The Myth of ‘British Values’
Ben Dzialdowski / Jan 17 / Cultural Identity
Britishness is hard to define. To many around the world, there are myriad interpretations of British culture and the values it embodies. With Boris Johnson saying “We are proud of our history and traditions” and calling to protect Britain’s culture, it begs the question: what are these supposed ‘core values’, and do they truly reflect Britain’s past and present?
In 2014, the government offered an answer to the first part of the question. They initiated a programme to “‘actively promote” fundamental British values, which they characterised as democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and the mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs.
When focusing on ‘individual liberty’, and ‘respect and tolerance’, it becomes apparent that these principles, which allegedly define British values, rarely correspond to the reality of how this nation operates.
While the government is eager to promote these self-proclaimed values, they fail to uphold them. The ‘British culture’ that Boris Johnson defends does not embody these values, and when he speaks of ‘our history and traditions’, he seems to forget both are marred with discriminatory norms that continue to plague our society. The enduring pride in Britain’s past milestones concerning human rights and individual liberty are masking the deviation from these values in government and UK society itself.
Respect and Tolerance
The government’s definition of “respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs” includes the “importance of identifying and combatting discrimination”, a hypocritical demand from a government that fails to address the rampant intolerance that resides in the society it governs.
This is a country led by Boris Johnson, a man who has written that “Islam is the problem” and referred to veiled Muslim women as “letterboxes” and “bank robbers”. These comments coincided with a rise in Islamophobic incidents by 375%. His party has overseen Muslim families in Britain falling into cycles of “intergenerational poverty” as well as experiencing increased racism and abuse along with state surveillance and racial profiling. Johnson’s rhetoric has directly impacted Muslims living in the UK, causing them to fear for the future. The ‘British value’ of ‘respecting other faiths’ has no chance of being upheld whilst an Islamophobe sits in the highest position of power.
Perhaps Johnson’s understanding of Britain’s values falls more into its imperial past, with his insistence that “it’s time we stopped our cringing embarrassment about our history” when referring to British colonialism. Such statements, alongside his usage of the words “piccaninnies” and “watermelon smiles” to describe black people, suggest that his motives are completely unaligned with combatting discrimination. His actions do nothing to suggest otherwise. The government’s sedative appointments to ‘progressive’ committees exemplify the apathetic stance on fighting intolerance.
The recent appointee to the Equality and Human Rights Commission is David Goodhart, a “supporter of the… “hostile environment”” and a man who denies that “racism and Islamophobia are significant problems in the UK”. Goodhart’s comments on Black Lives Matter highlight his disinterest in tackling racial bias and inequality, by writing that “false or exaggerated claims of victimhood are all too easy to make in the current environment”.
This sentiment may well reflect a more accurate definition of British values. Respect and tolerance cannot be a value of a society in which “widespread racial discrimination” keeps black, Asian and minority ethnic workers from senior roles. Combatting discrimination certainly does not appear to be a core principle of British culture when 55% of ethnic minorities say that “racism has stayed the same or gotten worse during their lifetimes”.
Considering Britain’s imperial past, alongside the current racial inequalities in the UK, the fundamental value of 'respect and tolerance' appears invariably unaligned to Britain, and it seems the government is in no hurry to rectify this.
Individual Liberty
‘Individual liberty’ and the promotion of human rights and freedoms are considered a British value on the back of certain historical milestones, including the creation of the Magna Carta in 1215, abolishing slavery in the British empire in 1833 and the decriminalisation of sex between men in 1967. On the surface, Britain may seem to abide by this value: an array of human rights laws have Britain’s signature, including some international agreements drafted by this very nation. Whilst human rights commitments such as these seem to support this value, it requires a large degree of tunnel vision to ignore the atrocities, the denial of rights, and the de facto social human rights issues that have plagued Britain both historically and in the present day.
Liberty and freedom were far from the agenda of the British Empire over the course of the 20th century. Devastating events such as the Amritsar Massacre in 1919, the Bengal Famine of 1943-44 and the torture campaigns in Aden in the 1960s showed no semblance of Britain’s core tenet of individual liberty, and certainly no regard for human rights.
More recently, both Theresa May and Boris Johnson have attempted to detach the UK from the few human-rights protections that it remains aligned with. May’s move to withdraw the UK military from the European Convention on Human Rights was a direct stance against individual liberty. Such movements against human rights laws in the UK have “long been under attack”.
Now, the government is trying to opt-out of other parts of the very same convention. These attempts to remove Britain from agreements that protect human rights have exposed the government’s contempt for ‘individual liberty’. As the Liberal Democrat justice spokesperson put it, Johnson is “trying to enable the government to run roughshod over people’s rights and allow ministers to break the law with impunity.”
The disparity in the de jure and de facto integrity of the UK when it comes to individual liberty is abundantly clear when looking at the issue of women’s rights. On the surface, it’s been over a century since women won the vote in the UK, and there have since been two female Prime Ministers. This has led some to the false notion that our society is now equal for men and women. In reality, underrepresentation and discrimination remain rife, and the government sees it right to appoint deniers of such issues to the very positions tasked with tackling them.
Take Philip Davies, who has previously stated that “feminist zealots really do want to have their cake and eat it”, being appointed for the Women and Equalities Select Committee in 2016. Davies was re-elected the following year and has since attempted to filibuster-down a bill protecting women from domestic violence.
The values of policymakers such as Davies mirror society’s disparity with the government’s idea of British values. Today, domestic violence remains a critical issue. During the first 7 weeks of lockdown there was a domestic abuse call every 30 seconds, and in terms of ‘Women and Equalities’, working women in their 30s “ may never know equal pay”.
If we thought that the appointment of a woman to the Equality Commission was proof of our commitment to equal rights, and an attempt to combat discrimination, we thought wrong. The appointee Jessica Butcher stands in firm opposition to the current women’s rights movement. Having attributed that familiar term of “victimhood” to modern-day feminists, she has criticised the “narrative of discrimination”, and of the MeToo movement has claimed that “Men have had their careers and reputations ruined overnight by MeToo”.
These appointments, and the issues in society that they fail to address, highlight the government’s complete neglect of Britain’s supposed core values of both ‘respect and tolerance’ and ‘individual liberty’.
The absurdity in claiming individual liberty and human rights to be a principle of Britain is made most evident by the core social rights denials concerning poverty in the UK. Denials that caused the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights to “strongly criticize” the UK’s recent austerity policies, “finding that they have resulted in around 14 million people living in poverty with almost 1 in 2 children affected.”. In 2020, after humanitarian-aid charity UNICEF helped feed children in the UK, Minister Rees-Mogg said that “UNICEF should be ashamed of itself”, calling it a “political stunt”. The moral hubris of those in power makes them blind to the blatant denials of fundamental rights that exist in the society they govern.
The government’s disregard for human rights was further demonstrated when the treatment of the Windrush generation came to light. Though the EHRC concluded the Home Office had “broken equality law”, the very orchestrator of this unlawful ‘hostile environment’ went on to be Prime Minister. And yet, even after this scandal, Britain continues to “deport people to countries they barely know”. It is as though a disregard for human rights and individual liberties is something that we cannot learn from, as though it may itself be a fundamental British value.
Final Words
Perhaps this myth that Britain is intrinsically virtuous prevents us from any true self-reflection. We gasp, shocked, at immigrant children in cages on the U.S border, whilst migrant families drown in our seas and our home secretary considers deploying giant wave machines to push their boats back across the Channel. We criticise human rights abuses in Russia and Saudi Arabia, yet we strip the right to protection away from British citizens arrested overseas “through no fault of their own… even if they are tortured”, and are one of the only European countries to deny child refugees the right to be joined by their closest relatives.
Britain has conducted itself without any influence of ‘respect and tolerance’ or ‘individual liberty’, and the society that it has created remains significantly lacking in these virtues. Whatever the British values are that Boris Johnson is so proud of, they certainly do not include respecting other faiths, combatting discrimination, or protecting human rights.