More regressive patriotism from New Labour

To paraphrase Neil Kinnock: You begin with a Labour leader elected in a landslide telling the unelected monarch that he's 'proud as proud can be' to be her prime minister, and you end with the grotesque spectacle of a Labour government - a Labour government, heir to a 200 year tradition of progressive reform - requiring citizens to swear an oath of allegiance to the Crown. And in castles too. Tom Paine must be spinning in his grave.

Is Gordon Brown's New Labour-lite government so lacking in political imagination that it can't conceive of any model of Britishness other than the most regressive and clapped-out kind? See here and here for more on the cart-before-the-horse nature of the government's attempts to inculcate a sense of national identity.