St george

What the St George’s Day bores get wrong

It’s St George’s day – a chance to celebrate England’s patron saint, and, for some sanctimonious characters, it’s also an opportunity to berate people by reminding them who St George really was. But there’s a problem with those determined to lecture others: they’re getting their facts wrong. In recent years, a peculiar narrative has taken hold among seemingly well educated people, who have suddenly discovered that St George was a ‘Turkish soldier’, an ‘Arab’ whose mother was Palestinian, or – perhaps the most absurd claim – ‘a migrant worker from the Middle East’ who would be ‘banned’ from the UK. The problem with these claims is that none of them are