Britain is still Great. We invented Oxfam! Lord Stern of Brentford is one of ours!

Slightly ironic that I posed the rhetorical question the other day of how opponents of independence were going to eulogise the 'greatness of Britain' now that they'd well and truly been stripped of their 'fourth-largest economy in the world' fail-safe line. David Miliband's article in the Times on Monday almost seems to be an attempt to answer that very question, albeit without having Scotland specifically in mind. It makes for unintentionally hilarious reading. You must know you're struggling in an article like that when by just the fourth paragraph you're already falling back on the British origins of Oxfam and Save the Children, and when by the fifth paragraph you're enthusing about "Lord Stern of Brentford’s study on the economics of climate change", the importance of which is apparently "impossible to overstate".

Absolutely, David, let's all stop worrying about the dangers of overstating the importance of the Stern report. I must say the people I know all (with a quintessentially British misplaced modesty) worry about little else. It's silly and it's got to stop.

Rather more troubling than amusing is Miliband's suggestion that we should also take pride in that lest vestige of Britain's colonial privileges - our permanent, veto-wielding status at the UN Security Council, which he claims to defend "out of pride in what we do today, not our role of yesteryear". Isn't that the condescending line of the self-styled 'benevolent imperialist' down the ages - "we exercise power over lesser peoples, but only for their own good?" In reality, Britain is far from being the most pernicious voice on the UN Security Council, but the real damage of the UK and France's apparent determination to defend the current veto system to the last breath (albeit in modified form) is that it provides useful cover for the real Neanderthals of the 'international community'. Naming no names.

I might actually be able to take a little more pride in being British if our government had the imagination to stop clinging to a vestigial power and influence at the UN that has not been earned, and in so doing help to bring about something that would be far more valuable to people in both Britain and beyond - a democratised international system in which all nations are equal.

The arc of desirability?

For all the distasteful triumphalism about the tarnishing of the 'arc of prosperity' last year, a stubborn fact remained largely unremarked upon - that one of the countries in the 'arc', Norway, had come through the global economic crisis remarkably unscathed. Yesterday it was revealed that Norway has topped the UN's annual Human Development Index, measuring quality of life - or as the BBC put it, the best places to live. Even more remarkably, Iceland is in third place and Ireland fifth. So should the arc of prosperity simply be rebranded the 'arc of desirability'? Well, to be fair, the data on which the rankings are based is two years old. But there seems little reason to suppose that Norway in particular will have slipped much since then.

And it's always intriguing to see how certain American commentators cover a story like this - can they bring themselves to concede that it might just have something to do with the Scandinavian social democratic model? I'll give you three guesses. The blogger Ann Althouse sums up why she thinks Norway is actually top with characteristic succinctness - "mainly because of a lot of extra wealth from oil". Now doesn't that remind you of somewhere?