Now that Scotland has re-established its own parliament, and the Welsh have
increased their use of Welsh to the point where Wales is now only partly
bi-lingual (the rest of the country is Welsh-speaking), and the Empire has
been dissolved (the Commonwealth is largely a political fiction), Britain
is no longer "Great", but is just the political term for the three
countries that share government and social services and some coinage and
sometimes the same language, on the same rather small island.
England and the English have been around for rather longer, but no Scot or
Welshman is English, and in spite of all the furor, no one residing in
Ulster for more than a single generation is really 'British' even if they
imagine they are. The Scots have their own legal system, their own
educational system, and their own banking system; they also have at least
two spoken and written languages other than English: Scots Gaelic and
lowland Scots. The Welsh have their own language and a strong sense of
their own national and ethnic identity.
The English tend to blur these distinctions, as they suffer from the
delusion that anyone who does anything important north of the Scottish
border, or west of Gloucester, is somehow an Englishman who was vacationing
in some other part of the island (as evidence, see almost any reference
work published in London since 1800, and a good many published in the US).
The lingua franca of the island is BBC or government English; it is taught
in schools. But every part of England has also its own peculiarities of
accent, vocabulary and speech forms. No difference between British and
English? Heaven forfend ~!
Juliet McLaren