Matthew Collins, author of Hate: My Life In The British Far Right, has struggled with the concept of Britishness, but successes in the Olympics are something we can all share
For the last year or so I’ve been having severe doubts about the whole “British” thing. It seemed that every time I saw the British flag some idiot was soiling it with racism or using it to beat another country around the head with.
Then there are my Scottish and Welsh friends. Somehow of the impression that they were more culturally superior in some way to the poor old English and wanting to be dissolved of any of the baggage that came with being British too. They rightfully get to sing national anthems that are about their countries and their aspirations and national pride while poor old England is lumbered with one about the Queen and not about those ‘dark Satanic Mills’, holy lambs and chariots of fire that Blake had eulogised in Jerusalem.
Was it any wonder the Welsh and the Scots did not want to share a national flag with us? Having seemingly forever soiled the Union flag (or “Butcher’s apron” as some call it,) watching England’s flag getting lumbered with the same old moronic behaviour needed to be addressed. Like the British, the English are not a race. That’s an argument the racists hate. But it’s true. Our football team has, for instance, roots in many different continents and our patron saint was born in the Lebanon. To quote Billy Bragg, those three lions on our football shirts ‘never sprung from England’s dirt’.
For me, the plight of England and Englishness has been frightfully more important than trying to cobble Britain together. Britain was, in the words of Billy Bragg, to whom Blake passed that non-sleeping sword, little more than an ‘economic union’, that doesn’t ‘even have a patron saint’. Having an Irish father, that made sense to me. England is a two flag country, after all.
So when the Olympics arrived I had to wonder how I would fair. There were aspects of the Olympics that are quite unpleasant. Empty, overpriced seats and corporatism that was not always ethical. Then there were the accusations that to support Britain was not ethical. The doomsday internet brigade was saying that to support Britain was supporting imperialism etc, etc. The same nonsense they trot out when England play football funnily enough.
I don’t judge my next door neighbour on the imperialist misdeeds of our ancestors, but more on what it is they are doing today to ensure a better and brighter future for tomorrow. So when those medals started coming in I realised that I shared something quite extraordinary with a lot of different people. Not ‘Christian values’ as David Cameron once ascribed them, but modern British values.
I didn’t even know who Jessica Ennis was until last Friday. I’d seen her face a million times before and grimaced. But then a mate of mine started getting very excited that she was from Sheffield and a “Blade”, and then questions about whether Mo Farrah would be fasting became quite interesting too. I had not given a toss about old “Mutton Chops” during his ride through France, but the minute he was going for gold medal last Wednesday, I became an expert on cycling. He did fine, by the way.
But on Saturday and Sunday, it was all about Ennis, Farrah, Greg Rutherford and Andrew Murray. Rutherford’s great grandfather is an Arsenal football club legend. You can’t get more English than that, apparently. And he has ginger hair, which means he may well have a little bit of Celt in him. Ennis is the “Blade” who defied the Daily Mail by being mixed race and coming from a stable, happy and supportive home like hundreds of thousands of other people.
Farrah is the Muslim “blow-in”, who came to this country and raced with all of his heart to give Britain its first gold medal in the 10,000 metres, and judging by the emotion in the BBC commentary box, a very popular gold medal it was. And when asked if he wanted to share it with another country, he nailed every racist in Britain by saying ‘this is my country’. That’s something no racist can bring themselves to say.