Have pride in your country (From The Northern Echo)

Have pride in your country

12:21pm Wednesday 11th January 2012 in Harry Mead By Harry Mead, Columnist

A QUICK glance along my bookshelves reveals the following titles: The Villages of England, English Country Lanes, England’s Thousand Best Churches, England: An Anthology and The Making of the English Bible.

Numerous others have the same common denominator, but these will do. England and the English form what today is known as a strong brand. Abroad, England is often synonymous with Britain or the UK. Even in these downbeat times, the word “England”

carries a poetic force, at least to some of the English. We might not now sing There’ll Always Be An England but we’re unlikely to substitute it with There’ll Always Be A Great Britain. Still less with There’ll Always Be A UK.

But will there always be an England? The way things are heading, probably not.

As we know to our cost, the Scots, the Welsh and the Northern Irish already have their own parliaments, by one name or another.

But they still send MPs to Westminster, who are able to vote on matters affecting only England. This should never have been allowed.

We, the English, should have stamped on it firmly at the outset. But we have meekly tolerated this abuse of democracy for years.

Now, we are on the receiving end of another humiliation, from the Cornish. Yorkshire folk might insist they live in God’s Own Country. But they accept it as being part of England. In Cornwall, however, a growing number of people regard the county as a separate country. They see it as a Celtic enclave, like Wales, whose rootstock population is untainted by Romans, Saxons, Vikings, Normans, you name them.

With a leader who sits on the county council, there’s a Cornish national party, Mebyon Kernow, which is campaigning for Scottishstyle devolution. Despite support from Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party, its chances of success might seem slim. But it has already scored a significant victory. Cornish is now an official identity option on the census form. It joins Welsh, Scottish and Irish as a sub-category under white British.

So, you can be Cornish, but not English.

Even in our own country we English don’t exist. Worst is that we appear to have lost the fighting spirit to do anything about it. “Cry God for Harry, England and St George.” Not these days.

MEANWHILE, there is the EU. Alarmed about binge drinking, especially among children, now being admitted to hospital with alcohol-related problems at the rate of 1,000 a month, David Cameron is reported to want to impose a minimum price on drink. But officials warn that this could fall foul of EU law.

Is this not a prime example of the EU pushing its nose in where there’s no need?

What matters it to other countries whether or not we are content for our young people to drink themselves into early graves?

THE things they say. For a reason that doesn’t matter, but has nothing to do with Meryl Streep’s Iron Lady, my youngest daughter found herself explaining Margaret Thatcher to her young son, Ned. “She was our first lady Prime Minister,” she began, then added the single fact perhaps most relevant to a seven-year-old: “She stopped children having school milk, so people called her “Margaret Thatcher, Milk Snatcher.”

Ned asked: “Did she just go into the school and take it?”