Colton Pridgeon ponders the puzzling question of ‘British values’ and challenges UK politicians to say what they really mean.
At the Conservative Party Conference in Manchester, UK prime minister David Cameron spoke warmly of the different journeys made by the families of various ministers in his cabinet. By different routes they settled here and embraced British values, he recounted. But home secretary Theresa May seemed to go cold on immigration. There are going to be tougher controls and more deportations, she warned. Then, as the Tory conference drew to close, a hijab-wearing Muslim woman by the name of Nadiya Hussain was declared winner of The Great British Bake Off. So what’s going on with British identity? And what exactly are the British values which leading politicians regularly lay claim to?
Shifting his party to the centre of British politics, Cameron gave a moving speech on the need for greater equality and the urgency of banishing poverty from our streets. Throughout his speech, the prime minister made repeated reference to various personal qualities aligned to his idea of British values: ambition and compassion; a get-up-and-go attitude and a strong sense of decency; our sense of humour and strong determination to fight our battles and ‘get stuck in’.
But what do these phrases amount to, exactly? Precisely what are British values? The Department for Education (which is currently running a drive to boost the promotion of British values in schools) cites the following: ‘democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs.’
If this is the official list, one interpretation is that by means of multiculturalism and other such policies, recent governments have been fairly good at maintaining these values, and Cameron is simply trying to give them a boost. But how does that square with the much frostier message from the home secretary?
In her speech, May gave a very tough talk about the need to bring immigration figures down, and she told us how she will be clamping down on asylum by transforming the entire system for claiming it. The home secretary described asylum seekers as abusing Britain’s ‘goodwill’. Does this suggest that the British value of tolerating those who are different, and having a mutual respect for one another, is being hammered away by the very same government which claims to embody such qualities? Perhaps! With statistics showing that immigration is beneficial to our economy, and that migrants take less in benefits than Britons do, it also suggests that tough talk on immigration is nothing more than scare-tactics and position mongering.
Perhaps Theresa May can tell us what happened to the idea of Britain being a country that ‘stands up for the displaced, persecuted and oppressed’? And if Britain does not really value such principles, when it comes to it what’s the point of these ‘British values’ we hear so much about?
It appears that Britain is having a serious identity crisis! Immigration has occurred on a large scale, without proper management to integrate recent migrants, and communities are now desperately attempting to find out who they are and what they represent. Brits up and down the country are questioning what our values are. In other circumstances this could be a good thing, e.g. if we were entering into a thoughtful debate about how to finesse such values. But right now what’s really in question is whether they exist at all; and if not, are we really standing on top of the void – a moral and political vacuum without a positive proposition for 21st century Britain?
Over to you – Cameron, May and Co. if you stand for stand for something which gives the rest of us something to stand on, now’s the time to show it.
We’re waiting….