Liddle Britain

This, by Rod Liddle in The Spectator, is superb.

Liddle writes:

I do consider myself a patriot. But when I examine precisely what it is to which I feel allegiance, I find that it is that bleak and discredited notion, the nation state: Great Britain. It is Britain, not England, with which I feel a shared identity and, try as I might, I cannot separate the southern province from the rest simply because we say ‘now’ instead of ‘noo’ or ‘noy’. Great Britain is — or was — one of those grand ideas I mentioned earlier, a geographically distinct entity consisting of various tribes held together through a shared ideology, loyalty and — as the Celts among you are quietly pointing out — a modicum of coercion, from time to time. It seemed to work — and in our collective unconscious as a nation, our ‘race’ memory, each part is indivisible from the whole. Forget language; English was dragged screaming a short distance from its Germanic roots only five centuries ago; even now, if you visit those low-slung Friesian islands, curling upwards from the north of Holland into Scandinavia, and you ask a local to speak his own language slowly, you will understand almost everything he has to say.

He goes on:

Let us see, in time, how relations between the east and west of Scotland progress once full independence is achieved; in England between the north and south, or between London and the rest. We have an endless propensity to loathe one another for our usually imagined differences, anything we can get our hands on to differentiate ourselves from other people.

And he concludes:

As for Englishness, consider it an act of benevolent patriotism to let it remain for ever undefined.

Shame about the New Statesman.