You will hear a lot of people playing Patriotism Top Trumps over the next couple of weeks.
Churchill-quoters who believe any English person who doesn’t raise a glass of cask bitter to St George on Sunday or fails to get a lump in their throat during the King’s Coronation, hates their country.
Well I, for one, won’t be celebrating St George’s Day – but if dancing around a maypole giving homage to the patron saint of Bulgaria, Portugal and syphilis is your thing, then go for it.
Neither will I be watching King Charles glide away from Westminster Abbey in his gold carriage next month because I have zero interest in a stranger who has amassed a personal wealth of £1.82 billion on the back of spending nine months in the ex-Queen’s uterus 74 years ago.
That doesn’t mean I hate this country. But I do hate what seems to have become the accepted definition of loving this country (let’s call it putting a Union Jack in your Twitter bio) and the people who seem increasingly hellbent on foisting that definition on us – people who label those not buying into their patriotic vision as traitors. And woke ones at that.
It doesn’t make you unpatriotic to think the Royal Family is a medieval farce and all this pomp and circumstance, and elevation by birthright, at a time of soaring poverty and inequality, is an insult to our intelligence. Especially when we’re coughing up £100 million for the farce, with a few hand-picked members of the lower orders crammed into the cheap seats to make Charles look like a Man of The People.
It doesn’t make you unpatriotic to think sending asylum seekers to Rwanda is a degrading, unworkable gimmick devoid of any trace of decency that the British were once famed for.
Just as it doesn’t make you patriotic to stand up in the Commons, write in a right-wing paper or call up GB News to denounce anyone who laments the Brexit disaster as a Brit-loathing Remoaner.
Especially when many of the leading chest-beating patriots who spun the fictions that persuaded voters to leave the EU were gutter-level hypocrites. I’m talking about Jacob Rees-Mogg (who moved part of his investment firm to Ireland), John Redwood (advised investors to “look further afield” than the UK) and Nigel Lawson (applied for French residency).
Then there’s Nigel Farage who whipped up xenophobia to make himself rich and famous, and ratchets it up now to extend his career. Or Boris Johnson who humped the flag all the way to Downing Street.
This seedy generation of Tory MPs may well place Union Jacks and Thatcher figurines behind their heads as they do a BBC-bashing link to Talk TV, but we know the mugging of taxpayers by their party’s chumocracy that funnelled billions to their own during Covid was the antithesis of patriotism.
Playing to the gallery with a mythical sense of British exceptionalism does not prove how much you love the piece of land you were born on.
What does, is the urge to make it better for all the people who live on that land today. It’s about a desire to make the country more equal and open-minded, more at ease with itself and more decent.
Don’t let anyone tell you what patriotism is. If you love your country, then love it in your own way, for your own reasons.
I swear by St George that that’s fine.
