'We wanna show 'em who we are': national events in England

[In] largely dismissing national events as ‘conventional carnivals of surplus emotion’ (1995: 45), Billig overlooks the important, and somewhat under-theorised, link between banal and, what I have previously labelled as, ecstatic forms of nationalism (Skey, 2006). In this chapter, I want to focus on this relationship as a means of examining the significance of, and response to, the upsurge in national, mass flag waving events in England over the past decade.