On Saturday Manda and I traveled to Wembley Stadium at the invitation of Mark Perryman to help organise 'Raise the Flag'. For those of you who don't want to know the score, please look away now.

Raise the Flag is a fans initiative, supported by the FA, the idea for which came to Mark in Rome, 1997, as a hail of coins rained down on him from the Italian fans.

Italian Ultra supporters - not the usual role models - were holding their flag formation aloft. Mark thought a similar display could be a way to demonstrate the positive side of England supporters.

Now every England home game features Raise the Flag and he hopes it could be a feature in the World Cup.

"It's something you can become part of," he says. "A symbol of pride in your team. A symbol of the fans and the flag coming together."

BBC: England fans raise flag of pride (31 May 2006)

This was my first visit to Wembley since 1999 when a young Michael Owen came on late to score a 90th minute goal in a 6 - 1 thrashing of Lichtenstein. I had been warned that I would be disappointed by the new Wembley Stadium but upon entering the empty arena I have to say that I wasn't disappointed at all. It looked to me to be everything that a modern football stadium should be and everything that the old Wembley - for all it's history and charm - hadn't been.

With our fellow Raise the Flag volunteers we set about strapping concertinard red or white cards to the seats, paying careful attention to the layout so that when they were raised above fans' heads, upon the playing of God Save the Queen, they would form a giant Cross of St George flag.

For me 'Raise the Flag' is not about 'reclaiming the flag' it is about projecting a positive image of support for England, and sometimes extending the hand of friendship to foreign fans. I don't feel that I need to reclaim the flag because it is already mine. True, it is a sad fact that the England flag is used by racists, but national flags are used by racists across the world, not just in England. Racists use them in Scotland and Wales too. The difference is that in Scotland and Wales, to their credit, the governments and civic institutions fly their national flags with pride and do not regard them as the preserve of racists, eccentrics, white-van-man, nationalists or footy fans. In England, by way of contrast, the government is British and so too are most of the civic institutions, and there appears to be a political imperative to NOT fly the English flag; to prevent patriotic identification with England, and even to guard against it.

Even the colossal Wembley Stadium, England's national football stadium, has just one small flag flying outside it.

Raise the Flag is an antidote to this official negativity that surrounds our flag. It is one nation under one flag; it is fun, it is engaging, it is positive, it is inclusive, and it supports our national team. And importantly, it is a bottom-up initiative that comes from the fans and relies on volunteers and 15-odd-thousand fans each matchday in order for it to work.

As for the match? Well, the least said about that the better. It wasn't great but we won. The atmosphere wasn't as good as it could have been, but it was still a far better and more cordial atmosphere than the atmosphere that I remember at the old Wembley. Unlike the bad old days I never heard the Pope or the IRA mentioned once. Unfortunately, what I did hear was the incessant beating of the England band's drum and their repetitious rendition of 'The Great Escape'. Now don't get me wrong, I love the England band, I like drums, and I like the theme to The Great Escape. But please not for 90-minutes non-stop lads, it's a form of music torture that drowns out the traditional spontaneous crowd noise and humour. And please cut out the Rule Britannia too.

Tonight we take on Croatia with the prospect of making Gordon Brown's nightmare a reality: England in the World Cup. C'mon England!

Which is the only nation competing to qualify for the 2010 World Cup that, when the two teams line up ahead of kick off, doesn’t have an anthem to call its own? Easy! Easy! England of course. Whatever the Scots, Welsh and at least half the Northern Irish’s view of the Royal Family, God Save the Queen is as much their anthem as ours, so why on earth doesn’t England get a tune that belongs to us?

Of course the Scots and the Welsh have decided that while God Save the Queen is good enough when the Union Jack is run up the Olympic Flagpole for their Gold Medalists Chris Hoy and Nicole Cook, when their football or rugby teams are competing in the colours of Scotland or Wales its time to belt out Flower of Scotland or Land of My Fathers. OK, so Northern Ireland has opted for no anthem of their own, though at Stormont they do at least have a Parliament they can call their own, a subject for another debate.

‘Happy and Glorious’ God Save the Queen goes, and ‘long to reign over us' a line later. Nothing could sum up English subjecthood better. Of course the Royal Family are happy, because they reign over us at our expense, but the argument for an anthem to call our own cannot be reduced to making the case for English Republicanism. However, a song that celebrates being ruled by others put in place simply by accident of birth, and which in not one stanza ever actually mentions England is surely not a fitting tune.

After World Cup 2002 the FA quietly ran a poll amongst England supporters on whether an alternative to God Save the Queen should be considered for international matches. With zero campaigning, and no alternatives offerred, an astonishing 36% voted for change. Nothing came of it, the opportunity to inauguarate the new Wembley with an anthem to call our own squandered, but there remains significant popular support whenever the argument is made not in terms of knocking God Save the Queen but simply pointing out that England should have its own anthem.

And the contenders? Well it would be very New Labour to commission Simon Cowell and Andrew Lloyd Webber to come up with ‘Anthem Idol’ wouldn’t it? It's just the sort of thing Blair-lite Cameron might favour too. But twenty-first century manufacturing of tradition could never match the heritage of the songs we have on offer to choose from.

Each will have their favourites. If I was asked to plump for a modern classic I’d choose The Jam’s English Rose. Haunting, full of longing for a country. But that's probably too up-to-date for most tastes. I Vow To Thee My Country has probably the best tune of the lot but I’m not sure that words written by a Yank entirely fit the bill - although music provided by a Swedish immigrant born in Cheltenham is rather neat. Rule Britannia is rousing enough yet is clearly a British anthem, not an English one in any obvious sense. Some will differ but I also find the singing of ‘Britons, never, never will be slaves’ more than a tad dodgy when the team we’re supporting on the pitch is made up of a fair number of players whose great grandparents were precisely that, slaves. Land of Hope and Glory fails for me on similar counts. Again, with no actual mention of England it is a celebration of the Britishness of Empire, not England. And do we really want a tune that marks England’s fate after Empire ‘By Freedom gained, by Truth maintained, Thine Empire shall be strong’.

No there's one runaway contender, presuming Cowell and Lloyd-Webber failed to find their anthem-factor. Jerusalem. Words by one of England’s greatest cultural figures, William Blake. Artist, poet, thinker. Music by an English composer. The words actually mention England. A bit too Christian? That might put off some, attract others. But of course the Jerusalem Blake was writing about was a better, brighter society we could call England. A bit political? Come off it, who doesn’t want a better England, the argument is only what we might mean by better.

Will it ever happen? I mean an anthem to call our own, not the better England! I entirely back the idea of an English Parliament but right now I would put the anthem, and a day off for St George’s Day too, right at the core of campaigning for England’s place in the break up of Britain. These are hugely popular issues, they carry none of the trappings of Westminster politics currently mired in scandal and disrepute. Yet they codify our difference, our independence and have the potential to appeal to all who call England their home.

Mark Perryman is the editor of Imagined Nation : England after Britain and co-founder of philosophyfootball.com. The company poduces a T-shirt with the words to Jerusalem forming a St George Cross, and on the back for fans of cult 70s sci-fi... well what other squad number could you give William Blake apart from ‘7’. Available from philosophyfootball.com