Description
What does it really mean to love your country?Sayeeda Warsi is proud to be British. She loves village cricket and grumbling about the weather. She loves green and pleasant landscapes with castles and ruined abbeys. Listening to "God Save the King" gives her goosebumps. She also loves that we uphold the rule of law and can still disagree respectfully with our fellow citizens. She is a true patriot. But in recent years, the extreme right has tried to deny her Britishness - and that of people like her with roots in other countries. A new xenophobic nationalism ties being British to one skin colour, one ancestry and one religion. It raises the flag as a symbol of division rather than unity. At the same time, the extreme left has disdained patriotic feeling of any kind - dismissing it as inherently divisive, even racist. Pulling no punches, Sayeeda makes the case for a progressive patriotism. Detailing the lessons she has learnt from a career spent fighting extremists, she argues patriotism is about pride, not prejudice. She calls out the political grifters, funded by foreign money, who preach division back home in Britain, and argues for the responsibility of bringing ourselves together as one nation, when too many are still being left behind. The Patriot is a call for all of us, whatever our background, to learn to love our country again.