Alternate Reasons To Be Proud Of Being English?

Since moving to England I have come to the regrettable conclusion that Britain as an entity is over. The reason is that I'm now convinced that too many English people are incapable of separating England from Britain and vice versa and that too many either never bought into the concept or have never understood it in the first place. The NHS isn't English.

My family is Scottish, and I've been raised with this idea of "Britishness". I, however, was born in England, and now live in England. What can I look at, or point at, and say "that's *our* cultural heritage!" Are the English just this bastard mongrel nation with nothing of their own?

If you moved to England from Scotland, surely there was a reason.

So, it feels weird to be proud of specific things that other English people have done. After all, they're not MY achievments, they just happened to have been made by people who share the same nationality. I do wish we made a bit more of a fuss about Newton and Darwin sometimes, but that's my science roots showing I suppose.

Why is it weird to feel proud of specific things that other English people have done? If there wasn't a vaccuum, some kind of need for it, I don't think there would be such a rise of English nationalism (small n) in the form of football supporting.

British (fruits of empire):
Victorian Engineering, the National Grid, the NHS

Dunno:
The Magna Carta, the Tate Gallery...

Magna Carta DEFINITELY English. Tate Gallery probably a holdover from British, but as most (if not all? Britain, Modern, Liverpool and is there one in the Southwest somewhere?) are located physically in England, I think the English can claim them.

x-post...

There are still a lot of British people in the British Isles, though I'm doing my best :)

If there's no need, ever, for the idea of cultural or national pride, then what *is* all that flag waving at football pitches about? Clearly *someone* is feeling a some kind of vacuum. Is the idea of the vacuum wrong, or is the pride just misplaced?

that's just Londonness, rather than Englishness. Please don't confuse London with England.

During lots of parts of the dark to middle ages, even many of the smaller Islands were not considered British - any island you could get a boat around belonged to the Danelaw, not the English *or* the Scottish.

Is cultural pride *always* nationalism?

I know we had a thread about this earlier in the week, but seriously. I don't think they are. But it's a fine line between celebration of your own culture and denial or denigration of other cultures, and noone quite knows where the fine line is.

I have difficulty with pride because as a crypto-hippy I believe that 'Shakespeare' could have been born elsewhere.

Xpost Archel, it's the United Kingdom of GB&NI, as I understand.

Also this sounds (a bit) like a thread I was going to start called '100 English Heroes' which I never did because I was convinced it'd go off the rails immediately. It would have started '1. Tom Baker'

I think that's fantastic, and not far off the idea of my thread. Tom Baker is a good answer - Dr. Who is a fantastic fictional English role model or cultural icon. It would be good to avoid the usual "Robin Hood, Winston Churchill, George Best" answers and come up with examples like Dr. Who/Tom Baker.

I am very happy with a sense of community, but I don't think each community has to score achievement points in order to be comfortable with itself, so I don't really feel the need for 'pride'.

Well, what are the achievement points of your particular community, then? I think that's part of the reason that so many of my mates have gone wild for The Streets. They think the band encapsulates something about their particular community or notion of Englishness.

However, on the plus side...

English ingenuity and boffinry as exemplified by those people at Bletchley Park cracking codes and parachuting dummies into Pas de Calais.

The fact that at the end of WWII we voted out the person who had led us to victory in the war in favour of the party that would create the welfare state.

The welfare state. as was

English humour

English pop music.

our appreciation of camp. In spite of all the violence that young english men get up to we are not a macho people.

Maybe it's just easier to FEEL pride when you're standing on a football terrace with thousands of other people. Right now on a greyish Friday morning when we're all at our separate workplaces or whatever, what sense can we really have of belonging to something bigger? I LIKE being English, but right now I'm not PROUD of it.

yes, and that's about the only thing to be proud of...

also archel OTM.

i have something else to add, but i'm trying to phrase it correctly...

What WOULD make me proud to be English would be things like an ethical foreign policy and a welfare state that still worked. So near and yet so far. Similarly, I long to be proud of national characteristics like open-mindedness, grace under pressure, and respect for/love of nature. But I don't know that we really do have these any more. Maybe our sense of humour?

Beautiful. Ideals are part of a national culture, and these are great.

Also, maybe the traditional English spirit of fierce independence and resistence authority? This is a double edged sword in many ways, but I do think that it's a national characteristic. Joe is always talking about the English "culture of deference" and I don't think that's necessarily always true.

A case in point. I think you'll find that he would definitely consider himself British!

(the streets are representational, but I don't feel the need for them to reprazent, if you know what I mean)

Funny, cause that's one of the things I was going to bring up. Perhaps the reason WWII stuff is so popular on English television is the more academic version of football flag waving. LOOK! It's the plucky English! Fighting off the Nazis with their sheer pluckiness and ingenuity! The Germans have money and manpower and bigger guns, but by gum, we're more plucky and independent!

An English person above has just said that makes them proud to be ENGLISH.

I didn't *say* they made *me* proud to be English, I was trying to brainstorm and think up a whole bunch of random things which *could* be seen as making a person proud to be English. You've raised your reasons why they should be struck off the list, and they've been struck. Like I said, I was going to say "Watson and Crick" and then realised that half the team was American. Does that mean An English Person is trying to co-opt the achievements of America?

and another x-post, I said George Best because he was the only footballer I could name. It's ignorance of FOOTBALL fullstop not ignorance of his exact birthplace.

it's a top song though.

And also that the ideals enshrined in the song cover other nations at least as well (and indeed Ireland better).

I do kind of see what you mean though

xpost nothing is unwelcome when you're wankered. The world's your oxster!

I'm wondering why everyone ignored this rather intersting question from the redoubtable stevem

When I lived in the Mull of Kintyre I was told that it was Kintyre that the Danes dragged their boats over. Using logs or something.

Also, what do people who claim Chaucer as a reason for national pride think they share with him? It just seems odd that there could be some sort o continuum with people who would have had such a different idea of what englishness was, wouldn't have understood you etc.

Now this I can vote for.

DB's passion over the toilets is bemusing but understandable.

Good thread, this!

In terms of concrete things, the BBC, esp. the World Service.

And Big Brother 5, obv.

Well it wouldn't because you're not French. I think that idea of Britain as unique (certainly in the sense of being more 'unique' than somewhere like France) is dwindling pretty steadily outside Britain itself. Even in countries that were part of the Empire. I don't really think many people care. There are still Anglophiles but what is there to be fascinated with any more?

Well, no, but you got there first, no? And today, as a smaller and more cosmopolitan country, you may be closer as a matter of National culture to the globalist phenomenon.

But yeah, I feel like I'm changing too, lightening up about all this, sort of.

Yes. I agree with that, although in my case it's probably just an 'old armchair' thing rather than being proud of anything. I'd quite like to be American actually but that's kind of on the level of British cinema goers of the 1930s-40s yearning to be American. America just seems to have more life..and I prefer American music to British.

I think I find the whole idea of being proud of your home country to be a bit... not suspect, but alien? Loving it, yeah, I get that (although in the sense of crazy wild adoration London is more 'my home' than England could ever be, and indeed to me for a very long childtime London was England and I'd be all 'are we out of England yet?' in the back of the car going to Oxfordshire or somewhere) - it's often a despairing sort of love, but it's a love nonetheless.

I suspect that I am a Londoner first and British second and European third and 'English' really only gets a look-in when I'm saying, say, look at my obsession with class am I not too too terribly English, what? It's not that I'm unproud, ashamed, of the fact that I'm a native of England and brought up in its culture, it's that I don't see the need. My nationality, the bits of specifically English culture I grew up in, is and are part of me: why should I go around being proud that I am myself? It's enough, surely, just to be.