Ignore Wes Streeting’s doom mongering about Britain ...Middle East

“There is a deep disillusionment in this country at the moment and, I’d say, a growing sense of despair about whether anyone is capable of turning this country around.” Now there’s a cheery thought to start the week. Despair? Disillusionment? And these were the words, not of a professional doomsayer or a GB News presenter, but of Health Secretary Wes Streeting, a senior member of His Majesty’s Government.

Streeting was reflecting on the political realities of Labour’s shattering by-election defeat last week, and I’m sure his purpose was to illustrate that he was in touch with the British people. We feel your pain, he was saying. But for many of us, it was little more than an elevated version of Private Frazer’s refrain in Dad’s Army: “We’re all doomed”.

It is not difficult to be disillusioned by the sights, sounds and sentiments of Britain today. And we all have our triggers. For me, it’s the ad hoc display of flags of St George on lampposts, at road junctions, in private gardens and in public spaces. I know this is all meant to be a statement of patriotic devotion, but my personal response is precisely the opposite.

square CHARLENE WHITE

I'm sick of 'flag wars', so I'm fighting back – by putting up all the Commonwealth ones

My love of Britain is rooted in its values of tolerance, inclusion and respect for others, and there is a nationalistic defiance attached to the displays of English flags that I can’t help feeling excludes me. I understand the political, cultural and economic reasons for these demonstrations, but, as an unreconstructed liberal and a Jewish person, from immigrant stock, I don’t think the people who put up the flags would like me very much.

So, as I approached a major roundabout on the outskirts of Oxford, I had a viscerally negative reaction to the serried ranks of flags which now hang from every lamppost. Their presence, I felt, was a direct challenge to my way of thinking. Did that make me anti-patriotic? Am I a traitor to my country? Or is it that I just have a different idea of what makes me proud of my country?

Bear with me, but on the car radio at the time was the Sara Cox show on Radio 2 (yes, I have reached the Radio 2 stage of my life). I have long thought Ms Cox to be one of the best broadcasters around – clever, funny, and with an unwavering and genuine respect for her listeners. This manifests itself in the phone-in conversations she has with people up and down the country, who are eager to share with her (and us) the remarkable details of their ostensibly unremarkable lives.

So you have the couple who are towing a caravan to Anglesey to celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary, or the dad who’s driving from Surrey to Glasgow to take his daughter to see the University, or the daughter who calls in to say her late mum once met Meat Loaf, or friends who are travelling from Wales to Belgium to take part in a triathlon, raising funds for their local hospice. I’m not sure I’ve remembered all the details correctly, but you get the idea.

For three hours, listeners call in to request their favourite songs, and to tell their personal stories of triumph and disaster, of friends and relations, of enduring loves and ordinary lives. I find it so moving, and I often have to dab a tear away when there’s a tale of a simple pleasure that gives such extraordinary joy.

And then I realised what I find so emotionally affecting about this wondrous collection of random voices from Braemar to Bodmin. It’s what makes me proud to be British, the tea parties and the neighbourly acts and the selflessness and the humour found in the bizarre and the banal.

You don’t need to wrap a flag around it, because we all have our own, often very personal, idea of what being patriotic means. And, for me, it’s British people being British, having a laugh, doing a favour, cherishing their family, in the face of everyday adversity. Despair? Disillusionment? Not a bit of it. And that’s why, if you want to cheer yourself up and remind yourself that this really is a wonderful country, it may be better to listen to Cox than Streeting.

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square SIMON KELNER