There’s no shame in being British – so why does it take a foreigner to point it out?
Last Saturday was St George’s Day. An important date for English people who love their country. But in recent years, it’s become an important date for English people who hate their country, too. Because it’s the day they take tremendous delight in pointing out that actually, St George wasn’t English. He was Turkish.
Personally, I find this a rather feeble form of pedantry. Not least because it isn’t even accurate. In St George’s time, the third century, Turkey didn’t yet exist, any more than England did – so he wasn’t really Turkish, either. In any case, if you’re going to call into question the historical veracity of this particular legend, it seems somewhat peculiar to focus on the nationality of its protagonist. Rather than, say, the claim that he killed a dragon.
I do appreciate, though, that I’m wasting my breath. Because we know the real reason these people love to point out that St George wasn’t English. It’s nothing to do with historical accuracy. Instead, they do it to parade their progressive credentials, and to express their amused disdain for such lowbrow, low-status pursuits as flag-waving and patriotism. It’s a way of saying: “Look at all these silly, Tory-voting, Brexit-loving gammon. They hate foreigners. Yet their own country’s patron saint was a foreigner! And they don’t even realise it! Or at least, they didn’t, until we started pointing it out to them every single year!”
In the age of Twitter, that great radicaliser of the modern Left, this kind of contempt for ordinary patriotism has become highly fashionable. But one man, at least, has had enough of it. He’s sick of middleclass liberals talking their country down.
And he isn’t even British. He’s Australian.
George Brandis is a senior diplomat who has just completed a four-year stint as the Australian high commissioner in London. And, in a speech this week to mark his departure, he said it was high time that modern progressives showed some pride in their country and its history.
“I wish the self-lacerating classes in Britain would realise that the world respects their own country a lot more than a lot of them do,” said Mr Brandis. “There are some members of the commentariat, possibly some members of the Foreign Office, who are almost guilty about Britain’s imperial past, and think that notions like the Commonwealth should be uttered sotto voce.”
He’s quite right. Except in one small detail. “The self-lacerating classes” is a fine phrase, but it isn’t strictly accurate. Because it isn’t themselves that these people are lacerating. It’s their distant ancestors. And by so loudly denouncing the crimes those distant ancestors once committed, they’re signalling their own superior moral virtue: highlighting how compassionate they are, how caring, how appalled by injustice. That’s not self-lacerating. If anything, it’s self-aggrandising.
The truth is, it’s easy to apologise for your country’s past. You get all the credit for saying sorry, without incurring any damage to your own reputation – because everyone knows that you personally aren’t to blame for the thing you’re apologising for.
The only risk is that you start to look comically self-absorbed. Harry Enfield used to do a character called “Jurgen the German”, who spent every sketch going round Britain, offering unsolicited apologies to random members of the public for the Second World War. “I must apologise for the conduct of my nation in the war,” he would wail, apropos of nothing. “I assure you that I shall take my shame to my grave!” The recipients of these apologies looked bemused. Neither they, nor “Jurgen”, had even been born when the war ended.
Perhaps this is the future for our Royal family. Perpetually traipsing round Britain’s former colonies, offering unsolicited apologies to puzzled locals for events that took place three centuries earlier. Indeed, this noisily contrite new era may already be at hand. At the end of the recent royal tour of the Caribbean, the Duke of Cambridge spoke of his “profound sorrow” about the slave trade. “Sorrow” isn’t quite “sorry”. But it’s probably only a matter of time.
I wonder whether progressives in other parts of the world devote as much energy to condemning their own countries’ former empires. Do middle-class Italians constantly decry the Romans? Do Viennese liberals wring their hands over the Habsburgs? Are woke Mongolians forever apologising for the excesses of Genghis Khan?
Still, we know one thing for certain. Russians don’t feel guilty about the Russian Empire. Because they’re currently trying to bring it back.