There’s a very old joke about an English woman on holiday in Germany with her husband, who overhears two locals refer to them as foreigners. “I’m sorry,” she tells them, presumably in an accent used to read the BBC News in 1935, “But you are mistaken. We are English, it is you who are foreigners.”

I didn’t say it was a good joke. Just old.

I do, however, think it’s instructive. It’s commonplace in discussions of English identity to think of us as being xenophobic, afraid of foreigners, but to me it’s always felt more like we’re autoxenophobic… afraid of becoming foreigners ourselves.

The evidence of this is all around us. In her recent Telegraph article, Suella Braverman complains of, neighbourhoods in England where English is irregularly spoken, and you have to ask why the hell that should matter. It matters for the same reason it matters in the timeless English story about how the people in the local shop switched to speaking in Welsh when we walked in, or the one about the snooty Parisian who speaks perfectly good English but refuses to. It matters because those damned impertinent foreigners made us feel foreign.

We do have a long tradition of trying to make sure we are never foreign anywhere in the world. Both by making over there feel like over here – hotels on every continent have learned that they need to provide chips & sausages and none of that foreign muck – and by taking to heart and making our own that which was indisputably foreign but which we could not do without – anyone fancy a curry? We’ve even had a very middle-class counter-culture, of going abroad as authentic travellers, living like natives, sneering at the Spanish chips ‘n’ lager resorts, eating the foreign muck… and the English autoxenophobe rightly regards them all as a bunch of tossers.

Like all phobias, autoxenophobia is silly and irrational, and we can joke about the English lady who believes that being foreign can only apply to others, but it becomes serious when we’re triggered by a neighbourhood where English isn’t the first language, or by a Polish bakery, or a group of orthodox Jews, and that fear, silly and irrational as it may be, expresses itself as anger and violence.

Not that only the “English” get angry, of course. Braverman complains about, clashes on our streets between Hindus and Muslims over conflicts thousands of miles away. And that’s bad, because that makes us feel foreign. When it was clashes on our streets between gangs of charming white gentlemen, stoked by conflicts between two football clubs, 20 miles apart, that was fine, because we understood that without having to watch the foreign section of the news. Not that it’s xenophobic or autoxenophobic to not want violent clashes on our streets, but the answer is a police force that arrests violent people, a court system that impartially sentences them for what they did, and a prison system that has the capacity to hold them, none of which Braverman’s party seemed to think worth funding properly.

Finally, I think I should admit that I am autoxenophobic. I’m a rubbish traveller, I live in probably the least diverse place in England, as a Geordie I’m technically not even fluent in English, my grasp of foreign languages extends exactly as far as, Oon van rooge, sieve ooplay, in the Chinese supermarket I secretly fear that I’m somehow doing it wrong. On the other hand, I don’t like cricket, or ale, and I don’t talk like my front teeth are welded together, so I don’t think I can even lay claim to the green & pleasant lands identity that Braverman is laying out.

On the other hand, I do think our country deserves more of a national identity than us all just being scared shitless of being foreign. If we must, as Braverman puts it, define what it is we are fighting for, then being slightly scared of kolacz doesn’t really seem sufficient to urge anyone into battle. No, instead I propose that we fight for Gogglebox. Yes, the TV programme. When I watch Gogglebox I see people who don’t look like me, who don’t talk like me, who don’t have the same experiences or political beliefs, and I see them laugh at what I laugh at, gawp at what shocks me, cry at what touches me, and take the piss out of most of it, and I feel kinship with them and remember that I live in a country that’s big enough, and strong enough, and self-assured enough to make space for differences, and that’s an identity worth fighting for,