Mr Brown and an insidiously brutal attack on the British way of life

fcgv · June 9, 2007

Daily Mail

Peter Oborne

The past three weeks have been kind to Gordon Brown - and desperately bad for David Cameron. The Chancellor has very sensibly gone quiet. He has not tried to spoil Tony Blair's final days in the limelight, while sadistically allowing poor Cameron to immolate himself over his party's misguided grammar schools policy without outside interference.

This is good, shrewd politics. The Chancellor's silence means that he will be listened to all the more attentively when he finally emerges, in two weeks' time, as a prime minister with serious and weighty things to say.

He has, however, made one mistake which threatens to dog his premiership, and which may eventually damage his historical reputation. This is the decision to put a determined assault on British identity right at the heart of his vision for the country.

The first sign of this came ten days ago, during his visit to the Hay Literary Festival. The central purpose of this trip was to promote his new book about his personal heroes and to emphasise his credentials as an intellectual.

The political philosopher David Marquand has recently remarked that Gordon Brown will be our best-read and most intellectually serious prime minister since Gladstone 140 years ago, an observation which has some plausibility. But, judging from the Hay trip, which included an interview with the TV personality Mariella Frostrup, this prediction may turn out to have been premature.

Most of the interview (which occurred just days after Gordon Brown's much-vaunted promise to put an end to "celebrity politics") involved meaningless flim-flam, but the Chancellor did make one highly significant comment.

He declared that under his leadership, Britain would "not be a place defined by race or institutions".

The key characteristics would be values such as "liberty, civil duty, fairness and internationalism".

These thoughts were ignored by most of the Press, and given only very minor prominence in the Left-leaning Guardian newspaper. But the temptation to dismiss them as of no importance vanished with the publication this week of a pamphlet by two rising Brownite ministerial stars, Ruth Kelly and Liam Byrne.

The document, which I understand had been licensed by the Chancellor, fleshed out in much greater detail his remarks and also paid dutiful homage to some of his earlier speeches. Above all, it contained a number of proposals - including one to create a new British national day - which are likely to be introduced after he becomes prime minister.

I have studied this pamphlet in some detail. It is a very important document which gives a fascinating insight into what Britain will be like under Brown.

First, it is interesting to point out the astonishing level of historical ignorance displayed by Kelly and Byrne. They make elementary errors of fact and interpretation that would shame a sixth former, let alone a government minister.

For example, they describe the abolition of the slave trade, which they rightly highlight as one of our greatest national achievements, as a "victory for British liberalism". The truth, of course, is precisely the opposite. One of the shaming features of the 18th-century liberal enlightenment was its studied indifference to the hideous moral squalor of the slave trade.

It was only when liberal ideas were challenged by the evangelical revival, with its tremendous doctrine of Christian redemption and the ubiquitous love of God, that the agitation against slavery got under way. This crucial role of religion in the abolition of slavery has always baffled the progressive Left, which is why ministers such as Kelly and Byrne try to deny it. Indeed, Kelly, who reportedly possesses a strong Christian faith, ought to know much better.

More importantly, the Kelly/Byrne document is not merely ignorant, it is also intellectually calamitous.

At its heart is the same idea uttered by Gordon Brown to Mariella Frostrup - that a nation can be defined by values rather than institutions.

This is nonsense, as becomes obvious the moment you start to think about it. Of course, nobody would argue with the virtues of "liberty, civil duty, fairness and internationalism" which were singled out by the Chancellor at Hay.

But nobody - least of all Gordon Brown himself - has yet explained why these admirable traits distinguish us from other countries, such as France and Sweden, which also possess them.

Indeed, the assertion that civil duty and fairness are uniquely British would hardly be consistent with Gordon Brown's professed internationalism.

The truth is that all these noble values do exist in modern Britain. But they are not abstract ideas - they are actually embodied in our national institutions such as Parliament, the monarchy, the system of justice and - at a more modest level - in the Women's Institute, local choirs, county regiments, local cricket teams and thousands of other local voluntary clubs and societies.

And yet Gordon Brown, Ruth Kelly and Liam Byrne are prepared to go to inordinate lengths to exclude most of these symbols of Britain's civil society from the official definition of our national identity.

Instead, they are determined to jettison or sideline our traditional institutions, which have grown up slowly over hundreds of years, and replace them with new ideas borrowed from foreign countries, such as this new "Britain Day".

Sadly, the Monarchy, which encapsulates our long and magnificent national history and is fundamentally tied into the idea of the British state, has been completely written out of the plot.

As I read through the Byrne/Kelly pamphlet, I slowly became aware that these two New Labour ministers were not really celebrating British identity. In fact, they were doing the opposite.

They have been authorised by the Chancellor to launch a considered, savage and venomous attack on the British way of life enjoyed by the vast majority of ordinary people.

Judging from the Kelly/Byrne pamphlet, and that Frostrup interview, there will be two Britains when Gordon Brown becomes prime minister.

There is the Britain that most of us celebrate and love, and there will be the Britain of Gordon Brown, Ruth Kelly, Liam Byrne and the rest of the political class.

It is instructive to contemplate the differences.

In Brown's Britain, the State will urge us to celebrate a "national day", apparently to be modelled on a similar occasion held every year in Australia. Meanwhile, the rest of us will, instead, continue to observe Remembrance Sunday - the one day of the year when the nation pays homage to the brave men and women who died fighting for our freedoms and against fascism in the two great wars of the last century.

Similarly, in Brown's Britain, the role of the monarch will, as much as possible, be ignored. On the other hand, the majority of the country will continue to gratefully acknowledge the Queen as Head of State.

Equally, while most of us will try to retain our traditional civic identity, of the kind that has evolved over hundreds of years, Gordon Brown will endeavour to destroy this by creating a new kind of statesponsored citizenship.

It is a grim kind of future - yet it is not too late for Mr Brown to turn back.

dailymail.co.uk

Figleaf · June 10, 2007

FCQV, fyi....

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