Straight to the point

During her campaign to lead the Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch described women from ethnic minorities who, when she was canvassing during the election, would hand the matter over instantly to their husbands saying: “I can’t speak to you.” This is a culture, she said, which isn’t as equally valid as our own. It is, she suggests, contrary to British values. It would be interesting to know how far she’s prepared to press this case. If women went on strike until their partners agreed to share half of the housework, would this be an example of British values (fairness, perhaps), or would it be some loony bit of women’s lib at odds with the British way of life? What counts as British values isn’t as clear as some people think. It probably includes feeling patriotic, but being a proud British patriot is a form of identity politics quite as much as being a militant lesbian is. Those who find identity politics distasteful are thinking of other people’s identities, not their own.

British values include fair play and a respect for the rule of law, but exclude beheading people, which is the kind of atrocity some radical Islamists go in for. Yet hanging people was an acceptable British practice until fairly recently, and the two forms of execution probably don’t feel all that different to the victim. In any case, the meaning of values like fair play and the rule of law is fiercely contested. One has to argue over what counts as such things in a particular context, and this is where the disagreements begin. Fair play, for example, is really a synonym for justice; but there are several different theories of justice, no one of which can be said to be quintessentially British. One central British value is democracy, but there are quarrels over what this means as well. For some on the political Left, the parliamentary system is suspect not because it’s democratic but because it isn’t democratic enough. Nor is a devotion to justice or democracy peculiar to the British, any more than is a belief in freedom of speech or not throwing people through plate glass windows. In fact, there is no moral principle revered by the British which isn’t equally cherished by a good many other nations. In this sense of the term, there are no British values, just as there are no British saucepans in the sense of saucepans unique to the country.

Perhaps there was once a British nation which was united around certain values, but which has now been pitched into crisis by the arrival of immigrants with a different sense of what counts in life. But the idea of a past consensus which now lies in pieces is a myth. Britain has always been made up of clashing cultures. In the 17th century, such conflicts tore the place apart. Anyway, what was the common ground between 19th-century manufacturers and the working-class movement? A belief in justice, perhaps? But for some of the manufacturers that meant hanging or deporting some of the working-class militants. The values of The Guardian newsroom have precious little in common with those of Vinnie Jones or the Plymouth Brethren. Does the fact that Ben Elton and Nigel Farage are both British override the differences between them?

The problem, however, goes deeper than individual divergences. Contentions of this kind are actually built into the nature of liberal society, so that what unites people who live in such places — a belief in freedom, autonomy, self-determination and so on — is also what divides them. If everyone is free to do their own thing, the result is bound to be a certain amount of discord. The seeds of disunity are secreted at the very heart of everyday life. The competition in commodities is reproduced at the level of ideas. By extending freedom, we also risk undermining consensus, and hence the framework by which freedom is sustained. In any case, the consensus which liberal society affords us is fairly thin. We agree to disagree, and to do so peacefully, but not necessarily on much else. This is why Sufis and professional wizards rub shoulders on the London tube with Seventh-day Adventists and neo-fascists, a situation which many traditional societies would have found incomprehensible. If this makes for a gratifying amount of diversity, it can also make for lethal antagonisms. In non-liberal nations, by contrast, you buy your stability at the price of uniformity.

Most societies feel the need for a degree of solidarity, which oils the wheels of everyday life. In liberal society, however, this solidarity can be peculiarly hard to maintain. How do you unify a civilisation in which there are millions of centres of self-government known as individual citizens? The answer is that you do so by persuading each of them to internalise the law, so that they exercise their freedom within the framework of the common good. (What, however, if the law in question is a malign one?) It’s hard to sustain unity simply at this abstract level, however, not least in times of political crisis. It’s then that you need something more visceral and theatrical to bring people together, which accounts for the rise of autocrats-in-waiting like Donald Trump. If citizens can find their identity embodied in a flesh-and-blood figure who represents them all, the abstract unity of liberal society gives way to the gut-level togetherness of authoritarianism.

When this happens, there’s usually a rise in the ideological temperature. In 19th-century capitalist society, people were divided by spectacular social and economic inequalities, but they could come together as Britons around a set of shared ideas: ruling the waves, England’s green and pleasant land, the Gospel of Work, the imperial mission, Protestant liberty versus Catholic tyranny, the divinely ordained nature of social class, and so on. The point of most of this heady rhetoric was to mask actual social divisions. Or as Frederic Jameson put it, ideology is the imaginary resolution of real contradictions. Today, in a later phase of the same social system, people are generally too shrewd and streetwise to fall for such high-sounding stuff, the decline of which has gone hand in hand with the decline of religion. Oratory is embarrassing and outdated. Nobody believes that God arranged for someone to own the Ritz and someone else to clean its lavatories. Material self-interest takes over from ideology. Grand narratives give way to pragmatic calculation. None of this, however, is deep-seated enough to cope with a capitalist system beset by serious problems, which is one reason why the rhetoric of ideology has come creeping back. Solidarity between citizens must be reinvented in the face of an economy in trouble, and one way to do this is to create a scapegoat or bogeyman they can all agree to revile. The name of the bogeyman has changed over time. Yesterday it was the Jew; today it is known as the immigrant.

More from this author

The perversion of the English language

By Terry Eagleton

What the immigrant threatens to subvert is the cultural unity of the nation-state. The nation-state is a recent historical invention, dating from around the end of the 18th century, and from the outset unity has been one of its watchwords. A double unity, in fact, as the cohesion of a distinctive people (“nation”) is reflected in a distinctive form of sovereignty (“state”). This was always something of a fiction, since there are few if any peoples who aren’t to some extent hybrid. Neither was it clear why being a specific nation should give you a claim to having your own state — why the political should follow so inevitably from the ethnic. In fact, it’s a doctrine which has created havoc throughout modern history, as a good many drives for unity do. Unity may sound a worthy goal, and there are times when it is; but it can also mean suppressing essential conflicts, trying to reconcile incompatible interests and marginalising those who don’t fit in. It can steamroller vital differences and quickly become a fetish.

Which brings us to the question of what’s wrong with disunity. What’s amiss with having a territory inhabited by a whole host of different cultures and ethnicities which don’t share a single political or cultural consensus? Quite a lot of the world looked something like this in the centuries before the rise of the nation-state. In fact, it’s only from that standpoint that such situation might strike us as chaotic. It may not seem so at all to those who are part of it. If we’re happy enough at present to live check-by-jowl with people who believe in Zeus or alien abductions, why can’t we share the country with people who have never heard of Trafalgar or Waterloo, think cricket is a painful condition of the neck and have no time for the monarchy? Plenty of white British-born people have never heard of Othello or Mr Pickwick, but this doesn’t mean they should be given compulsory lessons in English literature to prove themselves true patriots. Knowing about cricket or Othello isn’t a British value, either in the sense that only British people possess such knowledge, or in the sense that it’s integral to British identity. In fact, the quest for that identity is beginning to look increasingly like the search for Shangri-La. Either what defines it turns out not to be exclusively British, or it applies only to particular sectors of the population. Understatement is supposed to be typically British, but you won’t find much of it in pubs on Saturday nights.

Despite all this, there are those who feel the impulse to affirm a single national identity. Yet history is not on their side. It would seem that the reign of the nation-state has been strictly temporary. In its heyday, it served the commercial middle classes marvellously well. But that world has given way to a globalised one, and the nation-state is a horizon we are now able to see beyond. It is just that it takes time for cultural changes to catch up with political and economic ones. Politically and economically, we are citizens of the world; but we don’t yet have the symbolic forms by which we might formulate this fact to ourselves.

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