WHAT does it take to be British?

You'd think I should know by now, after 40 plus years living in this country, especially with the milometer due to make a dreaded turn later this year. Pushing 50 I may be, but I'm still not sure how to answer that question.

Bill Rammell, the higher education minister, believes our teenagers should be taught "traditional British values" as part of an attempt to challenge extremism and promote a more cohesive society.

Under his proposals, 11 to 16-year-olds will learn about "core British values".

There are a number of potential problems here, not least exactly what constitutes those values.

There will obviously be the usual stuff about free speech and democracy, alongside the comfortable view that Britain was founded on freedom, democracy and liberty - rather than, say, hating and persecuting foreigners, invading foreign lands and enslaving their inhabitants for our own enrichment.

Britain good or bad? It's a big question and one that takes some answering. Take free speech, which is a fine thing - until that freedom is used to hurl racist names at those who are different, which once used to be the British way, and sadly sometimes still is.

A big part of the difficulty here is the notion that 60 million people living in a diverse nation can share homogenous views about anything. In a sense, this is illustrated by the Yorkshire paradox. I'm not from here, being a rootless type, but I've lived in Yorkshire longer than anywhere else, and something about pride in this region puzzles me.

You get it a lot on the BBC's Look North, where Christa Ackroyd and Harry Gration are forever blathering on about how great Yorkshire is, with Christa in particular using just about any story to lapse into a spot of parochial patriotism, her face glowing with the wonder of it all.

In a sense, there is nothing wrong with this because pride of place can help define identity. But the trouble with being proud of Yorkshire is this: which bit exactly is causing the chest to rise with bullish regard? Yorkshire is a huge county, in truth a network of counties, containing wildly diverse communities, from dales and moors to inner-city urban sprawls.

What, for instance, links the Dales hill farmer with the second or third generation immigrant in Bradford; or the wealthy suburbanite from Harrogate with the hard-pushed Whitby fisherman; the penny-pinched ex-miner from Barnsley with the onetime insurance salesman comfortably holed up in Wetherby?

And doesn't pride in regionalism automatically override national pride, the one place being closer than the other?

Personally, I am neither proud nor ashamed of being British. It's where I'm from, not who I am. There is far too much foolish sentiment tied up in expressing British pride. Shouldn't we spend more time thinking of ourselves as members of the human race, or is that just too piddling a liberal thought?

No consideration of what it means to be British can avoid the monarchy, usually the refuge of those scrabbling after nationhood. But that doesn't really help, because the royals produce either puffed-up pride or a big so-what shrug. So where does that get us?

Away from free speech, liberty and the rest, perhaps it's simpler than that. Maybe to be British is to be friendly yet defensive; to hope for the best but expect the worst; to take an unhealthy interest in the weather; to like a spot of bitter irony and sometimes a good dirty laugh; to grow too accustomed to the bruised hurt of sporting failure; to be white or black or any shade in between; to love Shakespeare or to lap up the latest Big Brother.

Oh, I don't know - you could play this game forever, stringing together contradictory facets of Britishness. I haven't even mentioned warm beer, cricket and old ladies cycling to church, as once summoned up by John Major, on a riff pinched from George Orwell.

Updated: 12:05 Thursday, May 18, 2006