Personally, it’ll be a cold day in hell before I allow my kids to pledge allegiance to the establishment.

You will not allow your children to promise to obey the authorities?

You will not allow your children to promise to obey the authorities?

Not quite what I implied.

“Personally, it’ll be a cold day in hell before I allow my kids to pledge allegiance to the establishment.”

You stick it to the man, dude!

Where American kids are pledging allegiance essentially to the US constitution, we would be substituting the Queen as proxy for our unwritten one.
I think that seems OK.

I went to a debate – though that word implies a rather livelier event than it turned out to be – at the LSE last night with Prof Bernard Crick and (someone I hadn’t heard of, but was a perfect parody of the type, Professor of Political and Gender Theory Anne Phillips) on “Britishness”. Crick argued that there was something admirable in the British democratic tradition and that pledging allegiance to the Queen was not such a bad thing in the context of attempting to bind newcomers into that tradition.
Phillips of course tied herself in knots arguing that while of course she supported certain values, heaven forfend that we should make any claims for them or imply there was anything the least bit admirable about “British” values….blah blah blah

Those LSE students who spoke for the most part clearly saw through her.

I’d have thought that the creeping conformity of an oath of allegiance was something liberals, either with a capital L or not, should be against.

I have been a republican for most of my life. Asking me, or my kids, to swear an oath of allegiance to a woman who would be more productively employed breeding corgis, is a step too far.

I believe people taking up British nationality do have to make that commitment. So, on one level at least – not wanting to go back on their word – they cannot become republicans? Which is a decent, although small, mainstream tradition.