When will I become patriotic?

Come, love of country, fill my heart…

I do love Britain. I guess I love England more. London most of all. I hope that in my life I’ve honoured the place I live and not disgraced it or undermined it (I support England and GB in sporting events – I fly a little flag on the car during the World Cup). So I really don’t want to sound like one of those annoying people who can celebrate Britain but only to the extent that it is mixed and polyglot (“food from every continent all on one street!” and so on). I also will not reject patriotism as some kind of moral defect (something for ‘gammons’ or Telegraph readers) or a false consciousness (a malign by-product of capitalism). Patriotism is a profound and probably necessary effect of birth and upbringing and rootedness.

But I don’t have it. It is, from my soul, absent. What am I to do? Will it one day just arrive? Will it land, eventually, on wings or something, in my vicinity, announce itself and then become part of my outlook? So that I might bristle appropriately when my nation is defamed or attacked? Proudly assert Britain’s superiority in matters military, economic and cultural?

I’m sorry to be flippant. This is a serious question. I’m an ordinary human being. I was brought up in a working class household in the approximate middle of England. I’ve enjoyed the benefits of living here for over sixty years. I went through the state education system like everyone else (well, most of us), my loyalty to the NHS is solid. Is there something wrong with me?

For all sorts of reasons I’m receptive to patriotism. But where is it? What has stopped it from lodging in my psyche? What do I lack? I obviously don’t buy any of the really dumb explanations for this sort of thing – I’m not more intelligent than the average patriot. I’m not better-informed or more open to the world or whatever. I have approximately the same intellectual assets as everyone else.

It’s obviously plausible that my broadly left-wing upbringing has brought this about. Mum and dad were both trade unionists, Labour Party members. But dad was in the army reserves ffs. Mum came to Britain from Ireland at 17 specifically to join the women’s auxilliary (ATS). Dad would sob through remembrance services and parades (he’d go out of his way to see a parachute display or a restored Spitfire). And I’ve inherited a lot of this. I’m not hostile in any way to nation or people or land. So where is my patriotism? I’m getting old. It’s overdue.

And I guess the reason I’m interested is because we’re now deep into a period of weaponised patriotism, of furious patriotic denouncements of every category of disloyal behaviour and beliefs. And, of course, of hateful racism premised on a lack of ‘assimilation’ or respect for British customs and norms. I look at the politicians and commentators whose patriotism is prominent, public, proudly asserted and I wonder, what is actually different about us? What caused this fervent love for nation to take root in you and not in me? Can it really just be our somewhat different political perspectives? That seems implausible. Political differences are – by necessity – essentially intellectual, superficial – not deep-rooted, not determined by my place of birth or my connection to this nation. Or did politics somehow short-circuit my patriotism? Divert its energy into something else?

I wonder if my 1990s entrainment with ‘global Britain’, with Blairism (and the tail end of Big Bang-era Thatcherism) – with technocratic politics and end-of-history pragmatism – has in some way neutralised any patriotism that did exist. Did the constant, strident assertion that there was no alternative to the globalised outlook leave me high and dry? A hollowed-out, unpatriotic shell? Likewise, did my later interest in internationalist politics – the whole idea of the Imagined Community and the general disdain for things national, local, parochial – innoculate me in some way?

And is this something I could work on? Should I just make more effort? Study the great patriotic texts? Find an online course? Is there a store of patriotism, a source that I could access? A place to go to tap into my lost patriotism? I’m serious about this too. I never decided not to be patriotic, never consciously rejected it or worked to exclude it. It’s just not there. Is this, in itself, a defect? Is there something wrong with me?

Anyway, I’m ready. If it does arrive I’ll greet it happily. I don’t presently own a flag-pole but there’s room for one out the front.