Why is it ok for everyone to hate England?

Irish rugby star Mack Hansen has voiced an unpalatable truth and we need to change it.

Photo by Illiya Vjestica on Unsplash

EVERYBODY hates England. So says the Irish rugby player Mack Hansen who is Australian really but qualifies to play for the Emerald Isle by virtue of his mother having been born in Cork.

Perhaps that’s the key to his brutal honesty – as a late arrival to the British Isles, he hasn’t understood that from a Celtic perspective you are meant to keep this basic and crude antipathy towards the English under your hat.

In a rugby context, it is well understood that most fans of Ireland, Wales and Scotland will always cheer for each other’s teams when they are up against the English. To a large extent this is due to a fraternity of the underdog – all three of the other home countries in the Six Nations contest know that as a vastly more populous country, England has many more players to choose from than they do.

Of course, it runs a bit wider than this too. The political eco-systems of all three countries also nurse the lazy notion of the English being bloody and arrogant colonial oppressors worth waging war upon, going back to Owen Glendower, William Wallace and too many Irish rebels to list. And better by far that this comic book hostility should find an outlet on the rugby field than on the battle field. As even Hansen admits of the English: “Once the game is done they are good lads like everyone else.”

But as an Englishman with the most Irish name imaginable, the crass commentary of Mack Hansen has set me thinking about why it is still deemed acceptable to pillory English national consciousness in a way that would be deemed totally out of order if directed at any other British Isles nationality.

Why, indeed, is Englishness seen as a source of shame among so much of the English intelligentsia? As George Orwell famously observed back in the 1940s: “England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own country. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman.” It is as true today as when he said it. And yet all but the most jaundiced of ledgers of good and bad perpetrated upon the world by the English would find actions in the former category greatly outnumbering those in the latter.

Given the Ireland versus England rugby match is taking place on the weekend of St Patrick’s Day, it seems a good moment to highlight the particular absurdity of St Patrick’s Day having become a bigger cultural event *in England* than is St George’s Day, which follows in low-key fashion a few weeks later.

It’s true: we have become a nation which celebrates the patron saint of Ireland with far more vigour than we celebrate our own patron saint, who leftists ritually point out every year was a “Turkish asylum seeker” in a bid to crush any nascent feelings of pride we may be feeling in our Englishness.

While St Patrick’s Day is a good-natured spectacle of people in ginger wigs and leprechaun fancy dress sinking pints of stout and generally revelling in “the craic”, St George’s Day conjures up images of resentful men in blazers carrying their national flag around the local bowls green before repairing to a village hall for a good old moan about not having a voice in contemporary Britain. Anyone remotely young or cool swerves the event and any parades associated with it are smeared as being open to infiltration by the “Far Right”.

Yet no Scottish person that I know is ashamed of St Andrew’s Day and no Welsh person of St David’s Day, even though hardline nationalist sentiment in both those countries is more prevalent than it is in England.

It seems clear to me that St George’s Day merits a rebrand. It is not as if the English are averse to fun or a good knees-up. Think of the “Barmy Army” of England cricket fans who good-naturedly follow their team around the world, clad in outlandish costumes that never fail to bring a smile to the face. Or indeed, think of Peter Kay’s various remakes of (Is This The Way to) Amarillo for Comic Relief, replete with marching fire-fighters, nurses and the like, all having a whale of a time. This is the spirit we need to tap into in order to reclaim our saint’s day.

The people of England cannot reinvent history or help it that their antecedents came out on the winning side of most conflicts they entered into. But we can show that we are as up for a good laugh as any other nationality in this neck of the woods. It might not be enough for the likes of Mack Hansen to stop hating us. But if we put on a good party plenty of people will want to join in.