Anthony Barnett (London, OK): Janet Daley wrote a column in Monday's Telegraph on there NOT being a need to define "Britishness". Diplomatically, she didn't mention the paper's own, now stalled though primeministerially endorsed campaign "Call Yourself British" whose likely demise I blogged earlier. Along with a now standard attack on multiculturalism Daley writes,
Britain does not have a unified, coherent, identifiable self-image, either as a people or as a political entity, which it can offer to incomers as an inspiration and a ready-made value system.
There is a reason why all the attempts to define Britishness seem to end in fatuity: not only because they dribble off into nebulous virtues such as tolerance and decency, which should be common to all civilised people, but because the British opinion-forming classes tend to find the whole concept of national identity either sinister or risible.
And she concludes,
It is not the indoctrination of some mystical sense of Britishness that is required but a restoration of the quiet pride and conviction that used to enable Britons to maintain the highest standards of civil behaviour in the world.
But how is this going to happen?
Ominously for Janet, one of the first comments takes a quite different approach, taking in none of her case:
I do so agree with those who prefer to be English, rather than British. It makes me feel very resentful when I hear discussions where people are described as Asians, African, Afro-Caribbeans and we are described as White(often by foreigners to these shores) I frequently point out that White is not a nationality and my nationality is English.
If you compare the Daley to Michael Will's recent speech blogged by Guy Aitchison below you can see, at least in this case, the complacency of the columnist as compared to the Minister. The ambush that may lie ahead for Wills however is also signalled by that same comment - the national question's challenge to the supra-national quest for Britishness. Despite this, OurKingdom is trying to assist the Minister on how the internet can be used to assist country-wide deliberations. More on this soon.
