A well-pitched approach to patriotism. Service to others, because they form your community, is central to building any kind of shared or national identity, that can make us feel a responsibility for others. And you’re right, if course, that a ‘homo economicus' or ‘invisible hand’ approach isn’t enough for improving society.

GK Chesterton, who knew a thing or two about the very best inclusive traditions of Englishness, said this (in context, about the loss of the monasteries): “We still find it necessary to have a reserve of philanthropists, but we trust it to men who have made themselves rich, not to men who have made themselves poor.” Ill-fated, but unfairly maligned, ideas like ‘the Big Society’ are at their best about that sense of shared responsibility to make things better. In the jargon of the day, we’d call it an ‘asset-based approach’: looking at what people can do, not what needs ‘fixing' about them.

Martin Luther King said, “anyone can be great, because anyone can serve.” Perhaps, to paraphrase Rainsborough, a stronger communal sense of Englishness begins from the idea that, “the poorest he that is in England has service to perform, as the greatest he.”