Grab your brolly and cans, you're British.

Jim White seems well impressed with Liam Byrne’s new project:

But despite such apparently significant obstacles, Byrne has been busy suggesting ways in which we could spend this one day of the year "bringing together citizens throughout the United Kingdom as well as new immigrants".

In his booklet, A More United Kingdom, Byrne has thought of the following: a ceremony to remember the good things in the past year; Morris dancing; and town halls hosting community discussions. Not since the contents of the Millennium Dome were first unveiled has such a riveting catalogue of events been put together. Let's hope the police will be able to cope with the queues forming outside town halls across the nation of those anxious to secure their place at community discussions.

Emboldened by the reckless excitement of his programme, Byrne has also delivered suggestions about how we should behave as we wave our Union flag in time to the gentle clip-clop of the Morris man. We should, he says, talk about how we appreciate the weather. Cultural dress, he adds, is to be worn (what is cultural dress: a frock designed by Melvyn Bragg?). And, above all, we should spend our time drinking.

A few more suggestions offered up in "A More United Kingdom (and I’m not joking, unfortunately):

.Young people to visit and help older people.
.Schools to “teach history” and provide choirs.
.People asked to appreciate “the country; weather; enjoyment”

I love my nation, but even I’ll admit that I sometimes struggle to "appreciate" its weather....
And, strangely enough, no mention anywhere which parts of the United Kingdom will be permitted (or alternatively, "forced", depending on your view point) to celebrate Mr Brown’s British Day.

It’s all, of course, an unnecessary nonsense and if a think-tank of separatists had been wanting to come up with the best way to ridicule both “Britishness” and the United Kingdom, they couldn’t have done a better job than the supposedly Unionist Liam Byrne.