What are “British values”? And is that apparently innocent and friendly phrase quite what it seems? Or should it be understood as part of a new political language that has been carefully devised to target, stigmatise and label minority groups, especially Muslims?
Many politicians on the right are keen to celebrate these ambiguous values. Look at Suella Braverman’s website and you’ll find an “oath of British values”, in which the home secretary celebrates “the tolerance and respect that we show to people coming to this country from abroad.” Sajid Javid, as communities secretary, wanted the oath of “British values” made compulsory for all holders of public office. Michael Gove insisted on “British values” being taught in all English schools. As chancellor, Jeremy Hunt repeated the phrase in his November budget statement. It is ubiquitous in public life; even on the left, Labour’s Keir Starmer likes to reference the term. At its worst, however, it has been co-opted to promote a coercive liberalism, whose purpose (like the idea of Laïcité in France) is to impose a homogeneous national culture with little room for outsiders.
It may seem counterintuitive to question what British values actually are, because many patriotic people will think of Britishness as a generous concept—as it has been for many people throughout much of the postwar period. Yet before its quiet introduction into national discourse by thinktanks and politicians over the past two decades, the phrase did not exist; there was no shared concept of “British values” as the country fought the Nazis in the Second World War.
In 1948, TS Eliot described English—not British—culture as being a “way of life” that included “all the characteristic activities and interests of a people”, including Derby Day and beetroot in vinegar. Winston Churchill, writing of the “English spirit”, noted that “there are always frayed edges, border-lands, compromises, anomalies. Few lines are drawn that are not smudged.” Today’s state-promoted notion of British values has its roots in a 2007 speech that Gordon Brown gave at the Commonwealth Club on national identity, amid mounting alarm about the future of the Union and concerns over Muslim integration.
In his speech, Brown spoke of “fairness, tolerance and what George Orwell called decency”, evoking milestones in British history such as Magna Carta in 1215 and the Bill of Rights in 1689. His narrative was of questionable historical accuracy: Great Britain only came into existence in 1707 and the Bill of Rights, far from being about tolerance, was meant to stop Catholics taking the throne. He also failed to mention Christianity, the peerage, empire, conflict between England and Scotland or anything that disrupted his own sensibilities. But his speech did involve a substantive engagement with what makes British values specifically British.
It also involved a generous vision of multicultural Britain in which minorities were allowed to enjoy multiple identities. Brown’s vision gave scope to be black, Asian, Scottish, gay and British. His Britishness encompassed Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists—as well as today’s dominant state ideology of secular liberalism.
That would all change when David Cameron became prime minister in 2010. Cameron (advised among others by Dean Godson of Policy Exchange and Maajid Nawaz of the now defunct Quilliam Foundation) built on Brown’s notion of British values. Cameron’s version was darker, however, and amounted to a rejection of what had traditionally been thought of as British.
Cameron’s interpretation was no longer about standing with the underdog and supporting minorities. On the contrary: he used British values to attack minorities and stigmatise the underdog.
Study of parliamentary debate through the Hansard search engine enables us to trace how the phrase “British values” emerged and mutated. It was never used in the 19th century, and only 31 times in the entire 20th century. It only comes into anything resembling regular use in the first decade of the 21st century, and initially only in a way that most of us would probably associate with the traditional British character.
Here, for example, is the Labour MP Chris Bryant speaking in July 2007 in a debate about a “British statement of values”. “Recent opinion polls,” observed Bryant, “suggest that the British public think that the most important British values are a sense of fair play, a respect for minorities and the belief that everyone has the right to say precisely what they think.”
This version of British values was a common feature of the rhetoric of Brown’s premiership. Under the Cameron government, the term was turned into a weapon. From 2010 it cropped up more regularly, but most of the time it was framed as standing in opposition to Islam. In 2014, the Conservative MP Margot James stated in the terms of the emerging ideology of the Conservative government that “conservative religious values” were “fundamentally at odds with British values of equality and freedom.”
The so-called Trojan Horse plot played a fundamental role in shaping this new conception of British values. This story began when a letter detailing a sinister Islamist conspiracy to take over Birmingham schools was leaked to the press in 2013. (The letter, and the idea of any plot, has since been proven to be a fabrication.) The police told Gove, who was education secretary at the time, that they believed the letter was a hoax. But amid moral panic in the mainstream media, the government nevertheless imposed a duty to “promote fundamental British values” in schools.
The following year, the idea of British values was incorporated into the Prevent doctrine, which was made a legal duty for public sector workers in 2015. Under Prevent, people suspected of extremism—defined as “vocal or active opposition to British values”—could be targeted as a threat to British society and placed on the government’s deradicalisation programme. Inevitably, thousands of innocent people—many of them schoolchildren—have been harassed and interrogated. It has also disproportionately targeted and impacted innocent British Muslims, even to the point of using religious profiling to allocate funding. Operating in what is known as the pre-criminal space, the Prevent programme is intended to identify and deradicalise people who might become terrorists in the future. But something troubling is going on here. An innocent-sounding term, “British values”, has been deployed in the government’s definition of extremism as an officially sanctioned attack phrase against those who deviate from approved conduct and language. The term has become a core part of a pseudo-scientific discourse that relies heavily on abstract concepts and technical terms, many of which were invented or recalibrated to classify or demonise Muslims.
Other words and concepts in this lexicon include “moderate” (understood as the antithesis to extremist) and “radical”—or, more ominous, “radicalised”. The application of both these words at once has become straightforwardly racist. When applied to a non-Muslim white political figure, the term “moderate” is a disparagement, carrying the heavy implication that she or he is boring, unoriginal or second-rate. By contrast, “radical” is a term of high praise, signifying energetic, free-thinking and progressive. The situation is reversed when applied to Muslims. For them there is no higher praise than “moderate”, while brown political figures deemed “radical” are swiftly put under surveillance and labelled as dangerous and extremist.
This distinction can be traced to the days of empire when local politicians who accepted British rule were praised as moderate, while radical ones were imprisoned. It is axiomatic that moderate brown people support British values while radical brown people are enemies of the state.
The justification for this new political language is security. It goes without saying that the overriding duty of any state is to protect its citizens, but this new language about Muslims has nothing to do with violence. It is used to describe, isolate and punish peaceful, law-abiding behaviour.
A new thought crime has been invented: “non-violent extremism”. Like British values, non-violent extremism is a recent invention, first used on the floor of the House of Commons in June 2011 by Theresa May as home secretary when she announced her new Prevent strategy.
Before that, non-violence was generally regarded as admirable, and was used to describe forms of peaceful political action or civil disobedience. It was certainly not seen as sinister, but rather as a sign that civil society is working. Its introduction into official discourse by May marked an especially troubling moment in our national history, because it opened the way for the state to police not just criminal activity but opinion and peaceful behaviour, like failing to conform to approved standards of dress or taking religion too seriously.
At the heart of the historic idea of Britishness has been eccentricity: citizens may think and conduct themselves as they want so long as they stay within the law. Notably, non-violent extremism is defined by the government as being in opposition to British values. The presence of the one can be taken as the absence of the other, and vice versa.
The “British values” discourse goes startlingly far in its ideological policing. Someone advocating for violent revolution is breaking the law and will be punished—this is to be expected, and it’s what any functioning government would do. Abusing gay or transgender people is also breaking the law. But a Muslim who argues that the Sharia is the best type of legal system and should govern society, while remaining peaceful and following the law of the land, is in contravention of “British values”, placing herself or himself under suspicion.
The political climate determines who should be punished for their opposition to British values. Robin Simcox leads the Commission for Countering Extremism, an agency set up under the May government that is designed to confront opposition to British values. While he is concerned about protecting speech which defends western values, sometimes seen as “far-right”, Simcox has recommended that the government should not engage with the Muslim Council of Britain. In state schools, Ofsted inspectors told to ensure compliance with British values have been known to question Muslim schoolgirls about why they wear headscarves. When one primary school banned headscarves, Ofsted backed its decision. Surely this new orthodoxy of British values being taught in schools must throw any thoughtful schoolchild into complete confusion.
The government defines British values as “democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect, and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs.” Though this is a reasonably accurate statement of liberal aspirations across the world, there is nothing particularly British about it. Democracy is a recent development.
Was Britain a foreign country before the suffragettes? There is nothing democratic about the hereditary monarchy. Legislators in the House of Lords are appointed. Does that make these organisations un-British? Bear in mind that successive British governments have manifested no respect for the British values they invented and now claim to enforce. They have mocked the rule of law and the “activist lawyers” who try to defend it. They are brutally intolerant of refugees and asylum seekers and dislike individual liberty.
The idea of British values (like the ostentatious waving of Union Jacks favoured by politicians) is profoundly un-British. No country has traditionally been more self-deprecating about national identity than Britain. Significantly, the concept is not even taught in Scotland. Indeed, when as education secretary Michael Gove launched his consultation to road test his idea of British values, he could only do so only in English schools.
Braverman may have made an oath to British values, but that doesn’t stop her speaking of an “invasion of our southern coast”. Her disgusting language shows that the term has become the instrument of an ugly, racist and profoundly un-British English nationalism, which is opposed ideologically and practically to the relaxed multiculturalism that Britain has historically sought to represent.
Additional research by Martha Harrison
