If you’re on Facebook, you can’t have failed to notice the groups with names like “ENGLAND SHIRTS BANNED IN ENGLISH PUBS!”, “ENGLAND FLAGS BANNED BECAUSE THEY OFFEND ISLAMS”, “LICKLE KIDDIES CALLED RACISTS FOR SUPPORTING ENGLAND”, and so on, ad nauseam.
And of course it’s all gibberish. A legitimate complaint is misunderstood, a comment is taken out of context, a person wearing an England shirt is chastised for something entirely unrelated, and the tabloids do the rest. It just takes a bit of selective reporting and enough misinformation to fire up all the old knee-jerk prejudices and we’re done. Facebook groups with over 150,000 members frothing at the collective mouth over an ill-conceived rumour.
You’ll find plenty of good sense about this on Anton Vowl’s blog, which is where I also found this video. In aid of the Carers UK charity, the song “We’re England” has been put together ahead of the World Cup to celebrate our jolly interesting multi-ethnic heritage.
I love the use of one of the themes from Holst’s “Jupiter” as the intro riff. A pop song featuring a classical theme written by an Englishman of Swedish and Latvian extraction. If you don’t understand the significance of that, you really don’t know much about England (or the whole of Britain, for that matter).