The English peasants revolt 1381 John Ball gathered the people around him after sunday church saying;

"Good people, things cannot go right in England and never will, until goods are held in common and there are no more villeins and gentlefolk, but we are all one and the same. In what way are are those whom we call lords greater masters than ourselves? How have they deserved it? Why do they hold us in bondage? If we all spring from a single father and mother, Adam and Eve, how can they claim or prove that they are lords more than us, except by making us produce and grow the wealth which they spend? They are clad in velvet and camlet lined with squirrel and ermine, while we go dressed in coarse cloth. They have the wines, the spices and the good bread: we have the rye, the husks and the straw, and we drink water. They have shelter and ease in their fine manors, and we have hardship and toil, the wind and the rain in the fields. And from us must come, from our labour, the things whcih keep them in luxury. We are called serfs and beaten if we are slow in our service to them, yet we have no sovereign lord we can complain to, none to hear us and do us justice. Let us go to the king--he is young--and show him how we are oppressed, and tell him that we want things to be changed, or else we will change them ourselves. If we go in good earnest and all together, very many people who are called serfs and are held in subjection will follow us to get their freedom. And when the king sees and hears us, he will remedy the evil, either willingly or otherwise.". . .

Take note Mr Straw! [self proclaimed stalinist]

We have a constitution and require no other, a constitution that offers the British people full protection from those at Westminster.

Why discuss anything foreign to our laws?

Just to go off on a tangent, I find it interesting that he mentioned that the Government didn't give effect to Article 13 of the Convention in the Human Rights Act:

Right to an effective remedy

Everyone whose rights and freedoms as set forth in this Convention are violated shall have an effective remedy before a national authority notwithstanding that the violation has been committed by persons acting in an official capacity.

I often wonder why the Government saw fit not to include Article 13 and would be interested to know.

I'm toying with the idea that nationhood / national identity is a category that applies most accurately to England, Scotland, Wales and (Northern) Ireland, and describes the culture of those countries; the state is the UK; and Britain / Britishness is an attempt to join up and bridge those two separating parts of the equation (to create British nationhood or make / keep the UK a nation, which it has never really been).

The project of defining Britishness attempts this bridging task by seeking to ground nation and state in 'common' or 'shared' values. These are transcendent - supposedly - because of that commonality but also because of their universality in a philosophical sense. That is why they are common to Western liberalism (e.g. the European Convention) in general. The particular expression of them in the British context (distinctive not exclusive) relates to the fact that they bridge both the domains of fundamental principles (of philosophy and of a state) and the domain of culture.

For this reason, we're dealing with both a 'statement of British values' because they are the transcendent / uniting values of the 'British nation' in a sense that is EXCLUSIVE to British culture; and a 'British statement of values' because they are the DISTINCTIVELY British expression of universal values in the philosophical sense.

It is difficult to identify those British values that Mr Straw believes transcend English, Welsh, Irish and Scottish values - because there are none.

As Neil Ascherson told Gordon Brown some time ago, the British values that he claims to espouse are in fact English ones.

Perhaps there some additional values that may be distinct to Ireland, to Scotland to Wales that are not necessarily shared by England. I don't know.

Britain is an 18th century construct and in the 21st century the Union should rest on the consent of the people in each of its constituent nations.

Papering over the Union with 'Britishness' is not going to work and it is only being sold to the English anyway. The Scots have their own ceremonies for British citizenship, featuring the saltire, and Scottish schools are not proposing to teach Britishness even if anyone can decide what it is.

By giving devolution to Scotland and Wales the Labour government has enouraged those countries to develop and strengthen their own national identity.

Mr Brown hopes that he can persuade the English to give up theirs but he has underestimated the latent strength of English national identity.

One of the so-called English values, not always honoured, is 'fair play'. It is not one that Mr Brown recognises.

Jack Straw and the Labour government in which he is a Minister of State have done more to alieanate the English from the notion of Britishness than any government in the last 300 years.

This was evidenced by the almost total lack of recognition let alone celebration of the 300 anniversary of the Act of Union on 1st May 2007.

In fact there was a Justice for England demonstration held that day protesting at the apartheid system being perpetrated against the English since UK devolution from which the English have been and still are denied a say.

The Scot Michael Martin, Speaker of the House of Commons, showed his "Britishness" by denying the demonstrators the opportunity to march past the Palace of Westminster. He, Jack Straw nor Gordon Brown are part of a government that the former East Germany would have been ashamed of, so we English will take no lessons in Britishness from them.

Is it not amusing that the Labour Party, who are the ones directly responsible for the beginning of the break up of the Union, are increasingly unable to keep up with the pace of change? The Labour Party are stuck in a semi-Imperialistic fog, harking back to the good old British days and scrambling about with rhetoric, in an attempt to lure the people back under the wings of their British colonial rulers in Westminster.

Increasingly, the British government and other British parties are looking like creaking old cronies and not fit for the 21st century.

We in England need an English government fit for purpose, not a purposely unfit British government. They are holding us back deliberately and we will be treading water until they accept the inevitable and let us move forward into the future.

Independence IS that future. The sooner they accept this, the less painful it will be for them and us - because it is painfully embarassing to watch them cling on by their fingernails.

Judging by past performance, what is clear, is that our British rulers will not go voluntarily. They will do all they can to drag us down with them and create friction where it did not previously exist in an attempt to divide and rule. The welfare of all our citizens and the state of neighbourly tolerance depends solely on this minority rule in a most undemocratic system of power.

And still they presume to dictate the terms of democracy to countries across the world? We should all be ashamed of the British mindset in our midst.

To be fair, GB [Gordon Brown] does believe in fair play but he calls it 'British fair play'. See http://politics.guardian.co.uk/labour/story/0,9061,1256550,00.html#article_continue or again http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/newsroom_and_speeches/speeches/chancellorexchequer/speech_chx_270207.cfm.

QED Ian!

David, aka Britology Watch