Less ordure would have been heaped upon the august head of the former Attorney-General, Lord Goldsmith, had he recommended the humane gassing of all Britain's cats. Even the tentative suggestion of a national oath earned not just the condemnation, but the contempt, of every section of British expressed opinion, from the termini of the League of Empire Loyalists to the New Communist Party and all stops in between.

Temperamentally I had my bucket ready. From my earliest days as a young member of the St Pancras Socialist Sunday School, I have hated all this ceremonial stuff. Going up to Oxford (not long before being sent down again) I discovered an incapacity for taking part in any of its daft rituals. Matriculation in the Sheldonian Theatre sounded complicated and unnecessary, “handshaking” with the Master like something out of Gormenghast, and the requirement to dress for examinations in a tatty gown and to flutter round town, as an ailing vulture might, like a piece of generational sadism. And for what good reason? No one could tell you.

But there weren't many as institutionally incompetent as me. In general my contemporaries - even those who led semi-violent Trotskyite sects and went on to become human rights lawyers - sucked it up. They put on their robes, they shook the hands, they matriculated together. And today they, like everyone else, express their outrage or amusement at the very idea of the oath. They now put on QC's wigs, prelate's robes, dog collars, medals, accept knighthoods, peerages and membership of the Garrick, watch their infant Cubs and pubescent Guides parade around church with the Union Flag, and yet express instant outrage at the notion that we might do as the Americans do, and pledge allegiance.

It hardly brushed their consciousness on the way to rejection, as far as I could tell, that Lord Goldsmith had been trying to solve a genuine problem - the difficulty of consolidating a national, British identity, in a time of unprecedented demographic change. Had they drawn breath they might have reflected that the American pledge of allegiance, created by a Christian Socialist for Columbus Day in 1892, was partly motivated by the scale of new arrival into the US. Ellis Island had opened earlier that year, and in 1891 half a million immigrants landed in New York alone.

The objection to Lord Goldsmith, taken in the round, seemed to be that an oath, like a motto or even a national day, was somehow un-British in conception. Either because the very act of affirming Britishness was antithetical to British reticence (we don't do that, we don't have mottoes, national days etc), or because governments and politicians cannot call these things into being, but rather they must be the products of genuine organic tradition. Like, shall we say, the State Opening of Parliament?

One of my favourite books, published (alas!) nearly a decade after my Oxford démarche, is a book of historical essays, The Invention of Tradition. In its pages historians such as David Cannadine show how the tartan was a 19th-century marketing device, the great medieval Oxford ritual of the Chancellor's Inauguration goes back only as far as 1911, and Queen Victoria wouldn't open Parliament in person between 1861 and 1876, the current ceremony being created later by her son, Edward VII.

That this might be done successfully seemed unlikely to Lord Robert Cecil, later the Marquess of Salisbury. “Some nations have a gift for ceremonial...,” he said, but “this aptitude is generally confined to the people of a southern climate and of Non-Teutonic parentage.” Hardly 60 years later Richard Dimbleby was confident that Americans would have to “wait for a thousand years before they can show the world anything so significant or so lovely” as a British royal ceremony.

Tradition, then, can be invented, even in Britain. The Mail on Sunday is running a campaign to “save” Britannia on our coinage, and has managed the extraordinary feat of eliciting support both from David Cameron and from the senior Liberal Democrat Chris Huhne. Britannia was, said Mr Cameron, an ancient British symbol, having appeared on a Roman coin and a “British” one in 1672. Said Mr Huhne, in a comment I like to think was written for him by someone on work experience: “Britannia has been an enduring symbol of British pride and history for millennia.” I may be wrong but I imagine that the 1672 coinage was English, and that Huhne might as well have invoked the Pliocene as the past “millennia” in search of “British pride and history”.

Well, if a bint on a rock with a stick can be a vital British symbol of togetherness, then why can we not have an oath? No more, apparently, than we can have a Museum of Britain. When one was mooted recently, the excellent young historian Tristram Hunt described it as a “deranged idea”. Fair enough, part of his objection was to having Kenneth Baker associated with any such project, but it is also true that Hunt could not seem to bear the notion of a museum devoted to British (as opposed to London, Scottish, Welsh or working-class) history.

This, of course, leads one to reflect on the three genuine British characteristics displayed in the oath discussion and in so much else. The first is our capacity for instant negativity. On Thursday last I sat with two charming couples in early old age, listening as they itemised the reasons why the Olympics would be a disaster. The clinching catastrophe was the prospect of our local high street collapsing from the weight of passing Olympic cyclists. One of my American friends, who loves Britain, often describes it as “the Land of No”.

The second is class pessimism. We of the newspapered classes might get the idea of an oath - though of course for us it would be redundant - but the hooligans and teddy-boys, they'd just snigger and stab each other while it was being administered.

But overwhelmingly, for good or bad, what characterises us is our complacency. Love everything that's old, even if it's rubbish. Dispute the value of everything that's new, even if it's desperately needed. Campaign against stuff - from incinerators to airports - but never for it, whether it's new schools or green power plants.

Now, I don't want my kids to swear an oath particularly, but if it helps national cohesion, I am eccentric enough to prefer that to having them troll around a modern British city forcibly dressed as medieval monks. Which other commentators can say the same?

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