"Ashamed to be British"

I’ve been mulling over for a while blogging about an oft used phrase “makes me ashamed to be British (or English)”. As usual Nigel Farage has tipped me over the edge. The BBC has a survey about attitudes towards Englishness in which it appears that young people are likely to be less proud of being English than older people.  The BBC then approaches its man for all comments, Nigel Farage, who says “It’s as if we’re teaching young people that any sense of English identity is racist.” In the replies below the Beeb’s tweet about it, several people say Farage makes them ashamed of being English.

I will leave Farage alone, and I will also leave alone the issue of the framing of questions. The choice in the Yougov poll was about whether people feel “proud” or “embarrassed” to be English. National identity is a complex thing, and there are lots of other possible feelings, and lots of other ways of contrasting being proud.

(In what follows below, for “British” you could perfectly well read “English”. That does not mean that I think “English” and “British” are interchangeable – that is a con trick we English have been pulling on the rest of the world for centuries. It still works on most Americans. It only means that, whether you are using the frame of “Britishness” or “Englishness”, the mechanism is the same.)

I am struck by how regularly people respond to events by saying something like “makes me ashamed to be British”. Nigel Farage has that effect – not surprisingly. So have the Windrush scandal, Grenfell, Brexit, the state of our prisons, the prevalence of foodbanks, to name only a few. I suspect that a lot of people who say it don’t actually mean it – it has become a trope, a cliché, a standard reaction to the many shameful things we see around us.

And I wish people would stop saying it. There is no need for any of these things to make us feel less positively about our nationality. What we should be ashamed of are the people who make us feel like this. I am shamed by the political schemers who have been so brutal towards the Windrush generation. I am shamed by the liars, cheats and charlatans who stole the EU referendum result. I am shamed by the succession of home secretaries who think that prison is only about punishment. I am shamed by the poisonous attitudes towards unemployed and disabled people entrenched at the DWP by Iain Duncan Smith and embraced by all of his successors. I am shamed by the many people who insist that Dunkirk was a “British” victory and who ignore the 18,000 French troops who died standing between us and the German army in order to give us a chance to escape.

I am shamed by such people, but I am not ashamed of who I am. I am British and English, and proud of both. That does not mean that I think I am better than anybody else. It is a fake, brittle patriotism that can only love its country if it can pretend that its country is better than anybody else’s. I am simply proud to be British, and I will not be shaken from that by the liars, thieves, pretenders, charlatans, bullies, bigots and bloats with whom I share my nationality. The fact of sharing with such people sometimes dismays me. But we do not get to choose with whom we share our nationality, and our nationality is bigger than the character of any of its undesirable holders. So, I am ashamed, dismayed, perturbed, troubled, sometimes grieved, by the antics of people such as those mentioned above. But they will never make me ashamed of my nationality.

We have our country: we don't need it “back”.

Thereis a time for mourning, there is a time for resolution, and there is a time for truth. Sometimes those times coincide, and this is one of those moments. Being a time for truth also means a time for confrontation. We have to tell the truth about the Leave campaign's great lie about immigration, about the brutal enthusiasm for stoking up imaginary fears with their anti immigration rhetoric, and the atmosphere they have helped to create, an atmosphere of fear and hate, in which it becomes possible to think that taking someone's life is a legitimate act. “He was nothing to do with us” they say, as they weep crocodile tears about the abrupt ending of a life.

Sometimes I feel really sorry for Nigel Farage. He complains about having to sit on a train with people speaking foreign languages around him. He must have such a fragile sense of identity, sitting in an English train, with English language ads and instructions on the wall, reading an English newspaper. He makes me want to pick him up and cuddle him, take him home and tuck him into bed with a nice soothing cup of ovaltine. Poor little Nigel. Only, of course, he isn't. He knew exactly what he was doing when he unveiled his Nazi redux poster this week, playing on the worst fears of the fiction he and his like have created. And when somebody finally takes him at his word, he will wash and wash and wash his hands, but the stain will not come out.

A worse lie still is the one that has taken hold in the mind of so much of middle England that their country has somehow disappeared. It has not. It is still here. As our football team once again misfires magnificently through a major competition, as April rain in June washes out the cricket, our country has not gone anywhere. It is in nobody else's hands. It is still here. It belongs to us and we belong to it. People have been bamboozled into thinking that they have lost their country. What they have lost is security, identity, pride – and all because of the way the world works, not because of Europe or immigration. Zero hour contracts, low wages, precarious employment, food banks will not disappear if we leave the EU. They will not disappear if all the immigrants go away. Britain will continue a gradual slide down global economic rankings, because other countries are developing. There is no way to stop that, and the slide will be faster if we leave the EU. People say “We're still number 1”. We're not. That does not mean we can't be proud of ourselves. I'm very proud of being English, of being British. I don't have to pretend I'm better than anyone else to do that. Yet people are being made to be unhappy, and in fact to be murderous, because somebody across the road is wearing different clothes or speaking a different language. That is foul.

Bletchley Park

I often wonder how I can celebrate being English, and indeed being British, without idiots like the BNP thinking I'm on their side. But it's no good keeping quiet just because *they* happen to be waving *my* flag. So I thought I might state from time to time things I'm proud of, without any implication of scorning other peoples and what they might be proud of.

Now here is something to to be very proud of. I've been to many, many stately places and national monuments, but few made me feel the way Bletchley Park did. British codebreaking and British computing genius played an inestimable part in winning the war against Nazism.


The Bombe, designed to test Enigma rotor settings.




Alan Turing's office. Looking into a very ordinary office with a sense of awe because I was in the presence of greatness.



Colossus. In the presence of more greatness - in two ways. Not just the awe inspiring original, but also the dedication of the amateurs who have spent more than six years recreating it.






View from the American Garden across the lake to the huts.



The sad state of some of the buildings today, which illustrates why Bletchley Park needs help with funds. These Paypal and Worldpay links enable you to donate to Bletchley Park online.










There's more on what you can do to help at Saving Bletchley Park.