Here's a thread about England I thought up while walking in Bavaria today. I got quite cross, despite seeing hundreds of butterflies, beautiful meadow flowers & Golden Eagles, and swimming in mountain streams and lakes.....
It was hot today (about 30 degrees) and I walked about 20 miles in the mountains close to the Austrian border. I'm English, but I have a right to be here because (by virtue of an Irish passport) I'm a European citizen.
Now, most English people have been deprived of this right because the likes of Dominic Cummings, Mark Francois - and let's face it - Vladimir Putin decided that it wasn't something English people should have. And by telling lies on an industrial scale...
..and by appealing to the high incipient levels of racism in England, fuelled by the Sun, the Express and the Daily Mail, they managed to persuade enough English people to go along with it....
(here's another photo from today's walk). They also managed to strip Scots of their European citizenship *against their will*. But this is all somehow fine because - well, it's the will of Cummings, isn't it?
This state of affairs is now being sustained by a concerted effort to whip up hatred against asylum seekers. These are people who have nothing, who need help; but English people are seemingly willing to watch them drown rather then help them...
in fact the rhetoric seems to indicate that many English people - egged on by their repulsive, incompetent, corrupt fascist government - would like to see the Royal Navy machine-gunning these people....
This is not a normal state of affairs. This is Fascism. It's not in my name. I was born and educated in England, and can trace my ancestry in England back to the 14th Century, but if this is what being English is, I'm not English.
Journalists covering the asylum seeker story should ask themselves which side THEY are on.
Meanwhile, I'm eternally grateful to the Republic of Ireland (through my Irish grandmother) and to Germany for believing in Europe as much as I do, and for allowing me the opportunity to live and work in any part of the Union I want to.
The other side of this coin is that I'll never forgive the people who made me choose whether I was British or European.