This coming Thursday is St.George's Day. In London, there will be various events on the day, kicking off with an appearance by the Mayor, Boris Johnson, at Leadenhall Market in the City. However the main event will be this Saturday (25th April): a festival of music in Trafalgar Square.
Johnson wrote yesterday about the huge public response to the celebrations when they were first announced. Certainly the rise of an English consciousness is one of the significant cultural/political stories of the past decade. What is astonishing is that it has been an almost totally grassroots phenomenon, with no official sanction whatsoever (until perhaps now). It has not been encouraged - indeed, has been actively discouraged.
There is a marked rise in people who, without a second thought, would once have called themselves British now referring to themselves as English. This is mirrored in the increasing use of the St. George flag. If one looks at footage of the 1966 World Cup final, the Union flag dominates as a matter of course. By the time of the last world cup, this had been replaced by a sea of red crosses.
Resentment at the aggressiveness of Scottish nationalism might be a factor, as indeed might be the various encroachments of the EU and indeed the cult of globalisation.
But it's likely that the main inspiration for the upsurge has been the disastrous doctrine of multiculturalism, which needed a common enemy if it was to work. 'The English' became shorthand for the majority (which, in factual terms alone, they are.) On an unconscious level, millions realised this.
The cultural establishment has happily reinforced the doctrine. Over the past decade, amongst commentators, academics and creatives, deconstructing 'Englishness' became the order of the day, in a way which would not be tolerated by the Scots, say, or the Welsh, who have instead been encouraged at every turn to re-affirm their sense of identity.
So Eddie Izzard can produce a TV series called 'Mongrel Nation' which is dedicated to showing Englishness as nothing more than a series of random influences, and this passes unquestioned into the new orthodoxy (if he had made a similarly titled programme about Scotland, he would almost certainly never work there again). AA Gill can write a book about the English (Angry Nation) which, if applied to any other group, would have seen him facing charges of racism.
This negative onslaught is the background to the new-found celebration of England. Of course, there are certain sections of even the more conservative establishment who rather recoil at the sight of flags on cars and hanging from front windows. It's not the sort of thing we do, they say. They look back instead to a time of undemonstrative, understated patriotism, characterised by the more melancholy passages of Elgar, or that sense of wistfulness and nostaglia inspired by the English landscape.
This is indeed an attractive vision which it is still possible to respond to. But it no longer cuts it in the modern world. It was in any case based on an inherent assumption of superiority. We don't need to shout about who we are, it seemed to be saying. We simply ARE. For better or worse, those days are long gone; the country's own cultural and political establishment have seen to that.
The new celebration of England and Englishness will be more visible simply because, in the minds of millions, it needs to be. Those flying the flags are not bone-headed racists or throwbacks; they might shout about it now because that is what other groups do, and have been encouraged to do. It is, they've concluded, the only way of being heard.
Tom Waterhouse (not verified) | Mon, 2009-04-20 10:09
A very perceptive and well-argued piece. Very well done indeed.
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