Gordon Brown has been on about “Britishness” with enthusiasm of a toddler who has just discovered Lego. It must be the omnipotent feeling that goes with building something out of nothing – just like God when He created the world in seven days. I suppose Gordon Brown believes he can now build a whole new nation in seven days too. The only problem is that in divine terms 7 God’s days would be equivalent to 7 human millennia – a revelation that appears lost on Gordon Brown. He has no time to procrastinate – who knows, he may only have until the next elections!
I am not exactly sure what “Britishness” is but I imagine it is the same phenomena as the Yugoslav or Czechoslovakian nations were at the time of the Eastern Block Soviet-backed sustenance after the post-War border reshuffling, or the “Rainbow Nation” in South Africa after the desperate attempt to prevent post-Apartheid ethnic cleansing payback. They are all artificial hybrids incapable of self-preservation. The common factor shared between them is that they have all been built rapidly and with dilettante amateurism, and as history shows, they fell as rapidly and spectacularly to pieces, some of them only in shame, others in bloodshed.
It does not bother Gordon Brown that much that as we speak (or more precisely, as HE speaks of Britishness) the Scots are seriously contemplating stepping out of the Union altogether, and the Northern Irish have been campaigning for separation (more or less violently as the decades of unwanted marriage progressed) since its inception. As far as Gordon is concerned the whole bunch of tenants occupying the British Isles constitutes the British Nation, and if you do not feel British first and foremost and over and above any of your tribal loyalties, then you can always move to France, or wherever the hell you come from.
I must say that in Great Britain I have so far met only the English, the Irish, the Scots, the Indians and quite and few Welsh, all emphatically pronouncing their nationality with unashamed separatism. I only met one British – it was a second-generation Jamaican bloke, but he somewhat qualified his “Britishness” when he informed me that he was in the process of tracing his roots back… to Africa.
I wonder what it is with nations building these days – it is some sort of architectural trend displayed by people in authority who clearly like to re-define and re-shape national identities and loyalties which have taken centuries to evolve to what they are now. Why not leave them be? Why not let the English be Poms and the Irish be Paddies? What is wrong with letting people be who they are?
