"..... So what does it mean to be British? Speaking as someone who is by inclination a Scottish nationalist, my answer might surprise you (and Ms Alibhai-Brown). I actually think that original Britishness is quite a brave concept, being the first attempt in historical times to construct an inclusive identity that was not purely racial. My problem with Britishness is the same that Ms Alibhai-Brown is struggling with - pity she didn't take me out to lunch. Namely, that the foundation of its inclusiveness - the "big idea" we all bought into - has disappeared, leaving folk like Yasmin clinging to the cultural wreckage and blaming me for taking to the lifeboat prematurely.

Britishness began as a political project by the English and Scottish elites to unify the Atlantic Archipelago as a bulwark against the Continent. First the Stuarts had a go in 1607. Then after a century of civil war on these islands, the Union of Parliaments in 1707 gave the English internal peace to take on the French for world domination and the Scots aristocracy a chance to try and make some money. Subsequently, having duffed up the French, the Brits went on to take over the world with the Scots a very willing partner.

This imperial project, seen from today's moral high ground, was indeed "supremacist" (the White Man's Burden and all that). It hardly needs platitudes from the Runnymede Trust to remind us of the obvious. But the notion of Britishness which created the Empire - and was as clinically cruel to the Highlands as it was to Bengal - was not based on anything as crude as race.

The early Brits were culturally arrogant but they thought of themselves quite consciously as latter-day Romans. In other words, anybody could be a British citizen. Britishness was inclusive - a fantastic revolutionary thought - provided you subscribed to its cultural values and "civilising" mission. Yes, that's definitely on the arrogant side. But it was a wonderful conceit whose positive side I can see: everyone can join. You are not permanently excluded by some Act of God, be it your colour, sex or class.

Of course, early Britain was riddled with contradictions, but they were contradictions caused by this inclusive ideal of British citizenship. Thus- to its lasting credit - it is the British who first abolish domestic slavery because it is in obvious contradiction to open entry to being a British citizen. Then they take arms against the slave trade throughout the globe. Far from it being a "butcher's rag", there was a time when the appearance of the Union flag on the horizon made many a slave trader quake.

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Secondly, the two World Wars exhausted the home islands economically. Britain was no longer physically capable of Empire. But it is obvious why latter-day Britishness is so bound up with these conflicts, especially the Second World War: because this was the last hurrah of an inclusive British "mission". In 1940, Hitler offered Britain its Empire in return for a free hand in Europe. We could have taken the deal and been rich. Instead, we fought a war for little national or conomic self-interest, driven by those strange, civilised British values.

Unfortunately, Britishness died after that because its fundamental premise - an inclusive citizenship based on a great (if flawed) romantic notion of a new Roman Empire - disappeared. American capitalism came to dominate the globe. The Empire was dismantled. Joining Europe seemed alien. Increasingly, British culture became infested with nostalgia, self-pity and selfishness. Its only defining political signatures were either capturing state subsidies or a negative Europhobia. What in this club would you want to join? I respect the intellectual attempts of people like Gordon Brown to redefine Britishness around a core set of positive social values, but to date their project is flawed by its universal vagueness: subscribing to motherhood and apple pie is not enough to rescue a British identity.

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People in these islands (including Scotland) can be wickedly racist. But surely Ms Alibhai-Brown can see that giving every self-defined group an entrenched quota of jobs and representation will fragment and fracture forever the idea of a common identity, British or otherwise. We'll end up a squabbling bag of ferrets, if not another demented Yugoslavia. What we do need is a fresh collective project, one more amenable to the times. I still believe a civic Scottishness is one route, though the dullness of Holyrood means I'm keeping my fingers crossed.