Not unless everyone in Britain is a Muslim, no. And all those things are either people, invented by people, or built by people. British people, which makes them something British, but as soon as they cease to be remembered, eaten or used by British people they can't be considered part of British identity, can they?

Unless you think Puritanism, or druids, or killing Saxons, or hanging, or the feudal system - all things that have, at one point or another, defined British identity - are still what makes someone British.

"Nation" is not a unit of identity in any meaningful sense, IMO. You can be part of a culture, sure, but there's no way to intrisically connect a certain culture to a certain concept of nation except through the use of force, perhaps - for example, by eradicating the people who disagree with you and absorbing the survivors, a la the Romans, the Saxons, the Normans and, in America, the Europeans when they drove out the Native Americans.

Ok: 1,000 years ago, every person in Britain lived by the feudal system. The feudal system was therefore a crucial element of British identity - it defined our system of government. Now, no one lives by the feudal system. Exactly zero people in the British Isles use it as a form of government. Ergo; it is no longer part of British identity.

Similarly, if people stopped remembering who Churchill was, he'd cease to be part of what it means to be 'British', because no British people remember him.

Nation = sum of the population.

No one eats quail anymore, so it's not a "typical British dish" anymore, but curry now is. A generation from now, no one will eat black pudding probably, a generation after that, it would no longer be accurate to consider it a British dish.

All I'm saying is that "nation" is not a concept that is discrete from the people in that nation. There is no entity called "Britain" or "America", just the people that live there and give it a culture based on all the stuff they do and think.

So if everyone in Britian was a Muslim, Britain would be a Muslim nation. Stuff like religion is of course complicated when you have a state religion like we do, but even so, that's what it would take.

In a very real sense, out culture is being eroded by new people coming in with new beliefs, but it's also being eroded by everyone that dies, and everyone that's born and every time someone leaves to live somewhere else. Culture and the national character are evolving things, organic processes that represent a snapshot of a certain moment in time, not concrete, monolithic ideas that transcend individuals.

I don't buy any of this multi-cultural Britain bollocks ('cept for the integration of my girl... she's-a-comin' ) but I only define Britain by what it once was. An empire, Churchill... even Maggie Thatcher - yes she killed the unions, but she stuck one up those fucking Argentinians.

Now we're a joke. Brimming with 9/11 sympathizers, Tony fucking Blair, the PC brigade, Euro-mentality.... just look at the news in the past couple of weeks for an example of the latter. The London 2012 logo.

That's us. That's what defines a big event in our nation?

Where's the red, white and blue? The lions? It's just more non-descript, completely 'inoffensive' shit.

If this is to be a nation of burkas and Halal... then it isn't Britain anymore.