But its element of xenophobia is not about nostalgia for lost Empire. It is entirely unlike the venomous resentment of the old upper-crust right wing, now passing away, which blamed the Americans and (often) the Jews for stealing the Empire and for violating England's timeless innocence with chewing-gum and supermarkets.The truth is that the experience of colonial Empire left the English cool. But several, asked to explain the outburst of newspaper Kraut-baiting, brought up the old Dean Acheson chestnut about Britain having lost an Empire but not yet found a role.That is a cliche which no longer works. Germans in London were amazed by unsolicited messages of friendship and apology. In the aftermath, German journalists were besieged for comments Most were forgiving. But their performance suggested that Englishness is not what it is usually held to be, and that something else - Anglitude - is setting in.The stereotype no longer fits, if it ever did.

The most important event in the week was the enormous blunder made by tabloid papers which claim to ventriloquise public opinion The English, in a general way, do not much like the Germans. But in 1996 they refused to hate them to order, and unexpectedly rejected the tattered old wartime strip which they were invited to put on. Instead, there was a wild and impulsive daring, a manner of attacking which was sometimes reckless and sometimes a flame of inspiration which ran through the team in an instant and for that instant made each player infallible. It's not easy to wish defeat on a team who play like that, although their way seemed the wrong way to win a match, and so it turned out. Then the game began, and everything looked different.It was the way England played There was nothing beefy or steadily "English" about it. At one stage, a list of pros and cons for applying for German citizenship had begun to assemble itself in my head: pro for German education, railways and political system, contra for nervous conformism, the frightful short-sighted pedantry of the legal system and the racist requirement of "German Folk-Membership" which meant that I would never be admitted anyway. This was not because Scotland had lost to England; it was the result of tabloid poisoning.

Negritude did not claim that black people were born with similar attitudes. Instead, it suggested that they had enough of a shared past to make them respond to oppression in similar ways. When I sat down on Wednesday to watch England play Germany, I hoped Germany would win. Still, it was more interesting than Black Power or the fatuous fantasies of "Afrocentric studies". The writer Franz Fanon and the Franco-African politician Leopold Senghor made Negritude popular among left-wing intellectuals, but elsewhere the notion got a bad press It was thought pretentious windbaggery. It was never clear whether the term meant a common black culture or just a resemblance between all colonised or post-slavery plights.

Now, after the football week, I wonder if there is such a thing as Anglitude. In the 1960s, there was a lot of talk about Negritude This was a French idea about the experience of being black. Parents cannot, as though they were in a theme park, take a ride on one of Gillian Shephard's 50 per cent selective schools before going for a spin on the technology college roundabout. Most would happily exchange the certainty of a good school within easy reach of home for all the dazzling "choice" offered in the White Paper..

If standards are too low against other countries that has been so for 40 years and has nothing to do with comprehensives.Ministers claim that their White Paper is encouraging "diversity", as though this were sufficient cause for congratulation. But what is the point of all this diversity? We are not talking here about cans of soup, where you might want to try the cauliflower and Stilton one week, the French onion the next. There is no evidence for this whatever: more children are passing exams, more are going to university and more of those are getting first and second-class degrees. The only choice for parents is whether to enter a child for the exam. Most will do so, if they think the child has a chance, for fear of him or her being condemned to one of those comprehensives that aren't really comprehensive. Parents who decide not to enter their children are usually exercising choice only in the sense that the A-level failure does not choose Oxford or the homeless person does not choose the Savoy.The third lie is that "the Government does not intend to oblige any school to change its admission arrangements". The reality is that, once one or two comprehensives in an area start to select children up to the 20 or 50 per cent limit, the others will be obliged to follow.