Alexander Chancellor: I don’t like traffic jams or lager louts but that doesn’t mean I hate Britain

The Italians are often thought of as being unpatriotic, and one can see why. They relentlessly denigrate their national institutions, abuse their politicians, and compare their democratic arrangements most unfavourably with those of the ‘more mature’ north European countries. You might conclude, therefore, that most Italians ‘hate’ Italy. But, of course, you would be wrong, just as the Daily Mail was wrong when it decided on the basis of Ralph Miliband’s political opinions that he ‘hated Britain’.

The Mail’s justification for its now notorious headline (‘The Man Who Hated Britain’) was that Miliband Senior ‘had nothing but hatred for the values, traditions and institutions — including our great schools, the Church, the Army and even the Sunday papers — that made Britain the safe and free nation in which he and his family flourished’. Well, I can think of lots of people, born and brought up in Britain, and with no leanings towards Marxism, who feel some aversion to each of these institutions, especially — and quite reasonably — to the Sunday newspapers; but none of them would be suspected of hating Britain.