This weekend, New Zealand celebrates the Queen's Birthday. Monday is a public holiday.
Ever since I arrived in NZ from the UK in 2003, the irony of this particular public holiday has not been lost. In the UK, a public holiday to celebrate the Queen's Birthday would be deemed as either elitist or ethnically sensitive.
The UK Parliament would be far more likely to establish a 'Mandela Day', than a 'QE2 Day'. So it is down to her subjects on the far side of the world to share her day in London, Sandringham or Balmoral. When it comes to that real sense of 'Britishness', Westminster still does not get it.
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