Defining Britishness is rather un-British. Britishness cannot be the same as Americanness as we are not a nation founded anew, nor one whose history is defined by a single epic event such as a revolution, nor one rooted in an idea with the individual force of the pursuit of happiness. The qualities that the British prize - fair play, humour, tolerance - are not inviolable ideals, but matters of judgment. That the United Kingdom consists of four components makes it even harder to find a definition of what it is to be British that is based on abstract values rather than shared institutions. The British have been rightly suspicious of state-sponsored patriotism, finding political efforts to nurture a national culture distasteful and populist appeals to nationalism dangerous. The British find their idenity in their history, their language, their society. It may be messy, but it is more meaningful that way.

This will lead some to dismiss the tome Citizenship: Our Common Bond entirely. That would be unfortunate. Lord Goldsmith investigates two quite separate factors of citizenship in one volume. The first relates to the legal status of citizenship in Britain. The second deals the social bonds.The former is the more straightforward item. As this document outlines persuasively, there are numerous quirks in the statute book that mean there are six different categories relating to citizenship. Despite all of these laws, there is no single statement as to what UK citizenship entails. There are also curiosities such as the Treason Act 1351, which makes it treason to “imagine the death of the king”, to slay Jack Straw (as he is the Lord Chancellor) or to sleep with the wife of the monarch or wife of his heir (it made sense to Edward III back then, his father had been deposed by an alliance of the Queen and her lover). There plainly is a case for reorganising the law.

It is when Lord Goldsmith seeks to take on the social dimensions of citizenship that he finds himself travelling down a path strewn with banana skins and greased with butter. In order to have anything specific to recommend, he has to reach for international precedents - pledges of allegiance and a national day for instance - that are rational enough in the countries concerned with their particular histories and traditions but are not transferred convincingly to this country. As a result, the whole exercise rather falls apart. It is debatable whether it should have been entertained in the first place. For the research that Lord Goldsmith has himself commissioned, notably by Anthony Heath and Jane Roberts of Nuffield College, Oxford, does not indicate that the cocktail of internal nationalism, rise of the European Union, globalisation and immigration has actually produced a crisis for citizenship. It has instead inspired a more complicated version of it with most individuals feeling both British and something else but retaining what is, by the standards of polls conducted across the EU, a comparatively high level of pride in the nation. There are some important exceptions to this - younger men of black Caribbean descent being prominent among them - but it is hard to envisage how the chance to swear fidelity to Her Majesty or a national day will change their minds.

Nor would it be even if an all-out crisis existed. It is not for this or any Government to impose a top-down model of national identity for the rest of us. The job of the Government is not to manufacture identities. It is to foster a society that allows British people the security, freedom and opportunity to be who they are.