EVERY YEAR, you can guarantee that the Irish will celebrate St Patrick’s Day with colourful parades and lashings of stout, and that the Scots will commemorate Burns Night with much haggis, tartan and rhetoric of insurrection. But what of the English? These days, St George’s Day seems to consist of moaning that we don’t observe this national holiday. Good. We shouldn’t celebrate Englishness, because national celebrations are for nations that are chippy and insecure.

There have been cries once again this year for the English to celebrate our patron saint, and for the English to take pride in our ethnicity. William Hague and Simon Heffer have done so recently, and the likes of Garry Bushell and Billy Bragg have been campaigning tiresomely on this subject for some years now. If these are the kind of people you want to hold street parties with, then you are most welcome to them.

Let’s face it, English nationalism is the preserve of rather odd people, those types who have St George crosses in their front garden, who adorn their front rooms with scary Royal Family kitsch, or who go round smashing up cars in Trafalgar Square just because their team lost a game of football.

If I may employ a comparison, consider the nation as the macrocosm of the individual. Only insecure souls or rabid egotists feel the need to talk about themselves all the time. Just witness the conduct of Big Brother contestants, or guests on Trisha or Jerry Springer. The megalomania or ostentatious paranoia of these people is intolerable and often resembles a form of demented solipsism. Contrarily, normal, well-adjusted and confident folk just get on with their lives and don’t possess the impulse to project their egos on to the world.

If anything, it would be preferable to celebrate Britishness, which celebrates both the difference and unity among our four peoples. Britishness is also far less concerned with ethnicity and more conducive to a multi-racial society, unlike Englishness or Scottishness, which both seem to hark back to a militaristic, racially pure medieval paradise of William Wallace or Henry V.

We should jettison St George, just as the Irish should drop the blarney and the Scots the Braveheart baloney. The English should not celebrate St George’s Day tomorrow. Ignoring it with cool reserve would be a far more confident expression of Englishness.