What does it mean to be British?

My brother sent me this e-mail this morning, thought it was quite good.

One of the national daily newspapers is asking readers:
"What does it mean to be British?"

Some of the emails are hilarious but this is one from a chap in Switzerland ..

"Being British is about driving in a German car to an Irish pub for a Belgian beer, then travelling home, grabbing an Indian curry or a Turkish kebab on the way, to sit on Swedish furniture and watch American shows on a Japanese TV. And the most British thing of all?

Suspicion of anything foreign."

Quote:

Originally Posted by drinkfeckarse

My brother sent me this e-mail this morning, thought it was quite good.

One of the national daily newspapers is asking readers:
"What does it mean to be British?"

Some of the emails are hilarious but this is one from a chap in Switzerland ..

"Being British is about driving in a German car to an Irish pub for a Belgian beer, then travelling home, grabbing an Indian curry or a Turkish kebab on the way, to sit on Swedish furniture and watch American shows on a Japanese TV. And the most British thing of all?

Suspicion of anything foreign."

:D True enough but i suppose you could easily substitute Irish for British and it would still be applicable?........

Quote:

Originally Posted by drinkfeckarse

"What does it mean to be British?"

Wouldn't have a Scooby Doo myself. :cool:

Funny & True

Quote:

Originally Posted by the 12 th man

:D True enough but i suppose you could easily substitute Irish for British and it would still be applicable?........

Exactly.

drinking halves of bitter in your local on Sunday morning

Here's an interesting angle to this topic from The Guardian's Timothy Garton Ash

In our search for Britishness, we should put out more flags - or none
There ain't no black in the union jack - and no Jacques either. We need multiple symbols for our multiple identities
Timothy Garton Ash
Thursday January 19, 2006
The Guardian
There it hung, limp on its pole, while Gordon Brown spoke of the need for a new affirmation of Britishness at the Fabian Society's annual conference last weekend. Some people, myself included, found it disconcerting to have the union jack so prominently displayed on stage, in solitary splendour, at a meeting of the centre-left. We expect the old imperial flag to be on parade for a marchpast of the territorial army or a royal visit to the Women's Institute; but for Fabians in pursuit of a 21st-century Britishness?
The pristine, very official-looking flag (I examined it closely) on stage at Imperial College actually came from, and at the suggestion of, Her Majesty's Treasury. It illustrated the chancellor's speech. In arguing for a modern British patriotism, Gordon Brown asked: "And what is our equivalent of the national symbolism of a flag in every garden?" As so often, the inspiration for his thinking is clearly the United States, where you do see the stars and stripes spontaneously displayed outside countless homes. Our likely next prime minister added a further argument: "When people on the centre-left recoiled from national symbols, the BNP tried to steal the union jack ... We should respond to the BNP by saying the union flag is a flag for Britain, not for the BNP." And, he concluded: "We should assert that the union flag is, by definition, a flag for tolerance and inclusion".
Intellectually, I can see the case. We shouldn't abandon the British national flag to the nationalist right; we should "make it new". Emotionally, I can't go there. I love this country, but the union jack leaves me cold. It has such powerful associations with all the most old-fashioned, fustian, chauvinistic aspects of Britishness. However pristine, it still somehow carries the faint smell of stale beer in a village hall on a drizzly Monday afternoon. Cringe-making attempts to rebrand "cool Britannia", with Geri Halliwell wrapping herself in the union jack, also left me not cool but cold. What about Kelly Holmes wrapping herself in the flag after her double gold at the Olympics? Yes, that produced a real tingle down the spine. But it's the exception that proves the rule.
Perhaps some of us are just not susceptible to flags? "Flag waving" is a pejorative term for a good reason: it often goes with people being killed. But not only and not always. I was deeply moved by the sea of flags - orange, Ukrainian, Polish, European - waved by the demonstrators on Kiev's Independence Square during the entirely peaceful Orange revolution. I was also moved by the way ordinary Americans put out the star-spangled banner in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001. (That didn't mean then, and it doesn't mean now, that they supported the invasion of Iraq, although the Bush administration did harness their patriotic emotion to that purpose.)
When I return to Heathrow from a trip abroad and, driving through the green, rolling countryside, spy the simple red cross on a white background of the flag of St George, flying from a neat farmhouse amidst the trees, my heart beats just a little faster. Yes, I know the farmer flying that flag is probably a rabid Eurosceptic, if not a BNP supporter, but the organ at work is the heart not the head. The heart has reasons reason knows not of.
There are, however, sound historical reasons for my reluctance to see the solitary stage display of the union jack at a conference devoted to redefining Britishness. If you look back through its history, that flag is intimately linked with monarchy, military, empire, whiteness, and prejudice against continental Europe. To reduce it to "a butcher's apron", as did one overexcited Scottish Nationalist, is clearly unfair. But it certainly stands for a version of Britishness that was constructed, as Linda Colley and others have explored, by imagining continental Europeans (especially the French) and the colonised peoples of Africa and Asia as our defining others.
Paul Gilroy has popularised the phrase "there ain't no black in the union jack". Trying to think of an equivalent for the equally excluded continental Europeans, I came up with "there ain't no Jacques in the union jack". It turns out this may not be altogether true. One of the possible etymologies for the term jack, in union jack, derives from the way the original progenitor of the union flag, King James VI of Scotland, later James I of England, signed his name "Jacques". (The Oxford English Dictionary finds this etymology implausible, but still thinks it worth mentioning.) But over the 400 years since the earliest version of the union flag (then only combining the English and Scottish crosses) was introduced in 1606, the union jack has generally come to be understood in Britain as the opposite of anything to do with any bloody continental Jacques. Especially if the Jacques in question happens to be called Chirac.
So should we throw out the British national flag and design a new one, as the British Council has done with its logo? That would be ridiculous. Across the world, everyone knows the red, white and blue crosspatch. It has flown over good deeds as well as bad. To throw it out would divide the nation. No, as Gordon Brown urges, we have to do what we can to invest it with positive, tolerant, inclusive meanings. But we should do something else as well.
The key to the survival of liberty in the modern world is the embrace of multiple identities. One of the distinctive strengths of Britishness is the way it exemplifies, indeed necessarily requires, multiple identities. Every Brit is always something else as well. I'm also English, Gordon Brown is also Scottish, John Humphrys is also Welsh, Kelly Holmes is Jamaican-British, Sir Iqbal Sacranie is Muslim-British, and so on. Britain is this peculiar, theoretically impossible, practically confused but rather wonderful thing: a nation of four nations. And many more ethnicities and cultures have now been added to the brew. As we suggested in London's bid for the 2012 Olympics, we are among the world pioneers of multiple compatible identities.
I doubt that much more British national solidarity will be evoked by a wider use of the union jack. Certainly it will never do for us what the star-spangled banner does for Americans. But if our national identity is to be reinforced by bits of cloth on poles, let us have not one but many of them. Beside the union jack, let's hoist our local flags - of the town, the school, the team, the club, the university, perhaps the county or region too; and then the flag of St George if we are English, or the saltire if we are Scots, or the Welsh dragon, or the cross of St Patrick.
And, if we feel that way, the European flag. In most other European countries this is routinely flown beside the national flag. Why not here? And what about adding the UN flag, for good measure? Too many, you say? To be sure. So make your own deliberate choice of two or three. To express who we British really are today, we must put out more flags - or none.

There is actually no such thing administratively speaking as Great Britain. Administratively speaking there are three different sets of laws for the territory that Frau Elizabeth Von Battenburg is the head of state. There are laws passed for England & Wales, Scotland and some rare ones in Northern Ireland only. The administration of government is divided too. Northern Ireland is a seperate administrative entity, even their Civil Service departments names are different to those in England and Scotland. If we extend this to it's immediate dependant territories... The Isle of Man is not in the so called UK as they are outside the EU. The Channel Islands are similarly positioned.
Then there is the old argument that England is in illegal occupation of both Scotland and Wales and that the Channel Islands belong to France, and that is without going near their tortured involvement with us!