What does a true Brit feel when we commemorate the war or fly the St George flag? Depends on the Brit

The Guardian

a day ago

Are we, to echo Keir Starmer's now infamous phrase, 'an island of strangers'? No. But there is a deep cultural divide in this country, a cultural dissonance we don't discuss but should. Witness the row about the Wythall Flaggers, the group that has erected numerous St George's flags in the Worcestershire village to parade its patriotism. What does it mean? Is it laudable patriotism or a nod to the hard-right, anti-migrant politics that is fast becoming mainstream? Is it inclusive or exclusive? 'We have members of the community of all ethnicities and religions stopping by and praising what we are doing so please don't call this racist,' say the organisers.
Maybe that is so, but certainly different people will look at those flags and take different meanings from them, feel different emotions. That's pretty much our island story now. We are the same, but we're different.
The VJ commemoration last week, led by King Charles, spoke to that. There was all the pomp and circumstance you might expect, but a few hours before Britain and others marked the victory over Japan at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire, there was, in Delhi's historic Red Fort complex – and much noted in British/Indian households – a very different celebration to mark India's 78th birthday as a free nation.
There was no mention of the victory over Japan, or the tremendous part played by Indian soldiers in securing it. Instead, one of the heroes honoured was Subhas Chandra Bose (no relation), who created the Indian National Army (INA) from Indian soldiers taken prisoner by Japan, and fought against the British when Japan invaded northeast India in 1944.
The INA achieved little on the battlefield, but Indians see the INA as comparable with the American and Irish struggle to secure freedom from British rule. When the British court-martialled three of Bose's officers after the war for forswearing their original allegiance and 'waging war against His Majesty the King Emperor', Indians – far from turning against them, and accepting the British depiction of them as 'Japanese-inspired fifth columnists' – turned on the British. Their defence described them as patriots and converted the court martial into a Britain versus India battle. Even Gandhi, the great champion of non-violence, eulogised Bose, describing how 'the hypnotism of the INA has cast its spell upon us … His patriotism is second to none'.
Indians can be accused of ignoring the truth that Japan behaved with unprecedented cruelty, but many here can and will argue that Britain is also doctoring history when it claims, as during Friday's celebration, that the war against Japan was a war for freedom. No mention there that Japan was attacking Britain's Asian colonies and Britain had no intention of giving these Asians freedom.
There's also dissonance as we discuss immigration. The story now is that while Europe has always welcomed migration, it cannot cope with such vast numbers of uninvited guests. But that, too, raises eyebrows among various diaspora who call Britain home.
That immigrants are coming in large numbers from lands this country has no connection with cannot be denied. But this picture of Europe traditionally welcoming migrants distorts the truth: while Europe has coped with internal migration from other European countries, and some former colonies, it has largely been a people-exporting continent.
As the historian Alfred Crosby put it: 'European migrants and their descendants are all over the place.' While they mostly live in their own continent, Europeans 'have leapfrogged around the globe'. Migration has long gone both ways.
We in the various diasporas know this. Between 1820 and 1930, more than 50 million Europeans leapfrogged so successfully from their continent that they created what Crosby calls Neo-Europes, 'lands thousands of kilometres from Europe and from each other'. At the beginning of the 19th century, these lands were almost wholly non-white, but by the end the great majority of people were Europeans. In 1800, North America had fewer than 5 million white people, southern South America fewer than half a million, Australia had 10,000 and New Zealand was still a Māori country. As a result of the wave of European migration in the next century, Crosby wrote, Australia's population was almost all European in origin and that of New Zealand about nine-tenths European. We hear the debate about migration and raise an eyebrow. We know the context.
In April 1990, the late Norman Tebbit waded into this very British dissonance with his cultural test, the 'Tebbit test', suggesting that immigrants who support their native countries rather than England in cricket are not significantly integrated into the UK.
But that was always nonsense. We are one nation, but, apart from on very rare occasions, there are no UK cricket, football or rugby teams. The English don't support Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, and their respective fans largely reciprocate. Many a Scot has been known to temporarily support whomever might humiliate England. Yet they all belong. In rugby and cricket there is one Irish team, with the Northern Irish playing alongside their southern neighbours.
So we are not an island of strangers, but neither are we close to, or even seeking, cultural homogeneity. There are points of view and differing perceptions shaped by varying experiences and different shades of history, and frankly it's all a bit of a hodgepodge. But then, families are like that. People will hold patriotic ceremonies, and fly patriotic flags, but all of it will always invite numerous interpretations, as does the idea of patriotism. You can worry about that if you like, but I think it's all quite healthy.
Mihir Bose is the author of Thank You Mr Crombie Lessons in Guilt and Gratitude to the British.