The 23rd of April was St George’s Day, that perennial day of politically correct paranoia. Or not – just public propaganda telling us it was. The day when an Englishmen dare not show any hint of patriotism, paralysed by fear. Even thinking about displaying a St George’s flag feels as though it is psychologically punishable by the thought police with a life sentence of insufferable mental torture.
As Ricky Gervais quipped on Twitter: “Happy St George’s Day. (That’s the day that English people don’t celebrate in case someone thinks they’re racist”. He has a point, it must be said. As if to reiterate his sentiment of the day’s modern connotations, The Telegraph reported a statement yesterday from the Church of England saying that it will be delayed until next week as “it is literally a movable feast”.
The paper wrote that, according to church rules, “ no feast days are allowed to be marked during Easter Week. If a saint’s day does end up falling during this week, it is “transferred” to Monday after the Second Sunday of Easter”. Of course we all knew that, didn’t we?
Key politicians including Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn were slated for posting messages on Twitter, prompting Professor McCulloch, an ex-chair of the Journal of Ecclesiastical History to pithily point out “Downing Street is obviously illiterate about the church”. As harsh as he may sound, such illiteracy of all age groups in modern England is inevitable, is it not?
I suspect May, Corbyn and, indeed, many others are somewhat ignorant in bliss of these historical details as St George’s Day has in recent days become a notional relic of a bygone era where Brits made known their pride on such an occasion.
Heaven forbid British schools engender a sense of British spirit in the next generation worthy of annual appreciation. In today’s snowflake safe zone in our schools, I’m sure the study of the Feast of St George is conveniently brushed under the classroom carpet.
According to Ofsted, “fundamental British values” are: ‘democracy; the the rule of law; individual liberty; mutual respect for and tolerance of those with different faith and beliefs and for those without faith’. In reality, the fundamentals of Islamic faith take precedence over the teaching of British values and Christianity, for fear of seeming remotely, well, British.
Meanwhile, the BBC continue to call a group of barbaric terrorists the “Islamic State”, probably to distract attention from inconvenient British cultural creations like St George’s Day. Who would dare celebrate with innocent patriotism? As Oscar Wilde put it: “To many, no doubt, he will seem to be somewhat blatant and bumptious, but we prefer to regard him as being simply British”.
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Surely that is for Holy Mother Church to decide PP?
;o)
“ no feast days are allowed to be marked during Easter Week. If a saint’s day does end up falling during this week, it is “transferred” to Monday after the Second Sunday of Easter”.
These, indeed, are the Church rules since many centuries, both in the West and in the East. Bad example, even if the general argument is valid.
The subversion of Englishness is part of the trajectory of the increasingly dominant “equality, diversity, inclusion” ideology now embodied in the incrementally enforced 2010 Equalities Act. Its origins were in the US New Left “race, gender, class” + “no platform for opponents” movement which spread outwards and upwards. The groups specifically chosen for politicisation were “women, students, migrants, ethnic & sexual minorities” (the “disabled” were tacked on later). I watched the process of what its devotees called “agenda-networking” in Britain growing from local governments, community relations groups, trade unions, the National Curriculum Council, one academic journal or institution after another. The process can be fully documented.
One opponent after another was neutralised from Powell to Scruton. From primary school to police station, si monumentum requires, circumspice.
I believe the NS has published some sort of correction on Scruton and suspended the writer involved.
There were and remain injustices that need remedy, especially to women who are under attack from trans thuggery in the guise of ‘liberty for differences’. The blame for our present mess lies squarely with HMG and it’s cowardice in failing to speak the truth to these ruthless new sources of media-magnified power.
Tragically all too true, DA!
YOUR farbissen definition of nationalism, it seems. (I’d see it differently. As does God, in the Bible, which Leftists mostly abhor).
Nationalism = being proud of one’s nation; standing up for yourself.
I’ve faith in the old school. Westminster needs quotas for MPs to be representative NOT of genders or heritages, but of trades and work specialisms, to be more inclusive/ meritocratic, better balanced.
I think the former Charterhouse head boy made a fair job running our NHS and would be better than May as PM. So your school should not matter. YES, some groups are overrepresented in Parliament. Unionists, for one.
Agree with your last sentence. And whilst on it, they should be warier of fawning celeb-beholdenness, as with Batmanghelidjh, or even little Thunberg.
Nationalism is sound. Read your Bible, MM. God prefers dealing via nations, not Hallsteinian or Coudenhove-Kalergian utopian collectives.
Dad was schoooled 40s and 50s. The great rot in our schools started late 60s. It’s now ingrained throughout, and mainstream teachers are majority LabLibGreen voting/ oriented, with a few hiding any conservative traditionalism and the best originality carefully in staffrooms, where the NEU (NUT/ NASUWT – both run by mainly hard Leftists, from close involvement, but in my case NOT as a Commie, &c.) holds PC sway, and is ready to delete such excrescences. The NUT was imho pretty instrumental in damaging our schools and UK teaching. Now it’s merged into the NEU. I’d like to think matters may improve; but see no sign as of yet.
Most grammars and private schools (inc public) have managed better to conserve the best of our once world-leading education. A pity the Reds have succeeded so in ruining English workers’ kids’ education overall, eh?
The Campaign Teacher Commies of the NUT were not conference tricoteuses, but certainly often firebrand, loony-sounding, revolutionary Trots and Communists.
Gove started turning things around and was doing rather well, until dire Nicky Morgan undid most of it.
Happy St George’s Day!
Nationalism (insane hatred of the other) can be distinguished from patriotism. Our experiences differ as do our faith in what teachers can do – it’s hard enough getting anything into kids heads, never mind loony ideas.
My 50s grammar school failed me and others from the ‘wrong’ side of the tracks and it took years for me to recover. Even now I’m still bitter about it.
As to the public schools – you jest? Where do you think the occupants of Westminster went, many of them with fake Oxbridge degrees in PPE – the posh kids media studies?
It’s not teachers who are taking instruction from infants slobbing about the streets of London or half-baked BBC presenters – it’s our Conservative government.
It was certainly celebrated in my late Dad’s day. Trendy teaching by Marxist teachers was creeping in by the late 60s. Plus gradual decline in churchgoing.
Our political leaders are living products of that era and subsequent. The decline is steady, and wide.
For a while our best grammars and private schools, and a handful of state ones upholding similar ethos and with great traditionalist teachers, not over-inoculated with PC, held out. However the long march of cultural Marxism (inc within the Tory party) is addressing the “defect”, onwards and downwards…
More complicated than blaming schools. We fought two world wars against jingoistic nationalism, so that was bound to make people think twice about the wilder Georgists surely?
As to teachers. If your dad’s day was the 60s and 70s, there were no Marxist teachers to speak of. I sat on a regional NUT committee run #by Communist party members who despaired at the polls which showed teachers 2/1 Tory voting in elections. Attempts at strikes etc always failed. At national conference, there’s be all these firebrand speeches from the platform ‘listened’ to by rows and rows of women knitting.
One factor changing teacher’s politics was continual criticism and interference from thick public school boys in parliament, and the replacing of HMI by politically motivated Ofsted. The last honest report on school performance in the 70s pointed out the limitations to schools’ ability to ameliorate the effects of bad neighbourhoods – the blame for those being HMG social policy. The introduction of Academies where money is gouged out of the system to pay sharp suited oafs has not helped gain the support of 500k teachers for the party.
I don’t remember St George’s Day being celebrated much during my sixties childhood. C of E Churches flew his flag but that was about it.
In those days the English went in for modesty and under-statement, now very out-moded notions. Parading with flags and drums was something that small, insecure nations did.
And it’s rather amusing that the article closes with a quote from an Irishman.
Hmmm. Should the word ‘so-called’ precede IS in the first line of the last paragraph?
George is as likely a mythical as a historical figure – as applies to anyone else from that time. The dragon being a clue you might say. (Or did he kill a Serb – Dragan.)
He was Syrian? Turkish? Greek? Roman? Take your pick.
The author’s main point is a good one. Being patriotic is an aspect of maturity, and recognising the good fortune to be born here rather than elsewhere in this troubled world. Nationalism is thefrenzied zeal of those who want their nation to dominate the whole world. People who respect their home countries and want to stay in them cause no trouble. It’s the internationalists – the USSR, EUSSR – who cause all the trouble.