What are “British Values”?

Pre-election Britain is currently going through a self-evaluation in such a way that, were it retail goods brought over a shop counter, there could be an action brought under the UK’s Trade Descriptions Act of 1968. This piece of legislation replaced the Merchandise Marks Act of 1887 with “fresh provisions prohibiting misdescriptions of goods, services, accommodation and facilities provided in the course of trade”. It protects the consumer, who might otherwise be sold something which did not match the description given by the seller and is thus of lesser value than advertised. This act of deception currently applies to a commodity mentioned daily in the British media, and marketed under the brand name of “British values”. Regrettably, some immigrants seem not to share these values. But what are “British values”, and who says so? We should examine the meaning of “value” before ascribing them to a nation.

Value is the ascription of worth and has two main fields of function, the mathematical and the behavioral. Financial value, although that is what is most commonly understood by the English word, is a sub-set of the mathematical function, and need not be a third category. If x is given a value in a mathematical problem and a house is valued at a certain price, nothing essentially different is happening between these two scenarios in terms of value viewed as simple ascription. But whereas mathematical value is contained solely within mathematics, a self-referential system, values can also be societal, and so refer to something other than an apparatus of pure value comparison. Societal values can perhaps be defined as a set of civic indicators deemed acceptable to the majority of a society as conducive to its continuation.

British values, then, would be a belief that a certain set of actions in the civic sphere are preferable to alternatives as consensually agreed by the people who live in Britain. As we shall see, however, it is not a country’s people who get to evaluate their own nation. In this case, financial value is a valid comparison because a price is either centrally controlled or arrived at by the operation of the free market. So too with national values.

Nigel Farage, currently the joker in the pack of British politics, has recently been criticized for referring to polling showing that a large percentage of Muslims in the UK do not subscribe to “British values”, and it is presumed that everyone knows what this yardstick is in much the same way as they know the names of the four separate nations that make up the United Kingdom. But what are British values? That is, not what do we nostalgically believe them to be, not an airbrushed list of qualities the post-war British held dear and which always begins with “fair play”, but what are they in actuality? Perhaps we should ask the British government.

In 2014, the Department for Education (DOE) published guidelines for Britain’s schools, instructing them “to actively promote the fundamental British values of democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance of those with different religions and beliefs”. The first three on this wish-list are demonstrably eroding, to say the least, and are in any case not specific to Britain among Western nations. Nothing makes them uniquely British. But it is the fourth that needs unpacking. (“Tolerance” and “respect” for other peoples or religions can be conflated into one term without significant loss of meaning).

Firstly, we must go back to the source of the DOE’s four pillars of British society, and the paragraph quoted from above guides us: “These values were first set out by the government in the ‘Prevent’ strategy in 2011”. This “strategy” has a very specific purpose. The UK government introduced its Prevent program specifically to counter Islamist terrorism, although its guideline document gives equal ranking to other perceived threats. So British values have been defined by government as part of a program to stop Islamists blowing things up and hacking people to death. Is there not more to them than a sub-section of a government policy document? Let’s go back to the last Labour period in power.

The consensus among what there is of the British political Right is that the beginning of the programmatic dismantling of post-colonial Britain, including its elusive values, began in earnest in 1997 with the election of Tony Blair’s Labour government. Margaret Thatcher was certainly the last Prime Minister to be recognizably Conservative, and when her own party turned on her like the Roman consuls on Caesar, John Major was only ever presiding over an interim government before the advent of “Blairism” and the Blairites.

Blair’s Home Secretary was David Blunkett, and in 2005 he wrote a piece for The Guardian on patriotism and British values. In it, he gave a definition of these values:

I believe Britishness is defined not on ethnic and exclusive grounds but on shared values: our history of tolerance, openness and internationalism; and our commitment to democracy and liberty, to civic duty and the public space.

Along with the same anodyne abstractions noted in the DOE set above, note Blunkett’s negative definition which opens the quote. Whatever British values might be, they are not rooted in ethnicity. Indeed, any hint of White British patriotism is now highly suspect, and Labour have a particular animus against England. John Prescott, one of Blair’s aides de camp, spoke of the British Isles as “Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the regions”. [Italics added]. The BBC never mentions England by name unless there is rioting there or a football match.

British values, however, must not just be defined by government, they must be taught, and for the pedagogical aspect of national evaluation we move forwards almost a decade from Blunkett’s article.

In 2016, a governmental review was published that remains one of its best-kept secrets. Despite being hidden in plain sight, things only become visible to the public if the media make it so, and this document received no coverage. The Casey Review, subtitled British Values and the Common Language of Virtues, is a founding document of British adherence to globalism that would require a novella-length exegesis worthy of a Mediaeval Aristotelean scholar to show its significance. I’ll highlight a few salient points, but if you want to see the technocratic manipulation and systematic undermining of national, practical civic wisdom, it is a short report and worth your time.

The problems with the report are apparent at the outset, with author Baroness Casey’s stated aim to “establish a set of values around which people from all different backgrounds can unite”. Of course, each of these “different backgrounds” already has its own set of values, often differing from those of the British. The review’s example of a value which they deem universal is honesty, and this is assumed to be a value which immigrants from all backgrounds automatically share with the host nation. Teachers may struggle to explain this to the children of devout Muslim families who believe that honesty can be suspended in the case of taqiyya, an Islamic doctrine sanctioning lying if it is in the cause of their religion. This is confirmed by the Koran, Islam’s ultimate arbiter.

The Casey Review is pedagogical throughout. Baroness Casey quotes from David Goodhart (essentially a journalist) on teaching values, and we get our first glimpse of the universalism to come:

Values, meaning different and sometimes conflicting notions of how to live a good life, are in a way the problem, not the solution. It is shared experience and mutual interests, and the way these can be fostered by public institutions and public rituals, that are a better means for overcoming differences.

Values, meaning in this case British values, are now the problem. This is the ideological epicenter of a document super-saturated with ideology. The Baroness herself approves:

While a bolstering of British values may well contribute to enhanced integration, placing an emphasis on character and common virtues could be a more effective way of allowing pupils to discuss shared experiences, and to use a common language in discussing what they think it means to be British.

To give the document an air of philosophical gravitas, Aristotle is invoked as one of “many philosophers of character”, and is found to “suggest that a number of virtues are held in common across humanity”. Apart from his spell in Macedonia tutoring Alexander the Great, it is not reported that Aristotle saw much of the rest of humanity in order to make such a comparison. There is no citation given in the review. Also, if virtue is the issue and it’s a Greek philosopher you want to back you up, Plato would seem the more obvious candidate. However, Plato famously held (particularly in the Meno and Protagoras) that virtue could not be taught, and that is not what a technocrat wants to hear echoing down the millennia.

As noted, a line-by-line exegesis of The Casey Review is required, but I will just note a line from the summary, and the document’s extraordinary sign-off:

[T]he teaching and cultivation of values should be a more interactive, collaborative and inclusive process which will help to enhance the moral character of the next generation, and thus the tolerance, respect and community cohesion… currently lacking across Britain.

“Community cohesion” is code for ensuring Muslims do not have their patience tested by any aspect of British society, and “inclusive” is another familiar dog-whistle word meaning “fewer white people and their values”.

But it is the final statement of the review, boxed off and highlighted at the foot of the document, that contains the core message. Once again, it is by David Goodhart, who is clearly in favor at court:

To combine diversity with solidarity, to improve integration and racial justice, it is not good just preaching tolerance, you need a politics which promotes in-group identity. [Italics in original].

Racial justice has now arrived at the scene, and the identity politics we see blooming now in Britain is here seeded. Identity is all, provided that identity has nothing to do with White ethnicity.

The destruction of ethnic culture is an ongoing part of the drive to rid Europe of its nation states by dismantling the history of those nations, and an example from the troubled country of Sweden is instructive. In 2019, an archaeologist at Stockholm’s Länsmuseum turned whistleblower on the policy of the museum’s curator with regard to newly discovered artefacts from the Viking era:

Coins, arrow-heads, ritual amulets, weapons, jewelry and weights that were kept in the past are now dumped into metal recycling bins upon discovery instead of being cared for and displayed. Museum excavators are instructed to recycle unearthed iron elements into scrap metal on the weak pretext that ‘it would take too many resources to process, identify and store them’.

It is not easy to see how the storage of small metal items at a museum would present a logistical problem in a building geared precisely for storage. As for allocation of Swedish resources, it should be noted that the excavations which unearthed these historical treasures were part of works to prepare land for new accommodation for asylum seekers. The Swedish Culture Secretary at the time was Alice Bah-Kuhnke, a half-caste lady whose Wikipedia page curiously omits mention of any religion she might hold. Those interested in her are forced to make assumptions based on her parentage, her mother being Swedish and her father from 97%-Muslim Gambia. If a country’s ethnic history is destroyed, quite literally in this case, that country can be defeated without a shot being fired, and new values can be imposed which exclude those previously kept alive in the genetic make-up of its natives.

Alice Bah-Kuhnke: In charge of Sweden’s cultural heritage (2014-2019) and now a MEP for Sweden’s Green Party

Genetics is not a purely biological affair. It is obviously a vast field, but we all grasp the concept of heritability and would do so even if our reading stopped at Darwin. We may also know that the formation of heritable characteristics over time may not be limited to physical evolution, but extend to the sphere of the social. In primitive and broad-brush terms, one theory for the vast differences between Africa and Europe in terms of simple development goes back to differing ways of obtaining food. The gatherers in warmer climes had no need of co-operation with one another, which was thus purely discretionary. The hunters of the frozen north, however, who required a team of men to overpower larger animals and whose food did not drop from the trees, soon learned that co-operation was essential both to eat and to stay alive. From these behavioral seeds, two very different continents grew. And those seeds also contained values and the importance of their variation. Thus, the ethnic history of a nation, its developing valuation of itself, travels with it via a genetic delivery system which reinforces behavior advantageous to the group, in this case a nation.

Michael Levin, in his 1997 book, Why Race Matters, examines valuation in the context of racial difference, and makes use of reinforcement as a qualifying term:

From a behavioral standpoint, to value something is to be reinforced by it, and to explain someone’s values is to explain why those stimuli that reinforce him do in fact do so.

Reinforcement is a term in standard use in psychology. People require “conventional reinforcement”, such as praise, acceptance or encouragement. But the distinctive history of a national people has its own type of genetic reinforcement: ethnicity.

The valuation of individual and national ethnicity is the epicenter of the modern schism between the Left and the Right, and to recognize the role of reinforcement in that valuation is to go to the heart of that divide. Reinforcement in ethnic terms creates a virtuous circle in which an individual who values their ethnic history in turn reinforces the value they place on their own partaking of that ethnicity. The English value the work of Shakespeare not just because his work is dramatically satisfying and his use of language appealing, but also because he was English. A high valuation of ethnicity is why nations have national heroes, real or mythical. Which brings us to the question of national pride. Pride is the last of the Bible’s deadly sins, and national pride is now politically suspect if and only if that nation is historically White.

National pride is more complex than personal pride. It is more than the warm glow every time you see your diploma on the wall or feel the heightened sense of self-worth that comes with going for and getting a job you very much wanted. The pride an Englishman or any other native feels in his country extends backwards in time and goes down to the cellular, genetic level. Essentially, you are proud of those who came before you and what they achieved and, by extension, your own place as a living part of that achievement, which is your country. If this is a genetic as well as a temporal relation, we would do well to remember the root of ‘genetic’ is the Ancient Greek genos, among whose meanings are genus and species, but also family, lineage, and kin. This is the genetics the Left would rather you didn’t notice.

So, to what conclusion did our whistle-stop tour of contemporary British values, and the teaching of same, lead us? We can certainly say, pace the favored courtier David Goodhart, that values are not the problem. The problem is that values are being set technocratically by committee and not organically as national self-awareness. The installation of a pedagogical regimen will dictate what those values are, and what they are, what value is given to x, will not be the result of a natural accretion of values which have grown out of collective national identity but a set of globalist diktats. The values British schoolchildren are taught at school are the result of a technocratic/globalist value system which supersedes nationalist values and which by necessity prioritizes indoctrination, conformity and orthodoxy over national fervor. But real British values are not the outcome of focus groups of leftist ideologues writing anti-terrorism documents. They live in the blood and the soil of its native people, whether the new elites like that allusion or not.