Comment: A cause for celebration

10:44am Wednesday 23rd April 2008

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Today is St George's Day which marks the national saint of England. It also happens to be the day when William Shakespeare, our greatest poet and playwright, was born and died.

In most countries of the world that would be cause for celebration.

You have only to look at what Americans do on their Independence Day to see that is so.

Closer to home, the French make a great song and dance, complete with deafening fireworks, on Bastille Day.

Yet most people will not be celebrating England today or even recognise that it has any significance.

I remember some years ago when the George pub in Portslade applied to magistrates to stay open late on April 23 for a modest festival.

The JPs refused on the grounds that it was not a special occasion.

Yet other parts of these islands celebrate their national days with fun and fervour. If you are anywhere near an Irishman, no matter how far away he is from home, you will know all about St Patrick's Day.

There are some people who think we should do more to mark this day. They have even suggested making it into a public holiday.

One trouble with that is that it would come at a time of year when we are already overburdened with such days off, what with Easter, May Day and the Spring Bank Holiday all occurring within a couple of months of each other.

Another is that it could exacerbate national divisions at a time when Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, is doing his best to promote Britishness.

Others believe that if there is to be a patriotic public holiday it should be in the autumn.

John Blackman, a former Tory Mayor of Brighton and a great naval man, has always marked Trafalgar Day in October by raising the Union Flag at his home in Saltdean. That would be a much better day for celebration.

Mr Blackman is among a minority in being unashamedly proud of the national flag. Most of us would not even notice if it were flown upside down, as it all too often is.

The trouble with the Union Flag, or for that matter the cross of St George, is that it has become associated with extremism and xenophobia.

Because most Britons, and particularly those in England, have been reticent about displaying the flag it has been hijacked by the political far right - first the National Front and now the British National Party.

The flag of St George is only widely flown on those rare occasions when the English national football team does well in Europe or in the World Cup and then it is too often associated with wild yobbery.

So should we do anything at all to mark St George's Day rather than let it wither away? I believe we should.

What worries me, and I suspect many others, is that our national character and landscape is slowly being eroded.

I am not one of those who think everything was better in the Fifties. There was poverty, snobbery and ill health which thankfully have largely been abolished.

But there was also a very real sense of national and local pride. If blindfolded and suddenly released at that time, you could instantly tell that you were in England.

It would not have taken long before you also realised from the accents of the people and the local architecture which part of England you had entered.

Now much of that has gone, along with the smoke of the Fifties.

Approach a housing estate, such as those which have been shamefully attached to Henfield, and there is nothing to distinguish it from similar developments in Harrogate.

The Government is insisting on cramming thousands more homes into Sussex and other parts of the South East. In most cases, nothing has been done to give any hint of local identity.

So many people are coming to live in Sussex from London, other parts of England or even abroad that it could be anywhere.

You hardly ever hear a proper Sussex accent any more or, for that matter, anyone speaking in the South in rustic tones. And when was the last time you heard any Sussex dialect being spoken?

Even in counties with more recognisable characteristics such as Yorkshire and Cornwall, local accents and language are melting away.

Walk into the Arndale Centre in Eastbourne and most of the shops there will be replicated in Eastleigh.

Specialist shops are closing all over the country as they are unable to compete with Tesco, Sainsbury and Asda.

Three pubs are closing in England every day. Half the villages in this country now do not have an inn. Many back-street boozers, which have been in towns like Brighton for more than a century, have also called time.

On Easter Monday I went into a small Yorkshire pub up on the moors. There was just one other customer.

I asked the landlord, whose family has owned the pub since 1823, how many regulars he had. "Five,"

he replied. "But four of them are dead."

Independent breweries are dying fast. In Sussex there is only one of any size, the estimable Harvey's of Lewes. Other great names such as Tamplin's of Brighton have long since gone.

Even the appearance of the countryside is changing. Historic hedgerows, which have been such a distinctive part of England for so long, have been grubbed up, so that parts of East Anglia are like small prairies.

Alien crops like oilseed rape have been planted, the vivid yellow contrasting harshly with the soft spring green of Sussex leaves.

It is perhaps because we are so reticent about our patriotism that this has been allowed to happen.

George Orwell said England was the only great country where intellectuals were ashamed of their own nationality.

Hilaire Belloc, that great adopted son of Sussex, was even in Edwardian days worried about the erosion of village inn life.

Our reluctance to defend the English way of life has led it to be eroded, first by corporate greed and secondly by coarse chavs who have no appreciation of what it means.

We need to defend local and national identify and there are welcome signs this is already happening.

The East Sussex county town of Lewes already has the highest proportion of local shops in the country.

The houseboat owners of Shoreham have formed a viable self-help community which provides an alternative way of life and a local attraction.

Local food companies such as Taj, Bill's and Infinity in Brighton and elsewhere are not only surviving but thriving.

Brighton is booming because people flock to the unorthodox shops in the Lanes or soak up the bohemian atmosphere of the North Laine rather than go to some soulless out-of-town shopping mart.

I went to Whitstable in Kent last week to see one of my brothers who was celebrating the fact that the locals had beaten off an attempt to sanitise and redevelop the sprawling, slightly shabby but undeniably atmospheric harbour.

St George's Day could become an annual rally dedicated to protecting the understated, charming, extremely fragile English way of life.

It could be celebrated modesty in those pubs still remaining, even if extra time is not granted by JPs for St George and the flagon.

Do you agree with Adam?