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Good question. Someone has clearly been following the political debate because leaders seem increasingly attracted to this patriotic flourish. So if something in your life feels a bit flat, a bit underwhelming, a Great British rebrand does seem the solution du jour, to use a Great British French phrase.
Before I go on, I hope you are enjoying this sentence because it is not just a sentence. It is a Great British sentence. And, indeed, it is only here because it is part of my commitment to the Great British Paragraph. The Great British Paragraph is a grammar structure that I have created not merely to demonstrate my immense patriotism, but also to show my belief that all writing can be lifted if we just rebrand it.
And it is not just the writing. Oh no. We are also launching Great British Punctuation!, which will absorb our previous failing entities: Great British Comma, Great British Full Stop and Great British Semicolon. And just to show we are really down with the Insta generation, notice the exclamation mark that we have placed at the end of Great British Punctuation! By the way, all of our points of grammar really are home-grown. Our exclamation marks are all produced at punctuation factories in Great British Freeports within the UK. We have drawn a line — or at least a Great British hyphen — on cheap European punctuation.
There was always a touch of Great British branding around, though it was mostly ironic: the Great British weather, the Great British bank holiday, the Great British Rail sandwich, the Great British breakfast. Business and political branding tended to just use British, and it was not always the hallmark of excellence one might have wished. British Leyland, British Steel and British Coal were either privatised, broken up or sent to the Great British Insolvency Service in the sky.
I think the blame starts with Boris Johnson, which feels like a safe bet even if it’s wrong. With Johnson one could never be sure if this was heartfelt, cynical, ironic or all three. There was The Great British Bake Off, but Johnsonian hyperbole appropriated the prefix, throwing the words in front of some otherwise prosaic concept as a way of making a bad idea seem interesting and patriotic. Great British fish’n’chips, the Great British pasty, Great British lockdown parties, the Great British currency crisis. All sounded just that little bit better for being ours. Post-Johnson, the Conservatives began to use the idea more widely. The Tories came up with Great British Nuclear (once the British Nuclear Group), an exciting name for an industry heavily dependent on companies that were not, er, British.
Not to be outdone, Labour is now promising Great British Energy, which is something to do with its clean energy mission, but is somewhat lacking in Great British detail just now. Keir Starmer has made setting up Great British Energy one of his five key missions, which is a bit disappointing since simply setting up a company is not really the hard part. I have wondered if other nations feel the same compulsion. Are there similar Fabulous French, Glorious German or Champion Chinese brands?
A word of warning however, if you are tempted to rebrand yourself. There is something a little needy about it. In general, its rise has tracked the decline of Britain. In the days when the country was an undisputed global power, no one ever felt it was necessary to tell you how great Britain was. But anyway we are clearly heading down this path. Look forward to Great British Love Island, Great British Strictly, Great British Vaping and, of course, Great British Me.
All of us can be Great British Me and, I guarantee you, you will feel better for it. I rebranded as Great British Me some months ago and it’s been working really well. Once I was just me, but now as Great British Me I am feeling the respect and admiration that comes with my new soft-power status. It’s not entirely working out at home, where my desire for a Great British power nap is not often respected by the Great British Wife when there are Great British chores she feels I should be doing. But that’s what I had Great British Children for.
Anyway I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this and I’m sure you’ve noticed the difference. Last year it was just an article. This year it’s a Great British Article.
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