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You ask 20 of your friends how English and American democracy came about. None of them would say that Anglicanism or Protestantism had anything to do with it. But it was crucial to it!

I believe Britishness is defined not on ethnic and exclusive grounds but through shared values; our history of tolerance, openness and internationalism; and our commitment to democracy and liberty, to civic duty and the public space.

Some time ago, the United States was an English colony. If an Englishman were asked if the United States would be independent, he would have said no, that it would always be an English colony.

I descend from both Philadelphia Quakers and Carolina colonists whose families were separated by the Revolutionary War. That helped give me insight into the agony of Patriots who, until the British government denied their claims, had always, like Ben Franklin himself, thought of themselves as free-born Englishmen.

The patriotism in Britain comes from us being a leader. On jobs, on tax havens, on workers' rights, on the environment. We can be leading Europe... and it will be to the benefit of every British citizen.

Britain is characterized not just by its independence but, above all, by its openness.

The assertion that 'all men are created equal' was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain and it was placed in the Declaration not for that, but for future use.

What supposedly bound that Commonwealth together was a mysterious shared identity - Britishness.

The Declaration of Independence was always our vision of who we wanted to be, our ideal of freedom and justice, how we were going to be different, and what the American experiment was going to be about.