On the Land of Hope and glory faux furore. Firstly I know it's all a right wing media distraction piece cooked up to galvanise the right and annoy the left and any attempt to engage in that conversation will get shot down by everyone

Here's why I've always disliked all of these nationalist anthems. This is long and I'm sorry about that but it's important to understand that a lot of people (and particularly young people) think very differently about the nature of what we call 'The United Kingdom'.

Its not 'woke' or lefty nonsense or whatever other label enables it to be deflected away and ignored. I've felt the same way long before social media existed or I gave two hoots about politics.

We are all just going to have to stop trying to convert eachothers minds and and get on with accepting that different views exist. This thread is not about criticising anyone's views but explaining why I dont share them.

When I was a kid I was really interested in the war. I wanted to be a Spitfire pilot, I could name every aircraft going; RAF, Luftwaffe, US, Japanese even a lot of the Russian ones.

The more I learnt about it, the less I saw 'good guys' and 'bad guys' fighting, it was all just people who were doing their duty as their country demanded.

The German people were coerced by a dream of their own land of hope and glory. They went to their deaths for their flag, for the fatherland, with nationalist songs ringing in their ears.

I've also always been really interested in history, and the growth of the British Empire is really what inspired these songs in the first place. Prior to the 18th C we were much like any other country economically, but over the next 200 years grew into the richest superpower ever

This was done on the back of invading, slaughtering and enslaving people all over the world. We drained these places of their resources and called the people our 'subjects'. Over the world, particularly Africa and Asia people fell into a poverty which they still haven't recovered

We British weren't alone in this, the French did it, the Spanish did it, the Portuguese, the Belgians, the Germans even the Italians had a go. In Eastern Europe the Russians did it and right now the Chinese are doing it too

In Namibia, I went on a hike with a load of Germans led by a local man, a member of the Herero tribe. They used to be the dominant tribe in that area. In 1905 they were slaughtered by the Germans and escaping survivors found the rivers had been poisoned. Only 500 Herero survived.

The Germans in the group were utterly horrified and shocked to learn this. These unheard stories exist all over the colonised world but often we English have no shame about it.

We instead built ourselves up as superior to these foreigners. There were literally debates over whether black people were human and felt pain. Their lives were just a bit part in our grand story.

We made ourselves (some of us anyway) exceedingly rich from the proceeds of empire and built great monuments and statues, filled museums up with exotic items and yes, wrote songs glorifying the whole process.

So to me these songs represent a nationalism I despise. It glorifies war, makes tragic martyrs of young men with nothing for the benefit of old men with everything.

It looks down patronisingly at everyone else in the world and fervently believes that it alone has achieved greatness and that outsiders are inferior and then call it 'the luck to be born an Englishman.'

I've travelled extensively around the world and I just don't see our superiority, we have a raft of social and economic divides in this country; homelessness, no proper care for the elderly, people working every hour of every day to avoid the ignominy of going to the food bank.

All the hope and all the glory seems unattainable for the majority, we are serfs living in the same feudal system we've had since the Normans turned up.

We have an education system which completely fails to teach young people any skills for work so we don't have the skills available to meet our needs in this country.

So what do we do? We abuse the people that come here to do these jobs and tell them they aren't welcome and through all the various facets of the old empire we tacitally send them a simple message: 'you're not like us and you never will be'.

I'm not attacking 'Land of Hope and Glory' or 'Rule Britannia', neither am I attacking the Union Jack, Churchill, the bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover or the village green preservation society. They are all just symbols of what I'm really attacking: Nationalism.

It sounds great, it's all about making our lives better for ourselves and our families but in reality all it has ever done is create war and misery and bigger divides between people.

As a kid I was massively into the Beatles. I wanted to be John Lennon. 'Imagine there's no countries... Nothing to kill or die for'.

We should have learnt after the Second World War but I guess we just didn't teach kids the right lessons about it.