This article theoretically discusses the national identity concept and its relation to the upholding of those distinctive elements that are associated with a country’s or a nation’s past. With a particular focus on the perceptions of British national identity in the 1990s, it presents some views of British academics, political pundits, politicians or journalists of those times regarding the state of the British society caught between the old and the new. The ‘Cool Britannia’ project proposed by the New Labour government aimed to resolve matters largely connected to a declining British society by putting forward a national rebranding plan, with the ultimate intention of modernizing a backward-looking British society at the turn of the century.
