'For England and St George'

 

 

 

Thoughts on St. George’s Day –Who are the English? - Part 1

 

With the offer this week by the Government of a Referendum on the New European Constitution within the next twelve months, agreed only days from the celebration of our patron saint of England it is timely to illustrate below an article by the author Linda Proud which appeared over ten years ago in This England and which with its patriotic and potent reminder of what it means to be English.

 

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Who are the English?

 

Although St. George’s Day is one that the English respect, it is hardly comparable to the national day celebrations as celebrated in most other countries.  April 23^rd is marked with much fervour by the English abroad than by those at home, for it is still far from being regarded as a national holiday here.

 

We English do not like parading our nationality. We do not plaster our cars with stickers saying, “I love England”. Being English constitutes many things, and one of them is a rather shy identification with the land of our birth.

 

Apart from anything else, we have been confused by various historical Acts of Union, which have created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.  For instance, do we consider ourselves to be foremost British, or English?

 

Britishness is, at the moment, a largely artificial construction.  It is something we aspire to. If we ever find full cultural union with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, but nothing is happening at the moment [Winter-2001] to promote such unity. British is what we will be when we have a British football or cricket team.  For now, what we need to understand is that we are English:

 

“Despite of all temptations to belong to other nations, he is an Englishman”.

 

So said Gilbert and Sullivan in one of their many moments of great perceptiveness. Despite, or perhaps because of the British Empire, we English appear to be ashamed of ourselves.  We go abroad, we revel in the cultural differences to be found in other countries, we adopt exotic foods, plants and words. We envy national uniqueness of other nations, and then come home to continue taking our own for granted!  We assume that our English life is the standard, a kind of mean line, compared to which all other nations seem either more colourful and romantic, or more dreary and oppressed.

 

To see ourselves for what we are, we need either to spend a long time abroad or, failing that, to turn an objective eye upon ourselves. This is difficult to do but, once achieved, the opening view is one of wonder.

 

To know ourselves, we can use the landscape as a mirror.  Even a short tour of the country will reveal several special qualities. The overriding one is gentleness.  A climate without extremes has created a land a people, similarly moderate.  There are no deserts in England. Mountains are few, the wilderness small. What we have instead is a rolling land of gentle changes complemented by weather, which often alters with the hour and, though it can be harsh, is rarely fatal.

 

The villages and towns have their roots in modesty rather than flamboyance.  They are the result of a practical people, a people who want to work and who require practical accommodation.  The Anglo-Saxons were farmers and they eschewed the cities already founded in Britain by the Romans.

 

City –life arrived late in England. It came with the industrial revolution – and even today most people live in a city out of necessity rather than desire. To be in a place such as London where there are no horizons and the passage of one season into another is blurred, can seem like enforced captivity out of necessity rather than desire.

 

To be in a place such as London where there are no horizons and the passage of one season into another is blurred, can seem like enforced captivity.  It comes as little surprise, then to learn that the first inhabitants of the first towns, which were established by King Alfred the Great, had to be persuaded to live in them as a matter of duty.

 

The quality, which the English prize most, is freedom.  It has taken a thousand years to achieve those freedoms for which the rest of the world envies us. 

 

Freedom is the product of good law, and the Common Law of England is founded on three assumptions: that man is essentially good, that all men are equal under the law, and that he who does not transgress the law is free.

 

This has led to such legal requirements, or idiosyncrasies, as the weight of evidence having to be supplied by the prosecution rather than the defence.

 

Throughout our history, a line of courageous judges have braved great danger by re-stating a fundamental principle of English Law, which is that God and the law are above the king.

 

Having our rulers answerable to the same law as the ruled has kept England free from oppression.

 

Under English law, and as subjects of the Queen, everyone in England is considered equal.  Obviously there are serious in equalities in the matters of wealth and property, but in terms of the freedom of the individual, all are the same.

 

This is not true in other countries, notably republics that have a concept of citizenship and, as a natural corollary, the concept of the “non-citizen”.

 

England has always loved justice, even when it has seemed most absent in our history.

 

 For justice to reign,

 

1) We need good judges,

 

2) We need juries,

 

3) We need a judiciary independent of the government of the day

 

These things are now under threat.

 

Firstly,

 

 Parliament is not keen on the independence of judges and too often puts itself above the law.

 

Secondly,

 

 By joining the European Union we have put our law below that of the Roman system, a system which the wise advisers of Henry 11  rejected in the 12^th century!

 

While there may be perverse judgements in our own courts, and a semblance of justice on offer from European courts, we are in danger of being seduced into this other system.

 

In fact we should be pulling back hard, for the Roman system is vulnerable to tyranny, whilst our own acts as bulwark against it.

 

In all the multitude of statute, legislation and directives pouring out of Brussels reason seems hardly to figure. This is the law of bureaucrats and committees, not of principle.

 

End of Part 1

Click Here to read Part 2