England’s cry is a plaintive sigh

Nike and Wayne Rooney's 2006 campaign consciously appropriated hooligan Englishness

ENGLISHMEN now in their sixties and seventies may recall a Scouting youth of at least two public parades a year, one on Remembrance Sunday and one on St George’s Day. By the time those men’s sons swore to do their duty to God and the Queen, only the Armistice was thus marked. Today, their grandsons again turn out for the nearest Sunday to April the 23rd, as well as the somewhat colder November outing. What is remarkable is not that the wheel has turned full circle, but that it ever turned at all. Since 1908, St George has been the patron saint of Scouting.

That, ostensibly at least, is the reason for the restoration of a St George’s Day Parade. It was not so before. Then, English Scouts marched for the Third Century dragon slayer’s patronage of their movement and of their country.  The reason that went away is complex, but it is likely that those post-war parades and its attendant sentiment were out of time even then. This was the late apogee of Britishness – how else could an ex-miner from Tredegar name the new universal healthcare the NHS without anyone questioning which nation he had in mind? As English fans celebrated football World Cup glory with union flags and a sea of red, white and blue, the subsumption of Englishness into Britishness seemed total.

But while the English fused their supranational and national identities, the Welsh and Scots merely stacked one discretely upon the other. These distinct Celtic identities gradually grew in relative proportion to a sense of Britishness. But rather than spark an English revival, it only shrivelled the expression of majority national identity yet further. Such was the imbalance that it appeared impolite – if not threatening – for the dominant partner of the British union to assert its distinctiveness. The more the Welsh and Scots made themselves different, the more the English were obliged to uphold British homogeneity. Englishness felt shameful, chauvinistic and atavistic, a far cry from the insouciant, respectable, self-assured assertion of Stanley Baldwin in his famous 1924 speech on the imperishable virtues of his nation. Such was the pariah status of Englishness that even John Major’s 1992 wheeze of substituting “Britain” for “England” in his invocation of his Tory predecessor was instantly exposed and condemned through mockery. We squirmed at the cod nostalgia of warm beer and long shadows on cricket grounds and derided the abuse of Orwell’s irony. But most of all we felt uncomfortable at any assertion, however benign and coded, of English national particularity.

Nevertheless, something else was afoot among the white English working classes. Just as their adoption of British colours at football underscored the end of Baldwin’s easy and superior Englishness, so their increasing use of the flag of St George signalled the start of a new self-conscious and aggrieved national identity. This looked enviously upon the craic of St Patrick’s Day, marvelled ungenerously at the scale of Burns Night, and asked accusingly why  the English could not have their day, too. As large metropolitan local authorities blundered into such PR disasters as abjuring the use of the word “Christmas” in favour of “Winterval”, and as Gay Pride marches were afforded seemingly generous public support it was easy for a tiny cohort to depict itself as the voice of a marginalised majority, forced to watch as all shades of ethnicity and identity but their own were commemorated. This, apparently, was the apex of political correctness gone mad. Add a new, New Labour Cabinet apparently dominated by Scots and the introduction of a Parliament to the north and an Assembly to the west and this grievance found a political as well as a cultural locus. The English National Party, officially dead for 20 years but functionally dead for far longer, was resurrected and transformed into the English Democrats. Perhaps tellingly, its Carmarthen was not a Barking or a Leicester, but the well-heeled East Sussex commuter town of Crowborough, where in 2005 it returned its first elected representative. In 2009′s European elections 2% of English votes – nearly 300,000 – came its way.

Most of the English middle class continued to despise and deride what they saw as either parochial or racist expressions of English nationalism, keeping the now mythical “skinhead” alive until the equally distasteful but less threatening “chav” was able to take his place. But some did not. Champions of Englishness among the intelligentsia emerged in the Simons Heffer and Jenkins. Some from the left added their voices too, contrivedly arguing not that the English deserved their voice but that they should not be allowed to feel excluded. And parts of the establishment moved in to try and detoxify the brand.  The English Tourist Board launched a St George’s week in 1998 with the avowed aim of making the marking of April 23rd respectable, The General Synod of the Church of England granted the day the status of a full festival for the first time since the Reformation. English Heritage decided that marking the life of a Turk who never set foot on English soil aligned with its conservation and archaeological remit. In 2008, Gordon Brown raised the flag of St George above Downing Street. Then, last year, the London Mayor delighted in cocking a snoot at sneering liberals by holding a festival of sorts. This, we were told, was a civic Englishness, detached from all that hooliganism and nastiness.

And yet the vast bulk of the English are neither repulsed by, nor attracted to, expressions of their national identity. They are merely indifferent. More than four in five respondents to a 2008 poll said they did not mark April 23rd in any way. Morris dancers remain resolutely naff. Euro ’96 killed Merry England. St George’s Day remains an event for brewers and quangos to promote, rather than for the masses to celebrate. And many who do think about it take perverse pride in this apathy. “Nothing makes me prouder to be English than the fact that most of my fellow countrymen neither know, much less care, about marking St George’s Day” says one. This may ironically be a sentiment more fitting of Shakespeare’s Henry V and his demand to “Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and St George’” than for those who bristle at the injustice of a Welsh Assembly but no English Parliament, or who tut at the staging of Diwali celebrations. Theirs is certainly a cry, but for most English it is a plaintive and un-English sigh.