England’s problem with being English

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/may/13/england-problem-with-being-english

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One of those English eccentricities, namely the one addressed by Paul Mason (I do not want to be English – and any attempt to create an English identity will fail, 11 May), has always puzzled me. What is it about the leftwing intelligentsia’s problem with being English? If I understand Paul correctly, it seems to boil down to class-induced resentment manifesting itself as a rejection of a singular English character. But it is immediately apparent to a foreigner who enters this country that the English are “different”, just like the Japanese or the Chinese or the French or the Turks are different. The English are not the only people on earth who have created a unique culture without somehow managing to have an identity. I don’t think there needs to be an attempt “to create” an identity – there already is a very strong English identity. George Orwell, in his essay England Your England, highlights the fact that the roots of this anti-English leftwing sentiment are nothing new. According to Orwell: “England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In leftwing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman.” The use of the English language alone, even if it includes the translations of Orhan Pamuk, does not make an identity.Bulent AcarLondon

• Paul Mason’s piece voices what many outside the south-east probably feel. You can almost draw a line, beginning around King’s Lynn, passing north of Cambridge, Oxford and Bath, and reaching the sea just west of Poole in Dorset. Inside the line, Englishness – its culture, accents and politics – is defined, deliberately or otherwise, by the elites that run the country: outside, in the Celtic west or the industrial Midlands and north, England is somewhere else, somewhere people don’t recognise as their natural heimat, as the Germans would say. I can identify with being a Yorkshireman, British and European, but not English. We know this, many of us, because it is inevitable that we travel into “their” England; yet “they” rarely venture out into the rest of the country, except perhaps to their holiday homes that deny us affordable housing. After the election, a little less English arrogance and a lot more attempt to understand the problem, would go down really well in the hinterland. Dr Alan PeacockExeter