St. Georges Day.

"Do ee kna what’s gan ern here?”

Asked a woman in the crowd as we looked out between the gang of rabid, Union Jack-waving white men and the five or six students nervously handing out Socialist Worker leaflets opposite them.

“I’ve got a rough idea, yeah.”

The woman frowned as the melodious mantras of the Glastonbury-survivors on one side continued to be drowned out by thundering chants of ‘EN-GER-LAND EN-GER-LAND’ of the Real Working Class TM on the other.

“Do them lot wanna ban St. Georges’ Day like?” she continued, pointing at the hippies.

Ah, St. George. Patron saint of Aragon, Catalonia, Ethiopia, Georgia, Greece, Lithuania, Palestine, Portugal and Russia and the cities of Amersfoort, Beirut, Caceres, Genoa, Ferrara, Freiburg, Ljublijana, Gozo, Pomorie, Qormi and Moscow. Oh, and England.

“No no, I think they just object to the other lot, the National Front, on the grounds that they’re a bit racist.” I replied, but she’d gone.

Facebook was also alive that day with mentions of St. George, the Roman solider who never really killed a dragon (but if he did so today would almost certainly be locked up for hunting an endangered species). The status of many seemed to be calling for the introduction of a national holiday to mark St. Georges Day – a noble enough aim, getting an extra day off work – but then I wondered how many of them also shared the sentiments of the 365,642 members of the ‘STOP our Government from killing off ST Georges Day because it may offend!’ facebook group, the same sentiment peddled between belches and jeers by the intimating posse of sheared clichés that commandeered Grey’s Monument in Newcastle City Centre, April 23rd.

The question I ask of everyone who propagates this idea is simply: who? Who is ‘offended’ by St. Georges’ Day? The Left? The Attenboroughs? The Sci-Fi enthusiasts with a penchant for The Never Ending Story?

No no, of course we’re talking about immigrants. The ‘others’. The people who come to our country, take our jobs, resist our ways and refuse to flash any tit on a summers day. Them lot.

Has anyone ever actually heard an immigrant in this country say they’re object to St. Georges Day, or the English flag, or crumpets or Wimbledon or cups of tea or anything we’ve decided is ‘English’ for that matter? Obviously we can discount any that have came from Greece, Lithuania, Palestine, Russia et al because, hey, he’s their saint too, so why on earth would they object?

The answer is always no and that’s because it’s a myth, a tall-tale perpetuated by the far-right to stoke up the trembling nationalism that is their life-blood.

No body ‘objects’ to St. Georges Day, to the flag, or to the kind of innocent patriotism that - for example - the World Cup brings out in most people, it wouldn’t make any sense to. But what we should all object to is that St. Georges Day, the pride we want to feel in our place of birth, is being hi-jacked – not by immigrants who have probably never even thought about it but by fascists who want to exploit our disillusioned national self-image.

For me, it’s a symptom of post-colonial blues. England ruled the world and the seven seas once - we pillaged and pilfered from across the globe, constructing an identity that is at it’s very core multicultural, a good-old-cup-of-tea from China, a chicken tikka masala from India, three lions from the African plains – and now, in a blink of history’s weary eye, it has all gone. We aren’t England the Great anymore, we’re England the puny, the politically subservient, the lost empire. And with it, our sense of identity has evaporated.

Like a cuckolded man emerging from the debris of his once great romance, we are a sucker-punched nation, binge-drinking our way from one unprotected fumble to the next, reeling self-consciously around a diminished sense of worth. Some of us want to find reasons to object to the quiet, studious, self-respecting races of people who enter our shores and who, by any rational statistic, present no real threat to our way of life, because their behaviour shows us up as what we are: the drunken, STI-ridden, leary joke of Europe who once ruled the world.

For all I despair of (and contribute to) our social ills, I love England. I love our cultural brilliance, our contributions to art and music and literature. I love our national character: modest, resilient, good-humoured. I love our country-side in a way that, when I stop and look at it, overwhelms a place so innate I can’t touch it, something I can only suppose is my silly, simpering human soul.

But loving Britain is loving diversity. We’re a mongrel race and always have been, invaded more times than Paris Hilton’s knickers, a melting pot of Celts, Saxons, Vikings and Romans. By either accident or design, we are a nation that has absorbed its trademarks and traditions from other places and amalgamated them into something unique and this is our strength, not our weakness.

If St. George were alive today, and did indeed have to protect a princess of this country by slaying a dragon, the princess would be our tolerance and compassion, and the dragon would be the looming monster of fascism – each scale a freshy-suited skin-head – that inflames communities and takes as a sacrifice new, disillusioned youth each day. A dragon that, in the forth-coming European elections, could take a seat of real power to punish us for our apathy.

I didn’t see the woman again, but there were plenty there that day at Monument, trying to decipher whether they agreed with those shouting far out on the right or those shouting far out on the left.

All the while, in the space in the middle of them both, on their way to work or to the shops, from all manners of backgrounds and beliefs, passed the people of England.