Green, unpleasant land

I suppose I was aware that I was English from a reasonably early age, although I doubt I knew what it really meant. After all, the extent of my world was New Malden, with the occasion trips to visit my aunty Joyce on Hayling Island and to Seasalter for caravan holidays with my nan and granddad.

Later, there was Nigeria, where my dad went to work, and Majorca where we went on holiday I also knew about Germany and that we fought the Germans in the war, which had finished less than thirty years before. The Germans were the baddies in our games when we weren't being cowboys and fighting the Native Americans whom we referred to as Indians.

At the age of eight, we moved to Hong Kong and suddenly I was living in another country but it quickly became home. I thought in dollars not pounds, and lived on a diet of mostly imported American TV and culture. England became a romanticised place for me, viewed primarily through the twin lenses of Arthur Ransome and Anthony Buckeridge's books. 

I guess that at this time in my life I was proud to be English - in an ex-pat community, where you're originally from is part of your identity - but I didn't really know much about the country whose nationality I claimed. 

The England we came back to in the late seventies was, as I remember it, a grim and gloomy place, although part of that must have been the abrupt contrast with Hong Kong Island. As I grew into my midteens, England was a place of skinheads and the National Front, manifested primarily for me in the guise of the New Malden Skins, but also the football violence I saw on the TV and read about in the papers.

I didn't like Thatcherism and, to be honest, I wasn't proud to be English, although I was happy to have the cultural heritage of the nation's pop music and humour. To be honest, I was more interested in being a European, not because I'd seen much of Europe but because of the version of the continent I viewed through the prism of the music I loved and, to a lesser extent, the art that I came into contact with via the bands I liked. I was long past viewing Germans as inherently evil; I saw enough in England that was bad - both historically and in the present day - to think it would be wrong to set ourselves up above anyone else.

When Britpop reclaimed the flag and New Labour came into power, I was confident that we had entered a better age, that my generation and the one before were more enlightened and egalitarian. I was sure, absolutely sure, that we were entering a future that was better than the past.

But I got that wrong. 

I don't need to paint a picture for you of how this country has changed over the last ten years or so. How New Labour forgot about the people they were supposed to be supporting, and failed to tackle our fundamental lack of social mobility. And then the Tories, still (always!) the nasty party, victimising those least able to protect themselves, charging people to learn, spurning social housing as a "breeding ground for Labour voters" (George Osborne), and still (always!) flirting with racism.

And the dividend of this - of an investment first made by Thatcher and Reagan in the eighties - was UKIP. The far right party that wooed the working classes by sympathising with their plight and then blaming immigration, the very immigration that the UK needed and still needs. (Osborne himself accepted that the country needed half a million more immigrants by 2020.)

And from there, Brexit, which left us in a society that is increasingly open in its racism, sexism and homophobia, that sees those who need the most help voting for those least likely to help them. I have been reluctantly dragged into Facebook arguments with people who are now comfortable openly vilifying Muslims. Indeed, substitute "Jews" for "Muslims" in their comments and you get a flavour of 1930s Germany. Regrettably, we're not so different.

Our press openly attacks the judiciary, while our Prime Minister remains silent. Nigel Farage, that evil buffoon, openly incites civil protest against the Supreme Court. 

It couldn't get much worse.

God, I hope that's true.