The U.K. is, for the most part, profoundly mistrustful of displays of patriotism. Just like the Anglo-Australian rivalry, there's a hefty element of class involved; a senior politician was sacked last year for tweeting a picture of a house with two England flags and a white van, captioned 'welcome to Rochester'. To an American, this presumably seems banal and harmless; a mark of national identity next to a utility vehicle! But in England, that image was freighted with socioeconomic symbolism and importance. The white van and St George's cross are key parts of the iconography of a certain segment of English (word used deliberately) society; white, male, working-class, boorish, misogynistic, stereotypically from Essex, obsessed by football, reader of the Sun. Indeed Kelvin Mackenzie, editor of the Sun in the 1980s and one of the few people I've never met but nonetheless despise, once delivered a very revealing quote: his paper was pitched to 'the bloke you see in the pub, a right old fascist, wants to send the wogs back, buy his poxy council house, he's afraid of the unions, afraid of the Russians, hates the queers and the weirdos and drug dealers'. Another key element of this culture's iconography is the Second World War; it's not for nothing that arguably the most famous England football chant is 'two world wars and one world cup', directed of course at the Germans who remain the target of a ridiculous number of Sun headlines. Mackenzie's phrase 'right old fascist' is interesting; part of the symbolic connotations of the St George's Cross have changed since the 1970s, because it was hijacked by the neo-fascist movement the National Front, who had an astonishing amount of cultural relevance and incited a hell of a lot of violence. It would be stupid to describe UKIP as fascist, but it's worth noting that the photo I mentioned earlier came from the constituency Nigel Farage was trying to win (and only narrowly lost). Since the 1980s, British society has became a lot more polarised. From 1945 to 1979 the UK was built on a corporatist, consensual social settlement that gave a remarkable amount of power to trade unions and to the central government. Margaret Thatcher almost single-handedly ended that, and in the process she destroyed many, many working communities in the North of England that had a strong sense of civic pride. The people who were proud of the U.K. (in the Hugh Grant in Love Actually way) diminished with that quasi-Scandinavian social settlement: the NHS is the closest thing the UK has to a state religion, and with successive Conservative governments dismembering it, what's their left to be proud of? Everyone who doesn't identify with the 'white van man' culture is reluctant to be US-style patriotic (perhaps because the US is an idea before it is a country, whereas the British are, as JS Mill said, a people distrustful of grand ideas). I see two more significant reasons for Britain's distrust for patriotism. Firstly, the U.K. has quite simply not come to terms with the loss of its empire; I still hold that our culture's wilful blindness as to the crimes we committed is a large reason for our present lack of cohesion, as we continue to fool ourselves into thinking we're globally relevant. We are beginning a long process of decay: some deal with that by hiding from it, others by denying it- neither attitude conducive to national pride Secondly, and interlinked, the UK experienced a surge of immigration from its former colonies in the 1950s, immigrants who were never fully integrated. The rhetoric against them became so bitter that simply to be patriotic seemed a moderately racist. (Given the theoretical sporting angle to this whole thing, it's intriguing to note that Lord Tebbit, one of Thatcher's Cabinet, proposed as a key determiner of your identity whether you cheered for England or India in cricket). The period 2003-2012 was an especially bad period for patriotism in the UK; internationally, we were America's lapdog, following them eagerly into an illegal war and facilitating breaches of international law; domestically, when the recession hit, the last vestiges of manufacturing disappeared (and are disappearing).
In this context, London 2012 was unbelievable. Everyone expected it to fail dismally; the logo sucked, the mascots were shite, we were competing with China, and our sportsmen were consistently failures. But it wasn't. The national mood was astonishing from the opening ceremony on; Super Saturday was, incredibly, a day when our polarised, marginalised, alienated society finally came together as one. I attended the Paralympic swimming; it was - and I'm no patriot- an extraordinary day. (Interestingly, the private security firm epically failed to actually provide security, so the army stepped in a week before the Games began, and proceeded to act with a somewhat surprising professionalism and good humour; the army providing security...how much more uniting can you get? Don't worry though; the mood of unity and optimism evaporated by the start of 2013, and as the bad-mannered and bad-tempered fight over the future of the Stadium itself shows you, no hint of it remained in our national culture, as far as I can tell. Equally, it was a powerful force at the time (mostly for the worse). Danny Boyle's opening ceremony presented an inclusive vision of what Britain could be and what its significance is (David Bowie, mostly). But the reality is more like Trainspotting...
Edit: lots of stuff raised since I posted. I can't agree with Buckle (although it is worth noting that London got the Olympic nod ahead of heavy favourite Paris); Robert raised some very interesting points, and the Brecht quote sure fits.
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