Sarfraz Manzoor

p>Gordon Brown’s richly symbolic decision to fly the union flag over Downing Street and his recent proclamations in favour of Britishness suggest that he considers patriotism a weapon in the battle for the hearts and minds of British Muslims.

The hope is that emphasising our common British identity will help counter the lure of Islamism. There is a sound logic to this strategy, but there’s a snag: while Islamism offers a coherent political ideology, patriotism is often little more than a stream of platitudes.

Challenge a politician to explain why one should feel proud to be British and the usual cliches and banalities are sure to be trotted out - fair play, tolerance and decency - as if they are the exclusive preserve of any single nation. The attraction of Islamism is that it appears to offer all the answers. Try to define Britishness and one tends to end up only with more questions. Does one demonstrate Britishness by planting a flag outside on one’s lawn? Is it something to do with forming an orderly queue?

The union flag has been rehabilitated and shorn of some of its nastier connotations, but patriotism is about more than flags. It is about feeling a sense of belonging, appreciation and respect for one’s nation, and the challenge is to formulate an argument for Britishness that is not so bland as to be meaningless and which can inspire all communities.

This task is made more difficult because of the insularity of many Muslim communities, some of which are in effect monocultural ghettoes. If everyone on your street is a Pakistani Muslim and all your fellow school pupils are also Muslim and your family watch satellite television channels broadcast from Pakistan, it is not going to be easy to persuade you that you are, in fact, British. That is why any discussion about patriotism and British Muslims needs to begin not with flags but with housing. It will be bricks and mortar that will help win the battle for hearts and minds.

Patriotism was defined by Mark Twain as “supporting your country all the time and your government when it deserves it”. That distinction between nation and government needs to be emphasised and one way to do this is by removing the politics from patriotism. The great appeal of the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States is that it is not explicitly religious or political, and thus Americans can celebrate merely being American. Removing the politics from patriotism means having the right to hate the government and still love your country.

As a young boy I was passionately unpatriotic, the only schoolboy in my class to support the Argentineans in the Falklands and the World Cup. Today, my patriotism is based not on politics but on hardheaded economic pragmatism. Every opportunity I have been given has been because of this country. It is more than an abstract attachment. I draw my patriotism from the values ingrained in Britain’s great institutions: the health system, created with the help of immigrant communities, schools and the BBC.

The first generation of Asian immigrants became pragmatic patriots. Their loyalty to Britain was bound up with an appreciation of the economic benefits that Britain offered - usually in sharp contrast to the places they had come from. That reality has failed to filter through to too many second and third generation British Muslims. It is tempting to suggest that those British Asians who propound such hostility towards their place of birth don’t need citizenship classes - they need a reality check.