The depressing rise of English nationalism makes me miss good old-fashioned British patriotism: by Ed West

“Another recent tradition we’ve come to love is Labour politicians saying we should “reclaim” our flag from the far Right. This began with the debate over the Union Jack during the late 1980s, when people on the Left began lamenting that the flag had connotations of fascism and racism and that it should be detoxified. (…)

The problem with “reclaiming” the national flag is that those making the argument don’t actually know what patriotism is. When politicians talk about Britishness or Englishness they usually talk about values; David Cameron did so at his Munich speech last year when he defined Britishness as a devotion to “equal rights regardless of race, sex or sexuality … It says to its citizens, this is what defines us as a society: to belong here is to believe in these things”; Gordon Brown has spoken about “fairness” and “tolerance”, as if other countries define themselves by their unfairness and intolerance. That is not patriotism, that’s a sort of fluffy universalism which by its very nature becomes intolerant; after all, what if a British person doesn’t define themselves by equal rights as it is currently understood? What if they just want to be left alone in their shed?

The modern Left doesn’t get patriotism because patriotism has to be exclusive, and involve parochial altruism – caring more about people like yourself. This tendency is innate in all of us, but the followers of current ideological fads are convinced it can somehow be eliminated, despite all available evidence to the contrary. (…)

Being English doesn’t mean conforming to a world-view set by a few people living in an arc from Shepherd’s Bush to Haringey; it just means being English, whether by blood or adoption (although the extent to which any nationality can be elective is limited). (…)

For 300-odd years English and British have been psychologically interchangeable in English people’s minds, largely because there has never been a need for a separate English identity. However, a combination of factors have recently altered this: unfairly slanted devolution settlements, an unpopular professional political class, mass immigration, and the question of Europe. And Englishness is a reaction to British identity becoming too “inclusive” and, therefore, meaningless (which is why whites apply the label far more often than minorities). (…)

you can see the same thing happening in England, where the new ruling class despise English patriotism and feel attached instead to Brussels, Geneva and the brotherhood of (rich and powerful) man. (…)

And this debate will lead nowhere while people continue to talk about a patriotism based on values rather than belonging. “