Poppy Day represents a more authentic 'Britishness' than Labour can ever hope to engineer

Michael Wills MP, Minister of State for Constitutional Renewal, has indicated that plans for a mooted ‘national day’ have been shelved. Answering a written question from Conservative MP Andrew Rosindell, Wills confirmed that although parts of Lord Goldsmith’s citizenship review would be considered, “there are no plans to introduce a national day at the present time”.

Hopefully it is correct to read between the lines that there are actually now no plans to introduce a national day at all. The initiative represented Labour’s belief that a greater sense of Britishness can somehow be engineered by launching top down, state sponsored gimmicks. Gordon Brown’s instinct is to impose, rather than encourage or nurture.

With identity, in particular, that is an approach which cannot work. Labour is chasing its tail in attempting to encourage more British sentiment amongst people in the United Kingdom. It is top down constitutional reform which diluted felt Britishness and damaged the Union in the first place. The party imposed sweeping constitutional changes without properly examining what the consequences might be in terms of identity. Its only instinct to check these consequences is to re-impose the sense of Britishness which it inadvertently damaged. Labour is like a drunk man who has broken the TV and attempts to fix it by repeatedly walloping it with his fist.

The British identity is a subtle construct, bound up (as shadow justice secretary Nick Herbert identifies) “in our institutions, culture and history”. It is easy to damage, but it is less easily repaired.

Certainly the means to do so is more subtle than Labour realise. It is a process of nurturing and encouraging those institutions, culture and history which contribute toward the identity. How much more eloquent, for example, is Remembrance Sunday in defining part of what it means to be British, in comparison to any number of reports or suggestions which the government might wish to instigate?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Football fever in Russia

Russia Blog is getting excited about Euro 2008. Indeed it is drawing parallels between Guus Hiddink and Peter the Great in terms of successful Russo-Dutch exchanges of expertise. Meanwhile, in Moscow, fans have been taking to the streets in order to celebrate the national team’s achievements.
Read more

Stormont might not collapse but paramilitaries continue to disfigure Northern Ireland

Image
The devolved institutions in Northern Ireland are supposedly ‘teetering on the brink’ of collapse yet again.  After repeated failures to agree a balanced budget or implement welfare reform created months of uncertainty, the Executive’s future is now in doubt because the PSNI believes members of the IRA were involved in murdering a republican hit man.  Despite its apparent seriousness, this particular predicament is unlikely to bring the shaky edifice at Stormont crashing down. The IRA was supposed to have disbanded its military ‘structures’ and decommissioned its entire arsenal of weapons back in 2005.  It was on the basis of this understanding that power-sharing resumed in 2007 and the DUP entered government with Sinn Féin.  From the outset it was a fairly flimsy pretext.   Less than a year after John de Chastelain, the retired Canadian general, oversaw decommissioning, the Independent Monitoring Commission reported that the IRA retaine...
Read more

Walker loada rubbish

Former BBC employee Brian Walker has overrun Slugger O’Toole lately with countless poorly structured, poorly written posts. It is possible quickly to recognize and avoid these by subjecting each Slugger piece to a cursory inspection and identifying those which feature characteristic lack of paragraphing and a tenuous grasp on the technicalities of linking source articles. Although I generally evade Walker’s posts by this method, occasionally (and unfortunately) I have persevered and found that their content is as unrewarding as the style in which they are written. Today, for instance, I inflicted upon myself Brian’s thoughts on a mooted Fianna Fail / SDLP merger . In actual fact, he is right to welcome news that the Southern Irish party has dropped this proposal from its agenda; however, the logic by which he arrives at this conclusion is parochial nonsense. To summarise, Walker believes that pursuing realignment with larger parties, whether they are from the rest of the UK or fro...
Read more