I was raised a Quaker, but only in a relaxed don't-fret-too-much-about-the-God stuff kind of way; no one made me dress like the man on the Quaker Oats box. When I turned 16 I was automatically sent a copy of The Young Quaker magazine for a few months, so my name must've appeared on some kind of central database at Quaker HQ, but the magazine itself was disappointingly lacking in sinister religious propaganda. It largely consisted of poetry and people wearing sensible hand-knitted jumpers. In short, no one tried to hammer the God nail into my forehead at an impressionable age.
In fact the best thing about being a Quaker was the lack of God in my life. As a Quaker I got to duck out of religious education lessons at my Church of England primary school. I sat outside the classroom with the offspring of other godless heathens, sketching comic strips and trying (and failing) to get into Stig of the Dump. Sometimes I watched through the windows as the local vicar, a uniformed officer of the Lord, Trojan horsed his way into the classroom to indoctrinate the locals.
This was all OK because it was happening in a leafy English village with a duck pond, thatched cottages, and a cricket pavilion. But today the government is concerned about more sinister Trojan horse schools, apparently more sinister because they're located in cities and involve different religions. David Cameron has responded to this crisis by declaring we need to celebrate "Britishness" with more enthusiasm.
More enthusiasm? More? We've been celebrating Britishness with the strained determination of a man desperately trying to shit a cricket ball for the past five years. There's a Union Flag on every cushion, bedspread and Rimmel commercial. Twee cartoons of the London skyline adorn packets of biscuits. TV can't shut up about Britain. The Great British Menu. The Great British Summer. The Great British Sewing Bee. The Great British Bake Off. The Great British Bayou. The Great British Bull Run. The Great British France.
We had the Olympics, for Christ's sake. We spent the whole of 2012 waving flags like a semaphore dictionary on fast-forward. And that wasn't enough? Now, years later, just as the Keep Calm and Carry On posters are finally starting to yellow and peel and fall from the wall like scraps of torched parchment, now Cameron wants MORE of that bullshit?
OK, he hasn't mentioned waving flags. He's on about the Magna Carta. We, his minions, don't love the Magna Carta enough, although to be fair to us, it's a hardly a crowd-pleasing read. There's no inciting incident in the first act, and there aren't any sympathetic leads either so it's hard to know who to root for. It's King John versus a bunch of wealthy landowners: a legal spat between several berks and the king of the berks. Plebs weren't covered by the Magna Carta, see. They had the same human rights as a parsnip. You could slice up their kids and use them as shoe leather until 1963. That's the Britain Cameron wants us to celebrate, the monster.
If he really wants to celebrate the spirit of Magna Carta, or at least the spirit of the bit which implied that the monarchy were no better than the rest of us, maybe he should call a halt to his weekly forelock-tugging audience with the Queen and spend that hour meeting a random member of the British public instead. Even if he wound up hating them, at least he'd learn more about his subjects.
As for the rest of "Britishness", beyond the Magna Carta and the flags and bunting, I'm not quite sure what it is. How will our sense of "Britishness" change if Scotland votes for independence? What percentage of "Britishness" is actually just "Englishness"?
I know what "Englishness" looks like, thanks to the free souvenir copy of the Sun that dropped through the letterbox last week, a Sergeant Pepper style crush of faces on its front cover, helpfully captioned THIS IS OUR ENGLAND. Englishness is Sebastian Coe and Peppa Pig. Amir Khan and Alesha Dixon. Del Boy and Harry Potter. Tinky Winky, Ant and Dec, Johnny Rotten and The Queen. An incongruous cacophony that cancels itself out.
The cover itself, of course, has become notorious for a different reason: namely the ill-fated photograph of Ed Miliband holding his copy aloft. He's apologised to the people of Liverpool, but really he ought to extend the apology to cover all of us, not for promoting the Sun, but for pulling such an eerie expression while he did so. If someone on your train leered at you like that over their newspaper, you wouldn't just leave the carriage; you'd leave town.
Cameron and Clegg were also snapped failing to resemble normal human beings while holding promotional copies of their own. Clegg held his up like an eight-year-old proudly showing off a potato print of a TARDIS he'd just finished, while Cameron loomed stiffly over his copy, irises aflame in the manner of an unearthly reptilian shapeshifter suddenly locking eyes with a warm-blooded peasant he intends to devour for breakfast. He can't help it. He's a lizard. David Cameron is a lizard. He can he lecture us on Britishness the day he stops celebrating lizardness. But that day will never come. Because he's a lizard.
David Cameron is a lizard.
A lizard. A lizard.
The man is a lizard.
David Cameron, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, First Lord of the Treasury, Minister for the Civil Service and Leader of the Conservative Party, is a lizard.
And a Trojan lizard at that.
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