Ard Mhacha. I gather you are refering to the Northrn Ireland situation (notice how I avoided refering to it as the Northern Ireland problem?) This needs another thread and I am not going to refer to it here. Sorry you feel the need to be so sarcastic about English visitors to Ireland. For what it is worth, my English freinds who have been to Ireland have spoken very warmly about the country and the people.

Thank you for you comments, Taxpayer.I sometimes feel like General Gordon at the Seige of Khartoum. Next time you pop in here, you will probably see my head on a stick. I agree with you that we need a stronger sense of national pride and identity. To think of ourselves as a collection of disparate racial groups, each with its own agenda, is a passport to disaster, especially if you have someone like Livingstone who is skilled in exploiting these groups. A nation divided against itself is a nation not at ease with itself.

Ken's ok, I have no trouble getting my head round this, if by 'this' you mean, as I do, English national pride and identity. I am not asking for English people to be treated differently. Ofcourse people should be treated for whom they are rather than because of their ethnicity. I have not being arguing this. What I do believe is that each country has it's own character, history, collective sense of being, if you will. If I mention Scotland, the mind automatically refers to things Scottish. The Scots realise this and take pride in it. The same can be said for the French. You say the word France and you immediately think of intellectuals sipping cafe au lait on the Left Bank, the Eiffel Tower, the french language, it's literature and music. And yet you would deny this for England. Do not the English have the right to define themselves as they see fit and to pass this on to the next generation? When I think of England, I think of our rich folk music, writers such as Hardy or the Brontes, Coleridge or Chaucer, the patchwork makeup of our fields and the bawdy humour of the Carry On films - perhaps I should make the last one the gentle humour of the Ealing films. OK, there is a lot of wishful thinking and romance in this picture. I know that there is a depressingly uniformity in the Town Centres and English weddings are boring beyond belief. But an Irishman toasting Ireland on St Patrick's Day will be toasting an Ireland of the imagination rather than the real one, and there is nothing wrong with that. It is important to have a good image of yourself, otherwise you have a negative view. This is why I think it vital for this country to embrace (not too tightly, but embrace it anyway) English nationalism. This has to be all embracing, including the ethnic minorities who live here. If they carry on celebrating thier differences, they will, generation by generation, become divorced from the country they were born in. They will give their loyalty to a foreign country that they will, slowly but surely, have nothing in common with and which would not recognise them as one of their own.

By the way, I know what Londoner's think. I am a Londoner. My freinds are Londoners. A lot of them agree with me. Some agree with you, but those that do come from ethnic minorites. Livingstons's divide and rule tactics are paying off. Nationalism expresses itself in this country through sport. Look how happy and crazy we were when England won the Rugby, a game few lke or understand. It was an excuse to express national pride. There are precious few other outlets for it. Taxpayer, take heart, it is there to be tapped. I do have a sense of the outside world, but to understand that world, I need to understand my place in it, and that is, for better or worse, as an Englishman, for that is how the world sees me.

So Ken's ok,what is it that I don't see?