National anthem kneeling in other countries thread

[EastAnglianLefty]

God Save The Queen gets very aggressively booed in any Scotland-England international football game - Scotland having its own league system means that its simply never used outside the international context because as a normal country the national anthem isn't played at anything but the biggest domestic games and they use Flower of Scotland for that now.  Its not the same for Rugby but that's probably more of an indication of the differences in the class and demographic breakdown of your typical Football and Rugby crowds.  Whenever it happens though it really annoys sections of the right-wing tabloids that get offended that Scotland does not support England: same people that got annoyed at Andy Murray's "anyone but England" remark many years ago and in every major Football competition when Scots people (Scotland having inevitably failed to qualify) generally find themselves supporting Belgium or Croatia or Trinidad (fun story that one: they managed to qualify for the 2006 World Cup in a bit of a fluke; and because half their team played League Football in Scotland and because they had a player called "Jason Scotland" they were adopted as the honorary Scottish national team for that World Cup) over England.

That's actually a reason why National Anthem politics isn't a massive thing in the UK: its not played a whole lot.  You'll get it at international sports events and perhaps at big events that the Royals would be at but not at random Premier League games and similar things.  In Scotland I think the only time you'd ever hear God Save the Queen used as a British anthem would be for those very rare sports that Scotland doesn't compete as a separate team in and events involving the Royals: no Scottish government (and I'm including a hypothetical Conservative-led one here) would ever use it more widely than that.

That's part of the reason, but the other part is that nobody really likes it as an anthem. Some people get annoyed by 'disrespect', but a non-negligible proportion of them would happily agree that Jerusalem or Land of Hope and Glory or whatever would be a better tune to use instead.

[EastAnglianLefty]

That's part of the reason, but the other part is that nobody really likes it as an anthem. Some people get annoyed by 'disrespect', but a non-negligible proportion of them would happily agree that Jerusalem or Land of Hope and Glory or whatever would be a better tune to use instead.

Isn't Land of Hope and Glory a subject of controversy too because of "wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set"?
Also total non-sequitur but I often myself signing Jerusalem as a Christian hymn. I love it.

It is, but a) with our history of imperialism, that's going to apply to pretty much every patriotic song; b) those who'd complain about people not singing the National Anthem wouldn't care about that; and c) 99.9% of the rest of the country wouldn't either - it's the sort of thing that is controversial on Twitter but most of the country are blissfully oblivious of.

That's part of the reason, but the other part is that nobody really likes it as an anthem. Some people get annoyed by 'disrespect', but a non-negligible proportion of them would happily agree that Jerusalem or Land of Hope and Glory or whatever would be a better tune to use instead.

That's a good point that I always forget: the times when its more relevant (sports) its mainly represented England and not Britain and that means that the Scots (and the Welsh) won't treat it like their national anthem and a lot of the English are like "why are we using a British song to represent England?".  And then you get the weirdos that seem to think that all four constituent countries should use it because "ITS THE ONLY NATIONAL ANTHEM" but they are a vast, vast minority.

It's even more confusing with rugby, where the Irish team covers both the Republic and Northern Ireland. They sing Ireland's Call, a song primarily designed to be as non-controversial as possible (mostly it's just repeating the word 'Ireland' vaguely in time to the tune.) Even then, there are always a few Ulster players who don't join in with the singing.