I am an Englishman. My passport was issued by the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and it describes me as a British citizen. But English is what I feel and, therefore, English is what I am. I have never believed that my nationality made me superior to “lesser breeds without the law” or that, thanks to an accident of birth, I possessed elevated views on liberty, democracy and tolerance that are denied to other races. My allegiance is cultural (which means Shakespeare and cricket) and geographical (the Peak District and the Pennines) and usually I do not make a fuss about it.

Indeed, not making a fuss about being English seems to me an essential ingredient of Englishness. If we posses a national characteristic that should be (in Shakespeare's ungrammatical words) “the envy of less happier lands”, it is our emotional reticence - the “modest stillness” that Henry V regarded as the proper response to peace and security.

American schoolchildren swear an oath of allegiance to the flag that they fly on their public buildings because the US is a new country that is unsure of its identity. Italian city squares are decorated with statues of the heroes of the Risorgimento because Italy was only “unified” 150 years ago. We English do not need to behave in those flamboyant ways and we lose something that is essentially English if we start to copy the behaviour of less secure nationalities.

When Gordon Brown wrote yesterday about “common values” that bind the Union together, he was describing the virtues that should inform any civilised society and I very much doubt if Jack Straw, who soon sets off on a journey of exploration, will return with a definition of citizenship that is exclusive to Britain as a whole.

But there is one characteristic that at least distinguishes the English from equally admirable races. We pride ourselves on not boasting about being English. When G.K. Chesterton wrote of “the people of England that never have spoken yet”, he did not mean to suggest that we had nothing to say for ourselves - merely that while other nationalities “talked of freedom, while England talked of ale”. We chose that subject because, being free, we did not need to assert the importance of liberty and because we would have been embarrassed to proclaim our love of what we knew to be our birthright.

If we abandon that natural reserve and replace it with oaths, flags, national days and long-winded statements of the civic virtues to which we should all aspire, we may do something to create a feeling of “Britishness”. But an essential part of what it means to be English will be destroyed.

Roy Hattersley's latest book is Borrowed Time: The Story of Britain Between the Wars

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