Are you still proud to be British.

The first time I ever truly felt ashamed of my country was in the run up to the Iraq War when Blair utterly debased both us and himself with his cringeworthy toadying up to America for all the world to see, with no sense of shame whatsoever. 

As for now, how can any good person be anything but ashamed at a nation with homeless on our streets, public services falling apart, people having to pull their own teeth out for lack of a dentist, more working people in poverty than out of work, the scourge of malnutrition starting to stalk the land, food banks all over the place, corruption in high office on a scale not seen in living memory, most politicians blatant liars it seems as well. We see them lying on TV. They know they are lying. We know they are lying. They know we know they are lying. And the do it anyway. And we still vote for them anyway.

Part of our legislative system is made up of appointees and cronies, the other part is elected by a hugely disproportional system. Most of us have lost confidence in being heard under this system and suspect with good reason that the powers that be do not give a shit what we think or want as long as they can hoodwink the small minority who make up floating voters in marginal seats, the only ones whose views they care about.

Work in this country has long since ceased to be the route to prosperity, just a necessity to even survive. The youth see little positive in their future anymore, with good reason. Most will never own a home, at least not until they inherit the one their grandparents brought. Assuming said grandparents have not had to sell it to finance dementia care.

And we have an electorate so stupid that they are taken in by the shite spouted by an obvious narcissist and charlatan like Johnson.

How can I possibly be proud of my country or it's people today?

And anyone who spends as much time reading about history as I do would know that though there were positives, there is much to be ashamed of there too, from the Amritsar massacre to the Irish Potato famine, and from the repression in Kenya to the appalling conditions in concentration camps in the Boer War.

Even our British Empire was with the partial exception of the white dominions an exercise in repression, brutality and torture. And even in the white dominions, the native populations suffered terribly. Brutalities used to repress recalcitrant populations included collective punishment on entire towns, bulldozing of dwellings, mine clearance by forcing lorry loads of prisoners to drive in front, resulting in most of them being blown to bits, concentration camps, deliberate starvation, sometimes to death, of detainees, blowing people apart with cannons, burning them alive, flogging them to death, beating them to death, barbaric tortures.

Most of this was known at the highest level, the only concerns being to protect the "security" forces from legal sanctions. In a book I have just read about the unvarnished history of the British Empire, one such British operative in Kenya described his arrival at the interrogation of a suspect. He described matter of factly how the suspect already had one eye hanging out of it's socket whilst both his ears had been cut off. He himself then cut the victim's balls off.

In every case when the British finally left a colony they spent much time beforehand burning incriminating evidence..

Present or past, it is hard for a moral person to be proud of this country.