MANKIND is a tribal animal and the more the authorities try to suppress such instinctive tendencies the greater his resolve to bond with those he perceives to be kindred spirits.

Take football, for instance. Grown men booting a lump of air-filled plastic is the main preoccupation of British males for roughly eight months of the year and is our best example of modern tribalism… right down to the war paint worn at a big match.

The Establishment pretends to support it because they know football is bigger than all of them put together. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. However, while this brand of tribalism is permitted because it’s a crucial safety valve for the masses, other forms are frowned upon or even prohibited.

Since the end of empire, the chattering classes have slowly dismantled our national identity by the imposition of a guilt complex.

All of us must answer for slavery, exploitation and myriad types of world beastliness inflicted on our former subject peoples. You name it, and the British – correction English – have been turned in to global pariahs.

Not so the Irish, Welsh and Scots. They’re oppressed and so therefore must be allowed a form of tribalism. It’s called autonomy.

The result is of course extremism elsewhere. The British National Party and the English Defence League dramatically increased in numbers during the New Labour era and if you want to know why you don’t have far to look.

The last government attempted social engineering and control on an unprecedented scale and the result has been a matching alienation. The doctrine was that ordinary people couldn’t be trusted – allow one modicum of ethnic identity and the mob will be goose-stepping outside the Guildhall before you can say ‘Nuremburg rally’. Yet this logic was never applied to other cultures who must be allowed to keep their traditions at all costs.

What always sticks in my craw is the cynical injustice of the last 30 years. First the British working classes were castrated under Thatcherism and then put out to grass by the Blair-Mandelson Project which cared about them not one jot. If this had been anywhere else there would have been a revolution. Nevertheless, it’s my firm belief that the English will one day be granted devolution thereby gaining equality with the other peoples who share this small archipelago we call home.