DON’T take this the wrong way but I felt a pang of envy for France in its amazing response to the terror which befell it last week.

What they did has shown us how firm they are in their understanding of what their country is all about.

Liberty. Equality. Fraternity.

More than five million people marched on Sunday to defend and proclaim those three principles. Muslim, non-believer and Jew; everyone there knew what they were marching for.

Imagine that over here. Even as the call went up a debate would break out, branding all those who wanted to march as racist.

And even if we were allowed on the streets, no one would really know what we were marching for, would they?

What DO we believe in? What ARE our actual rights?

Politeness? Fair play? Democracy?

I don’t know and neither do you. Because for years we’ve been prevented from having what every other civilised nation on this earth has got – a written constitution and a Bill of OUR Rights, not ones imposed by unelected foreign powers in the form of the iniquitous Human Rights Act.

We’re not even allowed to have an elected second chamber. Which means that half the people making our laws – deciding what taxes you pay and if you can get rid of the Human Rights Act – are actually just appointed by politicians.

Not one single member of the House of Lords has ever been elected to that chamber.

They are either there because they donated some cash to the party who they represent or are mates with its leader.

Or they are people who have been democratically booted out of the House of Commons only to reappear like magic in the House of Lords.

We’re told we have to have these people because they are wise and clever.

If they are so marvellous and valuable to our nation they won’t mind putting themselves up for election, will they? It seems to work OK in the US Senate.

If you told foreigners there was this country where half the people making the laws had either bought their way in or were chums with the people in power, and that in this country there was no written constitution or official declaration of the rights of those citizens, decided by those citizens, they’d think you were talking about Somewhereistan.

Or some tinpot outfit in Africa.

Not the country that has the cheek to describe itself as the Mother of the Free and the Mother of Parliaments.

We have handed over all responsibility for regulating our affairs to Europe.

A Europe, by the way, whose diktats and ‘ideals’ and collective influence went out the window when France was attacked.

It wasn’t the European charter or declaration of human rights act the French quoted on their banners on Sunday.

It was their underpinning, national, ENSHRINED values: Liberte, Egalite and Fraternite.

We Brits talk a good game on the old liberty story but the truth is that we have none because nothing is enshrined for us.

Listening to a full two hours of interviews in the Place de la Republique by the BBC’s Lyse Doucet, I felt that whatever the doom-sayers want us to think, France is more than OK, given that the murders were committed by four monsters and two of the greatest heroes of the day were Muslim men, including a policeman, who died protecting the people insulting his religion.

It’s not France we should worry about. It’s Britain.