What Have You Done Today?

(To Make a Fake Patriot Feel Proud)

Something like spring has arrived, breeding patriots as well as lilacs out of the dead land. Last week, ‘proud Englishmen’ were out in force on St George’s Day, telling us how much they love their country, whilst also questioning whether some people love it as much they do.

There was Rishi Sunak, fresh from his vicious speech promising to end ‘sicknote culture’, sitting in shirtsleeves at his desk with a St George’s mug and his usual sphinx-without-a-riddle smirk. But never mind, you skivers, Happy St George’s Day.

On the same day, Kier Starmer could be found writing in the Daily Telegraph that ‘Labour is now the true party of English patriotism’, and exhorting Labour candidates in the May elections to ‘fly the flag’ and mark St George’s Day ‘with enthusiasm’.

These claims enraged the sword-carrying High Priestess of Albion, Penny Mordaunt, who told parliament that even though Labour ‘drape themselves in our flag’, the party was ‘packed with the same old socialists and a few new plastic patriots.’ Inevitably, the brutish opportunist Lee Anderson posted a video of himself pointing at his St George cufflinks, accompanied by a sarcastic ‘Trigger Warning’:

If you are a Guardian reading, advacado [sic] eating, Palestinian flag waving, Eddie Izzard supporting Vegan then this clip is probably not for your consumption. Happy St George's Day!

There wasn’t much happiness in this sour tweet, or in Anderson’s chest-thumping insistence that England has been a ‘gift to the world’ because it gave us ‘the Industrial Revolution. Culture, arts, music, sports’, and - of course! - ‘William Shakespeare.’

I find it difficult to imagine Anderson dropping in at the Tate or heading off to see Hamlet, or taking any interest in ‘culture, art, music’ except as fodder for pub-bore nationalist rabble-rousing, and he wasn’t the only one. In Whitehall and Trafalgar Square, crowds that included ‘far right groups and groups linked to football clubs’, as the Met put it, gathered to celebrate St George’s Day by drinking, brawling with police, and listening to speeches by the likes of Tommy Robinson and Lawrence Fox.

Afterwards, men and women waved flags and cans of lager, and cavorted amongst the lions in Trafalgar Square in a Hogarthian display of pageantry. Many of them included the ‘Big Englanders’, who JB Priestley once called ‘red-faced, staring, loud-voiced fellows, wanting to go and boss everybody about all over the world.’ Men in crusader outfits looking like extras from Monty Python condemned the ‘statue pullers’ who disrespected ‘our’ history and ‘our’ culture. MEGA (Make England Great Again) nostalgists listened to Richard Inman, the anti-Muslim founder of ‘Veterans Against Terrorism’, recalling when an ‘African prince’ asked Queen Victoria ‘What made England great?’, to which she supposedly answered by placing her hand on the Bible and told the prince, ‘This book made our nation great!’

Oh those good old days, when African princes could ask an English queen those questions, and get that answer. Now it’s all gone woke and Muslamic. ‘What has England ever done for the rest of the world?’ roared Inman, re-channelling the Life of Brian’s ’Romans’ speech? The answer:

We gave them democracy. We gave them law and order. We gave them peace. We fought against tyranny. We defeated Napoleon. We defeated the Kaiser. We defeated Adolf Hitler. We defeated the communists…We defeated the IRA

As Brecht might have said, didn’t we have one cook to help us do all that? But then you think of the ingratitude. To think that we did all these things only for an ungrateful world to treat us as if we were just anybody. Asked what it meant to be English, one woman memorably replied:

To be English is about walking through the street and being able to breathe, I think, to breathe. And when it is a sunny day, to be able to lie down, in our green pastures, as people would say.

That is a pretty low benchmark of Englishness. Elsewhere, a man with a Britain First badge said that St George had given us our ‘values’, and a woman complained to Times Radio that ‘We’re a coffee nation, not a tea nation anymore.’ A self-proclaimed ‘proud Englishman’ said that he ‘had enough of this country being taken away from us, from government more than anything, the elites, the globalists.’ Go figure.

And a haunted couple who looked as though they might have corpses buried under the patio declared: ‘We’ve come for our grandchildren because we don’t want them to grow up having to hide in a room, talking about how things used to be in this country. We want them to be as they were in our country.’

The interviewer didn’t ask which children were hiding in which room, because really, what’s the point?

It’s easy to mock this combination of victimhood, bluster, paranoia and stupidity. But we are all living in the country that people like this helped to create in 2016, many of whom remain pinned to the wheel of perpetual grievance and wounded national pride that pushed us into the Brexit fiasco.

I have never been able to comprehend this ‘proud Englishman/King and country’ patriotism - let alone the indignation that so often goes with it nowadays. There aspects of Englishness and the English that I can appreciate and even take pride in. The kindness of the nurses at Chesterfield Hospital; the English language; the anti-slavery campaign of Thomas Clarkson and his companions; The Detectorists - a warm and gentle take on weak masculinity and English eccentricity which manages to weave deadpan comedy and the Essex landscape into something surprisingly romantic and touching.

Portishead, Joy Division, John Cornford, Doctor Feelgood, Wilfred Owen, Waterloo Sunset, and the Bonzo Dog Doo Da Band are all expressions of Englishness, and I can say the same about EP Thompson, Zaiba Malik, Middlemarch, Rosie Holt, Steve McQueen and Linton Kwesi Johnson. I’m glad that William Blake could talk to angels in Lambeth and I would also like to see Jerusalem - the city of justice - in England’s green and pleasant land.

I also feel a certain national pride regarding that brief moment in 1940 when England was (with the help of the Empire - a contribution rarely acknowledged) the last democratic bastion against fascism, and SOE sent out its agents to work with the European anti-fascist resistance. I have a long list of English memories and associations : Dan Dare and the Mekon; Biggles and Commando comic; the Cambridge Folk Festivals which I used to go to as a teenager; the landscape of the Peak District where I live; Vaughn Williams; Snape Maltings; listening to sea shanties while eating fish and chips at Robin Hood Bay; Tess of the d’Urbervilles; Adrian Scott’s Sheffield poems; Steve Waters’ brilliant plays about East Anglia.

There’s a lot more where that came from. But none of this makes me think of England as ‘my’ country in any proprietary sense. It’s just the place where I was born and happen to have lived some years of my life. I don’t owe it my undying gratitude or loyalty. I’m not ashamed of being English, but I can’t even begin to think of myself as a ‘proud Englishman.’ I don’t find my ‘identity’ in this first person plural evoked by so many would-be culture warriors. I don’t think ‘our’ history is being erased if some slaveowner’s statue comes down - I see a bastard no longer receiving the honour he never deserved, in an era where the crimes of the past are no longer as easily concealed as they once were.

And as for those patriots who complain about ‘our culture’ being disrespected or under threat, don’t get me started. Culture is not fixed in time and place. Countries change and evolve, even if they don’t want to. Being English in the 21st century is not the same as it was when Alfred burnt the cakes, and it would be pretty alarming if it was.

So I have no desire to take ‘our country back’ (to where?) - except from the pseudo-patriots like Farage who have weaponised the most primitive nationalism and reactionary nostalgia and turned England into a grotesque parody of its worst features. I feel as estranged from this kind of patriot as they claim to be from the ‘statue pullers’, the ‘woke National Trust’, and all the other manufactured grievances that feed their endless victimhood.

How can I be proud of a country that supinely embraced the social cruelty of Thatcherism and austerity; that rode shotgun in the Iraq War; that is currently complicit in the Gaza genocide; that doesn’t even have the courage or the honesty to recognise or amend the mistake it made in 2016; that is now preparing to fly refugees off to Rwanda in defiance of humanity and logic, simply in order to scrape up some xenophobic racist votes; that made a depraved charlatan like Boris Johnson its prime minister?

Yes, I accept that Englishness is one layer of my ‘identity’, but there are other layers, as there are in all of us. And there other countries that I love, admire and care about, and whatever I was put on this earth for, it was not to love my country unconditionally and rally round its flag, simply because of an accident of birth.

Of course, this country is more familiar to me than any other, because I’ve lived longer here than anywhere else. But familiarity also makes me more painfully aware of the things that I can’t stand about it: its militarism; its arrogant, cruel, and clueless upper classes; its snobbery and inverted snobbery; its wretched deference; its unwillingness to challenge institutions that have long since passed their sell-by date and its unwillingness to stand up for institutions that deserve to be supported; its toleration of the harm inflicted on vulnerable people by successive Tory governments; its vile, toxic and mendacious rightwing press.

Each of us will have their own lists of pros and contras, just as the people of every other country will have theirs. To despise some things about this country doesn’t mean that I find it despicable. If English/British history isn’t the ludicrous fairy story told by the likes of Anderson and Inman, it isn’t a tale of unmitigated evil either. It has many traditions to draw on, and many ways of being English beyond the flags and crusader regalia, and displays of performative patriotism from people who claim to love their country as an abstraction, yet often seem remarkably indifferent to the people who live in it, in terms of their political choices.

I recognise that the current manifestation of these tendencies is the product of a particular historical moment: the upsurge in global ethnonationalism coupled with the still-weeping wound of Brexit that no politician dares even recognize, and the absence of any serious - or honest - national debate about how we got there and how we might get to a better place. In these circumstances, the ‘new’ patriotism is a renewed attempt to answer older questions which followed the end of Empire and the loss of what was once perceived as a world-historical ‘destiny’. At the end of his Beagle journal, Charles Darwin wrote of the future transformation of Australia into a ‘grand centre of civilisation’:

It is impossible for an Englishman to behold these distant colonies without a high pride and satisfaction. To hoist the British flag … seems to draw with it as a certain consequence, wealth, prosperity, and civilisation.

Darwin genuinely believed that the British flag was a force for good, and there are people who still believe that and cannot abandon the special place that goes with it, even if his juxtaposition of ‘Englishman’ with ‘British’ suggests a contradiction that we are still living with. Today, Britishness is no longer associated with greatness; its components are drifting away from each other. Faced with these ‘underdog’ Celtic nationalisms, the Englishness that was once subsumed into Britishness has reared its head once again, as a question to be answered and a problem to be solved.

Is it possible to construct an English identity that is not reactionary and backward-looking? Can ‘Englishness’ provide a unifying sense of belonging and identity that can heal a fractious society which has inflicted so many pointless wounds on itself? Will embracing some form of ‘inclusive’ Englishness - with the flag as its symbol - produce the active solidarity required to rebuild so much that has been broken and unite the population behind a common political project?

Much as I respect Gareth Southgate’s valiant attempts to shift the meaning of the St George flag, I don’t see it. Football is one thing: it’s another matter to persuade an entire nation to think differently - and honestly - about itself and its place in the world. That needs more than flags and pride, and maybe less of both. In his Telegraph article, Starmer wrote:

I have no time for those who flinch at displaying our flag. Because the cross of St George belongs to every person who loves this country and seeks to make it better – a symbol of pride, belonging and inclusion. We cannot allow it to become the preserve of the tiny minority who want to drive hatred in our communities.

Starmer also tried to reclaim patriotism from the Tories on the grounds that:

frankly, when you’ve trashed the economy, hammered mortgage holders, weakened the union, neglected our forces, repeatedly broken laws you expected others to follow and denigrated some of our proudest national institutions, from the BBC to the National Trust to the England football team, I’m afraid you have lost any right to call yourself a patriotic party.

This is smart politics. But as someone who tends to flinch when seeing the flag, these words do not make me want to wrap one around myself. And I doubt whether a smart tactical electoral ploy can answer the questions that Starmer thinks it does, nor whether a ‘progressive’ patriotism can be extracted from symbols that are at best conservative with a small c, and at worst insular, reactionary and xenophobic.

And I also wonder whether this ideological tug-of-war between Labour and the Conservatives over the meaning of the St George flag is actually worth the rhetoric that goes into it. In 2012, millions of people were moved and thrilled by Danny Boyle’s attempt to construct an ‘inclusive’ British story at the London Olympic Games. Yet four years later, the country succumbed to a nationalist fit of pique in pursuit of a pipedream of sovereignty which has yet to provide any positive outcomes.

I’m not sure how we get out of this without facing up to the mess that has been made, and beginning to address the ruinous disintegration of English/British society that was already evident before Brexit. I don’t see the cross of St George bringing these outcomes any closer. In English Journey, JB Priestley embraced the concept of ‘Little Englander’ and called for a new social solidarity with the industrial cities of the North based on the ‘inner glowing tradition of the English spirit.’

Talk of inner glowing spirits is a little too mystical for my liking, but I do appreciate Priestley’s attempt to re-imagine a different kind of patriotism based not on flags and pageants, but on active solidarity and the quotidian ways in which the English might actually treat the least-favoured members of their society, and those who come to us for help:

Let us be too proud…to refuse shelter to exiled foreigners, too proud to do dirty little tricks because other people can stoop to them, too proud to lose an inch of our freedom, too proud, even if it beggars us, to tolerate social injustice here, too proud to suffer anywhere in this country an ugly mean way of living.

Now that is a kind of patriotism I can get behind, but right now I see a country that is more like the dragon than St George - if dragons only breathed hot air. And people keep saying that we’re better than this, but the last few years have made it clear that we really aren’t, and call me a citizen of nowhere (aren’t we all?), but it will take more than a flag to change that.