Britain is dominated by sneering, Guardian-reading Oxbridge liberals who hate their own country. Stewart Lee and Will Self are good examples. These people totally dominate the arts, the universities, the publishing industry, the BBC, the Booker prize...everything. We then internalize their self-loathing. You see it in the young. Most young people seem to take no pride in this country at all. In fact, they seem to identify more with America.
The British, and especially the English, must be the only people on Earth who are actually ashamed of their great literary tradition. Very few places can match this island. Harold Bloom, the American literary critic, compiled a list of the world's greatest books. He included more from Britain that anywhere else. This is the island that produced Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Samuel Johnson, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Dickens, the Brontes, Pater, Ruskin, H. G. Wells, Tolkien, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell...not to mention Darwin, Newton, Hume, Adam Smith, John Locke. Yet it means nothing to the young.
(Of course, the left are now doing what they can to destroy that as well. Last year, I got an email from my old university informing me that they're "de-colonising" the library.)