The Rt Rev Dr Richard Chartres is Bishop of London also urges us to 'hang out our flags on April 23rd'

"The festival of St George and Shakespeare is a good opportunity to trace the way we have come and to develop, in fresh ways, our common story.

The point is that we do NOT require a univocal idealization of our country or a roseate view of English history as some kind of cross-gartered rural idyll.

But our children deserve a rich account of the narrative of England which will give them the resources to make an informed and original response to the 21st century.

They need a narrative of England which does not palliate the crimes and injustices; does not edit out the debates between Catholics and Protestants, Anglicans and Puritans, the argument between the followers of Hobbes and the protagonists of Locke but which also insists on the glory and the grit of the Northern industrial towns; the cosmopolitan wonder of mercantile London and the hard earned ease of the suburbs."


Reading the 'parent' thread about respect for St Patrick's Day - which is in fact about the celebration of (sometimes distant) Irish ancestry in another country - it's obvious that 'national identity' is far from straightforward

English national identity often appears enigmatic and elusive not helped by the
equivocal word 'English' in its synecdoche use for 'British'. a memorial to England's hegemony over the rest of the British Isles

As recently as 1994 John Major, then Prime Minister, could still startle the non-English inhabitants of the UK by declaring that 'this British Nation has a monarchy founded by the kings of Wessex over eleven hundred years ago'

George Orwell observed that while the so called races of Britain feel themselves to be different from one another even differences between the North and South of England were significant.

Krishan Kumar writes that
'For the English, despite all the cultivation of 'heritage' and the celebration of 'Olde England' the past is past; it has done its work
This does not mean that the English turn their back on the past, in the American manner ('history is bunk') Rather it is an assumption of a continuity so seamless that the past dissolves insensibly into the present'

Such a perception of continuity he argues
'has significant implications for the concept of national identity'
He quotes Herbert Butterfield
'Because we in England have maintained the threads between past and present we do not, like some younger states, have to go hunting for our own personalities'
Or to 'create a nationalism out of the broken fragments of tradition out of the ruins of a tragic past'