Cry sod Harry, England and St George

In the recent European Social Survey, respondents were asked how emotionally attached they were to their country, from a score of 1 (not at all) to 10 (very emotionally attached). Whilst all countries reported majorities of citizens with affection for their country, Britain stood out starkly as the country in which the highest number of respondents reported indifference to their nation, with a median score at the dead bottom of the European countries polled. The numbers are echoed elsewhere. According to worldwide Pew polling, Britain leads the world in those who are not proud of their country, with an astonishing 29 per cent of Britons not proud of the United Kingdom. 

This lack of comfort or affection with our national identity amongst a significant portion of people is always at its most evident on St George’s Day, when a cavalcade of commentators take perverse pride in naming the national saint a Palestinian or a Turk, before proceeding to deconstruct every element of popular English identity, from the Anglo-Saxons to fish and chips.

This impression of elite disinterest and disapproval was not much helped when the mayor of London Sadiq Khan got the date wrong, and wished everyone a happy St George’s on Tuesday, proclaiming that “diversity is our greatest strength” and calling the English flag the “St George’s day flag”. 

Negativity about England and British nationhood in general reflect a longstanding elite allergy to patriotism in any form

Today, the St George’s cross will be flying across England, but it remains the most attacked and demonised symbol in the national imagination. This has only intensified following controversies over nationalist groups tying flags to telegraph poles, presented by supporters as a patriotic gesture, and by opponents as a divisive and intimidatory gesture directed against ethnic minorities. 

Yet controversy over the English flag and over positive expressions of national identity existed long before the flag raising fights of recent years. Negativity about England and British nationhood in general reflect a longstanding elite allergy to patriotism in any form. National identity is satirised, its symbols ironised, and the national character is presented as harmless, ridiculous and apologetic. When engagement with nationhood and history do get serious, it is only in moralistic self-flagellation over alleged sins of empire and jingoism, now subjects for repentance, and never celebration. The only thing that can be safely celebrated without irony is of course “diversity” and social “progress” — that is to say any force or movement that takes us further away from the habits, traditions and morals of our forbears. 

If a number of people, typically university educated members of the political left, have turned against patriotic sentiment, this is very much a late modern phenomenon. 

Going medieval

St George emerges as part of the chivalric reimagining of the English state by Edward III, with his flag associated both with crusading, and the newly founded Order of the Garter. King Edward III even had an Arthurian round table constructed, gathering knights to carry on the legacy of the legendary king. This enchanted Englishness of chivalry, moral striving, and picaresque adventure would continue as an idea well past the age of knights and the coming of the Reformation. Shakespeare would immortalise the role of St George and a nationalistic story of chivalric heroism through plays like Henry V — “Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’” — and it would be a potent symbolic trope in such works as Spencer’s Protestant chivalric allegory of the Redcrosse Knight in The Faerie Queen.

Whilst modern prejudices treat this legacy as whimsical or unworldly, a revival of interest in national identity, folk culture and the medieval past was part of a European-wide movement towards democracy and radical political reform. The Romantic movement in the 18th and 19th centuries resisted elite prejudices in favour of classicism and against the “gothic” medieval past. Individual self expression, ancient liberties, and class consciousness were all discovered and spurred by an engagement with medieval ideas and symbolism. 

In Britain, this flowered into the Arts and Crafts movement, the Gothic Revival, the Oxford Movement, and a wave of social reformism aimed at relieving poverty and regenerating cities and urban life. A century ago, the emergent Labour party and movement were steeped in Edwardian imagery of St George, medieval heroism and English folk culture. By referring to the social evils of “Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor, and Idleness” as five “giants” that must be valiantly slain the Beveridge Report was echoing a national folklore going back to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s legendary national history, in which Britain was originally a wasteland ruled over by terrible giants. 

In this context, St George, and the “medievalism” of English identity, is a symbol of both tradition, but also of social progress. When shipyard workers from Jarrow marched to London with a petition, they called themselves crusaders. Before departing, 1200 marchers gathered to be blessed by the Bishop of Jarrow. It was a scene — of working men marching with religious blessing to take a petition to the King’s ministers — that could easily be transposed to 500 years earlier. 

Lions led by donkeys

English identity was once a comfortable and natural fit for political radicals, not only in spite of, but precisely because of its chivalric and crusading baggage, with its moralism and militancy. Cynicism about that identity is much linked to the demonisation of “jingoism” and the horrors of World War One. St George was put to propagandistic use in the fields of Flanders by poets like Henry Newbolt: 

 Let be! they bind a broken line:

   As men die, so die they.

Land of the free! their life was thine,

   It is St. George’s Day.

Yet if the Great War was a national trauma, it is one whose dispiriting effects were curiously resurrected many decades after the event. The narrative of national betrayal and of “lions led by donkeys” only set in during the 1960s, popularised by historians like Alan Clark in his 1961 book The Donkeys, and by later satirical works like Oh, What a Lovely War (1963) and Blackadder Goes Forth (1989). Although later more balanced historiography has largely dismissed this picture of callously incompetent leadership as overly simplistic, it has become the dominant popular view of the war, an impression largely reinforced by schools, where the “war poets” are a central part of the curriculum. The legacy lives on, and it’s no coincidence that a prominent contemporary anti-nationalistic and anti-right wing activist group should be named “Led by Donkeys”. 

This growing cynicism about British patriotism in the 60s and 70s coincided both with the massive social changes that accompanied the sexual revolution, and Britain’s changing, and much diminished, role in world affairs. If St George was the symbol of an heroic civilising mission, whether in the Empire or the slums of decaying Victorian cities, that mission was now under the severest sort of questioning. 

Yet this cynical approach to English and British identity was very far from a universal norm for a rich and burgeoning popular culture. Pop music and folk music were often enmeshed, and both drew from a deep well of popular tradition and musicmaking quite independent of the great institutions of state. Interest in the English landscape, history and prehistory exploded in this period. Singers like Kate Bush and bands like Led Zeppelin were immersed in English and Celtic folklore, Arthurian legend and English literature, and English nationhood was very far from being seen as coterminous with elite power. 

Even apparent rebellions against and subversions of traditional Englishness could be very English indeed. The Sex Pistol’s “God Save the Queen” may be seen to epitomise a revolt against Englishness — “There is no future/In England’s dreaming” — but it was a work of working class anger far more than it was a sneer of bourgeois cynicism against nationhood. Singer Johnny Rotten himself said of it, “You don’t write ‘God Save The Queen’ because you hate the English race, you write a song like that because you love them; and you’re fed up with them being mistreated”. It’s perhaps no surprise that the punk icon would later turn his fire on the modern progressive establishment, no doubt causing his right-on fans no end of grief by supporting Brexit and Donald Trump. 

The decline of nationhood

Yet if English national identity has historically been a comfortable tool in the hands of working class movements and radical figures, something in the past three decades has fundamentally changed. Part of that story is the untethering of the working classes from progressive politics in the wake of deindustrialisation and neoliberalism. Left wing parties shifted from a politics rooted in place and class solidarity to when mired in identity politics, rights culture, and the professional classes. The median left wing voter is now female, university educated, and working in the public sector. The onetime stalwart of Labour politics — the non university educated man working a trade — is now firmly on the right. 

Another serious factor is migration and the rise of “multiculturalism”. Whilst there is no inevitable relationship between immigration and hostility to patriotism — America is a clear example of how migrants can be swiftly recruited into a strong national identity — there is such a relationship in Britain. A large part of that is how migration has acted not only as an agent of economic globalisation, but as a kind of intellectual colonisation for a cosmopolitan, vaguely post-modernist relativism about culture, allied to a burgeoning post-colonial ideology. 

In the context of Britain’s loss of empire, one answer is to invert it: Britain must atone for its colonialist sins by dissolving its blandly monocultural identity in the rainbow melting pot. At the same time, even absent migration, the existence of divergent cultures, religions and worldviews can be used to subvert and question inherited culture in the arts and the academy. In wider society, the growing centrality of therapeutic culture, relativism and individualism act together with increased diversity of every kind to cut people off from a positive relationship with national identity. 

Whilst intellectually many commentators can see that it would make tactical good sense for the liberal elite to make positive use of national symbols for their own projects, in practice they find it increasingly difficult or impossible to do so. Labour advisor and Starmer biographer Tom Baldwin made one such plea, but from the outset demonstrated why such an approach has ceased to be tenable. Why start a call for a new kind of patriotism with some unpleasant sneering about “a long-dead Roman soldier whose connection to England has as much basis in fact as the dragon he was said to have slain”? 

For one thing, less and less of the symbolism and culture around such totems as the St George’s Flag is available for progressives to use. As left wing politics becomes ever less solidaristic and sees inherited culture as a distorting imposition on individual self-expression, it becomes difficult if not entirely impossible to fly the red cross with the same enthusiasm as the rainbow flag. In this context 90s-00s movements like Cool Britannia and Britpop can be seen as a crucial inflection point. 

Whilst this cultural moment saw the continuity of an authentic popular positivity about Britain and Britishness, it swiftly and increasingly became an ironising and satirical project amongst elites. A new establishment did its level best to appropriate national symbols to progressive ends, a tendency that runs from Blair’s patriotic messaging in the 90s, to Danny Boyle’s London Olympics opening ceremony in 2012. It simply didn’t take. Ethnic minority groups tended to respond transactionally, progressive voters continued to view national symbols negatively, whilst more conservative groups resented it. Just about everyone came to perceive it as a cynical gambit, rather than a wholehearted embrace of patriotic sentiment. 

Dreams of “civic nationalism” and “progressive patriotism” were firmly killed off by Brexit, which neatly sorted the cosmopolitan sheep from the nationalistic goats. Yet enthusiasm for Europe amongst progressive elites was only ever a shallow proxy for a globalist disinterest in national identity. Indeed, the same European Social Survey that put Britain last for emotional attachment to nationhood, also scored it towards the bottom in terms of affection for Europe. Ironically, the table was headed up by such nationalistic countries as Poland and Hungary, for whom Europeaness is an important civilisational component of national identity. 

This has left British and English identity in limbo. Englishness particularly is branded as “ethnonationalist”, which has proven a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the flag is eagerly and proudly deployed by far right groups. 

Even if such groups remain a minority, the British and English flags have become unambiguously right wing symbols. The Conservative and Reform parties vie with one another to assert their full throated nationalism, and to land the heaviest of culture war blows against the bloviating Labour government. 

Whatever one thinks of the Tories or Reform, this severely undermines the unifying role of English and British nationhood, and channels the broad river of national culture into the narrowest of political channels. 

Apart from stoking political division, this has badly undermined social solidarity and our capacity for collective action. Any number of political problems requiring sacrifice and compromise have been rendered intractable because we lack a governing narrative to mobilise society to solve them. 

Society is built not on agreements or constitutions, but rather is founded upon shared loves

The blocking force is not society at large, but a culture of mocking, deconstructing and satirising anything perceived as strange, other, overserious and overearnest. We have become the kind of society that Thedore Rooservelt warned of, characterised by “A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticise work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life’s realities”. 

Society is built not on agreements or constitutions, but rather is founded upon shared loves. Do we believe that the men and women who govern our society are in love with the English countryside, with the English language, with all the wonderful and terrible history of the English people? In an age of calculating managerialists, frozen into inactivity by media and mandarins, we are a country crying out for the old passions of a more vital time — of an England less tame and timid.