THE new Archbishop of York today urged the English to reclaim their national identity.

Dr John Sentamu - launching a powerful attack on multiculturalism- claimed that too many people were embarrassed about being English.

He called for English people to rediscover and reclaim their cultural identity by properly marking celebrations such as St George's Day on April 23.

"What is it to be English? It is a very serious question," he said.

"When you ask a lot of people in this country, 'What is English culture?', they are very vague.

"It is a culture that, whether we like it or not, has given us parliamentary democracy.

"It is the mother of it. It is the mother of arguing that if you want a change of government, you vote them in or you vote them out."

He said England was a place that had allowed reason to be at the heart of things, and allowed genuine dissent without resort to violence.

Dr Sentamu, who will be enthroned at York Minster on November 30, also strongly criticised the Government's controversial Terrorism Bill, saying: "The moment you make your laws so tough, even the most law abiding will say, this is a chance to break them."

The Ugandan-born Archbishop, who fled Idi Amin's regime in 1974, said that, "speaking as a foreigner really," he felt the English were somehow embarrassed about some of the good things they had done.

"They have done some terrible things but not all the Empire was a bad idea," he claimed, saying that he would not be where he was today were it not for the British Empire, and the English teachers and missionaries who worked in Africa.

"Because the Empire has gone, there is almost the sense in which there is not a big idea that drives this nation.

He claimed multiculturalism as a concept failed to convey the essence of what it meant to be English. "Multiculturalism has seemed to imply, wrongly for me, let other cultures be allowed to express themselves but do not let the majority culture at all tell us its glories, its struggles, its joys, its pains."

Dr Sentamu, who revealed recently that he had received racist and abusive letters, some covered in human excrement, after his appointment was announced, said the failure of England to rediscover its culture afresh would lead only to greater political extremism.

He intended to make mission and a passion for English culture, and the Christian roots of that culture, the driving forces of the next decade or more that he will spend as primate of England's northern province.

Updated: 10:20 Tuesday, November 22, 2005