Oh, here we go again! Another well-meaning bureaucrat telling us that being British is a bit like signing up for a Tesco Clubcard – you just fill in some forms, and poof! You’re as British as fish and chips in the rain. Well, let me tell you something, my friend: being British isn’t a bit of admin at the Home Office. It’s not a transaction. It’s not a certificate you print out on cheap government paper. It’s something deeper, something lived, something felt.

See, Britishness is one of those strange things in life. It’s not about what you believe, what you eat, or how many times you’ve watched Doctor Who. It’s something that runs in your blood, rattles in your bones, and sneaks into your sense of humour when you least expect it. You can’t just show up, flash some paperwork, and suddenly have the instincts of a bloke from Sheffield or a lass from Glasgow. It doesn’t work that way.

Some people think you can acquire Britishness like it’s an accent – something you pick up if you hang around long enough. But accents don’t make the person. A parrot can say “alright, mate?” but it’s still a parrot. You can move here, live here, drink our tea, and queue with the best of us, but if you don’t feel it, if it’s not in your gut, it’s just a performance. If you aren’t British, you can’t become it by showing up and getting legal paperwork. You’re just a foreigner living in Britain. You’ve no connection to anything British, will never have British heritage, have no British instincts, and everyone knows you’ll never care the slightest bit about British culture or history.

It’s a bit like haggis. Now, you can make it, you can eat it, you can even pretend to enjoy it, but unless you’ve grown up knowing what a haggis is, arguing about it, and watching people hurl it across fields for sport, then it’s never really yours, is it?

People love to talk about British values, don’t they? Oh, they go on about it like they’re selling a house: “Oh, yes, we’ve got lovely democracy, a charming little justice system, and, oh, over here, a spacious sense of fair play.” But the thing is, values change. What we call British values today would have been a joke a hundred years ago. And what they’ll be a hundred years from now? Who knows! Probably something about never offending anyone and having to apologise for existing.

But Britishness itself – that doesn’t change. Shakespeare wasn’t British because of his position on gender pronouns. Isaac Newton wasn’t British because he believed in free broadband for all. And James Cook? He didn’t become a Great Brit because he remembered to recycle his tea bags. They were British because they were born into it, raised in it, and carried it with them. Their blood and spirit were British, allowing them to participate in demonstrating the type of civilization British people create.

And that’s the thing – being British means your ancestors are English, Scottish, or Welsh. You are born British, and you die British. Your political opinions don’t change it. Your moral compass doesn’t change it. You don’t get revoked from Britishness like it’s a gym membership. You just are. And that’s why it can’t be handed out like a bus pass. Showing up to live where the British originated doesn’t make you the slightest bit British.

You can live here, you can learn the customs, and you can even play along. But unless you are British then you’ll always be playing at it. Being British isn’t something you apply for. You can’t become British just by showing up and filling in some forms. You can’t just turn up, wave a flag, and suddenly develop an instinctive knowledge of how to queue properly, or the exact moment when it’s socially acceptable to complain about the weather. It’s not an app you download. It’s something you either are or are not.

Now, I’ve nothing against Konstantin Kisin. Seems like a bright lad, good with words, says some sensible things. But have you ever noticed how often he says “we” and “our” when he talks about the Brits? It’s like watching someone try to join a pub quiz team uninvited and start answering the questions before they’ve even been handed a pint. You can appreciate the enthusiasm, but it doesn’t quite sit right, does it?

See, I couldn’t become Russian no matter how many shots of vodka I downed or how menacingly I stared into the distance. I could move to Moscow, learn the language, and develop a deeply suspicious attitude towards windows that are easy to fall out of, but at the end of the day, I’d still be Scottish. They’d still take one look at me and go, “Nice try, pal, but you’re not one of us.” And fair enough! Because national identity is not just about learning the rules or getting official documents of citizenship – it’s about being part of the story. Nothing against Russians – I’m sure there are plenty of proud Russians, no matter whose territory they find themselves in.

Likewise, your British family could have moved to China and you could have been born there. But no one would ever pretend you were Chinese, even if you were perfectly fluent and happy to enjoy the society they built. Nor in a hundred generations would there be anyway you could become Chinese. You’d always be what you actually are, which isn’t Chinese.

Britain – real, honest-to-God Britain – is a story that stretches back for centuries. It’s battles and kings and poets and engineers and drunken uncles ruining Christmas dinner. It’s who we are, not what we believe. And it’s not something you can simply inherit by nodding along and saying the right things.

Let’s be honest. If being British was just about believing in a set of principles, then that means you could also be un-British just by believing in the wrong ones. See the problem? One minute you’re British, the next minute someone’s decided you don’t fit the criteria anymore. Maybe you didn’t clap loud enough for the NHS, or you got the wrong answer on the official British Values Test™.

And if that’s how it works, then suddenly you can be stripped of your identity, erased from history, and replaced by someone more suitable. At that point, Britishness isn’t a heritage anymore – it’s a membership club, subject to cancellation, judged at the whim of whatever is fashionable at the moment and sure to be outdated in a season.

No thanks.

You can’t build a country out of rules and principles alone. If that worked, every former British colony would be a perfect little replica of Westminster by now. But history shows something else: people revert to their instincts. Everything not inherent soon sloughs away and people return to what they really are. Culture isn’t a policy; it’s the product of centuries of shared experience, history, and the odd drunken misunderstanding at closing time. You don’t vote it in, and you certainly don’t redesign it from scratch.

So no, I won’t be taking orders from foreigners on what I should and shouldn’t believe from someone who has no real stake in the thing itself. That’s not because I think the bloke’s a bad person, or because I believe in some magic quality that makes one people better than another. It’s because that’s not how this works. I’m not to be replaced by some compliance stranger from half a world away who wants the gifts of my civilization bestowed upon them and me dispossessed. Proposition nations don’t work; nor can following any supposed ruleset of values result in creating a country or culture. British colonies testify that despite the great gifts bestowed upon them, all people soon revert to their ethnic instincts and the gifts fall into disrepair.

I’m British. Not because I signed up for it, or because I ticked all the right boxes, but because it’s what I am. And so are the English, the Welsh, and the Scots, whatever petty squabbles we may have amongst ourselves. We’re in this together, bound by something much deeper than any slogan or set of ‘values’ that some government official dreamed up last Tuesday.

We started with a simple idea: what does it mean to be British? And somehow we’ve ended up with a bureaucratic nightmare where Britishness itself is treated like a Netflix subscription: renewable, revocable, and subject to change at any moment depending on who’s in charge.

It’s a dangerous thing, this idea that being British is something you have to prove, like a job interview where you’re asked to list your strengths and weaknesses before you’re allowed to keep your passport. Because once you go down that road, once you start saying that only people who uphold ‘British values’ deserve to be British, it’s just a short step to deciding that those who don’t should have their identity revoked altogether. And then what?

You end up with an entire class of wretched undesirables who are citizens in name only, living among us but somehow not quite one of us, as if they’d failed a test nobody even knew they were taking. It’s the kind of thing that, if you’d suggested it in a pub a few decades ago, you’d have been laughed out the door and told to get a grip. But today, some people seem to think it’s a perfectly reasonable way to run a country.

Who decides what ‘British values’ are, anyway? Some bloke in a suit? A committee of civil servants? A panel of experts who’ve never met a working-class person in their life? One day, British values mean free speech and fairness, the next day it’s all about “being kind” and “not offending anyone”. And before you know it, you’ve been un-Britished for saying the wrong thing about biscuits.

It’s nonsense. Britishness is not a checklist. It’s not a loyalty oath. And it’s certainly not a subscription service that can be cancelled at a moment’s notice.

I’m Scottish. And that doesn’t change based on what I believe about tax policy, football, or whether or not I think deep-frying a Mars bar is a legitimate culinary achievement.

And I love my English and Welsh brothers. Even if we argue, even if we bicker, even if we’d rather spend half the year moaning about each other. Because our history is shared, whether we like it or not. We’ve fought together, built together, lived together, and laughed together. That doesn’t just disappear because some politician in Westminster has decided that ‘British values’ now mean something entirely different from what they did last week.

And that’s the thing: no amount of political fads, policy changes, or fashionable ideologies can erase who we are. No amount of hand-wringing can undo the history that binds us together. Nations aren’t built in boardrooms, and identities aren’t up for review every five years like a government contract.

So no, you don’t get to redefine Britishness on a whim. And you certainly don’t get to decide that people who don’t fit your latest trendy definition should be excluded from their own country.

Because the truth is, we were here before all this nonsense started, and we’ll be here long after it’s gone.