When I hear pride I automatically think Gay Pride. Sorry!
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I get that, and you are probably not alone. However, like the flag of St George I am not going to let a word be hijacked by a group and made their own. I am proud to be British, I am proud of this country and the people who have made it great. It is also the collective noun for lions.
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I can’t think of anything more British than a chinese face with a broad Glaswegian accent. Francis Prior has an amazing theory about The Saxon invasion. It wasn’t an invasion. There is no archaeological evidence that they ever had a battle with us let alone a war. So many people from the Roman empire stayed. The Vikings became British, The Normans too, we fold people into our culture.
I love the fact that my Pastors wife, who is pure Jamaican, has a far more English accent than me, it’s very middle class and almost received. The only thing she hasn’t lost is the Jamaican R sound. That is so British.
It’s picnics with lashings of Ginger beer wearing the latest running shoes and having already mapped out the escape route for when the weather changes. It’s being cursed by everyone on your street for lighting that torrential downpour causing barbeque.
Sorry Londoners and southerners in general, but, it’s being brave enough to say good morning to strangers you pass in the street. It’s punting on the river or living in Narrow boats.
It’s English breakfst tea with the English breakfast. It’s watching the football and the rugby even the bloody cricket with your mates down the pub and having a good shout together when you win or lose.
It’s bacon and eggs, it’s a red leicester Cheese and Branston pickle cob (A crispy bun that just about cuts you pallet off when you bit into it) It’s Roast Beef, rabbit stew, pigeon pie, crab sticks and the most phenomenal metaphor food there hs ever been. The flavour of Haggis tastes just how the stunning countryside of Scotland looks. It’s reading about life in the shire in the Fellowship of the ring. It’s talking bollocks in the pub.
It’s real ale and it’s cheap larger, it’s pims and a gin and tonic. It’s a cold glass of cider on one of the 5 hot days that we get each year. It used to be getting up to mischief in the streets with your mates when you were a kid, and if my death penalty for pedophiles suggestion is taken seriously it will be again. That’s the Britain I am ashamed we are losing, That’s the Britain I hope to show my Filippino wife when we come over together for the first time. It’s home.
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To be British simply means you have attained the legal right to reside here and be treated as a British national. Beyond that is has become almost meaningless and certainly no longer relates to ethnicity or culture. Previously to be British meant you were more than likely English, Welsh, Scots or N. Irish. Now it does not. I have to at times extract myself from ‘Britishness’ and claim my English/Welshness to differentiate me from others who do not share my heritage or culture, but who can call themselves British. Even this is being eroded however as many of African descent deliberately and mischievously in my view call themselves English on the grounds they were born here. So we live in a world where Africans can declare their distinct African ethnicity, but the English etc cannot (ethnic groups need not be pure). And now all sorts of shenanigans and false arguments are put forward to try and undermine native Brits validity. This is deliberate in my view. A deliberate attempt to redefine natives and undermine them so that multiculturalism can be seen as natural and organic and they need face the reality of their wrongdoing. A literal passive genocide is ongoing, shown in fertilty rates etc.
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Trying to define it is part of the Problem. No one ever asks a Japanese person what it means to be Japanese because we already know the answer. This question is asked on these shows to deflect. Attempting to define it for people like that is playing right into their hands. I would simply tell them they should already know the answer.
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You’re not wrong. Some things are ineffable, and Douglas Adams captured the problem with trying to “eff” such things pretty well 
I think there’s something to this idea of KNOWING and accepting our history (our legal and scientific and religious history too, not just the big wars and the general cultural/empire stuff), and even being patriotic towards it. However, any attempt to define or enforce it quickly becomes risky: one could be othered in their own state, by just defining some crazy, rushed-through law as British.
“Generally aligned with the historical ways and traditions of The UK” is probably a good answer.
Not to take Ben Habib out of context, but he made a great point lately, on a more specific topic, that one of the defining things about Britain is a slow, careful (small-c conservative) rate of change (in laws). That could also apply to our values, demography, etc.
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