{"id":2847,"date":"2010-06-23T11:16:35","date_gmt":"2010-06-23T10:16:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=2847"},"modified":"2010-06-23T11:50:09","modified_gmt":"2010-06-23T10:50:09","slug":"what-does-it-mean-to-be-english","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=2847","title":{"rendered":"What does it mean to be English?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Although I am the Member for England on the Communications Consumer Panel, I don&#8217;t feel particularly English. In fact, I&#8217;m half Italian. My wife does not feel English either, but that might be because she&#8217;s half Welsh and half Czech.<\/p>\n<p>Most of our closest friends are not English either &#8211; they are American, South African, Czech, Slovak,\u00a0 Chinese, half French, half Spanish, and so on. We live in the most cosmopolitan city in the UK (London) and in the second blackest borough in Britain (Brent).<\/p>\n<p>Nevertheless I&#8217;m proud to be English and to live in England. There is something special about the people and the place.\u00a0 But what does it mean to be English?<\/p>\n<p>The &#8220;Daily Mirror&#8221; today publishes the results of a survey of 5,000 people who offered<a href=\"http:\/\/www.mirror.co.uk\/news\/top-stories\/2010\/06\/23\/from-queuing-to-sarcasm-the-50-things-that-make-us-english-115875-22352601\/\"> 50 things that make us English<\/a>. In fact, the survey does not capture what I think is a defining characteristic of the English: tolerance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Although I am the Member for England on the Communications Consumer Panel, I don&#8217;t feel particularly English. In fact, I&#8217;m half Italian. My wife does not feel English either, but that might be because she&#8217;s half Welsh and half Czech. Most of our closest friends are not English either &#8211; they are American, South African, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-british-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2847"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2847\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2851,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2847\/revisions\/2851"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}