IF HE was ever happy in the haze of a drunken hour, heaven knows he’s miserable now.

Morrissey, your sixth form posturing over the Olympics shows what hidden shallows you have.

Because comparing the London 2012 Olympics to Hitler’s Germany and calling what has happened “blustering jingoism” reveals a bankruptcy of ideas.

The Emperor isn’t wearing new clothes, he’s well and truly naked.

His mindset is stuck in an early 1980s version of a severely-divided Britain where students marched for a proper grant and hated Margaret Thatcher with a passion, where the Union Flag was synonymous with the far right, and where few were glad to be gay.

If this country hadn’t moved on in all that time, what a caricature of ourselves we would have become.

Do you know why the London Olympics was such a brilliant, lifeaffirming time for us? Because it proved just how far we HAD come.

The sight of Mo Farah and Jessica Ennis with the Union Flag is exactly what this country needs - because that flag isn’t the preserve of neo-Nazis, it isn’t just for promenaders listening to Elgar, David Cameron and his chums or skinheads at football matches.

It is everyone’s flag – rich or struggling with the recession – and these athletes’ golds have helped reclaim it from nasty nationalism, just as the Diamond Jubilee did, whether you are a royalist or republican.

I am comfortable with its sight just as I am comfortable with the Welsh flag.

Those of us over the Severn Bridge have known for some time that whatever conflict some people would like to insert into that situation, there is none.

We are both British and Welsh and happy to celebrate the achievements of the Team GB athletes.

The last time I saw similar nonsense written about a flag-waving celebration of who we are was an ill-informed piece in the New Musical Express (NME) during the Cool Cymru era which compared a Stereophonics gig to the Nuremberg rallies.

It was laughable then because what that time was about was pride in ourselves, not exclusion of others. And, Morrissey, you’re equally laughable now. Time was when you confined such stuff to the letters pages of NME. How I long for those good old days.

Morrissey also wrote: “Has England ever been quite so foul with patriotism?”

Was he excluding the rest of Britain, then? Or is he like some Iowan farmer who equates ‘England’ with ‘Britain’?

What London 2012 has shown us is that when we take a good, long look at ourselves, we’re a fantastic nation, that the majority of people are tolerant of those of whose skin colour is different, who worship a different god, or even no god, who sleep with consenting adults with whom we would not wish ourselves to sleep, and who are also Welsh, Scottish, Irish, Cornish or Manx.

We should be proud. Because we are a country of wonderful mongrels. PANEL MTV’s Valleys reality show is a turn-off I SHALL not be watching the latest “scripted reality-TV” show, The Valleys.

I have no desire to watch someone who styles himself the “Jean Claude Van Damme of Tredegar”

and whose party piece is wiggling his glutes.

Throw a rock in any Valleys pub during rugby season and you will hit ten of them.

The MTV show is just another piece of patronising garbage, putting forward the idea that those who grew up a 40 minute bus or train ride away from the Big Bad City (Cardiff....seriously....) would never have ventured into its clutches before, that all Valleys towns are sleepy “hamlet-towns”

where not much happens.

Anyone who watches it is complicit in this crime against common sense.

The only benefit I can see of this nonsense is a rise in the sale of fake tan and depilatory creams at Valleys pharmacies.