The Herald reports that H Clark is to lead the fight against the loss of our “ancestral visa” privileged entry rights to Britain.

She should crawl there on bended knee, since she has spent 9 years extracting cheap praise from the trivial intellectuals who feel they look more “grown-up” when they reject their inheritance.

Strong families celebrate and foster their ties and mutual obligations. Of course they have their differences, but they focus on the rituals and celebrations that strengthen what they share.

We all know weak and troubled adults who cope with their inadequacy and insecurity by blaming their normal, even outstanding parents. Passionate denunciation of their parents’ values, interest, foibles etc is embarrassing to hear. There’s something repulsive about disloyal denunciation of an inheritance, even when its amusing.

But Clark and Co have it down to an art form. Lest we forget, we’ve weakened the emotional claims that have been the justification for our continuing “family” privileges with stunts like:

• offering studied and childish insults to the Queen. Remember H Clark wearing trousers to a state dinner, and omitting the saying of grace even though the Queen is head of a state church, and was sitting at the same table as the heads of two of NZ’s churches;
• More recent was the silence, or even quiet encouragement of media hostility over the absence of a royal representative at Sir Edmund Hillary’s funeral, when there is unrebutted rumour that the Queen was never invited.
• ending our appeal rights to the Privy Council (at vast cost to ourselves);
• excluding British Navy ships (as they also refused to confirm or deny nuclear status) and celebrating Lange’s dishonest speech in the UK (which was directly hostile the the UK position) when we tore up our ANZUS committment;

The UK government has no reason to thank us for our contribution to the pressures on Blair with our “non-aligned” foreign policy (setting aside our sensible approach to Iraq).

Shrewd governments foster inherited links, the ties of culture, shared institutions and history, the emotional obligations of previous battles fought side-by side. Ours has sought piffling political advantage by overtly and subtly devaluing them.

Will young New Zealanders to be shut out of Britain connect the dots?