St George's Day

St. George's Day has been and gone. I hope everyone enjoyed themselves: for my part, I celebrated by eating some lovely crumpets. I would've had a cup of tea in the morning too, but it was a tad too warm. Had some dandelion and burdock instead.

With the day came the usual debates about why it isn't as widely celebrated as the national days of Scotland, Wales or Ireland. BBC local radio had a number of vox pop interviews with people who mostly seemed to agree that St. George's Day should be bigger.

Back in 2004 Pub landlord Tony Bennett, who runs the Otter in Drayton, campaigned to have his opening time extended for St. George's Day. Amongst those who joined Bennett were James Tumbridge, the Conservative candidate for Norwich North in 2001, and Julia Howman, whom I have written about before.

I believe that this was before Howman became involved with the BNP (she stood as a candidate for the English Democrats in the European parliamentary elections of that year) and so I certainly do not mean to imply that Bennett, Tumbridge or anyone else involved in the campaign shared her far-right views.

James Tumbridge, Julia Howman and other St. George's Day campaigners in 2004.

One wonders what Howman would make of the thoughts on St. George's Day expressed by fellow English nationalist David Starkey during an edition of Question Time:

If we decide to go down this route of an English national day it will mean we have become a feeble little country, just like the Scots and the Welsh and the Irish. Once upon a time, England was a great country. Remember: we're distinguished by the fact that we don't have national dress. We don't make a great fact about Shakespeare, like the Scots do about that deeply boring, provincial poet Burns and we don't have national music like the awful bagpipe.

What the Scots and the Welsh are, are typical small nations with a romantic nineteenth century-style nationalism. Do you want English national dress? There was a very serious proposal for it in the late eighteenth century - it would involve us turning up at Merrifield wearing Van Dyke costume, in other words little velvet knickerbockers and little lace collars... do you just want to be a little country, rather than the great one which we once were?