As many commentators have noted during the recent snowy and icy weather, the trouble in the UK is not that we experience extremes of weather, and in fact what we have seen is considered normal in many neighbouring states (remember London is as far North as Moscow), but that we do not experience them often enough. For comparisons we have to look back to 1981, 1963, 1947 and beyond rather than, say, 2006 or even 2001 which other countries could draw comparisons with. This applies to all 'extremes' of weather in the UK. The hot summer of 1995 could only be compared to 1976, 19 years earlier. The bulk of the weather in Britain is tepid and this allows us all to forget how to cope when it gets a little colder, hotter, wetter or drier than has been the case in the past decade. Combined with this is the tightness of public funding especially at a local level as councils have been facing constraints really non-stop since the mid-1970s when 'cuts' first became a common phrase for British local authorities. So, given that you are likely to only have harsh weather in winter one year in twenty or thirty, it is clear that it is a gamble they are willing to take to save a little money in not buying salt or grit and keeping it in storage and the necessary lorries maintained.
The other factor is the privatisation of so many public services in the UK. Why would a train company risk being sued by stranded customers or penalised for a string of late arrivals by trying to run a comprehensive train service. In a hot summer, it is far easier for water companies to declare restrictions on the use of water and to reduce the water pressure than for them to spend money to repairing the high level of leakages in the British system which means around 25% of British water is lost compared to 14% of French and 10% of Dutch. Greed and penny pinching make it far harder for the UK to be adaptable when something slightly different occurs. Of course, we have just finished one six-year war and are still in the middle of one that has now be raging for coming up to its ninth year (almost as long as the First and Second World Wars combined) so costing millions of pounds in resources and a constant haemorrage of British people through death and injury.
Anyway, given the context that the weather and the response of the local authorities, who I acknowledge do the best they can with the resources they have, creates, how do the British people respond to it? Well, this goes to 'extremes' as well. People talk of the 'Blitz spirit' or the 'Dunkirk mentality', once again having to rely on nostalgia for a war that ended 64 years ago (in fact going back 69-70 years to those specific events) rather than finding anything of merit from the British public in those intervening years. It is fascinating how with a single snowfall British people suddenly start talking to each other. I know the weather is a common topic of conversation but it seems that it needs to really begin disrupting people's lives before they break through to talking to their neighbours let alone strangers. Even among colleagues I have seen a change. Those stranded at home yesterday did not sit in front of their radiators whining they were out checking on elderly people, fetching food and helping people dig out their cars. In some ways the British cannot be stirred from their apathy unless it is by a 'crisis'. It has to be a tangible crisis, as the failure to alarm us all about terrorists in the early 2000s showed, something which is intangible will not stir us, it has to be immediately visible and physical and so snow and floods in particular flick the switch in the average Briton's head. Ironically, it seems, in my experience, and I accept that is very limited, to even push aside the usual whining about immigrants, dole 'scroungers' and so on and emphasise for many people the commonality of humanity.
A new focus of complaint, however, are those who warm us about global warming. There is a saying 'one swallow does not make a summer' and the same can be said in this case 'one snowfall does not mean there is no global warming'. The climate does shift steadily, we know the 11th century was warm enough for people to farm on Greenland and the 17th century cold enough for people to have bonfires on the River Thames but within those periods there were hot or cold, dry or wet seasons. As a spokesman for the Met(reological) Office noted on BBC1 yesterday, even if in 20 years when the global temperature is 2-3oC warmer we will still get snowy winters.
This beneficial, communal spirit which gets turned on by 'extreme' weather does have a counteracting behaviour too, sometimes among the very same people. Britons are, on the whole, very selfish and often find it difficult to comprehend that anyone else may have equal and/or different needs that have any validity let alone greater validity than their own perceived needs. This is most apparent when British people drive. The bulk of British drivers want no-one else to be on the road and if there are other drivers, for them to get out of the way. They see themselves as driving in a bubble, looking only a short distance ahead rather than what they are in fact, a cog in a complex machine of traffic. This situation has worsened and drivers now often do not feel obliged to signal, they complain at attempts to make them stick to a speed limit, and in my experience, these days occasionally feel it is appropriate to drive on pavements if it can get them where they 'need' to be, that little bit quicker. They take no responsibility for their actions, always blaming the others, especially if those others are cyclists or pedestrians.
Rather than tempering this behaviour the snow has apparently exacerbated it. Partly, I think, it is accentuated by the fact that 4x4 drivers, who assume they should be granted a superior position on the road at normal times, actually have it in such slippery conditions so apparently legitimising their arrogant attitudes and the fact that they are driving so far removed from the road. Ironically, talking to a man this week who lives in rural Devon, he said that now the 4x4 drivers have conditions which suit their vehicles many drivers are too afraid and lack the expertise to use them properly and so end up blocking village high streets. Despite the conditions many drivers are going too fast and are impatient with people trying to get over icy patches or going up and down hills cautiously. In my office we discussed how one car was tipped on its side on a road. Even stunt men find this a challenge, it is not the result simply of ice and snow unless the vehicle has slid sideways off a particular camber, it is achieved by driving too fast. Too many people in the UK speed in normal conditions and apparently have no appreciation of the stopping distances needed even on dry roads let alone on icy ones. Speeding among too many people, including, it seems newspapers like the 'Daily Mail' (complaining this week about the £15 increase in speeding fines to pay compensation to victims of other crimes, seemingly forgetting that speeding is a crime and that people who speed are criminals), is not seen as a criminal offence, rather it is perceived as a right, one that even outweighs commons sense.
The occasions on which such behaviour becomes insane is in the attacks on workers driving snow ploughs and gritting lorries. Interviews last night with such drivers showed that they had had objects thrown at their vehicles on some occasions smashing the windscreens. Apparently this stems from frustration that the roads have not been sufficiently cleared or not soon enough or that side roads are neglected or routes in rural areas cannot be kept open constantly. Attacks on the gritting vehicles is like shooting yourself in the foot because you are tired from walking. Yet, to too many people it apparently seems rational behaviour. However, perhaps it is unsurprising in a country where ambulance and fire fighting crews are attacked when carrying out their duties. If you have a problem with the services protest to the people who actually control it, vote for someone who will adopt a different policy, do not attack the people trying to deliver a life saving service, doing an ordinary job like the rest of us, under tough and dangerous circumstances anyway. Think about it, someone who drives a gritting lorry has to get up early on the coldest days of the year and drive constantly in the most hazardous conditions. Less severe, but equally moronic is the people who rush to overtake gritting lorries and snow ploughs. Think about it. If the road did not need a plough or gritting, the lorry would not be there and before a lorry has passed over a particular section the road is likely to be even more dangerous than usual, and you want to hurry on to that untreated road surface?
The other unhelpful thing is the attitude of employers who are given privileged opportunities to whine about how much the weather is damaging the economy. It is the same whenever there is a bank holiday, they are allowed to come on to radio and television and produce some huge figure about how badly industry is missing out by people being off for a day or two (in the case of bank holidays, of course, the UK has five fewer than the next nearest number in the EU and many of our competitors have many more than us. I imagine only the fact that the additional 2012 bank holiday is linked to the Queen's diamond jubilee that has meant no complaints from business leaders about it). Apparently the snow is losing business £600 million per day. Of course fuel utility companies and even many supermarkets (given the British tendency to stockpile food at any hint of a crisis) are actually benefiting from the cold weather. The new twist is the complaint from employers that too many schools have closed too quickly and so compelling parents to take time off to look after their children.
What the employers forget (or choose not to notice) is that often teachers cannot afford to live anywhere near the schools they work at because house prices have risen far faster than teachers' salaries over the past forty years and schools are fearful of being sued if any child has an accident even in good weather so are terrified they will get a slew of litigation if children slip over in the snow. Added to this, much investment in school buildings and heating facilities has been neglected over the past thirty years, there are regular reports on the poor conditions many schools actually are in, so it is unsurprising when their aged boilers pack up or single-glazed classrooms are too cold to study in. None of these considerations is allowed to get in the way of employers yet again telling us we are lazy and negligent and so are costing the country money (though of course not reducing their salaries or bonuses a jot). Hassle from employers makes many people feel they must get on the road to reach their work, often adding the hazards and accidents.
Extreme weather shows how shabby the UK's infrastructure has become from decades of cuts and when this is combined with an unassailable belief that satisfaction of all individual wishes is the only legitimate concern, it creates 'crisis' that neighbouring states must look upon with bemusement/amusement. I wonder what happens in places like western Normandy and Brittany which, like the UK, benefit from the Atlantic warm currents that stop the climate being as cold, most winters, as, say, northern France, the Benelux countries and Germany. In these regions of France they must have mild winters but the occasional harsh ones too, yet I never hear Cherbourg or Rennes or Brest grinding to a halt when this occurs. I suspect it means keeping things in store that you might only use once per decade, but at least you know they are there. I guess to it stems from an attitude which is not all 'me, me, me' when harsh conditions bite. I may be wrong and would be interested to hear from people who have had experiences in these regions. I have certainly travelled around Belgium in the winter when the temperature is often -10oC or worse without difficulty and without the madness that seems to affect too many Britons whenever snow comes. The weather might be extreme for the UK but let us hope that negative extreme behaviour can be moderated and the positive behaviour become normalised rather than needing extreme weather to trigger it.
P.P. 12/01/2010: One contributory factor to schools closing that I had missed, but is now being reported widely, are the league table ratings around percentage of attendance. This means that if a school opens and say, even a third or a quarter, in fact anything more than about a tenth, of its pupils cannot get in then it slides quickly in terms of its standing for attendance. I should have remembered the messages that I have seen coming home from the school that the 8-year old who lives in my house attend. The headteachers writes of figures like 92.4% attendance and a drive to get this figure higher. It is unsurprising then, that heads shut the school and so have that day null-and-void for the statistics rather than risk dropping even a 1-2% and so looking worse than last year when we had a mild winter.
Another point of behaviour that I forgot to mention is drivers using their fog lights when visibility is good. Many drivers, even now where there is a lot of thawing going on, certainly in the counties I have been driving through, seem to assume these lights are simply 'bad weather' lights. They forget that on frosty days often the air is far clearer than even on rainy days and so there is no need for fog lights. You can be fined if you have them on when visibility is more than 50-100 metres. On the back fog lights can be up to 30 times more powerful than normal rear lights. I know when you are driving up and down valleys on foggy days you go in and out of fog and may be excused for leaving them on in clear patches, but some people switch them on just when it is cold and frosty, every one car in ten I passed this morning had them on and there was not a scrap of fog on the 190Km I covered. I do wonder, if, as with drivers who keep full beam on at all times, whether these drivers actually know how to operate the functions on their cars or get stuck with a certain setting.
Showing posts with label bank holiday. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bank holiday. Show all posts
Thursday, 7 January 2010
Monday, 5 May 2008
The British and Bank Holidays
As I have noted on a number of occasions in the past the UK has 5 fewer bank holidays than any other country in the European Union. We get the following (typically they are given on the nearest Monday following the date itself): New Year's Day (1st January), Good Friday and Easter Monday (which move according to when the Easter holiday is), May Day (1st May), Spring Holiday (26th May this year, anyway the last Monday in May), Late Summer Holiday (a.k.a August Bank Holiday, 25th August this year, the last Monday in August), Christmas Day (25th December) and Boxing Day (26th December). Scotland (2nd January, 4th August) and Northern Ireland (17th March, 14th July) get an additional 2 bank holidays compared to England and Wales. Even the USA renowned for not having long holidays does better than the English and Welsh let alone our European neighbours. Those campaigning for us to have St. George's Day (24th April) as a bank holiday do not want an additional bank holiday they want it simply to replace May Day which they see as 'too Red'. Despite us having so few bank holidays you can guarantee that the news will have some employers' spokesman (and it is typically a man) complaining how many billions of pounds have been lost to the economy by workers having a day off. The British worker typically works longer than any other in the European Union in the average week anyway, surely these long hours more than make up for the bank holidays, but no, of course we must feel guilt that we are not working as hard as we can for the wealth of the company owners. The UK is exempt from the EU's working time directive which limits jobs to 48 hours per week and many people work a lot longer in the UK. Rules are tighter than they were in the 1990s but in the UK you can still work more than 48 hours per week if your average is less than 48 hours per week when seen over a 17-week period.
There is a simple way in which you can tell that the British work so hard, and that is how they respond to bank holidays. Today, Monday 5th May, is the UK bank holiday for May Day and despite the poor weather, rainy but humid (certainly in my part of England) the roads are jammed with people either heading to the beach or to DIY stores. In a country where working hours are shorter and they have more holidays there is not this madness to go places. The roads in my district get packed with people pulling caravans so that they can sit in a damp field looking out of their window at a slightly different scene to what they could see at home. The television companies seem obliged to pack the schedules with old blockbusters in the assumption that anyone sat at home will be slumped in front of the television bloated on a roast dinner as if it was Christmas. Certainly no-one at a DIY (Do-It-Yourself, I know it is called 'bricolage' in French, I have no idea in other languages) store would argue the British are lazy. The workforce at such stores are incredibly busy and people are coming in to buy tons of supplies so that they can work in their own houses for free. British people behave on bank holidays literally 'like there's tomorrow' and that they either must see some windswept beach or paint their spare bedroom or watch a certain film again so that everything is right and proper when they come before God on Judgement Day. It is a pity that Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) who painted Biblical scenes as if they had taken place in his home village of Cookham in the 1950s, did not do one of the Judgement Day as a British bank holiday. So UK employers, stop whining. You have a very dilligent workforce who need to have more of a break than you give them. Do not try to make them feel guilty for the few days' break they get. You work a lot less hard than they do, no matter what you may say about long hours, the average British worker never gets mid-week lunchtime golf games.
Another couple of things came to my attention regarding bank holidays. Karl Marx (1818-83) argued that as capitalism developed further the middle classes would be wiped out and push down into the working classes. To some extent the opposite has happened and manual labour from the UK has been sent to China and instead the working class now wear suits, work in call centres and have middle class aspirations that the middle classes are now finding it difficult to live up to, primarily because house prices (and owning a house was always the stamp of being middle class) have kept rising whilst salaries have stagnated as so much of the inflation in the economy is hidden, though I must say that with fuel and food now rising so quickly it is becoming more apparent. What has happened is that the middle classes have adopted (skilled) working class hobbies. In the 1980s caravans were only pulled behind saloon cars of a man who had worked hard maybe as a foreman and saved for months perhaps years. Now they are dragged flapping from side to side behind the huge 4x4s of company executives (who forget that you are not supposed to drive at 70mph with a caravan, the limit is 50mph and that is why they wave around so violently). Similarly twenty, thirty years ago, it was the workers who would do up their own houses, the middle classes would employ a 'man' to do it. Now DIY has effectively become interior design that you do yourself and the products that are sold are not just the old wood and paint but a whole range of things to 'style' your house. Similarly once gardens and especially ones to grow vegetables were the preserve of the working class; the vegetables supplemented the food on the family dinner table. Now gardening is a middle class activity and vegetables are apparently the new flowers. Again the stores have responded to this and half the stuff in a garden store is not plants but sculpture for your garden; I even saw a water butt in the form of a Roman column selling at £199 (€250; US$390) this week. Then you see the TV gardener Carol Klein (a lovely woman, I do not want to disrespect her) walking through a vegetable garden eating stuff straight off the plant. Now in a household where the vegetables are needed for meals that would be seen as being greedy and unfair to the rest of the family.
The other working class 'hobby' now taken over by the middle class (oh, and I have entirely left aside football (soccer for US readers)) is having families. In my youth middle class families had 1-2 children and that was it. The working class would have 3+ children. Now of course children are a luxury and a status item and so the situation has switched. It appears to be de rigeur for middle class families to have at least 3 children, to some extent, I imagine, so they can justify their purchase of a 4x4, but also so that they can keep demonstrating their wealth by buying designer clothes for the children and signing them up to language clubs, sports clubs, drama clubs, etc. which all cost a fortune and now lock you into long-term contracts like a mobile phone company (when the 6-year old in my house wanted to join a karate club it turned out you had to have standing order to pay the club and you had to give 3 months' notice to break it, a sharp contrast to the 'mat fees' or 'subs' we used to pay and the days when kids just lost interest in a club and never showed up again). In contrast people of the working class realise they cannot afford many children and it is they who often only have one child. The fact that family has become a hobby, I realised, was when 'The Guardian' an epitome of a middle class newspaper, introduced its 'Family' section alongside the sport and the travel sections on a Saturday.
The other thing that has come out of these thoughts on bank holidays is how 'dirty' or 'wrong' everything associated with Socialism and/or workers' movements is now perceived. My parents, old Socialists who believed in Harold Wilson's ill-fated 'white heat of technology' modern technocratic Socialism, have gone to Belgium for the May Day celebrations. Over there people still dress in red (dogs too apparently) and march around and celebrate being workers and the honesty of hard work; they have plays, singing, dancing a real party mood. Given what I had noted above about how guilty employers try to make working people feel maybe it needs revival in the UK. I mention this to the woman in my house and she said 'isn't Socialism something bad'. Even though at 35 years old she lived through a period when there were Labour governments, somehow now Socialism and even more simply workers' movements are just tarred with the brush of Communism and the Soviet bloc. This is why the campaigners for St. George's Day are going to win ultimately as in the UK May Day has been turned from a joyful day into something that now seems sordid. Of course even before workers' movements grew up in the mid-19th century, May Day had much older traditions celebrating fertility and the coming of the growing season. Such sentiments still appear in things like a Maypole (I do not know how accurate it is, but people tell me is it a phallic symbol) but of course any reference to Paganism was frowned upon even before things began to be comdemned for being 'Red'. To some extent this sentiment stems from the fact that though we have had a party calling itself 'Labour' in power since 1997, it in fact was the Blair Party with no attachment to the history of the Labour Party and beyond that of the labour movement. This is why Brown is finding it so hard now and why people have written him off long before he even needs to have an election and with an opposition lacking policy and clear direction. Gordon Brown is the leader of the Labour Party, but effectively that party and all the history it, and the bodies around it, stood for, died in the UK in 1994.
My advice on this May Day holiday, is put aside the DIY, have a break from work, but delight in the fact that you do work and you work hard. That is nothing to be ashamed of, it is something to be proud of. It is the leeches of society who suck more than they could ever use off you, who should be humiliated on news reports not the people who work hard for their families and for their countries. Both relax and celebrate.
There is a simple way in which you can tell that the British work so hard, and that is how they respond to bank holidays. Today, Monday 5th May, is the UK bank holiday for May Day and despite the poor weather, rainy but humid (certainly in my part of England) the roads are jammed with people either heading to the beach or to DIY stores. In a country where working hours are shorter and they have more holidays there is not this madness to go places. The roads in my district get packed with people pulling caravans so that they can sit in a damp field looking out of their window at a slightly different scene to what they could see at home. The television companies seem obliged to pack the schedules with old blockbusters in the assumption that anyone sat at home will be slumped in front of the television bloated on a roast dinner as if it was Christmas. Certainly no-one at a DIY (Do-It-Yourself, I know it is called 'bricolage' in French, I have no idea in other languages) store would argue the British are lazy. The workforce at such stores are incredibly busy and people are coming in to buy tons of supplies so that they can work in their own houses for free. British people behave on bank holidays literally 'like there's tomorrow' and that they either must see some windswept beach or paint their spare bedroom or watch a certain film again so that everything is right and proper when they come before God on Judgement Day. It is a pity that Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) who painted Biblical scenes as if they had taken place in his home village of Cookham in the 1950s, did not do one of the Judgement Day as a British bank holiday. So UK employers, stop whining. You have a very dilligent workforce who need to have more of a break than you give them. Do not try to make them feel guilty for the few days' break they get. You work a lot less hard than they do, no matter what you may say about long hours, the average British worker never gets mid-week lunchtime golf games.
Another couple of things came to my attention regarding bank holidays. Karl Marx (1818-83) argued that as capitalism developed further the middle classes would be wiped out and push down into the working classes. To some extent the opposite has happened and manual labour from the UK has been sent to China and instead the working class now wear suits, work in call centres and have middle class aspirations that the middle classes are now finding it difficult to live up to, primarily because house prices (and owning a house was always the stamp of being middle class) have kept rising whilst salaries have stagnated as so much of the inflation in the economy is hidden, though I must say that with fuel and food now rising so quickly it is becoming more apparent. What has happened is that the middle classes have adopted (skilled) working class hobbies. In the 1980s caravans were only pulled behind saloon cars of a man who had worked hard maybe as a foreman and saved for months perhaps years. Now they are dragged flapping from side to side behind the huge 4x4s of company executives (who forget that you are not supposed to drive at 70mph with a caravan, the limit is 50mph and that is why they wave around so violently). Similarly twenty, thirty years ago, it was the workers who would do up their own houses, the middle classes would employ a 'man' to do it. Now DIY has effectively become interior design that you do yourself and the products that are sold are not just the old wood and paint but a whole range of things to 'style' your house. Similarly once gardens and especially ones to grow vegetables were the preserve of the working class; the vegetables supplemented the food on the family dinner table. Now gardening is a middle class activity and vegetables are apparently the new flowers. Again the stores have responded to this and half the stuff in a garden store is not plants but sculpture for your garden; I even saw a water butt in the form of a Roman column selling at £199 (€250; US$390) this week. Then you see the TV gardener Carol Klein (a lovely woman, I do not want to disrespect her) walking through a vegetable garden eating stuff straight off the plant. Now in a household where the vegetables are needed for meals that would be seen as being greedy and unfair to the rest of the family.
The other working class 'hobby' now taken over by the middle class (oh, and I have entirely left aside football (soccer for US readers)) is having families. In my youth middle class families had 1-2 children and that was it. The working class would have 3+ children. Now of course children are a luxury and a status item and so the situation has switched. It appears to be de rigeur for middle class families to have at least 3 children, to some extent, I imagine, so they can justify their purchase of a 4x4, but also so that they can keep demonstrating their wealth by buying designer clothes for the children and signing them up to language clubs, sports clubs, drama clubs, etc. which all cost a fortune and now lock you into long-term contracts like a mobile phone company (when the 6-year old in my house wanted to join a karate club it turned out you had to have standing order to pay the club and you had to give 3 months' notice to break it, a sharp contrast to the 'mat fees' or 'subs' we used to pay and the days when kids just lost interest in a club and never showed up again). In contrast people of the working class realise they cannot afford many children and it is they who often only have one child. The fact that family has become a hobby, I realised, was when 'The Guardian' an epitome of a middle class newspaper, introduced its 'Family' section alongside the sport and the travel sections on a Saturday.
The other thing that has come out of these thoughts on bank holidays is how 'dirty' or 'wrong' everything associated with Socialism and/or workers' movements is now perceived. My parents, old Socialists who believed in Harold Wilson's ill-fated 'white heat of technology' modern technocratic Socialism, have gone to Belgium for the May Day celebrations. Over there people still dress in red (dogs too apparently) and march around and celebrate being workers and the honesty of hard work; they have plays, singing, dancing a real party mood. Given what I had noted above about how guilty employers try to make working people feel maybe it needs revival in the UK. I mention this to the woman in my house and she said 'isn't Socialism something bad'. Even though at 35 years old she lived through a period when there were Labour governments, somehow now Socialism and even more simply workers' movements are just tarred with the brush of Communism and the Soviet bloc. This is why the campaigners for St. George's Day are going to win ultimately as in the UK May Day has been turned from a joyful day into something that now seems sordid. Of course even before workers' movements grew up in the mid-19th century, May Day had much older traditions celebrating fertility and the coming of the growing season. Such sentiments still appear in things like a Maypole (I do not know how accurate it is, but people tell me is it a phallic symbol) but of course any reference to Paganism was frowned upon even before things began to be comdemned for being 'Red'. To some extent this sentiment stems from the fact that though we have had a party calling itself 'Labour' in power since 1997, it in fact was the Blair Party with no attachment to the history of the Labour Party and beyond that of the labour movement. This is why Brown is finding it so hard now and why people have written him off long before he even needs to have an election and with an opposition lacking policy and clear direction. Gordon Brown is the leader of the Labour Party, but effectively that party and all the history it, and the bodies around it, stood for, died in the UK in 1994.
My advice on this May Day holiday, is put aside the DIY, have a break from work, but delight in the fact that you do work and you work hard. That is nothing to be ashamed of, it is something to be proud of. It is the leeches of society who suck more than they could ever use off you, who should be humiliated on news reports not the people who work hard for their families and for their countries. Both relax and celebrate.
Thursday, 24 April 2008
Why St. George's Day Remains a Problem
Today, 23rd April, is St. George's Day in England. St. George is the patron saint of many countries, not only England but also including Georgia, Malta, China, Russia, Serbia, Montenegro, Greece, Portugal, Canada, Aragon and Catalonia (now parts of eastern Spain), Lithuania, Ethiopia and Palestine (and through connection, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation - people forget that there many Christan Arabs). Generally these countries have different days for St. George, but in 1415 today was designated the day he would have in England. St. George was born in Cappodacia in what is now eastern Turkey in 270 CE (AD) and probably spoke Greek as he lived in what was becoming the Eastern Roman Empire (later the Byzantine Empire). George was a centurion and worked as an ambassador for Roman Emperor Diocletian and visited England in that role. When he heard Diocletian had begun executing Christians, George returned to Rome where he refused to denounce his Christianity and was beheaded on 23rd April, 303 CE at Lydda in what was then Palestine. He only became England's patron saint in 1222 when he replaced St. Edward the Confessor (King of England 1042-66).
The English like St. George because he seems to sum up the militaristic attitude that the average English person relishes. He was a soldier and supposedly killed a dragon, probably even better in terms of imagery than St. Michael fighting the Devil. The cross of St. George, invented in 1099 at the siege of Antioch during the First Crusade is the flag of England just as the cross of St. Andrew is of Scotland and the cross of St. Olaf appears in various colours in Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark. It is even absorbed into the Union Flag for the United Kingdom.
The fact that England ended up with such an aggressive saint probably does not help matters. St. Patrick, patron saint of Ireland but seemingly celebrated across the world now, was renowned for banishing snakes from Ireland not for violence. He came from northern England or southern Scotland during the Roman occupation and was taken as a slave to Ireland. He travelled round Europe and was made a bishop before returning to Ireland as a missionary. He died in Ireland in 461 CE at the age of 76. St. Andrew, patron saint of Scotland, was one of the Apostles and after Jesus's death effectively became a missionary working in what is now Turkey and Greece and crucified by the Romans presumably sometime in the mid-1st century CE. St. David patron saint of Wales, actually lived in Wales in the 6th century CE and became archbishop of Wales and was a missionary among the Celtic tribes of western Wales.
The aggressive nature of St. George has just been added to by right-wing, jingoistic people in England. The flag of St. George has often seemed an oppressor's flag to the Scots, Welsh and Irish that the English conquered. Its appearance in the form of the ensign flag on British naval ships spread that sense far across the world. Whereas other federated countries like Germany and India put up single teams at world events, the English and the other countries of the UK have generally put up individual teams, notably in football, rugby and cricket and so it is the English flag rather than the British one which became associated in particular with football-related violence in the 1970s and 1980s. As in all countries, national symbols have been subverted by right-wing extremists and the National Front in the 1970s was often associated with football violence so drew on the Cross of St. George rather than the Union Flag in its imagery, further discrediting the saint and his day.
Part of the problem is that England has a difficulty establishing an identity which is distinct from that of the UK. England has 49 million of the 61 million people living in the UK and 57% of the area of Britain (i.e. the UK excluding Northern Ireland), so it is difficult to tease out what is English as opposed to British. The fact that leading people in England's history and in the formation of its empire often came from Wales, Scotland or Ireland or from other parts of the British Empire, further complicates an appeal to heritage, so whereas the other states of the UK can look to various glorious periods in their history, such as the Scottish Enlightenment, the English simply fall back on medieval imagery and consequently a further association with violence. This was given an extra boost in the Victorian period with a lot of the invention of English 'traditions' based on false or faked assumptions about the medieval era. In addition, despite being the dominant state in the UK, England has not been ruled by anyone English since 1066 instead a sequence of French, Welsh, Scottish and German dynasties have run the country. What might be more productive is to fragment the celebration of patron saints, for example have St. Piran's Day for Cornwall, St. Aldhelm (patron saint of Wessex) for South-West England; St. Chade (patron saint of Mercia) for the Midlands, St. Robert for Yorkshire; St. Helen for Lancashire; St. Cuthbert (patron saint of Northumbria) for the North of England; St. Edmund for East Anglia; possibly St. Richard (patron saint of Sussex as a Saxon kingdom rather than the smaller county) could be for South-East England, possibly St. Thomas a Becket for London. Anyway, by having regional patron saints days it would break away from the negative connotations associated with St. George and because, as with the Irish, Welsh and Scots, a smaller group of the population would be identifying with the saint it would feel far less generic and regional customs and traditions could be invoked.
Those supporting a greater celebration of St. George's Day (which they admit, is partly due to jealousy of the fun the Irish have on St. Patrick's Day) have naturally distanced themselves from the violent connotations which have been long associated with St. George. However, it is notable that the leader of the campaign in the UK to get today (or in fact the nearest Monday) to be a bank holiday said he hoped it would replace the 1st May bank holiday which he felt was too much of a 'Red' holiday and so out-of-date. The 1st May bank holiday is seen as international workers' day but it was a holiday even before then and certainly celebrated at the time of Edward the Confessor. Yet, for these pro-St. George's Day crowd it seems to have political connotations that they despise, hardly strengthening their case in de-politicising the celebration of St. George. Anyway, why can we not have 23rd April and 1st May as bank holidays. Britain has 5 bank holidays fewer than the next nearest number had by member states of the EU, so even if we had one for St. George, St. David, St. Andrew and St. Patrick, we would still be one bank holiday short of even the baseline of the norm.
Why should we not return to St. Edward the Confessor, he died on 5th January (we do not know his birthdate), and even if that seems too close to New Year, you could have 8th June when he ascended the throne or 3rd April when he was crowned. The day he was allocated for commemoration when canonised in 1161 was 13th October so that would suit those who feel we have two many bank holidays in the Spring. Given that he was the patron saint of
kings, difficult marriages, separated spouses and the British Royal Family he would seem ideal for the UK at the moment and for many of the families of those who are pro-St. George activists. I think the issue for these St. George activists, is whatever they may protest, they could not stomach having a homosexual commissioner of cathedrals as their patron saint as he does not appeal to the macho attitudes that so many of these campaigners espouse. Yet, until we can end the association between the patron saint of England, violence and suppression of workers' rights then it is always going to be difficult for the English really to celebrate St. George's Day without a real sense of unease.
The English like St. George because he seems to sum up the militaristic attitude that the average English person relishes. He was a soldier and supposedly killed a dragon, probably even better in terms of imagery than St. Michael fighting the Devil. The cross of St. George, invented in 1099 at the siege of Antioch during the First Crusade is the flag of England just as the cross of St. Andrew is of Scotland and the cross of St. Olaf appears in various colours in Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark. It is even absorbed into the Union Flag for the United Kingdom.
The fact that England ended up with such an aggressive saint probably does not help matters. St. Patrick, patron saint of Ireland but seemingly celebrated across the world now, was renowned for banishing snakes from Ireland not for violence. He came from northern England or southern Scotland during the Roman occupation and was taken as a slave to Ireland. He travelled round Europe and was made a bishop before returning to Ireland as a missionary. He died in Ireland in 461 CE at the age of 76. St. Andrew, patron saint of Scotland, was one of the Apostles and after Jesus's death effectively became a missionary working in what is now Turkey and Greece and crucified by the Romans presumably sometime in the mid-1st century CE. St. David patron saint of Wales, actually lived in Wales in the 6th century CE and became archbishop of Wales and was a missionary among the Celtic tribes of western Wales.
The aggressive nature of St. George has just been added to by right-wing, jingoistic people in England. The flag of St. George has often seemed an oppressor's flag to the Scots, Welsh and Irish that the English conquered. Its appearance in the form of the ensign flag on British naval ships spread that sense far across the world. Whereas other federated countries like Germany and India put up single teams at world events, the English and the other countries of the UK have generally put up individual teams, notably in football, rugby and cricket and so it is the English flag rather than the British one which became associated in particular with football-related violence in the 1970s and 1980s. As in all countries, national symbols have been subverted by right-wing extremists and the National Front in the 1970s was often associated with football violence so drew on the Cross of St. George rather than the Union Flag in its imagery, further discrediting the saint and his day.
Part of the problem is that England has a difficulty establishing an identity which is distinct from that of the UK. England has 49 million of the 61 million people living in the UK and 57% of the area of Britain (i.e. the UK excluding Northern Ireland), so it is difficult to tease out what is English as opposed to British. The fact that leading people in England's history and in the formation of its empire often came from Wales, Scotland or Ireland or from other parts of the British Empire, further complicates an appeal to heritage, so whereas the other states of the UK can look to various glorious periods in their history, such as the Scottish Enlightenment, the English simply fall back on medieval imagery and consequently a further association with violence. This was given an extra boost in the Victorian period with a lot of the invention of English 'traditions' based on false or faked assumptions about the medieval era. In addition, despite being the dominant state in the UK, England has not been ruled by anyone English since 1066 instead a sequence of French, Welsh, Scottish and German dynasties have run the country. What might be more productive is to fragment the celebration of patron saints, for example have St. Piran's Day for Cornwall, St. Aldhelm (patron saint of Wessex) for South-West England; St. Chade (patron saint of Mercia) for the Midlands, St. Robert for Yorkshire; St. Helen for Lancashire; St. Cuthbert (patron saint of Northumbria) for the North of England; St. Edmund for East Anglia; possibly St. Richard (patron saint of Sussex as a Saxon kingdom rather than the smaller county) could be for South-East England, possibly St. Thomas a Becket for London. Anyway, by having regional patron saints days it would break away from the negative connotations associated with St. George and because, as with the Irish, Welsh and Scots, a smaller group of the population would be identifying with the saint it would feel far less generic and regional customs and traditions could be invoked.
Those supporting a greater celebration of St. George's Day (which they admit, is partly due to jealousy of the fun the Irish have on St. Patrick's Day) have naturally distanced themselves from the violent connotations which have been long associated with St. George. However, it is notable that the leader of the campaign in the UK to get today (or in fact the nearest Monday) to be a bank holiday said he hoped it would replace the 1st May bank holiday which he felt was too much of a 'Red' holiday and so out-of-date. The 1st May bank holiday is seen as international workers' day but it was a holiday even before then and certainly celebrated at the time of Edward the Confessor. Yet, for these pro-St. George's Day crowd it seems to have political connotations that they despise, hardly strengthening their case in de-politicising the celebration of St. George. Anyway, why can we not have 23rd April and 1st May as bank holidays. Britain has 5 bank holidays fewer than the next nearest number had by member states of the EU, so even if we had one for St. George, St. David, St. Andrew and St. Patrick, we would still be one bank holiday short of even the baseline of the norm.
Why should we not return to St. Edward the Confessor, he died on 5th January (we do not know his birthdate), and even if that seems too close to New Year, you could have 8th June when he ascended the throne or 3rd April when he was crowned. The day he was allocated for commemoration when canonised in 1161 was 13th October so that would suit those who feel we have two many bank holidays in the Spring. Given that he was the patron saint of
kings, difficult marriages, separated spouses and the British Royal Family he would seem ideal for the UK at the moment and for many of the families of those who are pro-St. George activists. I think the issue for these St. George activists, is whatever they may protest, they could not stomach having a homosexual commissioner of cathedrals as their patron saint as he does not appeal to the macho attitudes that so many of these campaigners espouse. Yet, until we can end the association between the patron saint of England, violence and suppression of workers' rights then it is always going to be difficult for the English really to celebrate St. George's Day without a real sense of unease.
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