The Curmudgeon

YOU'LL COME FOR THE CURSES. YOU'LL STAY FOR THE MUDGEONRY.

Thursday, August 04, 2005

How to be British

As is well known, the Home Secretary casts no shadow. Nothing so thin and insubstantial is capable of blocking the sunlight to any appreciable degree, particularly in these days of inadequate but still eminently missable fossil fuel reduction targets. It is possible also that the Home Secretary casts no reflection in mirrors, though I think it more likely that he simply avoids looking in them, for fear of seeing Tony Blair grinning back at him.

Anyway, out of the British kindness of their British hearts, the Conservatives have given the Home Secretary a shadow. The shadow's name is David Davis. David Davis is British, and he believes in Britishness. Britishness is not easy to define, but presumably it consists of all the attributes which make Britain agreeable to David Davis. Britishness does not include multiculturalism. Britishness is monocultural - a single, definable set of values which held true from the Orkneys to the Channel Islands until a lot of wishy-washy liberals allowed some dusky foreigners to muddy the sceptred purity of our isle.

Certainly Islam is not particularly British, except in a "mainstream" version which is acceptable to David Davis and some Good Imams. A Good Imam is an imam who encourages his flock to "confront terrorism, not just condemn it". Muslims are not doing enough about terrorism. The terrorists are Muslims. Lots of other people are Muslims, too. It is simply not enough for these other Muslims to condemn terrorism and then go complacently on with their strange, barely-British-at-all lives. They are Muslim like the terrorists, therefore they must confront terrorism, unlike the British who can do no more than display their ongoing pluck and fortitude. They must find the terrorism, root out the terrorism, rip the terrorism screaming from their very hearts. They're all Muslim together, after all. One Muslim is as Muslim as the next, however Good or Bad the imam. Surely they have a secret handshake or something, by which the terrorism can be identified and confronted by mainstream moderates like David Davis.

Maybe it's because my own ancestors arrived too late, but I am not sure quite which values are included in Britishness and which are not. David Davis has argued that the Human Rights Act should be ditched if it prevents Britain being "as safe as possible", which suggests that courage and stoicism in the face of danger are undesirable alien characteristics. Fair play and the rule of law would preclude illegal attacks on defenceless countries, such as the one which the Conservatives enthusiastically supported in 2003, so presumably Britishness does not include these ugly foreign vices, either.

Can someone enlighten me? How may I aspire to be properly British, just like David Davis, Rupert Murdoch and Macdonald's?

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