British identity

Columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown offers her reaction to Chancellor Gordon Brown's call to promote patriotism with an annual day dedicated to celebrating British identity - along the lines of the US July 4 Independence Day. "In Europe, they admire the British leaders who beat Nazism and Communism, but today's Europeans also see us as perfidious, arrogant and horrible drunks. In the Middle East, increasingly, we are now perceived as in thrall to the US, and dishonest, too, because we breach international conventions. (...) No nation should define itself without paying any attention to how others see it. And we must not make the same mistake in our quest for a 21st-century identity. Our national identity de facto incorporates people from every corner of the globe, victims from every major disaster, revolution and war."

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