By his idiocy shall ye know him

Gordon Brown, who one suspects is but an election victory away from changing his name by law to Dear Leader, suggests we have a Britishness Day to celebrate ... well, being British; he exhorts us to fly the Union Flag in our gardens, and possibly to jump around shouting, "Yay for being British!" Let us gloss over all of the following, viz: that Brown, who will presumably be leading the Labour Party into the next election, seems perfectly happy to benefit from the lack of any clear answer to the West Lothian Question (already Labour has used Scottish MPs' votes, Brown's included, to pass legislation that applies only to England that would have been roundly rejected had the vote been for English MPs only), thus engendering resentment and division within Britain; that Brown, whose constituency borders have changed three times since 1983, is likely to claim that power only through the ludicrously gerrymandered constituency boundaries that would give a Labour Party with 36% of the vote some 50 more seats than a Conservative Party with 36% of the vote, most of them in Scotland; that Brown, who probably knows all six verses of The Red Flag, has likely never managed to look upon the Union Flag without grinding his teeth at the thought of all that foul Imperial history it represents (hence Labour's galumphing over the better part of 1500 years' worth of institutions); that Brown, who lives in London with his family, is not so exercised about Britishness that he doesn't spirit his wife back to Scotland when she's about to drop his hellspawn that they may be born Scots: all this is mere carping. The important point here is that Brown, who is apparently British in that he is a Scot, has so little idea of the British character that he thinks waving flags and prancing away like magnificent poufs are the kind of things that come naturally to us. They don't: we need the silly music. In short, there is surely little less British than a Britishness Day.