It is often said that the English suffer from a lack of patriotic feeling. And there is some evidence to support this claim: English people, on average, rate their degree of patriotism at just 5.8 out of 10, according to a European survey, far below the self-rated patriotism of the Scots, Welsh and Irish, and the lowest of all the European nations. Our ‘national day’, St George’s Day, is on 23 April, but surveys regularly show that at least two-thirds of us are completely unaware of this.
