The left loves to create the illusion of a wide-ranging and popular debate on topics about which, actually, the public has a deeply fixed view and no interest in change.  “Debate”, you see, is code for the preliminaries to change.  It worries away at things, sowing doubt where none doubted and, eventually, offering “solutions” none desired.  Without “debate” there can be no general impression of legitimacy, no sense in which consent attaches to the vandalisms of progressive politics.

So when Mike Greenwood of the hopelessly superficial but no doubt expensive government agency, Culture Online, is quoted by BBC News as saying …

“Englishness has always been problematic because we are a ragbag of influences from all over the world,” says Mike Greenwood, commissioning executive of Culture Online, which came up with the idea.

“What a site like this needs to do is reflect that and not impose an orthodoxy about what Englishness is.

“It needs to be inclusive, not just mother’s apple pie and a Turner landscape, so there is a debate about what Englishness is, and the answer will be different depending on your background.”

… you know that Englishness cannot be allowed to remain itself.  It must be digested whole, along with as much alien seasoning as possible, and regurgitated in some new, vibrantly inclusive form.

The specific object, in Labour’s sub-kulturkampf style, is to deny the exclusive self-hood of the English native and thence obfuscate it with a modern, new invented self for a modern, new invented England … a new invented England safe for black and brown Britons.  No no, of course I mean black and brown Englishmen.

(I’m sorry ... it can be confusing to have two apparent nationalities contained like a Russian doll, one within another in one part of one little island.  But that’s central to the problem.  The English and their Englishness are as much obstacles to the left’s project as are Islamic bombers.  So do yourself a favour and forget Britain.  It is just a political state that doles out a worthless passport-nationality to any inassimilable alien.  Black and brown Britons can never pass beyond that sorry status so long as a racial Englishness obtains among the English.)

There is, of course, a certain admission of failure by the left in this.  Any child could see, if it was pointed out to him, that there is no mystery about what Englishness is.  It is the character of the English.  No more need be said.  But with bombs in London and decades of official multiculturalism as good as dead the left is desperately feeling for ways to promote integration.  The Englishness of the English really must go.

It happens that this endeavour is aided by that general uncertainty which three centuries of an ersatz British identity have inflicted upon us.  We have, though, since Britain was sundered by Labour’s Scots and Welsh devolution, rediscovered that we, the English, exist. Increasingly, we have an archaeologist’s desire to disinter our Englishness.  But, sadly, this archaeologist is a lazy cove and easily satisfied by the artefacts he finds in the surface layer.  Double-decker buses, bowler hats, pigeon lofts, Constable’s Hay Wain, the Beatles, the Mini, warm beer and sandwiches … none of these populist artefacts are us, of course.  But the left is happy to preserve the illusion.  They can mouth their Multicult pieties and slip in hip-hop and chicken tikka marsala, the SS Empire Windrush and whatever else serves their cause.

This is how Mike Greenwood’s contribution to this grubby effort, snappily titled ICONS.a portrait of England, works:-

HOW ICONS ARE CHOSEN

YOU … Nominate things you think are icons of England.
Vote and comment on other people’s nominations

WE … Consider all your nominations, comments and votes.

THEN … We announce the new official Icons of England each quarter and publish lots of interesting background material on them.

So that’s nice and democratic then.  But why not just go with the vote?

On this evening’s BBC Radio 4 news David Lammy, the vacuous black MP for Tottenham and risible Minister for Culture, gave an interview on the ICONS initiative.  One has the distinct impression that Lammy is an affirmative action appointee.  “Brilliant platform speaker” and “keen political mind” are not phrases I have seen used to describe him.  He is aided financially by an odd couple: Lord Sainsbury of Turville, the Jewish billionaire and former Science Minister, and Baron Alli (Waheed Alli), the first “openly gay” member of the House of Lords.  Well, it’s nice to let people know you are happy.

In his interview Lammy was largeing it with hip hop, the Windrush and all things English, black and brown.  Britain, suddenly and very deliberately, was missing.  England is the prize now.  I find that utterly obscene and I hope every normal Englishman listening to him felt at least a twinge of disgust.  Are we nothing, then?  Not a people in our own right?

Not, it seems, if our existence as such stands between the left and its unnatural, doomed project for a New Man.  We are simply not that important to the people we elect.