Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: Let's hear it for the multicultural St George

Van and cab drivers will blazon the cross of St George today; proud men and women will wear it on their beating chests and heaving breasts, symbol of their England, their pride, their land which is looking especially lovely this sunny spring. Since the turn of this century the patriotic brave knight has become markedly more popular. I do genuinely wish the merry crowds a happy day and I hope this column doesn't wreck their good humour.

The England they imagine and celebrate is prelapsarian, an innocent garden of Eden, only more neatly cultivated and ordered. Its pure-blooded natives are congenial unless provoked to Boadicean fury and care not for bloody foreigners, daring modern ideas or interfering governments.

Much of this is fantasy. Stanley Baldwin's dreamy place of country smithies and corncrakes on dewy mornings never even existed in the 1920s when crashingly loud machines had turned over life in the countryside and towns. And the English are in truth a blend, a mongrel tribe, unable ever to resist the lure of outside delights.

I should know. It took but 10 minutes to ensnare my good husband, son of old Sussex, with sturdy, ancestral roots deep in the South Downs. As Jeremy Paxman writes in his book The English: "Any sensible reading of history would have to conclude that for the English to talk of racial purity is whistling in the wind; there is scarcely a family in the land which has no Celtic blood in it, to say nothing of the Romans, Jutes, Normans, Huguenots and all the others who have added to the national bloodstock." But reality checks like these hardly matter on this day. Life would be unbearable without flights of fancy and all nations make up myths to soothe the soul.

April 23rd is also the birthday of the greatest Englishman ever, William Shakespeare, who lived partly in gently rural Warwickshire and partly in that other England which was noisome, busy, ruthless, inviting, conflicted, sexy and hedonistic - London, the city loved by all the world.

There is irreconcilable tension between these two opposing ideas of what England is and means. London, I sense, is no longer seen as a part of England by true English patriots, and England is no longer interchangeable with Britain as it once was.

The first schism will have profound consequences for the capital, and the second has set off a psychic shock that is making the English restive. As the majority, they had grown accustomed to owning these isles. Now that Britishness is open and inviting (or ordering) in all sorts of riff-raff - Black, Asian, Muslim Britons, Poles, even Romanians would you believe? - the English would like to create their own discrete kingdom.

In this realm, the story of England is always rosy, its impact wholly benign and unsurpassed. Wars with Europe, slavery, colonialism, mercantile greed - all get spun into gold and the other Britons are put in their lower places. In some ways, these are the pitiful responses of a nation desperately seeking itself.

One of the finest recent books written on this subject is by an American professor of South Indian background. Krishan Kumar's The Making of The English Identity (Cambridge University Press, 2003) sensitively examines the awakening English self-awareness: "The English took pride, as did the Romans of old, in their role as empire-builders. ... [they] could not see themselves as just another nation in the world of nations. So what happens when the Empire ends? When industrial supremacy and global power disappear? These are the questions facing the English today, made more urgent by the move towards European unity and the calls for radical pluralisation and diversification of English society."

England, the powerful favourite son, is getting resentful after devolution of its three siblings, too. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are also no longer happy to be called British. Instead of integrating with the whole, each is causing a catastrophic disintegration.

Why do none in our political classes seem to care or even notice this much greater threat to national integrity and cohesion than that posed by some anti-British Muslims? We "ethnic minorities" are continually extolled to claim a national identity that has been frayed and torn by the four nations. In a few years we may be the only Brits left, which would be tragic. England could save us; England must do so, even as she struggles with her pained soul and seeks the political definition to which she is entitled.

And here is how. On this day, England parading ethnic pride and allegiance is fine and good, and perhaps necessary. However, the version on show is but a small, parochial and mean part of English heritage and history. There is another, even prouder narrative to instate, an England of many hues, culturally and sexually open and seductive, making and remaking herself through the centuries, unstill and vivacious, inventive, competitive, mother of fine political systems and social institutions, who gave its language to all the world and Shakespeare, too.

Next Saturday, my family and I will be in Stratford celebrating his birthday with joy and gratification. If you are black, Asian or Arab, you live Shakespeare's plays; his values and dilemmas are ours. The extraordinary staging of all his plays undertaken by the Royal Shakespeare Company pays homage to the universal appeal of the Bard. And so, delightfully, you get an English audience in Stratford applauding for over six minutes a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream by Tim Supple, set in India with eight Indian languages interspersed with English. And an African Briton, Chuk Iwuji, playing to great acclaim the lost and manipulated King Henry VI.

England is a cultural and biological crossbreed, indestructible and astonishingly creative. This is why millions of migrants seek to come here and why, way back in the times of Elizabeth I, the influx from elsewhere was unstoppable. You do not have anything like the same energetic heterogeneity or magnetism in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, nor in Tuscany, Provence, Andalucia or Austria.

For heaven's sake - St George himself was born in Palestine, served as a soldier in the Roman army in Anatolia in Turkey, was swarthy and dark-haired, and is revered by Muslims and Christians in the Middle East. How did he end up a patron spirit of warm beer, cricket, fox hounds, the Windsors and nuns on bicycles? Surely he is more representative, a truer saint of the mêlée and mix of London and Birmingham and Manchester? Small Englanders have re-branded him their Anglo-Saxon warrior. What's to stop us taking him back for greater England? Maybe it is time to wear that red-crossed T-shirt today. Heave-ho!

y.alibhai-brown@independent.co.uk

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