Broadcasts live every Wednesday at 7:00p.m. uk time on Radio Soapbox: http://radiosoapbox.comIn this roundtable edition of the show, I stepped in for Shelley and opened up a lively discussion around a deceptively simple question: do you love your country? What began as a reflection on a chance encounter while fundraising quickly developed into a much broader conversation about what we even mean by ‘country’ — whether it is birthplace, ancestry, culture, county, shared history, shared values, or some combination of all of them. With Paul, Alex and a caller joining in, we explored how identity can be rooted in land, kinship, language, belonging and lived experience, while also recognising how difficult it can be to define those ideas cleanly in modern Britain.The discussion ranged across Englishness, Britishness, Cornwall, immigration, assimilation, trust in society, pride, embarrassment, and the difference between loving a place and approving of its current direction. We also touched on historical memory, slavery, reparations, empire, and whether national belonging is best understood through race, culture or values. A Rudyard Kipling poem helped crystallise one of the evening’s central tensions: the pull between familiarity and difference, and between emotional loyalty and rational principle. By the end, there was no single agreed definition of ‘country’, but there was a clear sense that the question still matters deeply — especially when people are trying to work out what is worth preserving, what has been lost, and what it really means to belong.