It's kind of fashionable to hate Britain (and especially England). Of course, people who claim to hate it often couldn't care less. It's just a pose – an attempt to appear cool and sophisticated ("I'm not a small-minded suburbanite; I'm intelligent, sophisticated and cosmopolitan"). I'm not criticising the OP. To be fair, she does focus on the government and not the country generally, but it really p**ses me off when people run Britain down – especially sneering, sanctimonious liberals.
I don't like Boris Johnson. But then I can think of very few politicians I do like – or ever have. Macron is a puffed up little twerp, and the Canadian PM is insufferably vain. I didn't even like Obama, who I found unbearably smug. As for the monarchy, it's just an embarrassment, and always has been (a bunch of ugly, vulgar gargoyles).
It's our cultural history that makes me proud. For example, Harold Bloom, the American literary critic, listed the three of four thousand books he considered the best ever written. On that list, there were more from the UK than anywhere in the world. I'm proud of Oxford and Cambridge. And I'm proud of the great canon of English/British writers, beginning with Chaucer, then Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Byron, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Walter Pater, John Ruskin, Dickens, Virginia Woolf, etc, etc (to name just a few). If you date British literature from the birth of Chaucer, that's a 600-year-old canon. Plus, of course, philosophers like John Locke, who laid the foundations of modern democracy, and scientists like Newton and Darwin.
We don't make enough of our cultural and intellectual achievements. They mean far more to me than an oaf like Prince Harry. OK, the weather is often sh*t, and the country can be dreary, stressful and overcrowded, but culturally it's a jewel. For anyone interested in art, history and the life of the mind, this is the best place in the world (with the possible exception of France!). If you don't believe me, go to Cambridge or Oxford on a bright, cold Autumnal morning, have a coffee and then spend the day browsing the bookshops. There's nowhere in the world I'd rather be.
Cambridge is pretty close to me, actually, and every time I go there, I think "wow, this is the place Newton studied, and Byron and Tennyson and Milton and Darwin and Wittgenstein and Nabokov and Bertrand Russell and Stephen Hawking. It's the place in which the atom was first described, and the place where DNA was discovered." Virtually every major intellectual figure seems to have lived or studied or died in Britain – Freud, Karl Marx, Lenin, Rimbaud, Van Gogh, Monet, Schopenhauer.
Bill Bryson said that you can never grow bored of Britain. Every square mile contains some fascinating historical or cultural gem – some scientific discovery or poetic masterpiece or whatever. It's no coincidence that Bryson is American, of course. Indeed, it often takes an outsider to remind British people of what they have. And that's because our culture (especially publishing, academia and the arts) is dominated by people on the left who basically hate Britain. That attitude is then instilled in us – we sort of internalise the shame and self-loathing. It was only when I saw Britain through the eyes of an American friend that I really began to appreciate it.