Why Britain Is Great
by Paul Miller
Former Demos intern Tristram Hunt (not a lot of people know that) has the cover story of this week's New Statesman on Why Britain Is Great. One point he makes is that we have, "...developed an amorphous but nevertheless peculiarly British culture at whose root is a healthy irreverence towards religious and political authority. We like burning effigies of the Pope, wearing masks of Tony Blair, exposing the peccadillos of pious statesmen. What Islamic ideologues dismiss as western decadence, I like to think of as bawdiness: our high propensity for drunkenness, historic prevalence of illegitimacy, and astoundingly revealing clothing."
Read the article.