Saint George

St. George by Raphael

I grew up in a little town in a little country. Nothing ever happened in Salisbury whilst I was a child and it never appeared on the local news, let alone the national headlines. It had no minor football team to stage an improbable fairy-tale cup run. It never featured in TV dramas. Neither Antiques Roadshow nor Songs of Praise ever seemed to call. In short I had no way to tell if the rest of the country knew we existed at all. It might even have been that we didn't exist, and just received programming from a real world that carried on happily without us. Finally, when I was twelve or thirteen, a boy in my class won a Blue Peter badge. He went to London, to BBC Television Centre, and we could actually see him on the screen. Here at last was corroboration: I did live in the same dimension as all those other places on the television. Salisbury was real after all.

But even to this day I am completely thrown when I meet people who have heard of Salisbury. And if they say that they've been there it's all I can do not to scoff out loud, as if they're claiming to have somehow inveigled their way through the magic forcefield that shields us from the mortal realm.

All of which is a silly way of raising two ideas: 1) that one's home always looks different from the outside; 2) that we don't give any thought to what it looks like from the outside until we are forced to. Realisation can dawn in an instant or take years to seep in. And it can happen to a species as easily as it can to an individual, as the Apollo 8 mission proved in 1968 (left).

I've been looking at England from the outside now for many years - in fact, rather like a NASA probe, I seem to be moving further away - and an exterior picture has been gradually forming, as if the data were being beamed in from the depths of space, pixel by pixel.

But alongside the slow drip-feed of first Welsh and then American views on England, there have been sudden instances of insight. I've mentioned living in Wales before, but I must reiterate that I barely considered myself English before I moved there: I was British, of course, as was - I thought - everyone else. This was a long time ago - before Devolution - but I was left in no doubt, even by loving friends, that I was English and different, that in the past I had been the oppressor and that even in the present, on match day at least, I was still the enemy.

The English have no cultural memory of being oppressed. In a pinch, we might huff about the Norman Yoke but that is merely to clutch at the flimsiest of straws. And if ever we do wish to empathise with our downtrodden Saxon forebears, there's no way we'd be willing to give up all that we gained from the Conquest. No, we've never been oppressed but we still relish the way that the Plantagenet kings laid about them with sword and fire, crushing Welsh, Scots, Irish, French and even Saracens. It is these kings that we emulate when we send out our footballers wearing the three lions of Richard I; and when we fly the flag of St. George it is because of Edward III, who venerated courtly ideas of chivalry whilst he was cementing an English empire.

In England if we do admit to any of this then we are aren't prepared to see ourselves as the villains of the piece. We see Medieval battles, bashing the Scots or Welsh, as a bit of fun, like beating them at rugby perhaps. 'And look, they still have their own languages, don't they?' we might say, as if this mitigated against the centuries when children would be beaten, or worse, for letting slip a word of their mother tongue. The English were never required to face up to what we had done - there were never any recriminations. As Wales, Ireland and even Scotland were absorbed into this new United Kingdom of Britain, past grievances were swept under the carpet as we set about being beastly to the rest of the world.

It's an important distinction because I think we are much more aware of, upset by, and feel more guilty about what the British Empire did. The implications are still unwinding, all around the world, and we are involved in an ongoing series of complicated calculations, trying to see if our legacy can't be worked to be morally neutral. Yes, slavery, we think: terrible. But on the other hand, you know, Wilberforce and all that! We cling to the idea that we ended slavery thirty years before the USA because it makes us feel superior and less racist. Yes, India, we hmmm. Some bad things happened, but look we left peacefully and India's now a burgeoning superpower, the largest democracy in the world! Okay, we invented concentration camps, but we're not as bad as the Nazis!

The Second World War is seen as a huge make-weight when we're trying to get the scales to balance. Whatever terrible evil things we did, we think, the war against Nazism was a fire that scourged us of our empire and left Britain diminished but redeemed. As an historical narrative it is neat and tidy, but it is something we tell ourselves. I don't think it's how we're viewed in Kenya, or India, or America.

The view from the US is naturally shaped by the War of Independence. Britain, and especially England, is seen as a rump. Quaint, sure, but redundant. And it doesn't help that there's so much confusion about what exactly constitutes the UK, Great Britain, England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Northern Ireland or the British Isles. In terms of political power, 'English' and 'England' are used for everything. As a result, 'English' and 'British' are used pretty much synonymously: to be English is to be British, and vice versa.

But culturally, as soon as one identifies oneself as Irish or Scottish, or even Welsh, one is distinct, not English and therefore not British. Tartan, Loch Ness and Braveheart are not British, they are Scottish. Tom Jones and male voice choirs are Welsh. St. Patrick despite being Romano-British and growing up in Wales, is the most Irishy thing ever.

I'm not complaining. Celtic Britain has its own distinct flavour and has excelled at marketing itself and its culture to the outside world. The English, happy to wave the Union Flag, have never felt the need to cultivate their own individual character.

We need to think about how we're seen from the outside. Even more so because of the looming possibility of Scottish independence. If it were to happen, the divorce would be messy and protracted; everything we share would be carved up over many years. But one thing England would certainly retain is the negative association with British imperialism. As far as the rest of the world would be concerned, Scotland would be left floaty-light, new and shiny and free from centuries of subjugation. And England, that old bully, would be merely more shrivelled, more decrepit, with its blood red cross and its fondness for chain mail armour.

This has turned in to a long rant but, as I say, we need to start thinking about how we're seen from the outside. Last week I read this excellent article by Greg Jenner - it passionately puts the case that St. George is a pretty useless rallying figure for a modern England. I think it is the case that our Englishness, because of Britain, because of empire, has long been a internal matter, something that we only thought about in terms of looking inwards. That won't do.

Brilliantly, St. Patrick's Day has been turned into a rolling global party. It may be, for most people, nothing more than an excuse for a beer but it is undeniably a world-wide phenomenon, a massive celebration and a big win for Irishness. In fact, its promotion has been a deliberate policy of the Irish government for twenty years with (thanks Wikipedia) four specific aims:

• To offer a national festival that ranks amongst all of the greatest celebration in the world
• To create energy and excitement throughout Ireland via innovation, creativity, grassroots involvement, and marketing activity
• To provide the opportunity and motivation for people of Irish descent (and those who sometimes wish they were Irish) to attend and join in the imaginative and expressive celebrations
• To project, internationally, an accurate image of Ireland as a creative, professional and sophisticated country with wide appeal.

I love that, especially 'those who sometimes wish they were Irish'. As an Englishman I look at those words with envy - who would ever aspire to being English? For a start, we're never going to be able to compete with the Irish when it comes to getting the world drunk with us. But if we possibly could, we should take those aims and try to emulate them. After all, we must have something special, something uniquely English, that the world would be happy to cherish with us? And of course, we do. As Mr Jenner and a great many other people have pointed out through the years, we have Shakespeare.

We needn't do much more than rename St. George's Day, (April 23rd, non-English people) as Shakepeare's Birthday. It's so convenient! (No, there's no evidence that he was actually born on that day but it is very likely and we are a lot less fussy about the 'Englishness' of a Palestinian Christian martyr who we currently share with Georgia, Portugal and host of other places.) But we can keep the flag, sure, why not. George can stay patron saint if you like because that's entirely meaningless anyway. But we should start celebrating Shakespeare on April 23rd. It's distinct. It's marketable. His works are glorious and rich and almost endlessly open to interpretation and exploration. Funny, sad, exciting; English history or universal human drama - it's all there. And best of all, it wouldn't just be happening on village greens and in Norman churches. It could be everywhere; English is spoken by over a billion people, more than any other language. Wheel out the ambassadors and the High Commissioners! Unleash the heralds and their fanfares! Put on a show and celebrate our most significant contribution to world culture.

If nothing else it would be chance to future-proof England. Scotland might go its own way. Anglicanism and monarchy, which we have set such store by for so long, might not last. Symbols lose their usefulness or become sullied. Too often English patriotism is an ugly, intolerant beast, mired in ignorance and the born from the fear that we are no longer the power we once were. To hell with that. Shakespeare offers us an England for all ages, for all the world, and something to look back at fondly, proudly, when we are far from home.