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

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

What are ‘British values’? The very general and open nature of this question suggests the multiplicity of the possible responses. Not so very long ago, in the Thatcher era, there were calls for a return to ‘Victorian values’ as encapsulating the ‘true’ British values that had been forgotten during the nation’s post-war love affair with ‘progressive’ or liberal values. It is possible, approximately, to identify Victorian values with one version of right-wing Conservatism, involving ideas of individualism, enterprise and empire counterbalanced by Christian faith and philanthropic concern for the less fortunate. Similarly – also very approximately – you could argue that the Labour Party is the home of ‘progressive’ Britain, while the Liberal Democrats are the natural home of liberalism.

What the current emphasis merely on ‘British values’, without any ideological or philosophical qualifier, seems to involve is a typical Blairite (con)fusion of these three strands in the effort to distil a core and, as it were, timeless set of shared values that everyone can agree on and unite around because they are common to the different political traditions. Let us try to enumerate some of these universal British values as they emerge from the discourse and policies of those who advocate them (shall we call them Blair’s ‘Britology’?):

· Free competition (of ideas, individuals, businesses, economies)

· Equality of opportunity

· Democracy

· Respect

· Decency

· Moderation

· Honesty / integrity

· Courage

· Resourcefulness

· Determination

· Pride

· Independence

· Ethical imperialism

One thing that strikes one in this list of familiar British values is that they are really British virtues: political and ethical ideals for which, by labelling them as British, it is implied that they belong to something that might be called the ‘British spirit’ – both highly valued qualities, and ones which the British naturally admire and aspire to.

Absent from this list are more basic terms describing ‘typically British’ personal, social and cultural characteristics. One of the reasons why the campaigners for reaffirming shared British values tend to emphasise the above set of ideals rather than the more intimate, socio-anthropological descriptions of Britishness one could come up with is that it would be more natural and revealing to talk of Englishness (and Scottishness, Welshness, etc.) at this more personal level. But then one would start to move away, precisely, from the shared nature of those British values and to treat the different national identities of Britain as distinct entities. As I have argued before in this blog (15 November), Britishness – and, indeed, the very political identity and coherence of Britain as such – is articulated across a set of abstract qualities and ideals that are shared because they are universal in a philosophical sense, not necessarily because they are really common characteristics of all the peoples of Britain, whether English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, or other minorities.