School girl banned from making a speech on cultural awareness because she wore a union Jack-style dress.

 

Courtney Wright

I think that young girl, Courtney Wright, from Rugby, deserved an apology from her school. What the school did was outrageous. The school were celebrating 'Culture Celebration Day' and she was prevented from making a speech and put in isolation, because she was wearing a union Jack-style dress, like one of the Spice Girls. It seems that nowadays in Britain, you can celebrate everybody else’s culture but not your own.

Unfortunately, many of the people today who teach in our schools, are politically correct dipsticks and snowflakes. They're more interested in sexual identities than national or regional identities.

When I was a schoolboy in the 1950s, our teachers would show us a map of the world and tells us that everything on the map that was coloured red belonged to Britain. They never stopped talking about Roger Bannister's four-minute mile or Edmund Hilary's ascent of Everest. We were raised as little imperialists and most of my fellow pupils were white.

I don't think being British means a great deal to most people of the British Isles and I think regional identities are probably stronger than national identities. The Scots are known to support any team that is playing against England in the World Cup. Yet as a northern Englishman, I identify more with a Scot than I would a Londoner or a person from Cornwall.

Britain is a deeply class-divided society that is governed by amateurs. In a famous essay, the author George Orwell, wrote: "England is the most class-ridden country under the Sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly.” Orwell said that "almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during 'God save the King' than of stealing from a poor box..." When they used to play the national anthem at an English cinema, everybody used to run out to catch the last bus.

Edwardian English Middle-class families that produced Orwell, Philip Larkin and Stephen Spender, generally looked down their nose at the coloured subjects of the British Empire as well as Jews and the working-classes. Spender wrote about how his parents stopped him playing with "rough" children and Orwell's mother, who was a socialist, stopped him playing with the plumbers' daughter. Larkin's father had Nazi sympathies and supported Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists.