Who needs a St. George’s day?
Today was St Patrick’s Day, which means lots of Irish flags about, Irish shows in both Trafalgar and Leicester Squares, the sound of fiddles playing Irish dance tunes, and everything else stereotypically Irish. I managed to avoid most of it, going into London about 1:30pm after visiting my Nan and Grandad in Dulwich. I didn’t hit the festivities until the tail end, seeing an empty stage in Leicester Square, and arrived in Trafalgar Square to hear the sound of a jig (or a reel, I don’t quite know the difference) and a Riverdance-style performance, which was followed by a guy called Brian Kennedy singing a song called The Fields of Athenry.
Now, this song is all about a guy who got transported to Australia after being convicted of stealing some English lord’s corn during the Irish famine. (You can read the lyrics here.) This spectacle reminded me of something my nan had said this morning, which is a sentiment I hear expressed a lot now: why don’t we have a St. George’s Day? Well, the simple reason is that there has never been a demand for one. It’s a recent phenomenon of “me-too” complaining: they have their saints’ days, why can’t we have ours?
But the English don’t seem to have a distinctive national identity: a lot of English call themselves British, as if England was really incomplete without Scotland and Wales. We don’t have an English parliament for pretty much the same reason, resulting in the anomaly known as the “Midlothian question” after the MP who raised it as an objection to the Scottish Parliament, who represented the Scottish seat of Midlothian: that of Scottish MPs sitting in the Westminster parliament voting on matters which do not affect Scotland because in Scotland they are the business of the Scottish parliament – while English MPs have no similar authority in Scotland.
And the fact that an Irish singer can entertain a crowd in Trafalgar Square with The Fields of Athenry, a plainly anti-British song (albeit with some right; it’s a known fact that the British could have prevented the devastation caused by the “famine” and did not), is a clear example of this sort of confidence. I wouldn’t be surprised if I were the first person to comment on this. We don’t feel our culture under threat, and those for whom English culture means folk music, as Irish culture seems to at Irish culture events like this, flags, St George and military pomp don’t mean much at all.
Actually, there’s another good reason not to make a big thing of St. George’s Day, which is that it would be just another excuse for people to get drunk and make a big nuisance of themselves: as one caller onto a London phone-in show said, it would turn into something like Faliraki (a Greek resort famous for its drunken British holidaymakers). When English identity is raised in such contexts, it often has ugly results, as anyone who’s been around English football fans in bars after any major international match, particularly (but not only) a lost match, could testify. There are quite a number of examples of “traditional” bigotry still on display in this country, one example being the Guy Fawkes celebrations that go on in some small towns, notably including Lewes in Sussex. When delivering goods there a few years ago, I recall being shocked at the “No Popery” banners strung from the shops – a slogan beloved today of loyalist bigots in Northern Ireland and of anti-Catholic rioters in the 18th and 19th centuries. I heard some local dignitary defend that on the radio by saying it referred to the repressive policies of one particular pope – and that some of these banners were hung by Catholics! So that’s all right then.
Yes, I know I’ve written here before about St George’s Day and that I’m going over a lot of old ground. The difference between St. George’s Day and St. Patrick’s Day is that the latter is an institution of the Irish abroad. The English in London don’t need a special day to get together because … well, we already are, and unlike the Irish in particular, we don’t have a memory of repression or persecution. We don’t do St. George here because we don’t need to – and we should be glad of this, in my opinion.
