Alerted to the story by an email from my mum, I’ve just had a read in The Guardian about Gordon Brown’s plans for a ‘Britishness Day’, to be tagged onto remembrance Sunday.
He goes on to site american national pride as the inspiration.
Has he spent any time in the US? The jingoistic flag-waving over here is perhaps the single most baffling element in American culture – spending that amount of energy and effort in telling other people that are already like you, how great it is to be like you are. It’s an embarrassment to a lot of outward looking world travelling cosmopolitan americans, and just reinforces the refusal of Middle America to look at itself with any degree of self-analysis or self-criticism.
The bits of Britain that I’m proud of are those that stem from our history of dissent, our willingness to protest at the behaviour of our elected officials and our LACK of that very jingoism that Brown seems to be wanting to foster.
Bollocks to the flag – flags are generally a shit idea. The BNP are welcome to it. We don’t need to ‘reclaim’ the Union Flag, if people want to use it for sports, fine go ahead, I’m not going to accuse you of being nazis, I just won’t understand it.
It’s really odd to have read this story less than 24 hours after spending a good half hour trying to get my head about the reasons for American National pride, and seeing it as some kind of sinister government plot to coerce people into acquiescence, to disengage brains, to limit dissent. All things that we need LESS of in Britain not more.
So, Mr Brown, you can shove that idea up your arse, thanks.
Oh, and Faria’s been evicted, so Tenille tells me.