The Big City

It is maybe an unfortunate thing in some ways, for reasons I’ll go into later, but the English are not a very demonstrative nation. We don’t go in for showing-off or boastfulness, we are inclined to understate out achievements and we sometimes take a gloomy satisfaction from failure. Our culture has developed an inclination to see things from other people’s point of view. Whether this is from being continually invaded and occupied in our early history or a result of our more recent history of invading and occupying other people’s countries I couldn’t say. Whatever the reason, the upshot is a distaste for showing-off and a tendency to look down on boastful flag-waving and fanatical nationalism. That’s why we have a patron saint who isn’t English, didn’t live in England and couldn’t speak English. If you read a history of Saint George you’ll see that he never even set foot in England. This doesn’t matter because we don’t really need a patron saint, almost anyone would do. We are calmly confident of our national identity with no need for metaphors and symbols.

So who are these people I keep seeing with English flags flying from their windows and from plastic sticks on their cars? They are clearly not English. In fact a closer examination of their flags and cars and even the England football shirts they sometimes wear will show that most of those items are actually made abroad, mostly in China. And maybe that’s the problem. These people don’t feel confident about their identity because they can’t work out where it lies. Everything they buy is made abroad because they can’t afford things made in England. They listen to American music, their newspapers are owned by a republican Australian and the food they eat is never produced locally. They are bombarded by any number of aggressive, flamboyant and glamorous cultures and their own culture is not one that inclines them to fight back. So they have abandoned Englishness in favour of a type of mildly ironic sub-American form of flag-waving.

That is the problem with Englishness. Its very tolerance demands a lot of us. It’s very hard to stand by in the face of all these vulgar, showing-off foreigners and smile inwardly, accepting their culture as perfectly valid while knowing one’s own to be rather better. Hollywood constantly tells us that knowing something is not enough; you must articulate it for it to be worthwhile. And we are stuck with a culture that is based on not articulating, on keeping a stiff upper lip. How can we express our patriotism without denying our culture? It’s a conundrum, that’s what it is.