The British, we are told, are suffering from a national identity crisis. Who are we? What is it that makes us British? What are our common values? What do we believe about ourselves and our place in the world?

Of course the debate is not new. It has been going on at least since 1962 when US Secretary of State Dean Acheson said, “Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role”.

I have bought into this debate, my own take being that our inner loss of confidence and identity is directly attributable to the collective denial of our Judeo-Christian religious roots post-WW2.

But two recent incidents have caused me to pause:

On Saturday I went to a celebration of the election of the new Young Mayor of Newham, Joshua Adejokun, chosen recently by a ballot of all 11 to 18 year olds across the borough. It was held at his place of worship, the Cherubim and Seraphim Church in Forest Gate. Joshua is an attractively self-confident young man of 14 with dread-locks who spoke articulately about his election campaign, his family and his faith. The predominantly Nigerian Pentecostal congregation was exuberantly excited about this success for one of their own, and their joy was reflected in the decibel levels.

In the middle of the celebration, three white-clad ‘Soldiers of Salvation’ marched into the church carrying three flags, in pride of place and easily the largest of which was the Union Jack – not the Nigerian national flag or the church denominational banner, but the red, white and blue of the flag of the United Kingdom. It was saluted, elevated, furled and unfurled, paraded and saluted again before being deposited beside the altar at the front of the church.

Such enthusiastic respect for the symbol of British nationhood by an overwhelmingly ethnic-background congregation was unexpected to say the least.

Then on Monday I attended a lunchtime round-table discussion at the Quilliam Foundation, the organisation recently launched by two former Hizb-ut-Tahrir militants (Ed Husain and Maajid Nawaz) to counter the very Islamic extremism that they themselves once espoused. The theme of the seminar was British Muslims in 2009 – Where Next?

One of the speakers was Sabin Malik, a hijab-wearing young Muslim involved in community work and local government, and an adviser to Hazel Blears MP, the Minister for Community and Local Government. Sabin’s enthusiasm for things British was, again, unexpected, and certainly not the sort of sentiment you would hear from your average guilt-ridden self-loathing left-liberal opinion-former that stalks the corridors of Westminster, Whitehall and White City.

Britain is a great nation, she said. She rates the country’s openness, tolerance and democracy and in her view there is no better place for a modern Muslim woman to live. Her enthusiasm for things English like fish and chips, an ‘Indian’ (curry take-away) and the proverbial cup of tea reminded me of John Major and his description of a Britain at ease with itself – “long shadows on cricket grounds, warm beer, dog lovers, pools-fillers and old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist”.

It comes to something, I reflected, when it’s people from ethnic-minority backgrounds who show the rest of us how to have confidence in what it is to be British. In modern multi-cultural Britain I thought it was only the excellent Royal British Legion who displayed such flag-waving patriotism and sincere national gratitude in public. It seems I was wrong.

Our minority-background population to show us the way? It appears that they at least know no identity crisis.

Newham Council is at it again. We’ve hit the national headlines for all the wrong reasons. Here the liberal-left agenda rules, bulldozing all before it – including vulnerable children – and creating bad publicity.

Mr and Mrs “A” clearly have been superb parents to a number of fostered and adopted children. A review panel described them as “strong, caring, sensitive, supportive and resourceful”.

They have adopted and raised a particular boy for five years, and when they heard his two-year-old half-sister (known as “K”) was in need of a home because of her disturbed mother’s drug abuse, they tried to bring the siblings together by applying to adopt “K” too.

Thank God there are such caring and compassionate people.

But of course, they reckoned without Newham Council. Mr “A” told social workers that he had once smacked the boy and he abruptly ran into Newham’s ideological buffers: the couple were immediately disqualified from adopting “K”.

No matter that it is within the law for parents to use ‘reasonable chastisement’ including smacking; that Ed Balls MP, Secretary of State for Children, has said that a ban on smacking “would be the wrong thing to do for the children”; and that Beverley Hughes MP, Minister of State for Young People, has said recently that it shouldn’t be a crime for a mum to smack her naughty child. Newham Council knows better.

Mr and Mrs “A” applied to the High Court for a judicial review of the case, at the end of which Mr Justice Bennett roundly laid into the Council. Finding in favour of the couple, he said the Council’s decision was “bizarre”, “unreasonable” and made “in dangerous territory”.

But Newham Council has its own unique brand of arrogance so the judge’s findings were rejected. “Having carefully considered all the court papers… we have decided that the couple should not be approved as adopters for the London Borough of Newham,” said a town hall statement.

So there you have it. Newham Council disagrees with parental smacking so stuff the children. Ideology comes before common sense and town hall arrogance precludes “K” from joining her brother in a caring supportive home.

I stand with Mr “A”.  As a parent I have very occasionally used smacking for chastisement purposes and may do so again. I believe a sharp smack on the back of the leg by a committed parent as the fore-warned consequence of a child’s destructive behaviour can be extraordinarily effective.

And now, having publicly made my stand alongside Mr “A”, I suppose I can expect the dreaded dead-of-night knock on my door by social workers and apparatchiks representing the Peoples Politically Correct Republic of Newham…