Creating Britain: Inventing Britain For the 21st Century (Part One)

Creating Britain: Inventing Britain For the 21st Century

I was one of those who opposed Britain’s bid to host the 2012 Olympics. I felt it would involve a siphoning off of precious resources that would be better used for many other development projects – other social and infrastructure needs – throughout the UK. In addition, I could see the Olympics becoming a golden opportunity for politicians to lay claim to all the benefits that were thought to have accrued from this once-in-a-lifetime event, and to showcase the marvels of modern, prosperous, regenerated Britain.

Think of it: by 2012, we could be one year away from the end of the second term of a Cameron-led Conservative government; or the Labour Party could be celebrating 15 glorious years of power, only three years away from equalling the previous Conservative post-war record, and able to point to the Games as the symbol of all its many achievements and of the restoration of Britain’s pride and self-belief the Labour government had brought about. Almost enough to make you want to emigrate!

It does seem as though a process is afoot to redefine the role, identity and values of 21st-century Britain. And this process points naturally to the 2012 Games as its apotheosis – the moment when Britain’s renewed sense of its mission and achievements is offered up to the world – just as the 2008 Games will be the moment when China stakes its claim to be the present century’s leading superpower.

Conversely, pessimistic voices have expressed the fear that the 2012 Olympics could become the occasion for a horrific playing out of the War on Terror. Significantly – or it seemed so at the time – the terrorist attacks in London on 7 July 2005 came just one day after the IOC awarded the Games to the city: a terrible slap in the teeth to the UK’s pretension to be a beacon of multi-cultural social inclusiveness, which the British team running the bid had made the focal point of their successful presentation.

The Olympics, in this light, present a fabulous opportunity for terrorists to strike Britain at the moment when it occupies centre stage in the world’s admiration. By the same token, they set a sort of deadline for the War on Terror to have been ‘won’, so that Britain’s showcase can be the occasion for the nation to celebrate the triumph of the British values, characteristics and abilities that have defeated the negative values of the terrorists – just like the Festival of Britain was the moment when the country looked forward to a dazzling future that would be achieved through the same qualities that had enabled it to win the Second World War.

The War on Terror, on this vision of our near future, will be won by the same values that will re-unite the British nation around a sense of its destiny and identity in the contemporary world. For many of those – politicians, church leaders or cultural commentators – who are backing the effort to redefine, and achieve social cohesion around, core British values, it is almost as if those values were universal. They may have arisen historically within Britain and be ‘uniquely’ suited to the British ‘national character’; but they are at the same time authentic values for the whole of humanity to follow – and indeed, they are the values that will secure a lasting peace and a sustainable future for our planet.

What are these ‘British values’? What is their specificity in relation to Western liberalism and to the Western cultural tradition in general? And does Britain – or some of its leaders – really see itself as having an important (indeed, crucial) role to play in standing up and being counted for those values, whose triumph it will one day celebrate in front of the whole world? These are questions I will be exploring in subsequent instalments of this blog.