It’s lunatic season again: some of the smaller more excitable political parties are having their annual conferences. The usual suspects are out and about: the SNP is telling Scotland it would be far happier as a tiny country no one would pay any attention to while the Greens are announcing we’d all be much better off if we could set civilisation back by about a thousand years. But of all the idiotic suggestions arising from these yearly navel-gazing sessions, the nuttiest one is this: that the greatest threat to our country is the rise of English nationalism. Are you havin’ a larf?
For a start, apart from among a tiny number of people, English nationalism doesn’t really exist. I’ve yet to hear anyone calling for England to leave the United Kingdom: a couple of people might have muttered about it at the height of the Scottish independence debate, but they were simply feeling a little miffed.
The majority of the people on the recent march in London were not far-right headbangers; they were people worried about soaring levels of immigration, which has nothing to do with English nationalism. It is merely common sense.
What the people voicing querulous concerns about “English nationalism” are referring to is something quite different: a country sick to death of being told it is racist, xenophobic, parochial and should be ashamed of its past.
When I was growing up I was taught that we should be proud of the British Empire as we spread civilisation across the world. (We did, too. One-third of the world’s legal systems are based on that in the UK.)
Now we have idiots like Lenny Henry, who’s done very well indeed out of nasty, racist, horrid Britain demanding we pay £18 trillion to all black Brits in slavery reparations.
And that despite the fact that most black people in this country have their roots in Africa, not the Caribbean, which means they chose to come here and were never slaves.
It is also the British navy that put an end to the slave trade, chasing slave ships across the oceans, with a loss of 1,600 lives. On top of that the British government put up a loan of £20m to follow this through – quite a lot of money in 1833 and the final repayments for this were only made in 2015.
I’d say we’ve done our bit by way of compensation. Nor, as usual, is there any mention of African kings only too happy to sell their people as slaves. I’ll tell you what turns people into nationalists: it’s constantly droning on to them about how awful they are.
I’d given almost no thought at all to the fact that I am English – and I grew up in the United States – until in the 1990s I spent a lot of time with some Scottish Nationalists who lost no time in telling me what they thought about the English.
Initially I thought this was odd and a little rude. After a few months I started feeling angry. Finally it ended up with pride in my origins – I’m a Maid of Kent, no less.
I’m also proud to be British, mind you, and even prouder to be married to a Scot. But if you really want to get the English up in arms, tell them to be ashamed of their heritage. And don’t say you haven’t been warned.