Praise for Rhodri Morgan

I've slagged him off enough in the past, but at least one Labour grunt is prepared to tell Britishness Brown where he is going so dreadfully, dreadfully wrong.

“If the values of ‘Britishness’ are to be promoted primarily on the grounds of tolerance and decency, then bluntly the record of bulging prisons, record incarceration of children, fortress-like asylum policies, and a progressive erosion of the distinction between ‘anti-social’ behaviour (where solutions ought to be sought primarily through social policy) and criminal conduct (which falls to be dealt with by the criminal justice system) provides an uncertain background of evidence.”

Flagship New Labour policies like the decision to invade Iraq exacerbate the problem further, argues Mr Morgan.

Instead, he suggests, the case for Britishness “rests far more securely on a set of pragmatic... advantages which come to Wales – and to England and Scotland – from being part of a whole.”

Precisely. Britishness, or rather British identity, should be an accommodating umbrella identity, under which the national identities can assert themselves within a consenting and mutually beneficial union. Not some top-down imperial hangover of a union state, struggling to be a unitary state against all odds.

Ditch the British nationalism, Brown. Stop trying to forge a British identity with your authoritarian statecraft. Stop inventing shared values and common purposes, like some tin-pot fascist. Stop trying to tie us into a bio-metric Britishness database. Stop with your British Bill of Rights. Stop with your Britishness indoctrination of schoolchildren and immigrants. Stop with your erosion of freedoms and privacy. Stop with your stupid Britishness books and state-sponsored websites. Stop with your Britishness Day. Stop your appropriation of English history and achievements in the name of Britishness. Stop being so bloody prescriptive and begin to embrace Britishness as something in its own right, extrinsic to the elemental English, Scottish and Welsh identities, not in competition against them. Everything you do in defence of Britishness devalues it, can you not get that through your stupid thick head? We're a multi-national state, and we always will be so long as we're in political union. Live with it.