England's cross of St George

Well it seems I’ve opened the floodgates because there’s so many things I want to talk about buzzing in my head but I think for now I’m going to stick to the topical discussion of what’s happened to our national pride in the run up to St George’s Day on April 23rd.

Firstly, has anything happened to our national pride? I keep reading things which say the English have lost their pride, that the Scots, Welsh and Irish have more pride than we do and it’s all the Government’s fault or it’s down to immigration and there been too many people who are going to get offended if they see the St George Cross and how we should reclaim England. Then I have to stop for a minute because I don’t ever remember us having a “national pride” in the same way that the Irish do for St Patrick’s Day or that the Welsh do for the dragon and the daffodil or even how the Scots were so concerned about their national identity that they started singing Flower of Scotland as their unofficial  national anthem even though they’ve been part of this “united kingdom” since the union of the crowns back in 1603 when James I and VI took the throne on the death of Queen Elizabeth I.

Okay, I know the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (to give it its proper name) didn’t actually come into being until the Act of Union in 1707, but that’s just the political side of things. The Welsh had originally fallen under the sway of their neighbours to the east in the 11th century when the Normans carried on their invasion into the Principality but things didn’t really come to a head until Edward I managed to knock seven bells out of the last true Prince of Wales, Llywelyn ap Gruffydd in 1277. Then, technically, the Scots took over England when James I came down from Edinburgh to take the Tudor crown for the Stuarts and brought his influence to all things English. There was discontent at his favouring of Scottish noblemen over their English counterparts but  that was down to envy, jealously and greed that all the land and power was being given away, I don’t think true English pride had much do to with it.

Things carried on a pace through the Jacobite Rebellions of 1715 and 1745, when we nearly ended up back as a Roman Catholic country, with the forceful unification of Ireland and then subsequent partial devolvement, the long  years of bitter fighting across the Irish Sea and the terror of The Troubles, before the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 thankfully restored peace to the majority of people both in Eire and across the border in Northern Ireland, plus the mainland of Britain.

Up to date

Which  brings us up to date and back to the point of this diatribe – an article in one of our national newspapers which claims that the English are the least patriotic of the four home nations. Well colour me surprised,  but  not really. I’ve asked this before, what, exactly makes one English? The country is so vastly different from one end of it to the other that there isn’t anything singularly English enough to draw us all together.

The beautiful county of Kent, England’s Garden, is so different in both outlook and actual geography from my native county of Yorkshire, home to miles of drystone walls, fields of sheep and isolated moorland and both are as different again from the flat plains of Lincolnshire and Norfolk or the rugged watery landscape of Cumbria. What do we have in common that makes us English other than political boundaries? I am far prouder of the fact I am a Yorkshire girl than I am that I am English and, when asked, always say I come from Yorkshire not I come from England.

I don’t feel “English” in probably the way a Welshman or woman feels Welsh, ditto for the Irish and the Scots. They have a common ancestral root which manifests itself in an oral tradition of songs and stories that have become popular through the music and culture of their Celtic languages, Welsh, Gallic and Gaelic, which have all seen periods of persecution and a drop in usage, but which are all currently undergoing great revivals. There is also a great tradition of English music and oral tradition but it’s little known of outside of the folk movement.

This has pretty much left the use of the St George Cross to the football supporters and the National Front (and its supposed political party the BNP), both groups which have less than savoury reputations and led, in turn, to the current clammer by the right wing press for a reclaiming of English pride and the St George’s Cross. In their usual cavalier with the full story fashion, the paper in question is quoting a poll without actually giving any details of who carried it out, how many people were sampled or when it was carried out and where. Their headline would also have you believe there was a massive disparity between the most patriotic nation (the Dutch by the way, coming in at 7.18 out of 10 on a scale of how patriotic they felt) and the English when in fact our score was- 5.80 out of 10, a whole 1.38 points behind the Netherlands. There’s just one major failing with the survey. They’ve only published the results of nine countries and yet there are 50 states in Europe and a total of 27 in the EU.

And, as a final note, St George is widely believed to have been a Roman soldier and priest in the guard of Diocletian. Quick, where’s Il Tricolore?