It is becoming increasingly clear that Britain no longer really exists. I’m not sure exactly how long this has been going on. Last year, for instance, the nation formed from the 1707 Act of Union between the English and Scottish crowns very nearly tore itself apart de jure, holding a nervous and fractured referendum on Scottish independence. The vote was eventually won by the “No” camp, preserving Britain as a political entity, but it was clear the moral victory had been lost regardless. The “Yes” campaign made an exciting and convincing case for an independent Scotland, to which people could be proud to belong. The “No” campaign, by contrast, utterly failed to make anything like a case for Britain as a concept — only a case that it was safer financially to preserve it. (For the time being, anyway: With our government apparently engaged in the project of extracting as much short-term value from the nation’s assets as possible, you worry that the very ground beneath your feet might vanish the moment it ceases to help some banker in London’s spreadsheet add up.)

It’s astonishing to think that not even a century ago, Britain was the largest, most effective and arguably the most brutal empire the world had ever seen — one of the fundamental political institutions that structured the entire world. This might explain why British national identity, such as it is, continues to manifest itself in signifiers left over from the days of Empire: gin, tea, cricket, flags, those wretched “Keep Calm and Carry On” posters, all of them now zombified and divorced from their material basis. Their appeal is the dream of an endless summer of Pimm’s, bowls and thwarted romantic expectations on the lawn of a great country estate, as if this lifestyle could ever be made possible without the violent exploitation of around one-third of the population of the earth. Ten years ago, adorning oneself with these signifiers might have been considered a somewhat alternative statement. Since then, though, they’ve gained a great deal of popularity, to the point where they’re firmly established in the mainstream of middle-class culture in the British Isles.

There’s no greater proof of this than Britain’s most popular television program: “The Great British Bake-Off.” In America, where it airs (and streams) as “The Great British Baking Show,” it has already become the latest in a long line of imported British hits: Think of it as the new “Downton Abbey.” The show is a reality-TV competition in which charming amateur baking enthusiasts are challenged to make lavish cakes and tortes, savory pies and obscure European loaves. Each week, the least successful baker is sent off with hugs and well wishes, until a winner emerges.

At first glance, “The Great British Baking Show” seems as though it must be a recruitment video for membership in some twee and cutesy new reboot of the Empire. It’s all there. In the grounds of some indeterminate country estate, at the height of summer, a group of people are gathered in a tent full of bunting and flags and a pair of hosts all wry jolly-good-ness, to ... bake some cakes and bread. It’s the exact distillation of everything awful about the British home-counties middle-class way of life that, for whatever dreadful sins I committed in a previous existence, I was born into.