By Between Four Lions and this year's The Long Goodbye album, Riz Ahmed has spent a good chunk of his career thinking about what Britishness is, and who gets to be included in the official version of Britishness.
In a conversation at this year's Esquire Townhouse with Breitling, Ahmed put forward his own view of what it means to be British, and it's about a far from a chocolate box Constable painting of ye olde green and pleasant land as you can get.
"Our idea of Britain can be as narrow or expansive as we want. In can be mono-racial, it can be Shakespeare and it can be a nostalgia [for a time] that didn't contain people like us within it, or it can be as expansive as the reality that built Britain, which spans across the globe. For me, to say 'I love Britain' is akin to saying 'I love this planet'. I think it's a globalist position, not a nationalist position."
Ahmed's Britishness is about recognising this bit of land only exists the way it does because of the whole world.
"When I'm saying I love Britain, I love everything about Britain: everything that makes Britain Britain, and that's a lot more than just Shakespeare. It's something that's as rich as human history and human civilisation."
We have to say, that's a vision of nationhood we can get on board with.
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