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		Memo to Blair: We care about our country! January 6 2003 They say that history is the new cookery. Suddenly our TV screens have been hit with a blizzard of programmes about history, ancient and modern. We have had Simon Schama's epic History of Britain, closely followed by David Starkey's programmes - I especially enjoyed his Henry the Eighth. Time Team, an unlikely success story, has just celebrated ten years of popular archaeology, and its presenter Tony Robinson has graduated to serious history programmes with his life of King Harold, who died at Hastings in 1066 with an arrow in his eye. Hardly a week goes by without some intrepid team reconstructing a pyramid, erecting a Sarsen Stone or trying to re-create a Roman catapult. Soon we can look forward to Professor Neil Fergusson's series on the British Empire - and if the trailers are anything to go by, this may be the first TV series to present Britain's colonial history in a partly positive light. The Second World War is getting vast airtime. Channel Four's three-hour programme on the epic sea-battle between HMS Hood and the German battleship Bismarck made compulsive viewing. I sometimes wonder if Channel Five would survive without the Third Reich. On New Year's Day they offered us four solid hours of World War II. TV moguls aren't stupid. They wouldn't be showing this stuff if viewers didn't want to see it. The British people care about their country. They want to know about the events and the larger-than-life characters who made it. They value their sense of history and heritage and identity. So it's rather curious that the Westminster village, the Islington intelligentsia, seem to take a different view. New Labour clearly feels that national identity is somewhere between irrelevant and downright embarrassing. Tony Blair shows his contempt for our culture and our institutions. He takes down the great paintings in government buildings and puts up the kind of modern art which even his own culture minister describes as "Bulls**t". He destroys the House of Lords with no clear idea of how to replace it. He vandalises our constitution. He seeks to ban hunting, not for the sake of animal welfare but to buy off the class-hatred of his backbenchers. As George Orwell remarked in the 1930s, Britain is the only European nation whose intelligentsia are embarrassed by their own country. Orwell never met Tony Blair, but he could almost have had him in mind. But the greatest betrayal of our history, our culture and our identity is Blair's determination to capitulate to the European project. Already we see laws imposed on us by Brussels against the specific wishes even of Blair's own government. We see our legal system and our ancient rights and freedoms under threat. They are nibbling away at the right to jury trial, at the double jeopardy rule, at Habeas Corpus - not to improve our justice system, but to make it easier to impose the EU's "Corpus Juris" continental system. Blair wants to pass control of our currency, our interest rates and our monetary policy to an unaccountable central bank in Frankfurt. Having said, a few short months ago, that they would not accept a "European Constitution", Labour have now rolled over and changed their minds. Valery Giscard d'Estaing, ex-President of France and now Chairman of the EU's Constitutional Convention, has suggested that the new Europe might be called "The United States of Europe". Almost certainly, in 2004 Blair will kick and scream and finally accept the new EU constitution, making Britain a mere off-shore province in the EU superstate. And that, so far as Britain is concerned, will be the end of history. Perhaps our Prime Minister should spend more time watching history on television. Almost no one I meet in Lincolnshire wants to be governed from Brussels. We care about our country. We are not particularly demonstrative, still less jingoistic. But we are determined to remain free and democratic and self-governing. Woe betide any Prime Minister who forgets that simple fact.