[BBKing]

St. George's Day isn't a national holiday and why is it the government's role to promote national holidays anyway? This isn't a banana republic where we all get prodded out to salute the Great Leader and neither do I want it to be.

George Orwell puts it rather better when discussing the British character back in the 1940s:

All the culture that is most truly native centres round things which even when they are communal are not official—the pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside and the ‘nice cup of tea’. The liberty of the individual is still believed in, almost as in the nineteenth century. But this has nothing to do with economic liberty, the right to exploit others for profit. It is the liberty to have a home of your own, to do what you like in your spare time, to choose your own amusements instead of having them chosen for you from above. The most hateful of all names in an English ear is Nosey Parker. It is obvious, of course, that even this purely private liberty is a lost cause. Like all other modern people, the English are in process of being numbered, labelled, conscripted, ‘co-ordinated’. But the pull of their impulses is in the other direction, and the kind of regimentation that can be imposed on them will be modified in consequence.

http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/ess...d-unicorn1.htm and it's well worth reading.