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Move On, Citizen
Melanie Philips makes some excellent points in her column on British citizenship today.
Tomorrow sees the release of a review on citizenship commissioned by the Prime Minister. Leaked reports says it includes suggestions such as an oath of allegiance to The Queen and pledges to obey the law for schoolchildren.
Melanie is quite right to say that if these are the government's solutions to Britain's ills, Brown has things the wrong way around. The oath before the flag doesn't make Americans patriotic, for example: Fiddling with symbolism will only work if the conditions already exist for making the country something to be proud of.
And successive British governments have done their best to ensure this isn't the case.
In an echo of the RUSI report which caused such a stir last month, Melanie says, "This country has simply lost belief in itself."
"That is because there are now two Britains.
"There is the Britain that loves and would defend to the death its own historic national identity — and the Britain that either wants to destroy it or refuses to acknowledge that it is under such threat... And it is the latter which currently wields the levers of power."
Mass immigration, she says, has been a major contributing factor. On one hand, this phenomenon has been encouraged by those who believe a US-style "melting pot" culture would bring US-style dynamism to the nation; on the other are those who believe the UK's ethnic homogeneity was a crime in itself which needed to be put right.
Instead of encouraging immigrants to adapt to British life, she adds, Britain's leaders demanded that the country adjust to indulge the newcomers. "By asserting that all cultures were equal, multiculturalism did not merely encourage society to fragment into separate enclaves. Even worse, it made asserting a majority culture at all illegitimate and "racist"."
And the decline of the nation state, encouraged by the EU, has played a role, strengthening EU identity while destroying Britain's:
"The elites progressively unpicked British national identity.
"Schoolchildren were deliberately left in ignorance of Britain's national story.
"To call attention to the nation's great past was said to be jingoistic and xenophobic.
"Instead, the correct posture for any prudent teacher came to be national self-loathing.
"Deeper even than all that lay an attack on the very idea of the nation itself.
"To much Western liberal thinking, the nation is the source of all the ills in the world, from prejudice to war.
"So patriotism became a dirty word; and national institutions like Parliament were trumped by trans-national bodies such as the UN, EU or European Court of Human Rights.
"As a result, the English common law — the very fount of liberty and the keystone of British national identity — has been superseded through human rights law by a codified system of rights that is more familiar in Europe."
(...)
"With the best will in the world, immigrants find there is no British national identity into which they can assimilate.
"And indigenous Brits have been forced to become strangers in their own country — and are then vilified as racists if they dare protest."
Melanie suggests a few urgent steps which should be taken to slow, if not reverse the decline: She adds, remarkably, that Conservative leader David Cameron is becoming aware of the problem and "may save" the nation if he gathers the courage to act.
EURSOC wishes we shared Melanie Philips' optimism.
