"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.

Ringmer debates: my country right or wrong?

Ringmer LibDems held a debate, open to all, on what national identity means. The material used to introduce the topic is available on Slideshare.

It's a bit surprising how viscerally some liberals dislike patriotism, less of a surprise how viscerally some conservatives dislike liberals for being unpatriotic.

I think there is a liberal form of patriotism. But the first thing to say is that it is patriotism made by choice. It is legitimate to ask why that choice has to be made. Many liberals eschew patriotism because of the evils done in the name of patriotism. But I think it is unavoidable in practical terms. We live by groups. Wherever we are, whatever we do, the human tendency is to clump. We identify with some things and against others. Nationality is only one possible form of identity; many others exist. If nationalities did not exist, we would find another way of dividing ourselves into groups, and we would find other reasons for denigrating, killing and maiming the people who are not in our group. The world has developed in such a way that nation states are the mechanism by which we establish territories and decide who to kill. In our world nation states hold the monopoly of legitimate violence. If it were not nation states, it would be some other form of group identity. As we are members of nation states, it is our responsibility to bend our efforts to making them behave with humanity and decency. To do that properly we must embrace our membership.

So how do we do that as liberals?

First of all, as I have already said, we must acknowledge that a liberal patriotism is chosen. I love my country because I choose to. I do not love my country because I must. (What kind of love would that be?).

I take pride in its achievements, and I acknowledge its shortcomings. I do not need to pretend that half of my country's history did not happen because I love it. (What kind of love would that be?)

My country is exceptional to me. And I can live with the fact that someone else's country is exceptional to them. I do not need to pretend that my country is better than anyone else's in order to love it. (What kind of love would that be?)

I express my love of my country  peaceably by upholding the rules and values of the place in which I live; and by being critical when criticism is needed - it is an expression of commitment to want to improve my country. And it would be an insult to my country as well as to me if I was expected not to object when the country is being pulled into doing something wrong.

And I express my love of my country by crying like a child during Danny Boyle's Olympic opening ceremony.