What are "British values"?

Sajid Javid, the Communities Secretary, said recently that he wants all public servants to swear an oath of office in which they agree to abide by British Values. Writing in the Sunday Times newspaper, Javid said that: “We can’t expect new arrivals to embrace British values if those of us who are already here don’t do so ourselves, and such an oath would go a long way to making that happen.”

It’s an intriguing suggestion for many reasons, but two are especially significant—it assumes first that British values exist, and second that it would be possible to reach agreement on what those values are.

In the spirit of Javidism then, we ask: what are British values? An answer might be that they are a set of precepts that reflect the modern experience of being British. Sounds good. But this brings us immediately to the question of what it means to be British, and the ructions of 2016 strongly suggest that there may be no real answer to that question.

If you ask an early middle-aged, suburbanite, middle-class white man from Dulwich in south-east London like me what it means to be British, then you will get one answer. But if you ask a middle-aged, suburbanite, middle class white man from Dulwich in south east London like Nigel Farage, then you will get a different answer altogether. The distance between our views would be huge, just as it would be between a Ukip voter in Boston and the man who does the Gladdy Wax sound-system at the Notting Hill Carnival.

The neat relativist solution is to say that Britain is defined simultaneously by all of these visions and that in embracing them as a whole, we find our true national identity. The flaw in this nice little post-modern love-in is that it tries to recruit people who by definition reject this kind of pluralist view. And there are a lot of them. According to polls by YouGov, 37 per cent of British people agree with the statement that: “There are so many foreigners living round here, it doesn’t feel like home anymore."

So if it’s not the urge to awkwardly clap one another on the back and just get on with it, then what is Britishness? The legally-minded might point to our common law, and there may be something to that. Something—but, at the end of it, not enough. Important though they may be, neither the small print of dos-and-don’ts, nor the big over-arching legal principles forge the stuff of national identity. It comes from somewhere else.

Or at least it is meant to. But a nation doesn’t necessarily have to have its own distinct values or identity. Why should it? Isn’t it perfectly possible that a nation should have no distinctive singular essential identity at all?

In technical terms, rather than identity terms, the question of what Britain is becomes a little clearer. Britain isn’t an empire state, or a nation state or even a state nation. It’s a huge engine for allowing economic activity to flourish, which is what Phillip Bobbitt, the historian and thinker, calls a “Market State.” This, he described in Terror and Consent, as being “a matter of shifting the basis for the state’s legitimacy away from assuring mass welfare and towards maximising individual opportunity.”

The result, he said, would be a state that would resemble a “twenty-first century multinational corporation or NGO rather than the twentieth century state in that it will outsource many functions, rely less on law and regulation and more on market incentives.”

And having voted for Brexit, Britain has completed its journey to market statehood. British politics, both domestic and foreign, now consists of a debate over what Britain can make, buy and sell, and to whom. Seen this way, British values aren’t those of a nation, but of a multinational corporation.

There is little sense of Britishness, or British values here. Instead there is an emptiness, which is further confounded by the sense that, if Britain is a Market State then it is undoubtedly a failed one. It has not delivered material well-being to enough of its citizens, many of whom are feeling the chilly effects of austerity, rising inflation, stagnant wages and of rising inequality. What use is a market state that delivers such meagre returns?

And into this vacuum step the populists and the nationalists, who want to “take back control,” as Nigel Farage said in his post-Brexit speech, for “the real people, for the ordinary people, for the decent people,” and who, like the Prime Minister, talk about the need for Britain to enjoy a “red white and blue Brexit.” The Javid suggestion of an oath is another case of this new, crass nationalism. But they assume too much.

It turns out that the last twenty years have been a mirage. We are not multicultural, or liberal or open. So if we are not that, what are we? At present there is no answer to that question.