Jack Straw and Britishness

Blackburn Jack want's to be slightly more careful about what he celebrates as Britishness.

"We should do the same, bringing out the freedom that lies at the heart of the story," Mr Straw writes in The World Today, journal of Chatham House, the foreign affairs think-tank.

"That means freedom through the narrative of the Magna Carta, the Civil War, the Bill of Rights, through Adam Smith and the Scottish enlightenment, the fight for votes, for the emancipation of Catholics and non-conformists, of women and of the black community, the Second World War, the fight after that for rights for minority groups, the fight now against unbridled terror."

If people do actually learn that story then there'll no doubt be some wag who starts to plot freedom on a chart. The shape will end up as a skewed Bell Curve, with there being little freedom around 1066 for the Anglo-Saxon population rising to a maximum just before WWI at the peak of the last wave of globalisation, a time when the average Englishman could live his entire life without meeting the State except in the person ofthe postman and the policeman on patrol.

And then shrinking again, to now, where Jack and his partners in crime are reimposing the State controls upon us and our freedom.

Careful there Mr. Straw. Teach people this and they might wake up and get all medieval on you, start setting up the gibbets on the village greens again.

Another way of putting this is in the form of a simple question. "So, Mr. Straw, if you think our island history is one of the narrative of freedom, why have you and your colleagues been so assiduous in removing those freedoms?"