If you have a spare national identity lying around in a drawer or at the bottom of your handbag you could sell it to the French and make money on it because the French just happen to be looking for their own identity right now.

French demographics, like those of many other countries, are changing fast in this modern world of high indiginous population mobility and foreign immigration. Many countries adapt to this, some better than others, but few and far between indeed are those, like France, who feel that they have lost their national identity and need to find it again.

Before explaining the totally hilariously tortuous manner in which they are going about it, starting today, a good example of just how lost they are was given in an official poll which was published in the French press last year.

It revealed that whereas we Brits know full well that our national emblems are the Lion and Unicorn and the Bulldog, and that it’s the same for other countries – America’s Bald Eagle, Canada’s Maple Tree (since 1996,) Spain’s Osborne Bull, and Nicaragua’s Turquoise-browed Motmot (yes, the Turquoise-browed Motmot. You got a problem with that?) to name but a few – the French have no idea, poor things.

The poll asked the simple question “What is the National Emblem of France?” Well, answers ranged from the flag, to Jeanne d’Arc to food to the President to Napoleon, the French Royal family (which doesn’t exist,) the Republic, and, if my memory serves me right, the cockerel.

Only 9 per cent knew the correct answer, the cockerel.

Anyway, the last fifteen years have seen some extremely serious issues explode in France concerning immigration and immigrant communities. Those issues have included nationwide rioting and public disorder leading to a state of national emergency, religious extremism and terrorism, widespread racism and honour killings.

No government, left or right, has managed to get to grips with the situation and reduce the tensions between the immigration polulation and the others, and at the same time the press and people have been wondering loudly about just what the hell is happening to the country.

Well, the government-in-place has just come up with yet another way of avoiding its responsibilities and having to answer the questions being asked by the people. This time though they have hit on a brilliant idea, got to hand it to them. They have cleverly understood that the shrewdest thing to do would be the following. Instead of actually doing something, that for which they may be criticised, they have, by jumping on the “who are we” syndrome and amplifying it, organised a national debate at all levels, from infant school to the military, police to pundits, on what the national identity is.

Very cool move that.

The idea is that everyone discusses national identity in public meetings, political rallies, classrooms, communities, everywhere.

Then the government will analyse the results, hold confidential meetings on their implications, finally be forced to open a parliamentary debate on them, and, only after months of political wrangling with the press sniffing around like dung-flies to stir up the, um, soup even more, they will finally officially announce who, or what, the county’s national identity is. In around a year’s time.

Class.

A master stroke. In one fell swoop the government just bought itself around a year’s worth of insurance against having to do its job and solve the country's problems. A devilishly ingenious plot. Hitler would have been proud of it.

And the French fell for it too. Hook, line and sinker.

I can proudly reveal to you today (OK, I can only reveal it thanks to the article in Le Figaro in which I read the questions) that the government has just issued a document containing the 200 or so questions which are to be answered by all French citizens.

Here are some of them. Absolutely unblievable. Hang on to your hats....

‘Is France a great gastronomic nation, profoundly linked to its wines?’ ‘Why do we feel so close to our compatriots, even if we don’t know them?’

Those questions are the simplest and least bizzarely pretentious ones, being placed as they are right near the beginning. Then it gets all romanticky and stuff.

As in ‘Is it what we have achieved together, or that which we would like to achieve together, which connects us, or is it our culinary art, which is envied all over the world?’ Then there’s ‘Do our church bells embody our identity, or is it our national patrimony, our culture, our countryside, our language, our agriculture or our industries?’

No, this is all true I tell you!!

(Oh, are you crying because of the bucolic and wrenching nostalgia of it all? Sorry, I should have said beforehand that Kleenex nearby would be a good thing.)

Things get more serious thereafter, however, and four of the sixteen pages of questions are devoted to immigration and linked phenomena. Well, things get serious, but the questions remain weirdly amusing all the same.

‘Why should we welcome immigrants into our midst? In order to maintain our historical tradition of a country open to all? To help national demographics? To satisfy the need for qualified people in certain jobs? To take jobs that don’t appeal to others? For their cultural contribution?’

The last three chapters are devoted, as one can imagine, to matters concerning the celebration of French ideas of their identity, its values and its symbols.

And there’s also an invitation to go to your local central administration headquarters to attend ‘Civic Education’ classes which will be open to one and all.

Now, as we all know, all of our countries and peoples have to put up with the overblown and often negative national characteristics that others say exist. Germans = bombastic and awfully efficient, Russians = biggest drinkers and most arrogant tourists on the planet, Americans = think they run the place and don’t know where Italy is on a map, British = ummm, well, we are just misunderstood by the rest of you.

And one of the things we like to characterise the French as being is nombrilist and narcissistic.

Well, and I hate to say it, but this totally unreal and pathetically third-rate-philosophically orientated national identity debate risks proving that characterisation to be true.

And, meanwhile, the economy.......