Someone called Frank Nijhoff (*) put, in prose, what Gray put in verse: an elegy for a once great nation:
The sad thing is that if you are really convinced that you are such a great country, you wouldn't close yourself; you wouldn't shut yourselves in and others out.
It demonstrates a nation in deep internal conflict with itself, uncertain about its own identity, about its future and its place in the world, and trying to convince itself, somewhat pathetically, that it is greater than it really is (no matter what past achievements it holds).
And it shows a disrespect for your fellow Europeans: implicit is the idea that all the other nations, all the other 450,000,000 people in the EU, in some sense are less special, are less clever, are less queued up, are less proud of their own heritage and culture.
Just sad.
* I have no evidence that this is the Professor of Mathematics at Leeds but I hope it is: a man of science and rational thought.
