The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, delivered a long address to the Fabians last weekend on the subject of Britishness, a subject that has preoccupied him for years. He is certainly right to keep raising it. The fracturing of British identity, the uncertainty about what it means and whether it is desirable -- or whether, indeed, the very notions of a nation, of national pride or patriotism are desirable at all -- are all examples of what Brown rightly identifies as a chronic loss of national self-confidence, a phenomenon which at any time would pose grave social and cultural danger but is even more lethal in the current circumstances of global threat.

However, his speech was disappointing because, having raised this great issue, he failed to follow through with a properly targeted analysis of what has caused this slide in national feeling. Indeed, how could he when the Blair government has been responsible for taking an axe to the country’s traditions, values and integrity? This is, after all, the ‘year zero’ government which has ripped the heart out of the unwritten British constitution on the basis that tradition is bunk, thus fragmenting the United Kingdom, destroying the independence of the second chamber and politicising the judges; which has done its best to destroy national self-government by ceding ever more powers to the European Union and promoting supra-national governance wherever possible; which has destroyed social cohesion by encouraging uncontrolled immigration and promoting ‘multiculturalism’; and which has all but wiped out the country’s bedrock moral values through policies which wittingly or unwittingly have promoted family breakdown, fatherless children, victim culture, rising drug and alcohol dependency and the almost complete implosion of the concept of education.

Britishness, says Brown, resides in

the values we share and because of the way these values are expressed through our history and our institutions.

And so these are?

in addition to our qualities of creativity, inventiveness, enterprise and our internationalism, our central beliefs are a commitment to – liberty for all, responsibility by all and fairness to all.

Yes, he is right to say that Britain gave the world its idea of liberty. But the government he serves has all but destroyed that unique idea, which was based on the English common law and the belief that everything was permitted unless expressly prohibited, and deliberately replaced it by the continental idea that nothing is permitted unless it is expressly codified. The Human Rights Act, one of the most significant policy changes made by the Blair government, along with the European ‘anti-discrimination’ directives to which the Blair government is such an enthusiastic party, has made a bonfire of traditional English liberty – to the uniqueness of which Mr Brown, as a Scot, may well not have the most visceral of attachments.

To his credit, he calls explicitly for a return to the teaching of the narrative of British national history, the destruction of which has done so much to prevent the transmission of a sense of national identity. But in a society which has been culturally, socially, educationally and morally disembowelled, ‘values’ such as ‘liberty for all, responsibility by all and fairness to all’ degenerate into the most vapid of verbiage signifying precious little that is distinctively British. National identity surely rests above all on a shared collective memory. In Britain, that has been progressively eroded, surrendered, mislaid, unpicked, undermined and destroyed. What’s left is people like Britain’s Chancellor sifting through the fragments and hailing the piles of shards as a brave new dawn.