0038 Why I'M Ashamed Of Being British

It was so easy being a British child in the 1930s: everything was – or so it seems to memory’s selective mind - so ordered: how old was I, when I stopped raising my school cap (‘Don’t just touch it, Michael; lift it! ’) to, not just staff at school, but anyone to whom my parents talked or who had talked (‘My, hasn’t he grown! ’ as if this was some personal achievement) to me, or more likely, over my head, as I shifted from foot to foot, trapped in a grown-up world of politenesses; which however my mother loved and rightly as one now raised in her station from being polite to customers in grandma’s terrace front-window shop where homemade cooking was the income now that the cotton dust had got to grandpa's lungs; but now the wife of a man retired at thirty-eight, stone-deaf… The history books at school were slender – since we’d won every war – or if some foreigners thought we hadn’t, it had all the same brought out great courage, incredible bravery which was a lesson to us all, fortitude and leadership and deeds ‘ surpassing the call of duty’. We’d even won wars in places which technically weren’t ours, called The Empire; over which we ruled because we did it better than the natives; because we were born to rule.. And we were taught by haunted heroes who’d fought in the war to end all wars – the PT instructor had a face like camouflage, white, greenish, brown and red, where he’d been mustard-gassed; our heroes were still close to us, although they didn’t talk about it much. That was another lesson in how to be British. Geography was happy natives (only the National Geographic Magazine photographed their tits, and then only if brown) moving export crops, balancing trade and the occasional water-pot – which was always full. And the sun never set on those red bits on the map which were the British Empire… How easy it was to be proud of being British, and to take for granted that gift of birth, our birthright which, unearned, we would seek to earn anew by living up to it.. But then, haven't all of us, by some trick of space-time unexplained by Einstein, lived, as a child, in better times – or at least, if any didn’t, we never heard of them; or if we did, it was because the missionaries were putting all that right, if we just simply put a penny or two in their box, and here’s a flag to pin on your jacket like some painless medal.. * * * So, no more nostalgic trips now down that memory lane; let’s start from now and work backwards on why I’m currently ashamed, after all these golden years, to be British; and despite all that there is left of those things of magnificence – fair play, free speech, freedom itself, not yet quite worn away I’m deeply ashamed this week that three British subjects, despite Habeas Corpus, Magna Carta, and the rule of law, were handed over – and in irons – without due process of laws promptly promulgated by reason and humanity; and if they did indeed steal a million each on paper yet never charged here, where it occurred, we can guess that it’s because such unearned money is the game of all financial deals, in City circles, as in other countries… I’m deeply ashamed as of last year, that after a history of ‘responding to a request’ and just defence of the oppressed, we made a pre-emptive strike in the oily name of exporting democracy while our governments at home confuse democracy with ‘spin’; we are the spun in the woven lies of history. We have dirtied the name of democracy. I’m deeply ashamed, as of this decade, that we have found no way to enable our uncontrolled immigrant population to feel as proud of being British as are Americans of being American; ashamed that politicians put party over conscience; ashamed that – yes, young and old alike -, we have lost respect for others both in action or the lack of it; that ‘neighbour’ is now a mere geographical location; that we apologise for or demean our religious sense in a world where those we fight are more religious than are we; and last of all, I’m ashamed that one day soon we may become ashamed of being British. (Please read Tara McHale's poem on the same theme, it's a group effort - or add your own!))