The debate over British identity has taken center stage as a public concern in recent years. The foundation of British identity was based on the 1801 Act of Union between England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland that created Great Britain. Heath and Roberts describe this identity as “a relatively recent construct and has gradually overlapped with earlier national identities of English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish” (2008: 4). The four nations were unified primarily due to the political and economic project of the British Empire which developed a shared agenda and the Second World War which dissolved the distinctive differences between the constituent nations (Ward, 2004). According to Colley, the interests that united nations do not exist and even if they do exist "they are less distinctive" (1992). Although there is identification with Britishness, it is evident that the British have a greater loyalty to their parent nation. British identity is diminishing, as suggested by many authors, and this is due to many different trends and influences such as globalization, immigration and communication (Heath and Roberts, 2008). This essay highlights some of the reasons for the decline of British national identity and the rise of consensus nation sentiment. This will be addressed by considering firstly the internal factors of the devolution of power to Scotland and Wales, and secondly the external factor of immigration and the relationship between age and identification with a nation will be analysed. In their book, Smith and Wistrich argue that Britain sensed an identity problem once the devolution of power to Scotland and Wales occurred in 1998 (2009). Perhaps it is true that Scots and Welsh people feel more attached to their own na...... middle of paper ....... According to Pippa Norris, an individual's degree of nationalism is built at a young age and is based on “international context of the time” (stone and Muir, 2007:5), for example, citizens born in the 1940s during the Second World War will have a stronger sense of Britishness than those born in the time of globalization and conflicts over 'EU. Younger generations identify less with Britain than their parents or grandparents. The Home Office Citizenship Survey considers age to be the most powerful factor in “being British” and the survey shows that people over 75 feel the strongest identification with Britain (Heath and Roberts, 2008) . If the same trend of weak national loyalty among younger generations persists in the coming years, British national identity will certainly be weakened (Stone and Muir, 2007).