Joyce McMillan: Preaching to us about patriotism is not the government's job

THERE are only two famous quotes on the subject of patriotism, and it's perhaps significant that neither of them is very flattering. There's Edith Cavell's famous observation – etched on her London memorial – that "patriotism is not enough"; and there's Dr Samuel Johnson's typically trenchant view that "patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel".

Patriotism, in other words, has a long history as the most debatable of virtues, and as a moral principle that should always be qualified by a certain sturdy independence of thought; yet somehow those doubts hardly seem to impinge any longer on the mind of the present British government, which has taken, in its ideological dotage, to blustering and grandstanding on the subject of Queen and country like the Empire loyalists of old.

Yesterday, for example, the patriotic cause célèbre of the moment had to do with British servicemen and women at RAF Wittering in Cambridgeshire being ordered – or only advised, according to some accounts – not to wear their uniforms on trips into town, for fear of being abused by locals opposed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Despicable," roared the Daily Mail, echoing the mayor of Peterborough's description of the tiny minority of local neds apparently involved in this abuse. And like one of Pavlov's most obedient dogs, the Prime Minister immediately rose to the challenge, issuing statements about how we must all show respect and gratitude to our armed forces.

Nor is it the first time, this week, that Gordon Brown has been put through his patriotic paces by the gentlemen of the middle-market press. On Tuesday, his junior culture minister Margaret Hodge unwisely marred an otherwise brilliant and thoughtful speech about the arts and cultural identity by making a single, ill-targeted comment about an alleged lack of diversity in audiences for the BBC Proms at the Albert Hall; and once again, Mr Brown was to be found on patriotic parade, trampling over his own minister in the rush to confirm that the Proms Season was a British event to be proud of, and its traditional last-night programme – complete with Rule Britannia and Land Of Hope And Glory – perfect in every respect.

All of which is, of course, so much embarrassing tosh; and, what's more, profoundly un-British, both in its prescriptive attitude to how we should feel about our national identity, and in its attempt to close off debate about how we express it. So far as attitudes to servicemen and women are concerned, there is no "must" about the views any free citizen may take. The only unbreakable rule is that assault and harassment are criminal offences, from which off-duty service personnel should enjoy the same protection as everyone else.

And as for the Proms – well, in an age when the whole concept of the United Kingdom is under challenge, and is heading, at the very least, for a radical renegotiation, there is no point in denying that the traditional Last Night presents a distinctly retro view of British culture, and one with which people who were once on the receiving end of Britain's imperial adventures are likely to feel less than comfortable. Either way, it is certainly no part of the job of a self-respecting British prime minister to seek to close down debate on these subjects; or to collude with the authoritarian idea that no sensible person would raise the subject in the first place.

SO WHAT should government be doing on this fraught subject of national identity, to which the Prime Minister now seems drawn like a moth to the flame? The short answer is that in direct terms, it should be doing absolutely nothing.

As Ms Hodge fully acknowledged in her speech, cultures grow and change through an organic process that governments can neither dictate nor control. If they want to preside over a creative society, they need to support artists generously, and to allow them great freedom; they also need to pay serious attention – as politicians, citizens and human beings – to the work those artists produce, and to what it tells them about the changing society around them.

And if they want, in the meantime, to strengthen the national community they represent, then the hard truth is that they need to stop babbling about patriotism and allegiance, and instead start doing those practical things that make people love and value the political community in which they live: cherishing its freedoms, protecting its privacies, providing for its weak and vulnerable, and developing an economy and society that reward dedication and effort, rather than greed and destructiveness.

The stark truth – as relevant, in the long term, to Alex Salmond and his ministers as for Mr Brown and his team – is that governments that fulfil those basic duties of care don't have to talk much about patriotism, because the affection and allegiance of their people is already won; whereas governments that fail in those key respects are the ones that typically start blustering and bullying about the loyalty we owe.

So let the Brown government ponder the company in which it finds itself before it unleashes its next pompous lecture on patriotism; and remember that in the business of political allegiance, bad governments tarnish the name and weaken the identity of the state over which they preside, as surely as good ones enhance it.