This isn’t as stupid as it sounds. Anything can become an element of national identity. It can be ancient or invented 5 minutes ago. It doesn’t even have to be connected to people who were aware of your nation-state because it was created long after they died.
The problem isn’t that the BBC and the NHS are recent or that they are institutions instead of, say, natural phenomena. The American nation-state by necessity relies on achievements that are enormously more recent than those of European countries, yet it’s the first, and still the strongest, nation-state in existence. Newness is not in conflict with national identity.
The problem is that the narrative of the British national identity that ties it to the NHS and the BBC was embraced along class lines by people who despise their class inferiors. You can’t have a separate national identity for the fancy people. Trying to position your class identity (which is what “Britain is the NHS is”) as national identity only annoys the people to whom you are signaling that you are their class superior.
Clarissa's Blog 
Personally I think the answer is much simpler, the BBC is basically a propaganda tool, and one that is not covert at all. In Britain if you have a TV, you are required to have a TV license, the money from which goes specifically to pay for the BBC.
The BBC only shows left wing news, anti white news, and modifies history. (Several recent programs pushed out were trying to convince people that the English have always had blacks in their country and in large numbers.) I specifically state this last one, because they as in the BBC specifically stated that their slop was historically accurate and anyone who disagreed was wrong.
The BBC may exist in England, but frankly it has not represented England in my opinion for decades. So the comment the whole post was about is ludicrous. It would be like saying Patriotic Americans aren’t American because we despise the CIA which was created by America. The whole thought is stupid.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yes, Canada’s CBC has the same corrupt behavior, turning a once necessary and respected institution into very costly, politely correct, left wing propaganda.
LikeLike
I thought poorer people need National Health Service much more than the richer ones, so they should naturally support higher taxes, which are paid most by relatively well-to-do, to pay for state-provided services.
LikeLike
“poorer people need National Health Service much more than the richer ones”
AFAICT (being deliberately provocative here) the decision was made to stop education native Brits in medicine and rely on immigration… I remember stories about newly graduated medical students who couldn’t find a placement while the national government was importing in foreign doctors (often of dubious qualification) and letting them have at the local population….
LikeLike
It’s a middle class thing, but it’s a myth.
Of course, working class people did benefit enormously – with huge provisos, though, but I can’t go into significant detail here as it would take too much time – but the idolisation of the National Health System, which was indeed a thing among the working class when it first became available to them in the aftermath of the Second World War, has long vanished.
It was taken up by self-righteous, virtue-signalling middle-class Brits who are still reeling from Brexit and who have nothing but contempt for the “proles”, who they see as churlish, loutish oafs who cannot distinguish a Chardonnay from a Sancerre and who, in their own parlance, “do not know what’s good for them”.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yes, it’s very clearly a class thing. That’s not even the extraordinary thing, though. It’s the utter obliviousness of upper-middle-class Brits to how terrible their “but the curry is good” and “muh NHS” sound to everybody else.
LikeLike
That’s exactly why the wealthy elevated the NHS to the pinnacle of the national identity. They don’t use it. It’s got huge symbolic value to them but no practical value.
LikeLike
It’s very similar to the Statue of Liberty. People who are completely insulated from the negative effects of mass migration turned it into a core of US national identity. Even though it’s destroying the nation.
LikeLike
“The problem is that the narrative of the British national identity “
The problem is that the institutions named turned their backs first on the idea of a British nation in favor of deracinated and rootless international ‘tolerance’.
AFAICT the hard turn away from the British public started bubbling in the late 80s and through the 90s but really erupted after 2000 or so… (I’m probably off by a few years).
The Labour idea that it could and should “rub the right’s nose in diversity”…but that was a manifestation of trends that had been going on for a long time….
LikeLiked by 1 person
You couldn’t have put it better than that.
Anglo-Italian Jew here: grew up in England, left at age 26 to take up a post at an Italian university. I am thankful I am no longer in Britain or I don’t know if I would still be alive today. What they’ve done to the country is beyond words: they’ve destroyed not just a culture, but a whole civilisation.
LikeLiked by 2 people