Why I'm Still Proud to be British

They are some things that will forever be known as quintessentially British.

Sunday lunches and afternoon teas; our reserved nature and under playing our achievements.   We all seem to love a good moan yet we have an innate inability to complain and of course, there is the famous stiff upper lip.

Surely the term quirky was surely made for the British.

The trait that makes me very proud to be British however is the way in which when times get back, differences are forgotten and the old war time spirit of “We are all in this together” comes into play. 

In times of the EDL, BNP, UKIP and Britain First; sometimes it can be hard to remember that feeling.  Now and again though, even when you have lost hope that we can all join together in a common cause again, that spirit remerges.


The clean up campaign that was organized on Twitter after the London riots is one of the recent examples I can think of.  Hundreds of people joined together to clean up the streets.  It didn’t matter who you were or what you believed in; it was British people coming together for a common good.

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 A year later we hosted the Olympics and the roar of support in that stadium and all across the country when Jessica Ennis was running the 800m in the final stage of the Heptathlon will always stay with me.  I have never heard or felt anything like that in my life. 

Over the past couple of years however the vitriolic ranting by parties like the BNP, the thuggish and frankly terrifying nature of the recently formed Britain First and the thinly veiled racist and homophobic nature of UKIP seemed to have fractured our society into such a state that I didn’t think that it could be mended.
Yesterday however a little ray of hope appeared.   You may have recently seen the news about the Blackley Jewish Cemetery where dozens of headstones had been damaged and covered in swastikas by two teenagers.

Rather than letting such a blatantly anti-semitic attack pass them by however, the local community got together to help.  So many people turned up to help with the clear up that they had to be organised into shifts.  These people were from all walks of life and from many different religions; there was no “them and us”.  That didn’t matter.  They just wanted to come together as a community to help.

It is things like this that makes me remember that I am indeed proud to be British.  When times are hard we stand shoulder to shoulder as one.  When we are one as a nation there is nothing that can take us down.  Adolf Hitler couldn’t break us and I am damned if I am going to see parties like UKIP tear us apart.

So yes I am proud to be British, in the true sense of the word; not like it has been commandeered by Britain First.