Call Yourself British is the Daily Telegraph's attempt to make us all stop calling ourself Welsh (or Scottish or English or Irish) and bask in our Britshness. This follows on from Gordie's attempts last year to wrap himself in Britishness and call for a "British Day".
The site is covered with the Union Jack (and by the way, it is called the Union Jack not the Union Flag - incorrect pedantic fools!), Big Ben, British Bulldogs, the Queen and a British passport. It looks like a proper propoganda machine. But once you look at it closely, it falls apart pretty quickly.
First is their all important poll, headlined "Most of us feel British - for now ", "Only 37pc of us see ourselves as British" and "We are better off British - and proud of it". You'd assume that, in a website devoted to "rally the people of Great Britain around the 1707 Acts of Union", "us" would mean British people. Read the text of the articles and you quickly realise that they only carried out their poll in England - hardly a good example of uniting the UK!
Even better is, at the bottom of the front page, the pictures of the Assembly, Scottish and NI Parliament and the Commons. I'll reproduce it here and will give plenty of kudos to the first person to point out how not in touch with the world outside England the Telegraph is! (Remember that building on the left?)
Then there is their "Journey to the Heart of The Union" - passing through Glasgow, Edinburgh, Hadrian's Wall, The Midlands and into London (I guess Wales and Northern Ireland are just not important enough to be the heart!)
To cap off the whole doomed project (no new articles since December 2007) is the advert on the left for the Telegraph Family Activity Planner. Here it is......
I guess that's a good map of the United Kingdom as the Daily Telegraph sees it!
4 comments:
I hate to be a pedant myself - but technically the flag of the United Kingdom is "the Union Flag," UNLESS it is flown as the identifying flag on a ship of the Royal Navy.
However, given that popular usage of the word "Jack" to distinguish it from the American "Union Flag" has become so widespread it would seem that a more logical way forward would be to bow to a fait accompli and officially rename it.
Of course, there is the further argument on whether it's necessary at all...
YES! I got someone! There's nothing better than proving a pedantic person wrong!
In 1902 the Admiralty made it clear that they didn;t consider "Union Jack" to be a nautical term and in 1908 Parliament stated that:
"the Union Jack should be regarded as the National flag".
Oh yeah! Me 1 - You 0!
I'd say there's still a little bit of Wales and Scotland on that map....
Well of course Damon, the parts of Wales and Scotland you see on the map is what the Telegraph's Henries can see from the Englsh border - I'm sure they wouldn;t dare go into Scotland or Wales to see what is beyond their eyesight, not when these lands are full of such disgusting creatures as the Celts ;-)
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