Chocolate box villages did and still do exist, but that wasn't/isn't the day-to-day experience of the vast majority of people living in England. I also suspect that when the lid of the chocolate box was lifted, there was more than enough poverty, squalor and so on. Rural poverty, deprivation and exclusion hasn't gone away: Cornwall, for example, has more heroin addiction per head of population than Manchester.

Modern day rural poverty is based on numerous factors, but a big part of it must be the rise of agro-business and the industrialisation of farming since the 1950s.

SO'P's experience must parallel and reflect that of many people growing up in the industrial heartlands of the North and the Midlands in the 1960s and 70s and seeing the decline of the areas when industry was finally decimated in the 1980s. These sorts of changes, and the wholesale destruction of communities that resulted (along with the parallel destruction of rural communities), had far more of an effect on England than a vague threat from some undefined other who is doing unspeakable things with "our" flag.

I don't see what any of this has to do with a mythical "them" that the paranoid tendency amongst the English population believes, with an almost religious intensity, has take England from "us"... as Crowsis rightly says, it's still out there for any of us to discover, enjoy, add to and make of what we will. And as Les says, there's stuff to be proud of and stuff to be ashamed of, so why insist than anyone who isn't indiscriminately proud of all of it is anti-English and has an extreme left agenda (whatever than means in 2009)?

I wish these people who insist we have lost something would define "we", tell the rest of us what we've "lost" and make few sensible proposals about how "we" get "it" back... them at least we'd understand what the issue is. In the meantime, vaguely sinister and paranoid songs like the one that this thread opened with smack of fortress Britain, pulling up of drawbridges, Little Englander hostility towards Johnny Foreigner and other unpleasant manifestations of the worse of English...

PS, I too am (largely) English, and neither proud nor ashamed. I just am... is this wrong?