Illustration by Leon Edler
St George was 30 feet high and, aside from the long, red tunic, grey helmet and furry red plume, he looked like a Byzantine Jesus. He rolled on wheels along the high street and at his feet – at his casters – was a square of drummers dressed in the same, beating tambourines, skins and claves in one mighty, rallying rhythm. Trailing behind them were nymphs, dignitaries, fairies and worthies. There was Miss Ramsgate, proudly sashed, followed by a trio of rival Ramsgate “princesses”. There was an impressive green dragon, held up by three strong lads with backpack harnesses. The sun was high; the sky clear.
As we passed, men in barbershop chairs swivelled to stare. Even the seagulls turned a beady eye from the chimney pots. But the rear of the parade was less sure of itself. At the back was another 30ft figure of broadly Cappadocian origin, but dressed in white, with a flowery headdress. His identity was harder to clarify. “I think it’s meant to be Jesus,” a little man in a peasant costume had squeakily told me. It’s something to do with a spring festival, another woman said. “It’s the Ukrainian St George!” one man, dressed as a tree, laughed at me. “It’s not St George,” said Nadia, a refugee from Ukraine.
It’s a Sunday afternoon in Ramsgate, one of several towns that cluster on that breezy blister of land on England’s south-eastern heel. And I am in the middle of a textbook St George’s Day parade, mingling commitment and confusion. I counted only two St George’s Crosses (better known as England flags), which was odd, because in other parts of the country I’ve passed through in recent months (Bexley, Romford), I’ve seen a great deal of them, painted across mini-roundabouts. Just three years ago, the Economist declared English nationalism “a conspiracy of male writers, desperate to combine their love of football with a degree in English literature”. Where were the calls for an English parliament, the paper merrily asked. Well, these days, YouTubers police the ethnicity of Rishi Sunak, and housing estates are robed with red crosses. An Englishness with very different demands has come to fill the void – and here is an Englishness of a sanctioned, semi-official sort marching forth to meet it.
The day had begun peacefully. The town was still when I arrived, with no one yet taking advantage of the offers advertised in several pubs for “continental lager” at £3 a pint. One man wafted a metal detector on the uncrowded beach and a flock of wind turbines circled silently on the blue horizon. Only the 90 most dedicated filed in to the church – a church named for St George, the Martyr – for the 11am St George’s Day service.
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In true Church of England spirit, St George’s was doing its utmost to keep pace with the contemporary, and half succeeding. Reverend Paul Worledge was miked up, and backed by a PowerPoint presentation, while the nave was hung with prints from a local artist, including a fearsome Viking knight who appeared to be modelled on one of the Hemsworth siblings. And while we roared out “Praise My Soul, the King of Heaven”, some of the hymns were of disconcertingly recent composition, with consequently sloppy lyricism: “My Lord is faster than a rocket/Can see more than a telescope/Is bigger than the universe as well”.
But Rev Worledge was kindly and authentically tonsured and knew the names of his congregants. I was impressed by the pointedness of his sermon. First, he told us the story of the Roman St George, his efforts to protect Christians and his execution by Diocletian. Then, summoning the St George’s Cross on his PowerPoint, he discussed how in the past year the English flag had become a threatening symbol, used by the far right to intimidate outsiders. Nevertheless, he said, it is the flag of our country. We should find our national virtues within it. Under Worledge’s direction, a small boy, one of the younger worshippers, filled in each of the flag’s blank quadrants with four values both “English” and “Christian”: courage, grace, service and “spirit-filled”. Later, on A5 printouts of the flag, we wrote our own prayer into each box.
After the service, on the church steps, we were confronted by a troupe of mummers, here to give us the other, dragon-slaying St George. The group looked credibly medieval, and the script, written in pointless couplets, was hilarious. (Dragon: “Marrow from your bones I’ll squeeze, I’ll suck your blood up by degrees!”) But everything proceeded cheerfully enough. To medieval piping and the slap of a tambourine, George (a woman in an England rugby shirt with a colander on her head) boxed the dragon with a pair of oven gloves. When the dragon fell, we all cheered, and the locals loved the joke about a rival knight being revived with “Kentish ale”. To the sound of hollow coconuts, George rode off into the sunset.
I wanted to know how the people who were watching felt about St George and England. I chatted to Willow and Lucy, two of Worledge’s congregants. They were conscious of how English symbolry had become politicised in recent months. There hadn’t been many flags in the town’s centre (Worledge said it was worse “towards Margate”), but there were more on its edges; Willow had seen one neighbour arguing with another about flying their flag. “I want to be proud of my country,” Lucy said, though she feared the St George’s Cross had become a “marker of xenophobia”. But, she said, the important thing about St George was his internationalism, that he was the “patron saint of lots of places”.
“Pride in Place” is a new Whitehall initiative for regional regeneration, and a canny bureaucrat had decided that the day’s celebrations made a perfect peg for its Ramsgate launch. After the parade had turned to march back up the high street – and we had been fed homemade soup and sausage rolls – we gathered back in the church, an impressive crowd of two or three hundred. It was an audience ready to do good; when they were asked if they currently did any local volunteering, about half of people in the room raised a hand. Ramsgate is getting £20m over ten years to fund clean and safe streets, opportunities for the young, care for the old. We heard about the programmes that have already received money: special-needs support services, local filmmakers, a new Ramsgate arts magazine.
After the presentation, I grabbed the local MP, Polly Billington. She’d been on the parade, clutching a charity-cheque-sized poster for Pride in Place. A former special adviser to Ed Miliband, she seemed worried I’d ask her about vetting or Olly Robbins, so I stuck to the softball of the English question. She said the important thing about St George is “he is somebody that the English chose to be their saint” and that “he comes from somewhere else”. I asked whether programmes like Pride in Place would address the concerns of those flying the St George’s Cross over the past few months. “Forgive me – I’ve been fighting fascism since the late Seventies,” she said immediately. “There have been people who have been using the flag in various ways almost all of my life.”
The Electoral Calculus gives Billington a 16 per cent chance of winning her seat at the next election, and Reform 74 per cent. “Fascism” or not, it is impossible not to see English nationalism as the major force in Britain’s political ructions, a nationalism that has burst the bottle of officialised folklore. The campaign for a St George’s bank holiday proclaims this post-national banality: “St George’s Day is a cultural celebration when everyone in England can recognise the one thing we have in common – we all live in the same country.” But while there is an England for whom that is enough – not least in Ramsgate – there is another, one that sees English nationhood not even as something to be celebrated, but proclaimed, defined and enforced.
[Further reading: Who’s afraid of Olly Robbins?]
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This article appears in the 22 Apr 2026 issue of the New Statesman, All alone