Tonight:
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Margaret Hodge berates the Last Night of the Proms for being exclusive. She is right. The Proms exclude the majority of the English who have no time for classical music.
But that's not her complaint. Rather she thinks that waving flags while singing Land of Hope and Glory makes "people from different backgrounds" uneasy. In a sentence, she revealed how Labour could lose the next election.
Put bluntly, you can't hate your country and expect your country to love you, as every other Left in the developed world knows.
French socialists sing the Marseillaise. The supporters of Barack Obama carry the Stars and Stripes. They leave it to racists to say that immigrants cannot become fully American or French. Only in England does the middle-class Left play with separatism.
A few years ago Jack Straw spoke of his country with absolute loathing. "The English were potentially very aggressive, very violent. We have used this propensity to violence to subjugate Ireland, Wales and Scotland. Then we used it in Europe and the empire."
Leave aside the rewriting of history - no people pocketed as much of the loot of empire as the Scots - and consider the political implications of dismissing the English as rapacious brutes.
Inevitably, you will tell immigrants that there is no point in integrating into such a debased nation. True to form, Straw turned his back on liberal British Muslims and worked tirelessly in the Home and Foreign offices to promote the reactionary clerics of Jamaat-i-Islami and the Muslim Brotherhood as the authentic voices of British Islam.
In her speech this week, a rueful Hodge said that "culture can often be a source of intense difficulty and conflict, as the play Behtzi demonstrated".
Indeed it did, when a mob of angry men closed Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti's play. A Left that knew that hope and glory in its country's traditions as well as shame would have told the protesters that England believed in the rule of law, freedom of speech and the right of women to make themselves heard.
Labour chose to take the side of old Sikh men as they howled down a young Sikh woman.
Despite the best efforts of Billy Bragg, the Left is not building a progressive patriotism as English national feeling grows in response to Scottish devolution and the demands of the European Union. Fatally, it is allowing patriotism to remain the preserve of the Right. The failure did not matter once because only fuddy-duddies in Tunbridge Wells were meant to feel a love of country. Now the Right has in David Cameron a leader who is both unquestionably modern and easy in his English skin.
I think Gordon Brown understands the danger, but unless the wider Left wakes up, when English patriotism makes itself heard, it will speak with a conservative voice.
Reader views (2)
Being of the left, I appreciate Nick Cohen's efforts to expose the disastrous and bizarre path the left, particularly the 'radical left' has trod in recent times-so 'left wing' it has actually become right wing and anti-enlightenment, anti-women and pro religious fundamentalism on the grounds that if its from a minority group it's not just okay, but positively romantically exotic, with accusations of racism accompanying any assertion of the majority's identity.
- Rae, Wellington, NZ, 12/03/2008 06:28
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Records show that everything Hodge says or does has been a disaster.
This inept and stupid person must go.
- Mark Armstrong, london. uk, 05/03/2008 14:58
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