On the day after the highlight of the European calendar and
as the elections draw ever nearer, the relationship between Britain and Europe
is under close scrutiny. Naturally, that makes me want to chuck my
two-pennyworth into the mix and publicly stick two international fingers up
at that party in the purple and yellow.
We in the
island nation of Great Britain have a history of considering ourselves as being
a little bit different to our European neighbours, something that may be due to
the puddle of water between us and the rest of the world, or possibly because
of what my mother would call ‘small man syndrome’, but it’s about time we
recognise that we are a product of Europe and the wider world perhaps more than
anywhere else. Everything which we consider as part of our unique British
heritage has been given to us, forced on us or borrowed/ adopted/ stolen by us;
our language, our monarchy, our religion, even our beloved tea, it all comes
from overseas. (Except perhaps Morris Dancing, about which the less said, the
better.) There are of course some genius home-grown traditions – cheese rolling
and tossing the caber spring to mind, but in general these are regional rather
than part of our shared British culture.
But
this is one of the few things that I really love about Britain. We have so much
that we are perfectly warranted in moaning about (the weather, naturally) but
this hotchpotch of cultures is not one of them. If you want to find ‘pure’
British culture, I think you’d have to be looking back to pre-Roman Britain
(and I thoroughly recommend you do, it’s fascinating) but let’s accept that we
are the original melting pot and make the most of it. We’re no Madagascar, a
strange petri-dish of oddities grown in total isolation; rather our Britishness
was forged in the furnace of Europe over centuries, even millennia. Even those
who have never got as far as those gleaming cliffs have roots that spread
further than we ever stop to think about; we owe it to ourselves and the rest
of the global community to recognise it and keep in close contact with our
heritage. We have shaped nations across the globe, but let’s not forget just
how much they have shaped us.
