Most people probably won’t pay much notice to their calendars showing this is St George’s Day, a celebration of a long-dead Roman soldier whose connection to England has as much basis in fact as the dragon he was said to have slain.

The day is sometimes marred with troublemaking by the far right. But an obsession with English mythology isn’t confined to the fringes of politics. For the past decade, overly engorged ideas about this country have taken hold in an increasingly stark and polarised debate about its future.

Some have talked of wresting back from Europe an English birthright of liberty or yearned for a “global Britain” era when the Royal Navy ruled the waves. Others proclaimed a moral superiority that supposedly once “civilised” those they saw as “savage”, while still more look inwards to a story of an enchanted island that can stand alone against the world or even turn back global tides.

The stories we tell about ourselves matter at any time, but never more so than in election years when such oversized myths have been pitted against the more everyday thoughts about the country held by the people who live here.

As politicians prepare for a potentially pivotal general election, there are already endless debates over the European convention on human rights, stopping a “new Armada” of desperate people crossing the Channel, how the English “white working........

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