I am a Bruneian. This isn’t because of my race, religion, language, culture or values I adhere to. I identify myself as a Bruneian because I have a Bruneian passport. Moreover, I was born and raised in Brunei and although I may settle in the UK, there will always be a bond between myself and that land.

I suspect that most British people of ethnic origins define their Britishness in the same way i.e. “I am British because I was born ‘ere”

Pace Devil’s Kitchen, patriotism, or pride in your country, doesn’t involve thinking it’s superior to anywhere else. Most of us love, and are proud of, our families but few of us would seriously try to maintain that our children are superior to all other children or that our wife is more beautiful than anyone else’s. You love and are proud of your country because it’s your country, surely, rather than because you’ve actually sat down and, after a serious consideration of the respective merits of various places, come the happy conclusion that yours is the best one on offer. We British know that we’ve won the first prize in life’s lottery; we don’t have to convince anyone else of the fact (and, indeed, it’s pretty un-British to remind foreigners of their misfortune). That sort of thing is all very well and necessary for countries that, like the USA and the former USSR (and, to a lesser extent, France) are built on an idea — that all men are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, for example — which others ought to share. Britain, as are many other countries, is built on no such thing; people are British through an accident of birth or because they’ve voluntarily accepted the rights and obligations of being British subjects (a more helpful term, I think, than citizen, at least in this context) and that’s it.

Being proud of who you are doesn’t mean you think you’re superior to everyone else — that’s the sort of mistake we leave to the French and the Americans and all others, who, for whatever historical reason, feel they have to justify their existence and way of life to anyone else.

Nonetheless I fail to see exactly how the fact that the government of the day didn’t describe the Boer camps as concentration camps stops them from being just that.

When you say that Habeas Corpus was passed into law by a Scotsman do you mean Charles II?

What with the Blair regime merrily dismantling every last vestige of due process and English common law, I’ve found myself clinging to a ludicrously romanticised view of England worthy of Arthur Mee. I am thoroughly guilty of bewailing that 2005 marked the end of 790 years of Habeas Corpus in the full knowledge that it was not extended to the general populace until 1679.

The disagreement seems to be about the definition of concentration camp. Both myself and, I think, Phil are using it in the original sense of “place where government concentrates particular section of society it wants out of the way.” The British were undeniably the first to do this.

But DM is arguing that it the British did not invent the concentration camp because they didn’t operate them on the Nazi model. Did the British intend for the South African camps to be death camps? Probably not. Did people die there? Yes (lots, I seem to recall).

But nonetheless – noone’s been claiming that the British invented the death camp. But they did invent the concentration camp. Hence the “strawman of your own devising” stuff.