Admin Grey Swans'  reply to Jamie Driscoll's (The majority party but joining with Jeremy Corbyn's new party) article in The Canary.

https://www.thecanary.co/opinion/2025/07/18/what-is-british-culture/

This was my email to Jamie Driscoll's (Majority Party but joining with Jeremy Corbyn) article in The Canary

Dear Jamie Driscoll,

You asked

We’ didn’t build British culture. We inherited it from immigrants – and we need to remember that.

Dressed to reflect your nationality or family heritage in clothing

A child dressed with a Wales flag

school’s cultural diversity day

Admin Grey Swans reply - The British are incapable of seeing other cultures nor integrating into them, let alone learning foreign languages with anything other than a British pronunciation.

And then you make the mistake of the left wing by saying

anything to do with culture is fuel for the culture wars.

Admin Grey Swans reply - We are an island of strangers, suffering culture shock by migrants who are thousands of individual cultures each their own, again not understanding each other. Culture is an entire world view, including the emotional response to colour.

You cannot see your own culture as your eyes are looking out from your mind that is culture by cultural viewpoint of the world about you.

You ask

What exactly is British culture?

Admin Grey Swans reply - We are British in general, and English, Welsh, Scots, southern Irish and Protestant Ulstermen. With the sub cultures of Celt languages and the British cultural language dialects. Geordie - Potteries, Mancunian, Scouse, the hey up me lover of the south counties, and the various dialects even of just London and so many more.

And then further ask

Who exactly is British anyway?

Admin Grey Swans reply - Celts and their languages and Anglo, Saxon, Jutes who are the English.

There is no socialism worldwide that is not the ethnic cultural identity of a nation, with its flag and regional flags. That is not far right nationalism. It is part and parcel of human nature. English socialism has allowed the far right to say that socialism is neither English nor Celt and our British and English flags are only right wing.

Integration into other cultures cannot happen with British culture people. We see that, for example, with Brit Expats in Spain. And Brit Expats will never learn the local culture, which I’ve seen with Brit Expats in Greece.

But migrants can do the 2 culture trick needed to prevent their very serious stress injury of culture shock.

By migrants being taught by British and migrants integrated into being British, here for generations, the same language and culture as new migrants, then culture shock is prevented in migrants.

There is no such thing as a multi-cultural nation. Each migrant culture withdraws into its own language and culture and does not understand other migrant cultures as much as not understanding British culture.

I am two cultures in one body, but only English here and only Greek in Greece. But sometimes sneak in English culture on the quiet.

Examples of serious cultural differences even between European cultures:

British debate is a verbal fight til one voice dominates.

Greek debate is a brain storming session with lateral thinking, with one person doing the mental gymnastics of finding the solution written between the lines of what is verbally debated.

I helped on a Brit Expat Torygraph forum, British lawyers bemoaning losing big business contracts when strong debate over the aspects of the contract, over in the Far East:

Went off to the culture shock training businesses’ websites and found that our British debate culture is seriously insulting to Far East and South East Asian cultures, even to the point if disagreeing with their point of view in our British way, means (sorry this was between men trainers and lawyers) that what men valued was being said to be insufficiently small!

And this is impossible for British workers going to work abroad

Employers can prepare employees for working abroad by offering cultural training programs that educate them on the cultural nuances of the host country.

When we had British Empire we trained the colonial officer for 3 months full time in the etiquette of levels of society before sending them to a colony. But the day to day running of each colony was left to the local big wigs that had been before we arrived, on our behalf. The wives and children remained in the British compound and had no local cultural contact.

British workers abroad suffer serious culture shock stress from culture shock, with their foreign counterparts, as does the wife and the kids in local schools.

CONCLUSION

Culture is very different.

British have an arm’s length personal space whilst other culture do not worldwide.

And British may not mean exactly what they say

What a Brit says and what they actually mean are two totally different things. It probably took you some time to work this out, but now you get the not-so-hidden meaning when a Brit says ‘I’m not too bad’, ‘I might join you later’ or ‘I don’t mind’.

Brit actually means they’re blood awful.

Brit actually means I won’t join you later.

Brit actually means they do mind.

Our tea making ceremony in work and at home is very important. A Canadian businessman tried to bypass the tea start of negotiations and he reported the Englishmen looked at hime if he had farted loudly in their presence.

We need all migrants to integrate into the generalised British culture and learn the standard English pronunciation so all migrants comprehend each other as a social cohesion. Talking a languages without the right pronunciation makes it incomprehensible.

Migrant culture remains as Greek has over the centuries. With own churches, food, community centres and speaking migrant language at home or between migrants.

The British have never liked foreigners talking a foreign language out in the street. That will never change.

Two Africans in Athens without a common language had both come from a former English colony. They had learned not only the standard English, but also the culture of facial expression, tone of voice and body language. So giving full comprehension.

One HSBC bank advert showed how different hand gestures were amongst world cultures.

Greeks throw their heads back to say No with mostly a wordless noise meaning No.

English shake their heads side to side to say No whilst verbally saying No.

Giving somebody a thumbs-up in Greece, Iran, Russia, Sardinia and parts of West Africa could get you in trouble! There, a thumbs-up is synonymous with giving somebody the middle finger. (American) or two fingers (English).

Trying to do a high five in Greece with your palm extended is highly offensive in Greece.

So if Europeans are so different from each other, then from around the world the differences culturally are even greater.

We do migrants no favours by not integrating them into British culture. They will not lose theirs.

Let us get Jeremy Corbyn elected and give socialism a British face.

Paul Knaggs

Facebook - Paul Knaggs June 16, 2025 3.00am

https://labourheartlands.com/reclaiming-our-flag/

Reclaiming Our Flag: Why the Working-Class Left Must Re-Embrace Patriotism

When the Left abandons cultural identity, the Right doesn’t just fill the void…they weaponise it.

For too long, the British Left has been wilfully blind to a political truth as stark as the morning light: when we abandon our nation’s cultural identity, the reactionary right weaponises it against us. While we’re tangled in abstract theories, debating the finer points of some obscure academic text, the hard right is out there, shamelessly wrapping themselves in the Union Jack and declaring themselves the sole guardians of British identity.

This isn’t just a problem; it’s a profound, self-inflicted wound. This wholesale rejection of national identity isn’t revolutionary, it’s political suicide.

It hands the forces of reaction a free, unchallenged monopoly on patriotism. More catastrophically, it alienates millions of working people across our towns and cities, for whom love of country and the bitter struggle for class liberation are not contradictory ideals, but profoundly intertwined causes.

This isn’t ideological purity; it’s a strategic betrayal, plain and simple, and it’s high time we dragged it into the harsh glare of reality.

The left abandoning cultural identity has been a catastrophic mistake. It’s time to fix it. We need to build a movement that speaks to the deepest aspirations of our people, while remaining absolutely true to our internationalist principles. Only then can we hope to build the socialist future our nation, and indeed, the world, so desperately needs.

While the modern Labour Party under Starmer ties itself to global capital, NATO wars, and outsourced identity politics, it is the job of socialists to plant our flag where it belongs, with the people, in the soil of this land, against all forms of oppression, foreign or domestic.

As Lenin said: “No nation can be free if it oppresses other nations.”

But no class can be free if it despises the culture, heritage, and dreams of the people it claims to represent.

We don’t reject internationalism. We insist that true internationalism begins at home, by lifting our own people out of poverty, restoring our national sovereignty, and rejecting the neoliberal order that starves both solidarity and soil.



In short:

We are patriots because we are socialists.

We are socialists because we love this country enough to change it.