A FRESH round of Pride of Britain awards has given us all a new range of reasons to be glad we're British.

The fight back to health of courageous Davinia Turrell, the woman whose masked face became the symbol of the 7/7 London terror attack, could not fail to inspire all those who heard about her recognition in a national awards scheme announced this week.

Honoured alongside Davinia were a little girl who suffered horrific burns to save her brother from a house fire, a woman who saw off the street thugs plaguing her neighbourhood, and Yorkshirewoman Jane Tomlinson, whose refusal to cave in to terminal cancer is among the uplifting stories that rightly give us a sense of patriotic pride.

We turn out heroes all the time - look at our own international rescue worker Ray Gray, who within days of losing his son in a North Yorkshire road accident was heading for earthquake-stricken Pakistan, braving scenes that could not help but bring back the tragedy of his own loss.

On the sporting field we can hold our heads high this year, thanks to a historic Ashes victory which brought us still more heroes in the shape of Andrew Flintoff and Michael Vaughan.

So why, in the midst all this excellence, are we still so insecure that we fly into a panic at the idea that we should not always drape ourselves in the flag, be it the Union Jack or the flag of St George?

It irritated many, myself included, to hear that the prison warders of Wakefield Jail had been ordered to take off the England flag tie pins they were wearing to raise cash for a cancer charity.

It was another example of humourless political correctness taken to the extreme.

But irritated though I was, I couldn't get into a frothing-at-the-mouth frenzy about it like a lot of other people. Flag-waving just doesn't move me all that much, and anyway, isn't England robust enough to stand proud without a lot of histrionic display?

It was announced this week that England 'fans' are still deemed the ones most likely to cause trouble at major championships like the forthcoming football World Cup.

Look at any witness appeal to track down football hooligans and you'll start to see why people get a bit uneasy at the sight of too much red and white.

The beer-soaked, corpulent oafs captured on CCTV images of English thuggery abroad are identikit not only because of their pendulous guts and their brutally shaven heads.

The word 'England' is emblazoned across their chests, on the St George's banners they carry and on the repulsive tattoos with which they insist on branding themselves.

Alas for the rest of us, when these louts head abroad they scarcely need to bother to wear all their regalia. Their behaviour is so well-known that everyone knows precisely where they hail from.

And when you see them off-duty at airports, they're just as easy to spot. They're the ones stinking of ale at 9am, carrying boom-box CD players to entertain their unfortunate hotel neighbours and sporting the good old red-and-white extra-large T-shirts and trackie bottoms.

This penchant for wearing a uniform like the full England thug rig-out has always smacked of pack behaviour to me. It reminds me of schoolyard gangs who all have to wear their ties a certain way in order to be accepted.

So let's be grown up about this. National pride can be worn in the heart, not on the sleeve; and it doesn't have to be carved into your arm/neck/forehead like a kid writing a band's name on to his pencil case.

Updated: 10:00 Wednesday, October 12, 2005