For the October issue of Prospect, we have invited 50 writers and intellectuals to respond to Gordon Brown’s call in July for a “British statement of values.” What should this statement be and what should inform it? Our respondents ranged from Michael Gove to Eric Hobsbawm to Brian Eno; and you can read their responses here. Let us know what you think in the comments box below.
Collectively to define ‘Britishness’ (or any other set of social values) is a useless exercise in rhetoric – a populist and nostalgic version of past grand speeches about the Empire and such. As John Adams said, (when asked to comment on the American Revolution 50 years hence): America was “destined in future history to form the brightest or blackest page, according to the use or abuse of those political institutions by which they shall in time to come be shaped by the human mind.” The truth lies in what we make of our values.
Salaam
There is no such thing as Britishness or British values.
In my opinion Britishness consits of institutional racism, binge drinking, drug adiction, incivility, teenage pregnancies, abortion and anti-social behaviour. Muslim parents do not want their children to be integrated into such barbarity. They would like to send their children to state funded Muslim schools with bilingual Muslim teachers as role models.
According to Linda Colley in ‘Britons’, Britishness was forged from Protestantism and War.
Today, I suggest Britishness is characterized by tolerance and debate of comments by individuals like Iftikar Ahmad, an advanced system of democracy, art, design and architecture, and a willingness to vary Britishness to incorporate language, style, and food from many parts of the globe that Britain has either historically colonised or traded with.
As a foreigner coming into the country from experience abroad, having spent extended periods in 3 different Republics, it appears to me that the issue is a question of citizenship tied to constitution. If one were to claim to be British, one might wish to sign up to a constitutional instrument that is longer say than Magna Charta. Some Republics advertise a pluralist super-concept of citizen, designed to embrace a variety of former ethnic attachments, others state adroitly that they are democratic and Christian, and others still have concordats of recognition if not endowment with a variety of churches. Surely, one would have thought, responding to the old Armada notion above, that Britain is a nation with a past that goes back beyond Armada to Henry V - there lies a historio-genesis point of any future renaissance. So Henry V definitely must remain the standard bearer of all things British - such seemed to be the view from the other side of the channel when I was there. A protestant settlement as above is at heart simply a guarantee of certain minimal freedoms, so why not let your old Magna Chartula do its work - we might say from the outside looking in.
If we are searching for our values, it implies that we have lost them, and haven’t yet found them again.
So why not alight on values that prepare us for our future rather than wed us to an imagined past?
We face challenges at a global scale, such as climate change, that threaten to extinguish us collectively if we are unable to act together. And such collective action demands collective human values.
Those that argue that the state is a far more solid ground for human values that anything the UN has come up with (the charter on human rights for instance) forget that once upon a time, a secular democratic state was as unthinkable as the Earth orbiting the Sun.
If we want to start facing up to what the next 50 years holds for us, we need to look forward to some genuinely global humanistic values, and justice is not a bad place to start.
Isn’t this debate a bit pointless? With every passing year fewer people are describing themselves as “British” (certainly nobody I know describes themselves as anything other than English, Scottish, or Welsh these days), and with the possibility of an independent Scotland, even the legal basis for “Britishness” is facing the chop.
Even if this were not the case, does anybody seriously believe that a few vague universally applicable notions labelled “British identity” will actually do anything to reverse the accelerating fragmentation of the country into social, racial, cultural, religious, economic, and class groups that we’ve seen over the last 10 - 20 years?
Exactly how many angels can dance on the union flag?
What I think of these 50 ‘responses’ is that 46 of them avoid the issue and just waffle. 2 of them (Sardar and Seaton) are daft. And only 2 of them (Garton Ash and Gearty) are worth thinking about. Especially Garton Ash’s redefining the issue points to the only way toward a sensible discussion. Hmmmmm. 2 out of 50. Not a good score.
What an intriguing series of comments from the great fifty. I hardly understood some of them and I live here. Outside the Metropolitan Panic Zone, there is England, where the people go about there daily lives and never think, or have to, “Who am I?” A more certain reaction would be along the lines “You don’t have to live here.”
Every now and again the cosmopolitan elite have to re-connect to their own (or opportunistically adopted) land; throw off the burden of state funded cocktail parties for one day and venture beyond the glittering spires and out into the terraced suburbs where what they find will surprise (and appal) them all over again.
Me? I am English and proud of it. More tea anyone? Dreadful about the slave trade, wasn’t it. What do you think our chances of winning back the Ashes?
British values can only be assigned to a nation that is full of British people. The island is now a multicultural hot-pot - full of fascinating and diverse tastes, music and charm. In such an environment you cannot look back to a supposed golden age where people of one colour and one religion lived a common code. You can only look forward to what we would like to see, towards a nation that our granchildren can enjoy. Britain, in fact, needs a mission statement.
We can dream of a nation of ethical people; of families where men and women have finally been taught the skills of love; of every child having both parents there to hug; of communities that inter-mingle in interracial harmony and rejoice in each other; of interfaith where collaboration is seen as a natural part belonging to one human family, all born from the same divine spirit; of a nation where truly no child is left behind; of a health system that works because we no longer have to spend vast amounts of money on police, jails and special needs schools because both parents were given the skills to raise children of goodness in the first place; of a land where pöiticians are all exemplary individuals; of a nation where the press and media aims to raise us up rather than tries to drag us down into the gutter; of a country that achieves environmental sustainability and rejoices knowing that its beauty will be enjoyed by child a 1000 years from now.
If you look around the political scene there’s no-one that has a vision. And a people without a vision are doomed to slowly decay - like a half built house that is left to rot because the architect lost the plans. True, some people put a new stone on the wall every now and then, but it’s too little - never enough to stop the eventual decay.
Does British values extend to supporting the rights of those abroad, without invading their country?
If so you might want to take a look here:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=24957770200
You could, for instance email the UK companies operating in Burma, since “fair play” is such a strong British value.
http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=24957770200&topic=3071
And maybe this is a practical demonstration of how our values are shifting onto a ground of action that is something more than just a national base, the face-book group has around 170,000 members from countries all over the world.
Values don’t have a nationality, people do. There is a confusion about the whole idea of trying to identify British values - rather than characteristics - in order to somehow inject them into diverse people and thereby reinforce a more harmonious collective Britishness.
The most commonly touted such values are probably ‘fair play’, which we have ascribed to ourselves for ever but entirely begs the question of what is constitutionally or legally fair in the case of any particular clash; and, more recently, that political airbrush word ‘tolerance’, which is a cop-out because we can only tolerate something which conflicts with our values - otherwise there would be no need to tolerate it.
As for Britishness, that is an accumulation of miscellaneous knowledge and awareness of characteristics that has nothing to do with the general mechanisms of Western democracy but is peculiar to Britain, as Frenchness is to France. For instance, you would have to be considerably British to know that Enfield and Windsor are both places but that the connotations of these place names are different in the case of the personal names Harry Enfield and Charles Windsor. It takes far more time to acquire such random, everyday detail than swotting up citizenship exam questions.
Importing the reinvented wheel.
This call for British values is neither British nor valuable. This is a neo-conservative idea driven by Washington-based economic doctrine, translated into fashionable ways to govern.
Has nobody noticed how similar how similar the idea of rehabilitating the failures of the market with “information” is to Straussian ideas about ethics being relative, but a specific system of them being good for strengthening the public?
It is not hard to see how this call for “British Values” is a neo-conservative response to the values promoted by free-market-based practices, which is valuable precisely because it deflects attention from those very practices. This can be neatly summed up: It is alienation, imported from an alien nation.
John Gray, bless his dismal socks, has spotted the connection in the UK. http://www.newstatesman.com/200709200029
The freed market led to looser ethics, and the conservatives who unleashed this have panicked and gone neo, drawing the third way in their wake.
Brown follows this gravy-train of thought by promoting the market whilst bemoaning its ethical praxis: It does not matter what we do, only how we see ourselves, that is the value of “values.”
It is laughable how economists have re-invented the sociological wheel, and how politicians have followed the money. Just picture the deeply thinking information economist “Hmmm what information provides a frame for the individual decision maker? Aha! Values. This is the glue of society.”
Said Durkheim, also, hundreds of years ago. Less anti-social scientists have had the meantime to consider how value operate in practice, and have noticed the gap between what people say, in static heavenly terms, and what they do within the unpredictable, and shifting world we live in. People are socialized in the latter, as any parental hypocrite will know “do as I say, not as I do” is futile.
Thus David Goodheart’s neo-conservative argument that a welfare state is not possible without shared values puts Descartes before the horse - it is idealist. A strong welfare state that institutes strong forms of collective practice tends to strongly align values, somethig I have witnessed overcoming difference in Sweden, where 1 in 9 (!) of the population are immigrants. Yet as an immigrant from a libertarian state, I learnt about Swedish child rearing values as I picked up and dropped off my child at the subsidized childcare, which doubled as informal parenting encounter group.
So let us not import the American reinvented sociological wheel, but turn to longer, more civilized traditions, where the relationship between what one says and what one does is crucial. Pierre Bourdieu might be a good place to start. This call for values is about as valuable to the British as Leo Strauss and Information Economics, both of them basically a way of trading in hot air.
May a foreing talks about britishness?. Far away of topics a culture, the british one, gives every day a language to million people to share it in the middle of diversity: diferent cultures. This fact gives citizenship the oportunity of interactuate and intechange ideas and more. People use a language because a strong comunity talk with it, think with it. English is a tool for me to leave a reply here. British people are practical. You can organice an event and sure it is programed and not pospoused. You have good laws, thinkers, scientists. You are capable to make things work. But finally i think all this couldn´t be if you didn´t work so hard together over more than five centuries…
Perhaps when a country doubts about itself a new prospect appears nearby. The question is doesn´t loose your roots, your manners, your sense of humour, your politeness, your educational system, your sense of freedom. Hence a tought of a brit worth it.
British values, if they exist at all, are essentially a localised version of the general western liberal democratic tradition. I think the one thing that could be characterised as particularly British, is our healthy suspicion of “-isms” and ‘enthusiasts’ - be they political or religious. Although at times it’s very corrosive, our inherent cynicism has often served a useful function in insulating us from the worst excesses of fanaticism and demagoguery.
As a Canadian I think this search for slogans is a bit silly. The British know who they are, heck even the American revolutionaries stared out claiming their rights as Englishmen. The slogan most often put forward in Canada is peace, order and good government; usually as a put down and taken from a portion of the BNA act. The American slogan of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness has not made the Americans particularly long lived, more free or particularly happy. It was useful as propaganda to win a war. If you wish to use the land of freedom then you must explain in what ways are they freer than Holland. Isn’t it simply a slogan of nationalistic claims to superiority? Similarly Equality, fraternity and liberty. Shouldn’t you be known for what you do not what you claim to be. Frequently the slogan is used to justify anti social behavior such as the freedom to be armed to the teeth.
Human institutions are far more complex than slogans and much of it goes to the complex and often contradictory motivations that come with being human. Frequently a slogan is developed to push a particular political or philosophical position. So called free markets appeal to the completive nature of human beings. It is an important concept but only to that one characteristic. By itself it only appeals to sociopaths. Religion like to put its claim on morality (read how to interact socially), but recent studies demonstrate that morality is built in and universal except perhaps for sociopaths. Similarly empathy, we actually do feel others pain. How we put societies together is a great experiment that must respond to these and other human characteristics such as desire for power. It’s always evolving and there is probably no right structure. So carry on Britain with your noble experiment and do not be impeded by slogans.
well javier are you sure?
The search for ‘values’ is fundamentally misguided. The idea of ‘values’ stems essentially from German relativist philosophy eg. Weber, popularized by, inter alia, Talcott Parsons in the United States. ‘Values’ are not, properly speaking, standards of behaviour or belief, but an ex post facto justification of widely accepted forms of social behaviour. They are, therefore, more descriptive than prescriptive, and cannot be seen as having any ultimate moral or political purpose.
What is needed is something higher and greater than national pride, multiculturalism, regionalism or confessional solidarity. Even Plato in the Republic recognised the need for such a transcendent unifying force, in his case a rather cynical ‘magnificent myth’, conceived by the founders of the state. Leaving Plato’s Goebbelsesque construct aside, it is clear that for a society to be cohesive it must maintain a minimum of congruity or conformity within itself. This can only be achieved by the formation of an intellectual consensus concerning what constitutes the Good, both ontologically and in practical ethical terms. By insisting on ‘values’ rather than the necessary preliminary task of defining reality according to classical logic (A is not non-A), contemporary theorists risk hastening the final dissolution of our culture in a morass of subjectivity with no possibility of establishing Final Truth or the means of its identification. This is as true of UK society as it is of Europe in general.
Iftikhar Ahmed,
a’salam haleikum,
If you feel so strongly about the immorality of British society then why do you continue to live in dar el koufr? Surely you would feel more comfortable within dar el Islam?
Do you think that Islamic countries are really any more moral when they are currently subject to their own ‘fitna’ (chaos, strife, struggle). Egypt, for example, is rife with corruption and disregard for the poor (of which there are many illiterate millions). Is it really Islamic to deny people basic dignity in refusing political and personal freedom, education and sanitation? Moreover, can you say that the Saudis, for example, are a more enlightened people than the British when they so often abandon their moral principles when outside their country?
Muslims must surely begin to interact more positively with those who do not share their religious views if they are to emulate the cultural and intellectual achievements of the Ummayads, Abbasids, Fatimids etc. Withdrawing from Western corruption will merely force you to face your own.
Iftikhar Ahmed
You get the impression sometimes -
what is it that Muslim people want in the West?
Is it okay for them to call our societies brutal - while their job as the cultural leech - means that we can not say – hey! After reading the Koran last night - Mohammed was brutal.
Oh that’s right - it’s Islamophobia - so strike that from the record. We though seem to be able to do this - hey - but when someone like Rushdie says - remember when Mohammed called out to Allah’s three daughters - wasn’t that funny? Then Islam-Means-Peace is wrestled and kicked to the ground - not but us - but by Muslims themselves and the threats and attacks and the killings begin.
If you think that you are going to turn this Great British country into a submissive Arab wife or f*ck slave, guilty about her very existence - you really do have another thing coming.
At least we know what Britain is not going to be.
Postmodernism and similar artificial considerations aside, whatever happened to the British as champions of the rule of law, particularly as regards the power of the state over the lives of individuals? Sometime, most especially since the end of WWII, the British have broadly abandoned the value of their unique common law system and the liberties born therefrom in the face of overblown postcolonialist critique and an expanding welfare state. I am from Western Canada and was deeply disappointed on my first adult trip to Britain, finding the British to be deeply decadent and the only real flourishes of the sort of ideas I had prevuously associated with Britain practiced by an elite in London and the newest, youngest immigrants. Binge drinking and idol (Becks/Posh) worship are some small consolation. At least the elderly are still polite and well dressed.
There is no such thing as Britishness. There is the United Kingdom, a focus of loyalty and emotion comparable to the Monarchy in Austria before 1918 abd there are the ethnicities if the English Welsh Scots and Northern Irish. The individualism and dislike of being told what to think makes British values an impossibility. I for example am a passioanate English and British patriot who believes in Christianity as the religion of England loves the ancient institutions of our countrry loves all our traditions but deplores sex equality, dislikes any notion of equality except equality before the law and regards homosexuaL acts as wrong. Am I British?
As a continental European I am following the developments in Great Britain with great interest. This country is one of the few islands where there is still some common sense and some will to individual freedom left. This is what one can feel when one visits. So evidently there exist specific qualities of “Britishness” even today.
I think what we are really looking for is a way of life which allows the individual to prosper - not only materially but as a matter of fact first and foremost spiritually. No organisation or institution has the right to dominate the individual human being. This is what is being done by the EU and by all those coward politicians who serve an evil purpose by destroying the very module on which a healthy society is built: the happy individual. The right to happiness, the freedom to create and build ….this is what we want - most of us. And this is what is getting more and more denied by the mysticism of a failed catholic church and all the political institutions no matter what -ism they follow…
Queen Elizabeth I fought the church and Spain and did a great service to the British people in winning! We need the spirit of Queen Elizabeth I again to free the British from false ideas.
You are a wonderful people with a great heart. The world needs to thank you for your spirit, your fairness, your courage, ingenuity…
Yes, you also have failed. But you don’t give up this easily.
We do need a new working paradigm for a healthy society in this new millenium. The British Spirit and Values could very well be the foundation and example for all of us!
The core values of a living culture, a society or a nation are always an evolving thing. And in our increasingly pluralistic and world connected nation that must be truer than ever. Attempting to define core values involves attempting at least a simplification and in some cases an eradication of crucial differences in our cultural mix. With globalisation comes the import of issues, challenges and conflicts from arojund the world that cannont, necessarily, be fully resolved within the bounds of our own nation. “Out of the crookedtimber of humanity, no straight thing was ever built… Isiah Berlin translating Kant) etc…. Britain is far too complex a place today for there to be one over riding and defining set of values which all will accept. Past attempts to invent or rediscover such a set of values have usually involved creating mythical ones based on a simplificiation or idealisation of history and have usually resulted in antagonism, hostility or ridicule - often a combination of these.
Islam is seen as one of the main areas of contention. As an antidote to Iftikhar Ahmad’s simplifications i prefer the contribution to the magazine’s original article by Ziauddin Sardar which goes a long way towards answering those who see in Islam (as opposed to the tiny but noisy islamist movement) some threat to our values. In many key respects the moral core of Islam offers some good ethical examples to the wider culture. There is much in the practice of islam in practice that liberals will take issue with (the role of women for instance - though interestingly the Prophet never called for the veiling of women), but the two key values which Sardar highlights are surely part of what we would all hope would be among the inherent values of any decent society. (”the duty of mutual care defined by and enacted as concern for the weakest, most vulnerable and those in greatest need…acceptance of the diversity of our fellow citizens.)
The cultural revolution of the last 40-odd years has done a pretty impressive job in destroying the old, basically Christian, Brit culture. We now live in Roy Jenkins’ post-Christian EUtopia, the Civilised Society.
And having trashed Britishness for 40 years, the suburban revolutionaries who now occupy the corner offices are having second thoughts. Too late, mate. The solutions will be the entertaining bit. They’re arrogant enough to believe they can rebuild it with a few citizenship lessons, a revamp of the history curriculum and some media pressure. They’ll find destruction is much easier than construction.
The destruction of the culture would have been devastating enough on its own. But mass immigration has complicated things immensely - and is, along with devolution/seperatism, the reason for this debate. Even a strong, self-confident culture like that of the US would have found integrating such numbers in such timescales a challenge. And the demographics - low birthrates and high rates of emigration among the natives, much higher fertility among incomers - mean that in 40-50 years whoever’s in charge will be looking at the demography of a country more like Fiji or Surinam, with many different groupings and cultures. The English are being replaced.
The ruling elite saw for thirty years no reason to attempt any integration at all - up until 7/7 in fact.
As the Demos report on “Community-based approaches to counter-terrorism” said :
“On the one hand ‘communities’ are the stuff of multicultural Britain – they are benign exotic groups that add a cultural je ne sais quoi to the UK. The priority for policy-makers is not necessarily to understand the differences, but to celebrate them.”
Well, yes. The whole point was to import lots of exotic people (who had the advantage of providing cheap labour) to prove how cool and multicultural you were - and to cheese off the evil Right. The actual culture of the people you were importing was irrelevant - the point was that it wasn’t ‘ours’ - if indeed we had a culture at all.
Now they’ve seen the writing on the spattered walls in Tavistock Square.
So maybe the culture of the imports IS something to be interested in - and integration seems like a good idea after all.
The trouble is that the destruction of British culture was a prerequisite for mass immigration - a self-confident nation would either not have allowed it or would have ensured integration was a priority - which was what happened in America until very recently.
The continuing effort to reinvent a national identity should at least provide sour amusement for a few decades, while the kids are getting the qualifications they need to emigrate. As Robert Colls said :
“if the values do bind us, why do we need a statement? And if they don’t bind us, in what sense are they our values?”
Or as Jennie Bristow puts it : “Britain’s core national values consist of the unwillingness to promote core national values - a sense of national pride in non-judgementalism, provided the line is drawn on certain key law-and-order issues”. Josie Appleton, also in spiked-online : “The exercise of trying to tell immigrants how to be British is becoming an embarrassing demonstration of the fact that the elite doesn’t know itself.”
“The Union flag should be a British symbol of unity around our values. All the United Kingdom should honour it”. says Gordon Brown.
And what exactly are the values around which we should unite ?
“We should assert that the Union flag is a flag for tolerance and inclusion.”
That’s a good selling proposition which will unite us all.
“The Union Flag - it means whatever you want it to mean.”
or how about
“The Union Flag - unite around - whatever …”
I can see the future British identity, as the Native Brit percentage of the population continues to decline. Political analysts should be studying the recent history of Fiji, where the population is split 50-50 between native Fijians and the descendants of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent. The parallel shouldn’t be taken too far - there are different dynamics in Britain, where there is a multiplicity of immigrant groups, and there’s been no collapse of Fijian culture as there has of British.
Perhaps Trinidad or Surinam would be a better analogy. We’ve seen the first stirrings of communalist politics with Respect and the BNP. This is a trend which is unlikely to reverse.
Fiddling while Rome burns, aka, - a load of bollocks
I think we can glean a great definition by noting who is asking the question and why.
They are the Scotsmen in the Cabinet, who have fatally weakened the British Union out of intense emotional hatred of English dominance, and who often express malice towards the English as a race through their governmental actions. The Scots have disgraced themselves by consistently electing such characters, and I have no doubt that they should be expelled from the Union immediately.
They are putting the question to Muslim immigrants alone, definitely NOT the rest of us, because they alone have not been beaten down by the kind of value-averse social engineers who ruin every community that doesn’t threaten to chop their heads off.
Their motive is sheer panic. London’s financial mile would have collapsed decades ago without Muslim oil money, and now it is rapidly emigrating away from the Muslim lawlessness that brought. They look at the map and see an England without much banking, oil, mining, shipping, industry, education, and they can foresee the collapse of their parasite state of Scotland. And recent EU events have shown them how little the French will care about them in reality.
What else can they do but address the Muslim proprietors of London? The Britishness test is: Can you put up with the Scottish? Because opinion polls show strongly that the English no longer do.
I think Mr Ahmad in his post above has illustrated very nicely the scale of the problem under discussion.
The Islamisation of Britain is the elephant in the room hardly touched upon by any of the contributors to your piece. You open your borders to members of a supremacist religion with a history of violence and intolerance, pander to their every communalist demand, and then try to patch up your inevitably disintegrating society with the sticking plasters of “statements of shared values” and “redefining Britishness”. What a joke!
I have been to Blackburn and Bradford and seen the future of Britain there, which is why I’m emigrating to New Zealand in three months’ time. Good luck!
The most disappointing input from 50 “intellectuals” I have ever read in Prospect. Far too pessimistic and drowning in their own grand ideas.
To define a nation is of course a very difficult task. It involves bringing together “shared” values, hundreds of years of history and decades of rapid multicultural transformation. Why not give it a shot though? How about some positive analysis? I’m from Glasgow and we definitely have a strong element of community, character and shared values. I think we share this with the rest of Britain to varying degrees too. For me, Britishness is revealed in our sense of humour. We allow ourselves to be made fun of. By “taking the piss” we are saying it is ok to criticise, and freedom of speech is a cornerstone to this. Almost any topic can be traversed in the name of comedy. Even in America, the “land of the free” this is far from the case. We should celebrate our common belief that nothing is sacred, and anything that can be lampooned, will be!
I’d like to make two points:
One - for there to be British values presupposes that Britain exists in some sense other the obvious political one. Some might once have asked what Soviet values were, without recognising that the Soviet Union was an artificial construct that mainly served the interests of one nation. Is Britain a construct which serves the interest of anyone other than England (and why do a million Scots live in poverty)?
Two - there seems to be an overwhelming urge to say that British values have to be positive values. Is it not the case that the class system, selfishness and the urge to say ‘I’ve got mine, please pull the ladder up’ are essential English values. Why can’t we say that Norman Tebbit is the quintessential Englishman without liking Norman Tebbit?