Neither National Day Nor Elections Are Exciting Brits

(April 23) -- The English today celebrate their national day, St. George's Day. And on May 6, the voters in Great Britain -- England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland -- will elect a new Parliament. The question on many minds is: Does anybody care about either?

There has been at least a late surge of interest among young voters in the elections -- spurred, apparently, by this new phenomenon to the Isles called a televised debate.

But as for national day, This England magazine released a poll earlier this week saying that only one in three British people were even aware that St. George's Day is today. One-fourth of English adults said they feel ashamed to be English and feared being called racist if they flew the St. George's flag, a red cross on a field of white.

Political correctness and the increasing influence of the European Union were cited as factors in these sentiments. The magazine concluded that England is the "least patriotic" country in Europe.

This ambivalence is not confined to the British Isles. Nearly 3 million of the 4.5 million British expats in the world are eligible to vote in the May 6 election, according to a voter registration website called Decide Britain's Future. Yet only about 30,000 of them are registered.

"We discovered a sad state of affairs," Nick Howard, an Englishman who lives in Connecticut and spearheaded the voter registration drive in the New York area this year, told AOL News. "The Labour Party has passed a law that disenfranchises people who've lived outside (Great Britain) for the past 15 years. It's an outrage. From my perspective, the Labour Party has gone out of its way to disenfranchise expats."

Howard, chairman of the British Conservative Party in New York, estimates that this year's New York drive added about 500 voters to the rolls, roughly half of them ages 18 to 25.

The Guardian reported Thursday that the number of people registering to vote in Great Britain increased "markedly" before Tuesday's deadline, and the Electoral Commission says the bulk of the newly eligible are 18- to 24-year-olds, traditionally the strongest supporters of the Liberal Democrats.

A similar surge in interest among young voters helped carry Barack Obama to the U.S. presidency in 2008. In Great Britain, the phenomenon is coming from an unlikely source: the telly.

A taboo against televised political debates has existed in Great Britain since the invention of the cathode-ray tube, but it was finally broken April 15, when the leaders of the two leading parties, Labour's Gordon Brown and the Conservatives' David Cameron, agreed to face the cameras for the first time alongside the Liberal Democrats' dark horse, Nick Clegg.

Clegg's sure-footed performance in the first of three scheduled debates led to a surge in the polls, turning what had been a lackluster duel into a tight three-way race and inspiring the surge in voter registrations.

Clegg's detractors were quick to pounce on the candidate's sudden legitimacy. They painted him as an expensively educated elitist who speaks fluent Dutch, doesn't believe in God and doesn't even have the decency to root for a favored soccer team.

London's conservative mayor, Boris Johnson, suggested that "Cleggmania" might be some sort of madness induced by all that volcanic ash drifting over from Iceland. But Clegg's performance in the second debate on Thursday night appeared to cement his legitimacy.

The British were belatedly, often grudgingly, learning something American voters have known since 1960: Namely, that television is a powerful persuader, and a handsome, articulate candidate like John F. Kennedy will always trump a sweaty, stammering wreck like Richard Nixon.

Despite what the polls and the pundits are saying, Colin McSeveny, a Scottish businessman now living in London, said he has noticed a recent up-tick in public displays of patriotism.

"When I first visited England more than 40 years ago," McSeveny said, "it was unthinkable that there would be any fuss about the likes of St. George's Day. Most English people thought such displays of flag-waving were rather vulgar and found mainly in countries that felt they had something to prove. That attitude is not nearly so prevalent now and probably indicates that England's old self-confidence has waned as it struggles to accept that its days of leading the world in so many fields are long gone."

Of course, when McSeveny first visited England, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were all the rage.

And Will Lashley, an American video editor who has lived in London with his American wife for the past five years, says the pollsters' dire findings are less than shocking. "Articles bemoaning the decline of English patriotism in general and St. George's Day in particular have become staple newspaper provender here," Lashley said.

"It's like an American columnist's Christmastime complaints about rampant consumerism."