Personal Blogs

Over the past couple of months I've been reading a great deal about the concept of Englishness, it has timed perfectly with the erection of flags around so many of our towns.

There's a couple of quotations that I have come across over the past weekend that have resonated and, perhaps, suggest why the flag flying has taken over.

In his essay The Lion and The Unicorn George Orwell wrote "In the working class patriotism is profound but it is unconscious. The working man's heart does not leap when he sees a Union Jack, but the famous insularity and xenophobia of the English is far stronger in the working class than the bourgeoisie."

Contrast that with the words of sociologist Krishnan Kumar in 2014: "Bereft of empire, no longer a global economic or political power, confronted by seccessionist movements without and by 'alien' cultures within - the English seem to have found it best to turn in on themselves. Never having had an identity as an ethnic group, never having needed one, they are now... in the process of inventing one."

It seems to me that the flag flying epidemic stems from both of these extracts. Englishness has never need a strong identity (and indeed didn't even need one in the Second World War), but the loss of status - particularly felt by those who have been left behind - means all of a sudden we need to discover one, and one which may be deeply affected by the xenophobia Orwell identified 80 years ago.