THE NEW WIMBLEDON uniforms are, I concede, flawless. The ball-people look limber yet undeniably sexy in their body-hugging, cap-sleeved tops.

And the line judges, I say! White tulip skirts, crisp navy blazers, stripy cotton shirts, cute sneakers: for once they don’t appear to have been dressed by Fergie and her galumphing daughters. So why am I irritated — no, make that riled — that the All England Club chose Ralph Lauren to make over its frumpy Home Counties image?

Did they really need an American designer? Was Paul Smith’s colour scheme too zany? Did Vivienne Westwood want to squeeze ball girls into bustiers? Are Ozwald Boateng, Alexander McQueen and John Galliano simply not lawn tennis types?

“I have long been inspired by the rich heritage and traditions of England,” says Ralph Lauren. No kidding. He has built an empire stealing European casual, sporty and equestrian chic and repackaging it for East Coast Wasps. So the fashion wheel spins, and the prince of preppy is now back preaching to us.

Does it matter that such a cherished British institution has shacked up with a foreign brand? Lauren’s little polo ponies will trot out of the Wimbledon shop as sure as rain will fall. So he’s worth his £6 million deal. And anyway, what is British fashion? Our designers create from Parisian ateliers, their clothes are cut in Milan, sewn in China, shown in New York. Get with the global economy, grannio, you may think. Well, perhaps . . . except it just feels so wrong.

Likewise, as I glare at the Saharan patches on my lawn and read about Thames Water, which hiked up my bill on a promise to repair leaks but instead decided to award my hard-earned to its shareholders, my fury is compounded by the knowledge that my water is German-owned. I keep imagining the executives of RWE — Thames’s parent company — relaxing by glistening swimming pools, amid verdant gardens.

Deep in the Ruhr or Rhine, they won’t get neighbours ear-bashing them about plants shrivelled by the hosepipe ban. They won’t feel they have failed in their duty to their customers or to this country, because we are faceless, faraway citizens and this is a foreign country. They don’t feel responsibility, let alone shame. Besides now that it has extracted £1 billion in dividends from British folk, and the drought has stemmed its gush of profits, RWE is bidding us a cheery “So long, suckers!” Am I a little Englander, a petty nationalist, an economic dinosaur because I loathe the idea of British utilities and infrastructure being foreign-owned? In the global free market, the swirling, borderless world of international finance, why should it matter that the Spanish are about to buy Heathrow, Gatwick and five other British airports? Or that 21 ports, including Hull, Southampton and Tilbury — accounting for a quarter of British seabourne traffic — will soon be controlled by a foreign consortium? After all, much of our energy is already owned by French or American firms, or at any rate controlled by non-British shareholders.

And so powerful and cross-party is the belief that liberalised markets mean the best company — regardless of nationality — gets the gig and provides the best value for the customer, it feels heresy to ask two simple questions: is this safe and is it undermining our sense of nationhood? I cannot answer the first. No politician has ever explained what happens if things turn sour with a country that owns our strategic installations: a bunch of power stations, say, or Mersey docks, now property of the people of Dubai. The British Government has already vowed that Russia’s state-owned Gazprom will not be allowed near our gas for fear it will use supplies as a political weapon, as it did in Ukraine. Yet we are expected to believe that all other foreign companies are benign, have only our interests at heart.

But the second question is more amorphous. London is pretty much the epicentre of the global economy. A bus ride is a mobile Babel: a third of residents come from ethnic minorities. You can shop your way across the capital, eat in a café or a Conran, go on a bar crawl and not once be served by a British person. Moreover, we assume the lowest jobs will be performed by the latest arrivals — Bangladeshis, Latvians, Somalis — so that at Glasgow airport, I was shocked to see floors being scrubbed by actual white, native Scottish women. Yet in London, since there is work enough for all who want it, and unless you are an aggrieved white working-class family who has been shunted down the housing list by more needy incomers, we mostly rub along. That children of so many different origins cohere and thrive at my sons’ state primary makes my eyes well up at every school assembly.

Yet as David Goodhart says in his essay on diversity for Prospect magazine, such a society means “more of our lives is spent among strangers”, ie, people who are not like ourselves, than any previous generation. Add to that an understanding that jobs can be scooped up and relocated to any factory or call centre across the planet, that British students must compete not just with each other but with other have-English-will-travel EU citizens, and it feels like a nationless, Nike-sponsored world of limitless yet intangible possibilities is spinning dizzyingly out of control.

All this has caused anxiety to filter into our national psyche. I wonder how much global unease explains today’s paranoid parents.

Previous generations raised children in times of greater poverty and international uncertainty, yet were confident of their everyday safety because they felt, outside the home, they would be watched over by people like themselves. Today, for many, only the family feels safe enough: beyond that is an uncaring, unheeding world of disparate individuals.

So what role can a new and modern sense of British nationhood play in alleviating these feelings? We are, of all countries on the planet, the most apologetic about asserting our common values. And yet there is a deep-felt longing, as the England penants fluttering from countless balconies and cars illustrate, to come together as one. Patriotism is viewed with suspicion, even revulsion, as akin to racism.

Yet what we need is a patriotism that unites all the races making up our nation. And maybe that begins with the water that falls on our soil being returned to British hands and Wimbledon officials being dressed in the true English tradition, not in Ralph Lauren’s polo-ponied pastiche.

janice.turner@thetimes.co.uk

Times Recommends

• It’s the beginning of the affair
• Afghanistan: still a price worth paying
• Heroes of the downtrodden