British Values
After saying “enough is enough” in the manner of an exasperated nanny dealing with naughty children, Theresa May tells us that terrorism must be fought with “British values”. Charlie Lyons has a good point when he writes “It’s not up to Theresa May to define ‘British values’” — in fact, he makes such a good point that I have uncharacteristically linked to an article in The Spectator. If there are such things as British values, they are to be determined by British people as a woolly aggregate, not the Prime Minister or the Home Secretary.
Even if we take the people’s values rather than the government’s, though, there are still problems with the idea of British values. If you’re a sociologist, then fine: British values are the things that British people as whole tend to regard as “definitive of the good, fulfilling, and defensible life” (to quote Gary Watson, whose article “Free Agency” has the best definition of “value” I’ve come across). But if you are making policy, then there’s a problem. If there is something uniquely British about British values, something which obliges you to adopt them because you are British, aren’t we in danger of falling into the pit of cultural relativism? Britishness is great when we’re debating such things as whether you should put milk in tea (and whether you should pour the milk before or after the tea) but surely here we’re talking about values like “not stabbing random people” or “not blowing yourself up in a public place.” These are, we would hope, universal values, and making them British risks making them relative. In Britain, one simply doesn’t blow oneself up, my dear.
Now it’s clear that some do not share these fundamental values; otherwise, we wouldn’t have terrorism. ISIS and its sympathisers obviously think that stabbing, beheading and exploding people is fine and dandy, and they also think that many of the values most of us hold are abominations. To describe these values as “British” or “Western” plays into their hands because such groups are defined by their opposition to the West. If you are a young, disaffected British Muslim on the brink of radicalization, will an appeal to “British values” make you more or less likely to see a conflict between being British and being a Muslim? If you are told repeatedly that democracy is a British value, will that make you more or less likely to accept it? You can appeal to British values only when addressing people who first identify strongly as British, and those people aren’t the problem here.
Ironically, the people the “British values” rhetoric might possibly work on are not borderline jihadis but borderline racists and Islamophobes. If being British is the source of someone’s values (see how silly that sounds?) then convincing them that those values include things like caring and tolerance would be a giant leap in the right direction. I can’t see Theresa May as the person to do that, though.
