So, it’s almost St. George’s day …

I don’t honestly know if it’s nearly St. George’s day, but it must be because people have brought it up on the radio again: why don’t we English celebrate our “national day” like the Welsh and the Irish celebrate theirs? As a Muslim, of course, St. George and his day don’t mean much to me, but I suspect that the reason we don’t make much of it is because we don’t need to. The English have never considered their culture to be under threat, or cared much about it, unlike the Celts who have seen their languages, for example, all but disappear. (Welsh is hanging on, just, but Gaelic is now confined to the distant west of both Ireland and Scotland.)

St. George’s came up on the Jon Gaunt show last summer and it’s come up again this year, except that this year Eddie Nestor is sitting in because Gaunt is up in Scotland. Last year there were a number of incidents in Faliraki, a British-dominated holiday resort on the Greek island of Rhodes, involving drunkenness and indecent exposure. Someone suggested that if we were to have a big St. George’s day, it would turn into something like Faliraki!

But worse, it would cause a lot of ugly incidents and bring out the xenophobic worst in people. A couple of years ago I was working for one of the big parcel depots in Crawley, in Sussex, and I was given a truck to drive down to Lewes, a small town not far from Brighton which is on the south coast. It was Guy Fawkes’ night, which in most of the UK is an excuse to let off fireworks and make everyone wonder if we are being bombed or if it is just fireworks. In Lewes, however, they have an effigy-burning session, and I saw a “No Popery” banner which had been hung across the main street. No Popery (ie. no Catholics wanted round here!) is a slogan which accompanied riots in the 18th and 19th centuries. And worse, in a village not far from there, they burned an effigy of a gypsy caravan with the registration number P1KEY (ie. pikey, a derogatory word for gypsy). Which is why I don’t think we need another national day. It would just be an opportunity for people to get blind drunk, which they could do any other night of the week, but it could also be the night when non-English people have to keep indoors.