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Location: London, United Kingdom

Saturday, January 14, 2006


So now Gordon Brown is weighing in on the debate about Britishness. Absolutely pathetic.
One assumes that this is some sort of risible attempt to stake a claim to the Leadership of the Socialist Labour Party and by proxy (he hopes) leadership of this once great island nation by showing us how to be good citizens. The strange thing is that for at least 2 millenia we did not need to told how to be good citizens or how to appreciate being British. In fact, if we are being honest we are always first either Scottish, Welsh, Irish or English. We appreciate however, the benefits that is the sum of the parts - Great Britain & Northern Ireland.
The reason we now need to be told how to be British is so that we can "equip ourselves for globalisation" and being "clear what Britishness means in a post-imperial world is essential if we are to forge the best relationships with the developing world and in particular with Africa." This raises a number of interesting issues.
Why do we want to have great relationships with Africa?
Is that really a good use of our time and resources?
Despite having thrown Africa more than a trillion dollars in aid since 1962 the continent is poorer today than it was then. When will the West stop using money to assuage its guilt for what it did in the 19th Century? The fact is that like the Romans in Britain, we did some bad things and some good things there. We need to draw a line in the sand and move on. Most of us have realised by now that money will never solve the problems of Africa (except the odd pop star who left school at 12) and Africa is not our responsiblity any more than I hold the Normans or the Romans responsible for us today.
The real need for Gordon Brown to get on his soap box to tell us how to appreciate Britishness is that having (along with his cohorts of liberal 'elite' co-conspirators) ripped down or undermined every single institution or organ important to this country since 1945 he now realises that if we do not have something to rally around we will find ourselves a people together on this small island, but very apart.
The catalyst for his address was the July bombings. He tells us that we all responded 'magnificently' after learning that the bombings were carried out by 'Britons'.
The underlying reason for his address is that multiculturalism doesn't work and never will - it doesn't even work in the U.S. where the only thing that 'unites' everybody is actually money.
There is no such thing as multiculturalism and it is a suicide bomb in every single culture that adopts it as a roadmap for 21st century civilisation.
A true, living and evolving culture comprises many components (including laws, religion, language, dress, moral code, food and most importantly a philosophy – a view on what we are doing here & how we should behave with each other while we are). It is impossible to accommodate all the various characteristics of any single culture within a national framework that has to allow for 5, 10 or even 20 of them. This is why nation states were created in the first place.
The irony is that in the West’s desperation to accommodate the so many different cultures that they are not only killing their own (indigenous) but also weakening the cultures’ origin.
‘Multiculturalism’ accepts one fundamental truth – that all cultures are equal.
They aren’t.
Some of the cultures residing in the UK could have had periods when the sun never set on their empires (they didn’t) or could have overseen great periods in human advancement (some did), but when they came into contact again with the post-renaissance Europe in general, and the UK in particular, they were at the dawn of history relative to our position.
We have nothing to learn from them that we haven’t forgotten ourselves.
We know that they are only here to do the jobs that we are not prepared to do and they know that too. This situation does little to foster a sense of equality among the different cultures or begin to give the impression to them that escape from their current predicament is a realistic possibility.
We cannot be told how to feel British we have to feel it naturally. We don't today as we have lost our bearings. The myriad institutions (Monarchy to Marriage) have been so badly weakened that we are without the anchors of nationhood.

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