Identity and Its Destruction

English, as a word to describe nationality, became unacceptable to the politically correct because it excluded the people who had settled in the United Kingdom from, principally, the West Indies and south Asia (the Irish having been subsumed, along with the Scots and Welsh, completely). It was the general word for people from the United Kingdom, as it still is in the usage of most continental Europeans. The preferred, inclusive usage was 'British'.

British was no more inclusive than English for those from further afield than Ireland and there developed the usage of British Asian, again abandoned to be followed by all the terminology that skirts around issues of religion and descent. British began to look uncomfortably racialist, if not positively fascist. But it has enjoyed a renaissance in the last decade.

Cementing into place a national identity has become of central importance to Labour. Always weak on any history but their founding heroic myths of the stand of organised working people against the rapacious capitalists, Labour is now discovering the strength of tensions within the British Isles that better analysts of the past and the present have understood always. The loss of Scotland, encouraged by New Labour regionalisation policies, in the interests of its state administration rather than democratic governance agenda, was to be foreseen. But when taken together with the New Labour attempt to regionalise England, what was not expected, least of all by this regime, is the rise of English nationalism which threatens to break not just the Union. In threatening a death blow to the Union, it threatens post Second War power settlements.

The United Kingdom sits at the top table because its physical terrain offers the United States permanent bases in our hemisphere and a complex cultural and historical empathy that lends itself to the highest levels of co-operation. The trashing of these islands' common identity by New Labour, in its blind pursuit of European Union imperatives, provides much more than its own self extinction.

With Scotland come oil and gas fields, both exploited and unexploited; the Trident bases and the UK's nuclear deterrent; the enormous contribution to the UK's armed forces by the Scottish regiments; major energy resources that are non-nuclear and non-oil based; the only mass population of well-educated young people (and most of the others come from Wales and Northern Ireland); major research and knowledge economy power centres that New Labour, unbelievably, is attempting to cut off from UK research funding in their petty vendetta against losing Labour control in Scotland; and an exemplar of a decent and responsive relationship between government and its electors (which is more important than New Labour would ever understand, being essentially authoritarian and undemocratic).

Brown and his ruling group have a dawning realisation of just what their European Union-guided policies have achieved. In their propaganda attempts to assert Britishness and British values and British common purpose and interest, they try to inject new meaning into 'British'. Now Brown states:

"I will do anything to defend the Union". Including, it seems, facilitating attacks on banks and illegal waivers of competition regulation and market rules.

It is too little too late, as usual with Brown. Trident and nuclear defence policies are up for discussion in parts of the Union he no longer controls. Soon the oil and gas fields will be out of his grasp as are the possibilities of nuclear and other means of power generation which have moved into other hands. The fisheries and management of maritime resources in the north are lost to the Union too.

Reserved powers? Phooey. What is Brown going to do to assert control? The constitution is what we do, New Labour taught us that, with a vengeance. And the vengeance is loss of power and status throughout the world and a collapse of our relations with the US in the name of relations with the European Union. Well, it would be wouldn't it? They have run rings round our New Labour government, while the other great power in our hemisphere effs and blinds our pathetic Foreign Secretary.

New Labour have already destroyed the private lives of millions of citizens in England and Wales. The constant use of the word British indicates a pathetic, too late understanding of what they have done in our civic lives. They must be removed from power before they wreck every aspect of our public and international life.