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Ian Jack Journalist
I would be wary of trying to articulate "British values" other than by putting some flesh on the bones of the green paper's paragraph 204: that Britain is a society based on laws that reflect the rights of citizens, including the right to participate in the making of these laws, and the responsibilities that go with the rights, and so on. "Values" are quite hard things to pin down—even as gifted and thoughtful a writer as Orwell was happier depicting national characteristics than national values, though many of the qualities he prized ("The gentleness of England is perhaps its most marked characteristic") have not survived. The green paper mentions France and the US as countries that have clearer perceptions of their values: "liberty, equality, fraternity," "the land of the free." But those are vivid slogans created by revolutions. A Spaniard or a Swede has nothing similar, but I don't think that means Spaniards and Swedes have a less certain idea of what good citizenship entails. It may even mean that they have a clearer appreciation of their nations because they haven't been suckered by Enlightenment rhetoric into idealising themselves.
Are Scottish values the same as English values—or are they different and united by some overarching British values, in turn overarched by European values? Are values aspirations, or do they describe a historic and existing reality? Anyone who has witnessed the collapse of the London bus queue—they existed 20 years ago—would be puzzled by the notion that "fair play" or "women and children first" is a distinctly British value. This is very muddy territory and best left alone by governments. The rights and duties of the citizen are what need spelling out, with a heavy stress that no one can escape them on grounds of gender, colour or creed.
Josef Joffe Editor-publisher, Die Zeit
"If you have to ask, you can't afford it," was JP Morgan's fabled reply to a friend who asked the millionaire banker about the price of his yacht, thinking he might want to buy one himself.
Gordon Brown's question about citizenship and identity raises the same problem: if you have to ask, it's not for you. Britons used to know what "Britishness" was; hence, they did not have to ask. It was pork pie and monarchy, the Union Jack and the stiff upper lip, the glorious revolution and the empire, Shakespeare and cricket, Wellington and Waterloo—a sense of national exceptionalism wrapped in pride.
In a post-national, post-heroic, postmodern age you are flummoxed. By invoking specialness, you disrespect and exclude the Other as well as his/her culture and history. (Shakespeare is "wordism," and the empire is colonialism.) Hence you are reduced, as is Brown, to a universal catalogue of equal rights and procedures—bland stuff that is valid from Cork to Canberra, thus not worthy of particular affection. Not even English works, for that is the global language par excellence.
But take heart. Albion is better off than Germany. At least the Brits still have unbesmirched national symbols: The trooping of the colour, Big Ben, Runnymede, the Beefeaters, Diana… But we Germans have the better beer.
Michael Lind Writer
Unlike the US, which is a nation state, Britain is a multinational state with a common broad political creed shared by four constituent cultural nations—the English, Scots, (Northern) Irish and Welsh. The question of political creed and the question of extra-political national cultural identity are therefore two different issues.
It is perfectly reasonable for Britain to expect immigrants to share the values of the common, historic British political creed, as it has evolved up to the present. If they don't want to live in a liberal, democratic, pluralist, feminist society, immigrants with incompatible religious or secular values should stay home or go somewhere else.
But settling the question of the political creed does not settle the question of the extra-political national culture—or rather, in the British case, the national cultures. The British must decide whether to continue as a coalition of four cultural nations, or to add a fifth or sixth or seventh cultural nation by policies which, by default or design, encourage the conversion of immigrant diaspora communities into permanently distinct nationalities on British soil.
Immigration is compatible with the perpetuation of four permanent British cultural nations in Britain, as long as the immigrants gradually merge with the English, Scots, Welsh and Irish by assimilation (in which the immigrants simply lose their own cultures) or by "melting-pot" amalgamation (in which immigrants and native cultures fuse to form a hybrid culture).
From this American's perspective, a Britain with a common liberal and democratic political creed and four distinct national melting pots open to newcomers—English, Scots, Irish and Welsh—might strike the right balance between continuity and dynamism.
Magnus Linklater Journalist
Gordon Brown's plea for us to develop "a British statement of values" is well intentioned, but smacks of attempting to force the identity genie back into the bottle. His green paper on our constitutional future finds itself arguing against Alex Salmond's white paper on an independence referendum in Scotland—and, whatever views one might hold on that, it has one great advantage. It looks forward to the possibility of change rather than backwards at the desirability of tradition. It is no good wringing our hands over the loss of a sense of Britishness, because that has faded, is fading and will continue to fade. Rather we should be confronting the reality of the new arrangement that has emerged within these islands, and recognise its potential for a more healthy set of relationships. In Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, people are far more taken up with their own new and developing political situations than they are in rediscovering a set of British values that are increasingly hard to define. What comes out of all this should be a partnership of equals rather than something imposed from the centre. This may result in a far looser union than we are accustomed to, and that may be a matter of regret for Brown. But the good news is that the majority of voters show no inclination to break it.
John Lloyd Journalist
There are two issues which have become demonstrably urgent in the last decade, and they intertwine. In any discussion of citizenship and the state, both need to be deployed.
The first is citizenship itself. It needs to be made more difficult to acquire: that is, both people born into British citizenship and those wishing to acquire it must be made aware, through education, that it cannot be taken for granted. It must be "studied for": a study which includes, of course, proficiency in the English language, but also a skeletal knowledge of British history and a grasp of the rights granted and responsibilities expected of an active citizen. There has been progress made in making these necessary for the acquisition of citizenship by immigrants wishing to become British: the rules should become stricter still, and the necessity of acquiring the fundamentals of citizenship spread to the population as a whole.
The second is stewardship, by which is meant an active understanding of the nature of a modern world, in which resources are clearly limited, interdependence is a pressing part of life and no national decisions of any importance can be taken in a global vacuum. This also requires education: it must be linked to the elements required of citizenship; and it should seek to impart a sense of at least potential fellowship with other cultures, so that some idea of both diversity and mutual reliance is gained.
Michael Maclay Writer
Start with young people. The new strand of the citizenship education curriculum, on identity and diversity, provides the perfect context for young people of all ages to come up with ideas of what unites us alongside what might seem to divide us. Young people usually experience more directly and vividly than their parents the multiple identities that characterise modern Britain. At the same time, they have a pretty shrewd idea of the things we need to agree on to get along. The young also have a strong feeling, through the mass media and cyberspace, of our interconnectedness with others. Perhaps the Citizenship Foundation (of which I am chairman) could run a national competition, in tandem with Prospect, to seek out the spikiest, most imaginative and most relevant ideas. The historians and the philosophers, the poets and the professors, will have plenty of grand thoughts to offer further down the line. But start with those who are living British identity day by day, not those talking about it. The British have always been better at practice than theory.
Noel Malcolm Historian
Drawing up a "statement of British values" could easily become an intellectual parlour game. For a historian, however, it could be a mug's game: few generalisations are likely to hold true over long periods, or to be valid within any one period for all parts of Britain, or all levels of society. But still, to talk of values is to be normative, not descriptive. And when foreigners comment on what has struck them about British ways of doing things, I get the impression that my notion of these values may still have some empirical basis. So here goes.
There are two fundamental principles: respect for rules, and respect for individuals. Respect for rules concerns not only the laws of the land, but also social procedures of many kinds (the most exemplary being the queue). It also involves an expectation that those who exercise power will follow the rules, so that bribery and string-pulling are not the natural ways of approaching them. Respect for individuals includes much that is loosely described as tolerance; it involves non-interference (which sometimes strikes foreigners as coldness), and the expectation of such respect promotes non-conformism, even eccentricity. Some might think there is a basic conflict between respecting rules and respecting individuals; I think there is a fundamental connection between them (just consider the principle of equal treatment under the law). But in practice there may sometimes be friction between them, and in such cases two mediating values are also important: fairness, and common sense.
However, I do not believe for a moment that these values can be learned from government "statements." Values are learned, mostly, by living among those who practise them.
Kenan Malik Writer
"French citizens have a clear understanding of their values of liberty, equality and fraternity. America has a strong national perception of itself as the 'land of the free.' But there is a less clear sense among British citizens of the values that bind groups and communities who make up the body of the British people."
The government's green paper is good at stating the obvious. It is less good at solving the problem. The paper's vision of "local, regional and national events and opportunities for debate and deliberation" sounds more like a process to decide where to site a new airport than an attempt to define the values to which a people should cleave.
The comparison with France and America is instructive. Notions of liberté, fraternité, egalité and of inalienable rights emerged not through consultations, but through collective, fractious struggles to define—and create—a better society, struggles that give those values historical depth and emotional punch.
Today, of course, the very idea of "collective struggle" seems quaint. Whatever list of virtues the government's final "statement of values" endorses—and no doubt it will be a pick 'n' mix of the usual suspects such democracy, diversity, liberty, tolerance, fairness—people in Britain will have neither actively engaged in shaping them, nor have any true emotional or ideological attachment to them. It is time we recognised that the problem of defining values and forging identities requires not blunt policy measures but a transformation of our relationship, both individual and collective, with the political process.
Iain McLean Political scientist
I was in France during the July floods. Our house in Oxford was very nearly flooded. We were saved by our neighbours, who moved the furniture, and built the great wall of Osney to divert the river. Meanwhile Le Monde had a front-page picture of three neighbours in thigh-deep Gloucester sharing a nice cup of tea. Perhaps the only time Gloucester has made the front page of Le Monde and a good start for a statement of British values.
Munira Mirza Think-tanker
This government states that it wants to conduct "an inclusive process of national debate… to develop a British statement of values." It will use "a range of methods to support a national conversation and debate" ranging from "citizens juries to deliberative polling and electronic and media-based outreach." But then, this is the same government that refuses to hold a referendum on the EU treaty. On an issue that affects the economy, legal system and political decision-making, we the people are not trusted to make "the right decision." Well, if that's what it means to be a citizen today, no wonder many people seem so indifferent to it.
The problem with these endless consultations is that they ignore the real basis for citizenship—a sense of ownership over society and control over its direction. We can talk till kingdom come about tolerance, fairness and justice, but citizenship is in the doing of politics, not the talking around it. If Brown wants to start a debate, let's just get straight to it—the economy, civil liberties, the environment, Europe, healthcare, education and a whole lot more besides. When we believe as a society that we share our future and can exercise democratic power, then we will also feel a sense of identity that is real, and not just written down on paper.
Tom Nairn Writer
Since Gordon Brown's appearance as United Kingdom premier, assorted premonitions have surfaced in the gloom. Britlanders now inhabit a haunted house on the edge of a cemetery, where such terminology seems appropriate. Brown was not of course elected or installed by an indignant mob: over many years he materialised in fits and starts, glimpsed intermittently like a ghost from times past, brooding but saying almost nothing. Then suddenly the spirit was there, seated all too comfortably in the Anglo-Brit living room, account books and Britannic sermons to hand. The armchair's previous occupant had left for Jerusalem.
Such is death-in-life. The funniest sequence in Edgar Wright's movie Shaun of the Dead (2004) was where Shaun, seeing that the living were now besieged by zombies, organises a pretend-resurrection class at which people learn to stumble and stare properly, groaning in broken graveyard English. But that was just prediction: reality is worse. No Shaun has appeared to rally the English. David Cameron seems convinced the mausoleum can be maintained by New-Dawn-speak—itself another trait of the late-Brit times, perfected by Blair. "Better yesterday" had long been the UK's chosen route to modernity. Under Brown it has reached its terminus.
The key zombie aim is graveyard peace: a new consensus to leave the sacred essence unaltered amid ritual round-table acclaim, all-change orations and deference-tours of the Washington Beltway. Serious constitutional commentators like Anthony King and Vernon Bogdanor have been appalled not by Brown's radicalism but by his timidity. However, what the famed indecisiveness masks is death wish: Posthumous greatness at all costs, including Trident and two new super-super-aircraft-carriers.
In Shaun the graveyard ghouls came back for another try—and set about devouring the living to do so. Brown's immediate aim will be a funerary binge, at which the creaking Westminster gates will be locked up for many years: general election is the term. Such is the man's appeal for everything times-past that under 20 per cent of voters might pull it off (in 2005, 21.5 per cent got him where he is today). All Brown-Britland needs is enough non-voters—plus just enough Lib Dems to furnish a reluctant alibi for the gnarled gatekeeper, as the rusting bolt grinds home.
Could it have been different? Well of course, had thorough reform of the central apparatus accompanied devolution—and all that. In hypothetical retrospect, perfectly modest changes like a fairer electoral system might have partly freed the English people. Now, however, the sole possible answer is condemned by all true Brits as completely unthinkable. Which merely returns one to the point, the only one that matters. Plausible as a confederated Council of the Isles (or something like that) might have been, it's now too late. Failed states can reach the buffers at the end of their track, Brownism is zomboid victory, and that's that.
This has begun to dawn on both the Scots and the Welsh, and (even more surprisingly) the Northern Irish. Michael Fry argued in Prospect a year ago that for Scots the only way out from Britland Cemetery is out; and I wholeheartedly agree with him. But what about the English? Well...Shaun, Shaun, where are you?
Musa Okwonga Writer
As the son of immigrants from Idi Amin's Uganda I largely see Britain as a safe haven from cultural supremacists, be they religious or secular. Refugees flock here because they covet the great prize that is British citizenship—it allows them to live lives of freedom that are unimaginable in many of the lands that they are fleeing. For that reason, Britain—though no longer great in any pompous imperial sense—is incredible.
That said, I'm sceptical as to whether Britons should adopt anything so formal or specific as a statement of values. Britishness as a concept has always had a beautiful vagueness about it, and that's why this country is so inclusive. But if the government will draft such a statement, then I think there's one key aspect of Britishness that it should bear in mind: and that's a fundamental respect for everyone's basic humanity. Without that respect, we wouldn't have seen women, minorities and working-class people flourish as they have in our society. It's unthinkable, even in some other European countries, to have had a female prime minister, a black captain of the national football team; to have civil partnerships for gay people; to see people from disadvantaged backgrounds scaling the heights of their professions. As the wealth gap grows, and as the rumblings of extremism grow a little too loud for comfort, we shouldn't be complacent about the reputation for open arms that Britain has acquired.
Mark Pagel Biologist
Value systems evolve within human societies to protect individuals from others' self-interest, or to serve powerful social structures. The vulnerable rely on values to protect themselves from neighbours, strangers and institutions. Think of values of decency, honesty or freedom of expression. The powerful or charismatic often have less need of these values, tending instead to promulgate values that encourage or even coerce people to conform to their social systems—think of revolutionaries, politicians, shamans, popes, archbishops and mullahs. Everyone uses value systems somehow to promote their self-interest. Shared values only evolve from shared interests in making society work. If the government is serious about promoting Britishness it has to get everyone into a shared British boat where our self-interests more or less converge. That is much harder than producing bits of paper, but if they do it, some form of Britishness will emerge.
Bhikhu Parekh Political scientist
In much of the discussion of British identity, as of national identity in general, two related but separate questions are often conflated. First, what should Britain mean to its citizens or how should they relate to it? Second, what kind of Britain should they aim to create? The first admits of a uniform answer. The second is moral and inherently contested. When Gordon Brown says that national identity is founded in our common values, he confuses the two questions and creates difficulties for himself. He says, for example, that fairness is part of being British. Margaret Thatcher and many on the new right set little store by it, but it would be wrong to say that they are not British. Some British Muslims do not place much value on free speech in its standard liberal form, but it would be wrong to dismiss them as unBritish or showing an insufficient degree of "Britishness."
Being British is basically a matter of belonging and commitment. It involves recognising Britain as one's political home, committing oneself to its wellbeing, and accepting certain fundamental obligations to its government and other members. Being British is a matter of degree. Minimally it involves loyalty to the country and respect for its institutions and laws. Maximally it involves a deep love of the country and doing all one can to help it flourish. Traditionally this has been called patriotism. Since this term has aggressive and exclusive associations, I prefer to call it demophilia.
We can rightly insist on the minimum, and hope that more would be offered as citizens come to identify with the country and make their national identity an integral part of their personal identity. Being British then means making Britain an object of one's loyalty and conducting oneself as its good citizen. However much one may disagree with its dominant values, one may never be disloyal to it.
As for the values that should inform British society, almost all of them, such as liberty, tolerance, equality and peaceful resolution of differences, are common to liberal democracies and indeed to all decently constituted societies. What makes them British is twofold. First, British people have chosen to commit themselves to them and make them their own. Second, given their history and traditions, they necessarily define, relate to and prioritise them differently. They, for example, value freedom of expression, but do not define its contents and limits in the same way as the Americans do. We can have a British statement of values, though not a statement of British values.
Such a statement should meet three conditions if it is to be relevant and inspirational. First, it should be relatively thin, as otherwise it won't carry the various communities that compose our multicultural society. While laying down those values that are integral to all forms of moral life, it should leave space for legitimate moral and cultural differences. Second, it needs to take full account of the new challenges presented by our increasingly interdependent world, climate change, responsibility for the environment, and so on, and should have an international and ecological dimension. Third, the individualist and consumerist ethos has gone too far, partly as a result of an excessive emphasis on individual rights. We need to rethink the relation between the individual and society, and find a way of balancing rights with duties and responsibilities.
Simon Parker Think-tanker
Common values emerge from honest debate, disagreement and shared endeavour, not from consultation exercises. Instead of obsessing about the high politics of national values, Brown should be looking at the low politics of local government, healthcare and housing.
Citizenship will always be framed by a set of national rules, but it is lived out in towns, cities and villages, and experienced in the relationship between people and their local institutions. So bringing the people of, say, Manchester together to identify shared priorities and develop shared solutions is probably a more valuable exercise than discussing whether or not we still have a sense of fair play.
And if public services are going to become the frontline of citizenship building, we need to ditch the "citizen as consumer" paradigm that dominated the Blair years. Choice between hospitals is fine, but the British public is not just a collection of customers. The priority needs to be developing a richer and more coherent definition of the way people relate to the state, and a more sophisticated debate about the rights and responsibilities that go with that relationship.
Tariq Ramadan Philosopher
In these times of mutual mistrust it is useful to try to set a clear, inclusive framework of British values and what it means to be British—we do need a reminder of "our commonalities." It is, of course, easy to say that we value democracy, freedom, tolerance, the rule of law, justice, equality, fairness, solidarity and so on, and that everyone is expected to hold to these values. Millions of British Muslim citizens and residents have no problem with these values and are clearly respecting them in their daily life. There is thus little point in repeating this mantra—it will not help us to build trust between citizens or to marginalise the extremists. To combat radicalisation, British civil society needs more confidence and trust between citizens of different histories, memories and religions. We need to work upstream from the list of British values: we need "civility" as much as "civic commitment" to be able to live together. The problem is not the values but the mindset that welcomes them. It is essential to speak about "humility," "respect" and "consistency" and to avoid ending up speaking in an arrogant way about "our" values… speaking intolerantly about tolerance or from a position of power about equality. We need, as citizens, to reconcile ourselves with a kind of public decency to nurture a common and constructive sense of belonging. Values set within a confident civility are welcoming and inclusive; values promoted by a frightened national identity are excluding and exclusive.
Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad Political scientist
Instead of talking of values as if they were exclusive features of the citizens of one nation state that can distinguish them from all others, the government should be concentrating on strengthening the institutions through which human dignity can be secured: a bill of rights and a written constitution. But a British statement of values is silly. The idea of national values died with the dismissal of "motherhood and apple pie": anything sufficiently morally robust to serve as guide to human conduct is so universally applicable as to serve no role in distinguishing one person or group from another. (They serve apple pie in the restaurants of Beijing, so what does that tell us of the difference between America and China?). The green paper talks enviously of America's self-image as the "land of the free," but that did not stop the brutalisation of blacks—what did that was the civil rights movement. It is entirely unclear how and why a list of values is going to make a difference: how is fair play (one of the terms listed as a British value) to be proceduralised? And what of pluralism—one of the most contested concepts in British thought and politics today? (Note that this is in a document that immediately states that no identity should take precedence over core democratic values: isn't pluralism exactly the idea that there are no "core" values?) To act in accordance with democratically enacted laws is already a requirement; so it is not clear how defining someone as British through a values-list makes any difference. Let us discuss human rights, NHS culture, local representation, all the demands of governance—that would be truly British; but talk of values is a rhetorical gesture with no practical significance and possibly dangerous ideological consequences, especially of exclusion of those mysteriously deemed to fail meeting certain values.
Frederic Raphael Writer
When I was brought to England, from the US, in 1938, the great creeper-clad institutions which had recruited Henry James to Englishness (Britishness came later) were still dominant. Kipling's If, in which Success and Failure were both impostors, enshrined notions of modest manliness which kept the Buffs—my father's regiment in 1918—steady. The "values" which he incited me to absorb were expressed in the rules of the professions, in which, for instance, a gentleman's word was his bond. The more like the real thing the outsider could become, the more accessible might be those glittering prizes which FE Smith had advertised.
Gordon Brown's call for some kind of poll to choose a modernised set of values to renovate the national sense of identity (and honour) is either an exercise in condescension (cf Lenin humbly consulting the peasants before confiscating their land) or what the philosopher Gilbert Ryle called a "category mistake": since when can "values" be selected from a brochure and the poll-toppers inserted as moral uplift into the body politic like prosthetic implants? Don't values have to be implicit in acts and arts, not applied like make-up? Can an all-vote-now selection from a rigged menu barcode the fractious British with cohesive values and recruit the "cultures" of local/ethnic "communities" with their own laws and presiding "clerics" to a common standard of civility? What a suite of "c" words comes after cant!
Ben Rogers Writer
Gordon Brown is not alone in believing that, with the decline in religion, the development of liberal attitudes to "private" behaviour, the rise of consumerist values and lifestyles, and Britain's growing ethnic and cultural diversity, we as a society don't really believe in anything any more—that "nothing binds us," that "anything goes." To counter this trend Brown wants to promote a British culture of citizenship—somewhat like American civic culture, only more social democratic, even more perhaps (though Brown would never say this) like French civic culture, only less assimilationist.
I think Brown is right but his green paper proposals place too much weight on the role that general liberal values can play in sustaining a particular civic identity. We need more sensitivity to the way that values are embedded in national, collective culture. The green paper recognises implicitly the need to put some flesh of the values skeleton. It contains proposals for instance, to lift some of the restrictions on public institutions flying the Union Jack or other national flags, and endorses the idea of some sort of citizenship ceremony for school leavers. But we need to invent new civic rites building on those that already exist, and giving a more civic cast to some of the everyday interactions between the citizen and the state. These could include: turning the registration of a newborn child into a civic rite of passage; civic rites for young citizens, including the idea of national service; and making the payment of tax and receipt of benefits into more overtly civic exchanges.
Ziauddin Sardar Writer
My faith unequivocally requires me to work in open, tolerant and peaceful co-operation with my fellow citizens to make Britain the best society possible. Such a society must be based on a fundamental Islamic principle: the duty of mutual care defined by and enacted as concern for the weakest, most vulnerable and those in greatest need. It must be supported by two basic values of Islam, which are as British as warm beer: social justice and equity. By equity I mean equal access to opportunity backed by real resources that will enable individuals and groups to flourish and become self-reliant contributors to the common weal according to their interests and abilities. The value of mutual care means building facilities and institutions as well as providing the necessary resources to sustain the common good—that's everything from playing fields and youth centres to education, libraries, and that most Islamic of British institutions, the NHS. Values without proper resources are mere lip service, which is why mutual care, social justice and equity are duties not idealistic optional extras.
Participatory democracy is also a basic Islamic value: it's what our terminology of mutual consultation means. It goes further than representative democracy. It means engaging everyone in the business of governance from neighbourhood schemes on upward to our representative institutions.
None of these values can be achieved in practice without mutual confidence and acceptance of the diversity of our fellow citizens. The question is not indulging our differences but learning how through our difference we care about and can work together for shared and common ends.
Alexei Sayle Writer/comic
I have seen many propositions like this come and go over the years, it's sort of, like, if you hang around long enough and you remain interested in such things then each "new" pop group comes to look pretty much like all the pop groups that have preceded them. Sometimes there is a shuffling of ingredients you haven't seen before, a pinch of psychedelia with a soupçon of mod revival perhaps, but overall the music stays the same, so it is with initiatives such as this.
Over the years I have seen many proposals about the rights and responsibilities of the citizen come, hang about for a bit then go, from both flavours of government. The reason they always come to nothing and remain blather is that if you draw attention to the rights and responsibilities of the citizen then you also inevitably draw attention to the rights and responsibilities of the government. People say "well why should I behave responsibly when you lie to us, protect yourself from the Freedom of Information Act, give yourselves inflation busting pay rises?" Unfortunately lying, cheating, conspiring are the habitual way of politics and there is no will to effect fundamental change in that department.
Jean Seaton Sociologist
A baby sat on my kitchen floor turning the plastic brick over, biting and banging it, never taking its other side for granted, intently exploring its alien brick-ey nature (and having fun). The poppet's curiosity was gorgeous to behold and baby-watchers instinctively support her attempt to establish, by empirical research, the real qualities of the brick. Sometimes bricks have dismayingly hard corners but one wants her to investigate and make up her own experience-gathering mind for herself. After all, the baby is a tiny British citizen-in–waiting, and pragmatic, sceptical realism is a defining characteristic we want her to have. Questioning and testing are part of her national inheritance.
A preference for scepticism and uncomfortable objectivity are, in practice, often negative. Other peoples have nice big rhetorical values for their civic religion: fraternity, equality before the constitution—we have a kind of dogged reservation about much of that. Many of the most valued bits of Britishness are based not on some vaunting idea but on a distrust of the partial. An unease about what people claim rather than what they do. A quite small-scale hostility to capture—closely related to an anxiety about boasting. It is the empirical habit of mind that is one reason Orwell is valued all over the world. It is the defining feature of the institutions that we most prize, the civil service, the BBC or at least public service broadcasting, even the NHS. The British civic religion is fuzzy, unimpressed and dubious: can you write it down? No, not all of it—some of it can only exist in habits and institutions.
Siôn Simon Politician
Everybody says that nobody knows what it means to be British. That we have a "crisis of identity." This is the opposite of the truth. A great strength of the British nation is our metaphysical tribe-understanding of who and what we are.
Being British is a profound and complex thing. As such it is extraordinarily difficult to define or explain. But just because Bernard Crick may strain to put it into seven bullet points and they may struggle to wrap their floppy heads around it at the Guardian, doesn't mean that it's not vibrantly extant, and doesn't mean that people don't know what it is.
The lack of a definition of Britishness is not a proof that we need one. A British person knows what it is to be British. We feel it inside us like we know the colour of our eyes. We carry it around with our kidneys, our blood and everything else about which we don't need to think but which defines who we are. We don't need to define Britishness, because it defines us.
The task for incomers is more than to memorise a non-existent credo. It is to imbibe, to absorb, in some ways to reshape, the spirit of the tribe. (A spirit which they'd heard about from a different continent.) You do that by being cherished and supported from within. In the medium of English—the great national glue which we underestimate both as such and as a soft power edge internationally.
Our success in doing this over half a century is a monument to the national genius. Half a dozen crazy suicide bombers don't cancel the Britishness of 2m Muslims or invalidate the multicultural experience.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft Writer
If you are secure in your identity you don't have to define it or defend it. Gordon Brown's call for a British statement of values may be well intentioned or even altruistic, although there is an obvious arrière pensée lurking somewhere between west Lothian and Dunfermline East (as Brown's constituency used to be called). To have a prime minister who cannot legislate for those who elected him as an MP is weirdly anomalous. That may be connected to the way we aren't even sure what to call ourselves. Disraeli called himself "prime minister of England" and Gladstone spoke about "the interests of England" when he was in Midlothian, words Brown would not utter wherever he was.
And yet this frantic search for an identity means in itself that something has gone wrong, while looking for national or political slogans in a post-ideological age tends to produce fatuous results. Tony Blair "holds to a set of values," one of his admirers said, "fairness, tolerance, decency," and I fear that the "British statement of values that will set out our ideals and principles" will be as inane as that.
We could do worse than Evelyn Waugh's slogan, "Liberty, Diversity, Privacy," or we might say that this country has always cherished the values of limited government and individual freedom under a rule of law. But then why should such a statement of the obvious be required? We were said to have lost an empire without finding a role, and the country that needs a "mission statement" has lost its mission.
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