Britain needs a slogan we can all rally around

If you’re not a young person taking offence, you must be an old person giving it

Robust. Proportionate. Commensurate. If there were three little words the nation needed to hear more, I can’t begin to think of them. When Boris Johnson spoke this week about government measures against the Russian state, there were no sesquipedalian references to gloomadon-poppers, whinge-oramas or Mugwumps.

Instead, the Foreign Secretary, taking his cue from the Prime Minister, spoke with clarity, authority and measured forcefulness. In uncertain times, it is necessary to be – and appear to be – politically resolute on the world stage.

We have no idea yet how this debacle between Westminster and Moscow will develop. At the time of writing, we have not heard of Putin’s response to Britain’s expulsion of 23 diplomats following its mocking refusal to explain how a Russian-made nerve agent came to be used on a former spy and his daughter in Salisbury, placing other people at risk.

But it comes as a relief to hear fighting talk from our elected representatives who are defending Britain’s interests without recourse to petty parliamentary point-scoring.

By contrast, Jeremy Corbyn’s mortifying attempt to make political capital was shameful and a reminder of just what sort of a divisive, unpatriotic ideologue the Labour leader is. His shadow front bench were mortified, and rightly so, because if ever Britain needed a sense of unity, it is now.

I don’t mean because the Russians are playing games or Brussels bureaucrats are figuring out how to punish us for seeking national sovereignty, but everywhere you look there’s strife, antagonism, discord.

For every well-intentioned #Metoo or #Timesup, there’s an angry backlash. And then an angrier backlash against the backlash. Frankly, if you’re not a young person taking offence, you must be an old person giving it.

Any reasonable observation or opinion about millennials being the fattest generation on record, sharia law being a bad idea in the UK, or that eating meat isn’t immoral is liable to unleash the Furies.

Does it honestly matter to anyone if £16,000-a-year Blackheath High School decides, after consultation with pupils, not to have the word “Ladies” or its universally recognised symbolic equivalent on its loo doors? I think it’s a bit odd, but it’s got nothing to do with me, guv’nor.

More worrying is the trend for unisex loos in co-ed schools, because my children would hate it. But if I dared to put my head above the parapet (not the cubicle, please) and say so on Twitter, I’d have my allegedly transphobic face flushed down the loo before I could politely inquire: “Can you please explain again how identifying as a girl actually makes someone a girl?”

When I mentioned last weekend, in mixed-age company, that I dislike drag shows, everyone under 25 was horrified and loudly accused me of being anti-gay. I think the word “bigot” was murmured, but I was so busy – pointlessly – protesting that I don’t like Gilbert and Sullivan or modern dance either, that the moment to defend myself on that particular count had passed.

This pernicious idea that if you’re not actively, conspicuously with the minority then you’re against the minority is seeping into our society and is in grave danger of destroying our cohesiveness.

When photographs emerged of the late, great Stephen Hawking enjoying a night out with Peter Stringfellow at his eponymous club, I was braced for student snowflakes to have all mention of the ground-breaking scientist erased from the safe space of Cambridge University.

But perhaps they were all too busy getting aerated over the fact that Oxford has beaten them to a more-feminist-than-thou philosophy curriculum. To attract more women to the subject, Oxford has decreed that 40per cent of recommended authors be female.

I tend not to go to watch films without any female characters (Dunkirk was the most notable exception of late), but it would never have occurred to me to get uppity about the fact my German course at Edinburgh featured too much Goethe and not nearly enough Hildegard von Bingen.

By the way, Oxford has also prissily insisted that the post-war philosopher GEM Anscombe be called Elizabeth, so students will realise she is a woman. Am I alone in thinking that anyone keen enough to read philosophy at Oxford would already be aware of this facticle? It is, after all, the first one in her Wikipedia entry.

Next thing you know, they’ll be telling us Evelyn Waugh was a man, and JR Hartley is a fly-fishing myth.

Yes, I sound awfully analogue and fuddy-duddy, but I’m not sure whom it benefits if the young and jejune inherit so much power so soon. Any generation that can suffer hurt feelings from watching episodes of Friends – so much fat-shaming and misogyny! – needs to grow up.

The social media preoccupation with minutiae is a distraction from the real struggles that my generation started but their generation will have to finish: equal pay and sexual discrimination.

Brexit is coming – I’m a Remainer but not, I hope, a Remoaner – and with it challenges as well as opportunities. The 1939 war slogan “Keep Calm and Carry On” was resurrected in the early Noughties and, within a decade, this stiff upper lip reminder of fortitude in adversity was not only ubiquitous but being gleefully pastiched.

So there’s a gap in the market for a new mantra (“Mind the Gap” has had its day…), one that sets out our stall and round which we can all rally.

Robust. Proportionate. Commensurate. It might not sound terribly fun, but serious times demand serious slogans.