism of whatever civilisation we can lay claim to; as for all the rest of the loyal toasting and banging on about British values, that was for the little tweedy people, out in the provinces, riding to hounds and hanging on for dear life to a vision of a Merrie England that never really existed.

Yes: I’m guilty as charged of being one of those metropolitan chatterers who turned a blind eye to the economic reality of effectively unconstrained immigration simply because I enjoyed the upside of living in a genuinely cosmopolitan city. When I was growing up in the London of the 1960s and 70s, people always banged on about how polyglot it was – but in retrospect, with an ethnic minority population of under 4%, most precincts remained pasty-white. Now, in Lambeth, where I live, the percentage of recent incomers – of whatever heritage – is approaching 50%, and I can buy good-quality Italian espresso beans in my corner shop, and a cup of syrupy Ethiopian coffee in the cafe next door – surely a better marker of civilisation than whatever specious control I might exercise over Britain’s “sovereignty”? I was writing for the London Evening Standard when its then comment editor, Andrew Neather (a former Labour party policy adviser), fessed up to what everyone already knew: that Labour’s high command, during the Blair and Brown years, had consistently turned their sights away from the immigration situation, on the grounds that whoever was entering Britain, they were bound to be Labour voters.

Remainers failed to explain how the EU would prevent the 1% getting richer, when it can’t control members’ budget deficits

People who regard themselves – at least emotionally – as left-liberals can no longer turn a blind eye to the ever-increasing gulf between rich and poor in Britain; the mood-music of “inclusion” and “diversity” can be quite as delusional as any Merrie England ideal, evoking a happy metropolis full of bubbly baristas, rather than thousands of immiserated eastern-European piece workers hot-bedding it out in zone 6 – let alone the benighted, stateless migrants who were still turning up at the Jungle bidonville outside Calais weeks after it had been demolished. Those who campaigned for Remain failed to explain how the EU – hitherto quite as much an engine of neoliberal divisiveness as our own fiscally sandpapery government – was going to prevent the 1% getting relentlessly richer, when it can’t exercise any control over its member states’ budget deficits. Windy talk of “human rights” is always part of such mood music, an appeal to another nonexistent phenomenon: the world government, which would be the only institution capable of enforcing the responsibilities and rights of the billions who putatively constitute such a genotype.

It may be that we wealthy types feel able to call ourselves “citizens of everywhere”, but it’s a status that depends on the very frictionless mobility that made us so: our cosmopolitanism was really the froth off the top of financial deregulation.

We should have called ourselves “citizens of easyJet” – because mobility is always either a function of wealth or poverty; taedium vitae or desperation. I have no time for a patriotism based on delusions – nor am I convinced any more that there’s a residuum of core British values more puissant than those embodied by other nationalisms: the long war between multinational finance and the nation state continues, and values don’t enter into it. But, in common with many ageing baby boomers, I find myself more and more in thrall to a vast and bureaucratic organisation, undoubtedly polyglot and cosmopolitan in character, which depends for its existence on progressive taxation, and which aims, at least, to embody values of tolerance, inclusiveness and compassion. Yes, I’m not a British citizen, or an American one; nor do I hanker for the Australian or Israeli citizenship to which I’m also entitled; for I am a citizen of the National Health Service, a far more vital body politic.

• Citizens of Everywhere is a project by the Centre for New and International Writing at the University of Liverpool. Will Self’s new novel, Phone, will be published in June.