A Country Struggling with an identity crisis

As a regular poster on Five Live's message boards I am constantly amazed, bewildered and saddened by the attitudes of some of my fellow countrymen to anything non-white, non-christian and non-British, actually I think you could make that non-English because the Scots and the Welsh get a rough ride as well.

Any, or should that be, no, excuse is used by some people to introduce racial and religious hatred into a post, a thread or simply a couple of lines to start of a series of posts that always degenerate into slanging matches.

I find this difficult to understand on some levels, after all as a nation we have been abosorbing cultural influences from the rest of the world for hundreds of years, adapting them and making them our own. Yes you can point to certain things as being typical of English culture: Monty Python, Shakespeare, Chaucer, afternoon tea, fish and chips, warm beer, but beyond that you are struggling. Comedy programmes have absorbed the work of the great American comedians from Keaton through the Marx Brothers, Bob Hope, Steve Martin, Larry David etc and turned it into English comedy. Music has been heavily influenced by rock and roll, which although its roots are in the music of Irish and Scottish imiigrants, has turned itself into the greatest entertainment phenomenon of the 20th Cenury. Look at our film industry, we don't have the intellectual depth of the French or the charisma of the Americans - name me one truly great English film star. There's an old saying that the Americans produce film stars and the English produce great actors and I think there is some truth in that.

There are posters on the various boards who appear, to me at least, to have an unhealthy obsession with Islam, Judaism, Zionism, the left-wing, the right-wing, non-whites bascially anybody who isn't a good old fashioned WASP and I find it sad more than anything.