This is a fascinating thread, but something ard said has been in my mind since I replied to it, and I think I finally might have put my finger on how it relates to me and this thread.

Ard said: "Certainly the Brits regard their army as snow-white, guiltless of every crime they are charged with, for all of that, they are not in the same league as the US when it come to blind patritism."

Form where Ard sits and given his experiences of the British Army, this might seem like a fair statement, but reading this thread and the amount of times the military has been mentioned I'd like to offer an alternative view of what patriotism is to me.

I am what many of you would call a typical Brit. Welsh mum, English dad, rumours of Scot and Irish blood in the family but unproven so far - basically a person of the Isles. I've been doing my family history and we're all Ag Labs - until the railways appeared and my great-grandfather (who knew the plough) did what the chap in Nic Jones' song did and left the land and went and worked the on the technological wonder of the day, the railway.

In mid-Wales, my family were prevented from owning the land they worked by a system of bringing in Scottish farmers to run the farms that came up for sale. On a recent visit to one of the farms a great-great grandfather worked on in a forgotten corner of England on the Welsh border the current tenant (a loverly chap, happy to let me look around) was himself a descendant of one of these very interlopers. Gradually, the land my families worked on was taken away under the Acts of Enclosure that finally dispossessed the people of the land their ancestors had farmed and grazed on since they had settled after the last ice age. They were forced into working on large estates and finally off the land altogether and into the urban working-class ghettos of the big cities and industrial areas.

The oppression metered out by The British Empire and the regimes before it has caused as much suffering to it's own poor as it has those of the countries it conquered. Like so many families, my family were people of the land who have been forced to abandon their birthright so rich people could become richer. The governments that oppressed those cultures they invaded so ruthlessly were also oppressing their own people here, and continue to do so, eroding our basic freedoms and waging war in our name on people we shouldn't be fighting.

It's often argued the English don't have the heart for rebellion, but this is untrue and the history of England has many examples of ordinary people rising up against the oppresive ruling classes.

From the days of Eadric the Wild refusing to submit to the rule of William the Bastard, Wat Tyler and the Peasant's Revolt against the Poll Tax and their ancestors rioting in London as Thatcher imposed her own version of this unfair and hated tax 800 years later, Winstanley and the Diggers - still beyond their time now, over 250 years after the government of the time brutally put down these peaceful revolutionaries protest, from the Tolpuddle Martyrs deported for fighting for their rights and the protesters butchered at Peterloo in Manchester for seeking fair representation in the parliament that had spent so long oppressing them, Luddites and Levellers, Marx and Engels inspired to write the Communist manifesto in Cheetham Library, the miners, steelworkers and shipbuilders who fought for their communities on the face of heartless and despicable industry management and ministers.

Here is where my loyalties lay, and in many ways it goes against the very idea of patriotism. I don't feel tingly when I see a Union flag, I feel sick and the national anthem is the antithesis of how I feel about the Royal Family and their parasitic relations. I don't subscribe to being British and I don't care for Tories or New Labour or BNP or Lib Dems or any of those self-interested maggots who want to run the ever-dissolving Union. I'm tired of the politics. I hate cricket.

I do feel tingly when I think of how the ordinary men and women of the home countries have struggled and survived despite the odds stacked against them. The music, stories, accents and languages are the birthrights we haven't been dispossessed of and they are priceless. I go back to the country my family farmed in- land which is in my DNA and I get tingly, I stand on the Atlantic coasts of our islands feeling the might of the ocean in front of me and the depth and history of the land behind me and get tingly, I walk in the woods and fields near my home and watch the rooks and jackdaws loop and whiffle to the roost - this is my home and I love it.

And that might just be worth fighting for.