‘I may not agree with you but I will defend to the death your right to make an ass of yourself.’
Oscar Wilde
Around 500 years ago we didn’t like the Catholics much. We didn’t trust their ‘divided’ loyalty. We couldn’t accept that they could reconcile their faith and their citizenship, that they could be both Catholic and British. We institutionalized anti-Catholicism by passing the Act of Supremacy 1534. We killed people because they didn’t follow our version of our faith; we didn’t allow our Royal family to marry them; we didn’t allow them into those great British institutions Oxford and Cambridge; and when ‘the Catholics’ wanted to marry we insisted they did so in an Anglican Church.1 Just over 200 years ago we finally allowed ‘the Catholics’ to own their own property and some years later allowed their well-to-do menfolk to vote.2
Women, however, had to wait a little longer, as 200 years ago we believed married women were subordinate to their husbands and both the wife and her property belonged to the husband. Married women finally got the right to keep their ‘wage’ in 1870 and to own their property in 1882, though didn’t earn the right to be treated equally for inheritance purposes until the Law of Property Act 1922. After much bloodshed and strife all women acquired the vote in 1928, but female civil servants had to leave their jobs upon getting married until 1954: it was believed that a woman’s place was in the home.3 I’m pleased that we’ve progressed since those dark days, but women still aren’t equally represented on boards or in the top professions,4 the battle for equal pay is still not won, and tragically two women a week are still killed at the hands of their partner or ex-partner, with 2015–16 seeing such violent crimes in England and Wales reach a record high.5
We weren’t always compassionate towards people of colour. Over 200 years ago we thought it was OK to enslave black people. Britain dominated the slave trade during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as we fed the colonies with workers. Many a respected politician and intellectual made persuasive arguments to support this position. Many a British businessman made good money off the back of selling blacks.6 And it was only about fifty years ago that, commenting on the black civil rights movement in the US, the opinion of our embassy in Washington was that ‘the Negroes wanted too much too soon’.7 Closer to home, only thirty years ago it was suggested that schemes to get young blacks into business would result in them setting ‘up in the disco and drug trade’. It is only a few decades ago that mainstream politicians, mainly in my party, found the idea of blacks in their own country being equal to whites quite novel, and so considered those fighting to end apartheid in South Africa were terrorists.
We didn’t much like the Jews either. We burned and butchered them and about 600 years ago, in King Edward’s Edict of Expulsion of 1290, got rid of all of them. We were early pioneers in ethnic cleansing. Those who were brave enough to return or remain secretly were finally acknowledged just over 250 years ago via the Jewish Naturalization Act, 1753. Such was the extraordinary uproar it provoked that the 1753 Act, designed to allow foreign-born Jews to naturalize as British subjects, had to be withdrawn after two months.
We eventually let them into our great institutions and even Parliament but made sure at least until 1858 that they nominally converted or pretended to be Christian to enable them to take the oath of allegiance and hence their parliamentary seat. It’s likely that the oft-cited great Jewish Tory prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, who converted to Christianity in 1817, would not have made premier if he had still been Jewish at the time of his election.8
We questioned their loyalty during the British mandate in Palestine: were they Jewish or British first? They were the bogeymen for far-right fascists, the target of the blackshirts and the butt of bigoted headlines in the Daily Mail. Just over eighty years ago the Daily Mail shouted ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’ as it tried to convince fellow Brits that they were ‘a well organised party of the right ready to take over responsibility for national affairs with the same directness of purpose and energy of method as Hitler and Mussolini have displayed’. And their headlines on ‘German Jews pouring into the country’ are not dissimilar to the way they write about today’s refugee crisis.9
In the 1950s we officially sanctioned our police to persecute men who loved men and women who loved women. Scotland Yard led a witch hunt against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people. We set them up using undercover police agents provocateurs; we hunted them down, prosecuted them and locked hundreds of them up. They, gay people, were deemed subversive and could not be trusted, and certainly not in government or the military.10 The then home secretary, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, a Conservative, had promised ‘a new drive against male vice’ that would ‘rid England of this plague’.11 Although in 1967 we partly decriminalized homosexual acts, notably between two men aged twenty-one and over in private, convictions of gay and bisexual men actually rose in the years following this limited reform.12
In 1971, six months after I was born, celebrities, politicians and even Royalty supported the Festival of Light, a campaign against a permissive, immoral society. The Festival vowed to protest against ‘sexploitation’ in the media and the arts and promoted traditional Christian morality as a remedy to the nation’s malaise – and part of that ‘malaise’ was the LGBT community and their demand for equal rights.13
I was in high school before the whole of the UK decriminalized gay sex, and only then for over-twenty-ones, in 1982. It took a further nineteen years to make the age of consent for homosexuals the same as that for heterosexuals.
We sacked people for being gay, we treated them like social lepers, we chemically castrated them, we tried to ‘cure’ them through aversion and conversion therapies, we distrusted them and perceived them as a security risk, we saw AIDS as a gay disease only taking it seriously once it started affecting straight people, we rabble-roused the party faithful at conferences and meetings against them and enacted legislation to make sure we stigmatized them from birth. We created the environment where a loon took it upon himself to bomb a pub in London which was frequented by ‘the gays’, killing three and injuring dozens more.14
It was only in 2003 that we decided, at the insistence of that nasty, interfering lot from the European Union, that we could no longer legalize discrimination against gay people at work.15
Even in the mid-2000s, during my time as a Conservative parliamentary candidate, there was no real sanction, penalty or comeback from the party if you were homophobic. A friend with a formidable political CV and a long-term gay partner was advised that a ‘single man’ of his age may find greater success if he ‘turned up with a woman’. Gay friends still took their ‘girlfriends’ along to selection meetings, and many a miserable Tory wife has dutifully played her part until her Tory man felt he could ‘man up’ and admit to loving another man.
The country and my party’s views on homosexuality were in defence of our British values as we saw them then. In 2004 opposing civil partnerships was expressed as family values; today supporting gay marriage is supporting family values. So how fixed are British values? And how fixed should they be?
Today, we often talk of religious views, especially Muslim, as out of touch with British values. I too have been homophobic. It’s something I am deeply ashamed of. My campaign literature from my 2005 campaign is toe-curlingly embarrassing and deeply offensive.
My faith, like all major faiths in the world, has a much-debated theological position on marriage, morality, gay sex and straight sex. And I’ve questioned whether my own homophobia was developed in the years of religious learning I was exposed to as a child. And yet in my conservative Muslim upbringing we didn’t talk sex; forget gay sex – we didn’t even talk straight sex. No mosque taught it, nor for that matter did school in what was the awful era of 1980s sex education. The school sex education videos which we watched as ten- and eleven-year-olds taught me nothing. Being forced to watch in mixed-sex groups meant any questions the girls had were drowned out by the testosterone posturing of the boys. It was the nearest most boys were going to get to a porn video, and one sanctioned as ‘educational’ at that. I just pretended I hadn’t been there and hoped like mad that my mum wouldn’t find out that I had. The other Muslim girls and I kept it as our little secret, the unsaid pact, because we all knew that if one spilled the beans to a mum the other mums would be told, and then we’d all be for it. We were coming to the end of middle school, and some of the girls knew that it could be the final straw which would break their parents’ commitment to a western education and could result in them being shipped off to that containment centre that was the local ‘Muslim school’.
So gay sex was not on the syllabus at school, the mosque or, for that matter, home. No religious book ever mentioned it, no imam ever preached about it, no madrasa teacher ever referred to it, no parent ever acknowledged it. And in a pre-internet age, where access to information was restricted to library visits. I don’t recall a section on gay sex.
Naively I went through my teenage years and into an arranged marriage while still at university without having to engage with the gay issue. And then I discovered the Tory Party. Well, boy, were we obsessed with the gay issue. We protectors of British values of decency, family and honourable lifestyle choices came into our own on the subject of ‘the gays’. From our political positions in 1994, rejecting lowering the age of consent to that of heterosexual couples, to the personal trauma many a gay Conservative candidate and activist faced over the years, to our moment of high-ground morality in introducing Section 28, which amongst other things forbade local authorities from ‘teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’, and large numbers of Conservative MPs expressing opposition to civil partnership in 2004, we have much to be ashamed of.
In a nutshell as politicians and as a country we have been sectarian, racist, sexist and homophobic, and each time our behaviour has in our view been consistent with our Britishness.
It can be hard, therefore, to hear politicians, media types and commentators trumpeting ‘British values’, insisting kids should be taught these values in schools and suggesting Muslims don’t subscribe to them, when we in the not-so-distant past have done and said things which flew in the face of our current version of British values, which include individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance. We speak about these so called ‘British values’ as if they have always existed in the way we define them today.
Allow me to take a deeper look at our history.
Let’s start with that bastion of Britishness and values, the Magna Carta, the ‘Great Charter’, the world-famous document from the thirteenth century, whose 800 years of existence we all celebrated with great zeal during 2015. It is seen by many as the moment when we finally wrote down the values we stand for. Now, putting aside the fact that the Magna Carta wasn’t really about protecting the little guy against the big guys, it was about protecting the big guys from the even bigger guy, we do gush about how June 1215 was a moment when the great rights, protections and liberties we all take for granted today were first born. Across the pond in the United States they based their Declaration of Independence and Constitution on the mythical values laid out in this great document, a constitution and values that in 2016 didn’t prevent the country from electing disgusting views in the form of President Trump.
As centuries passed and we looked back with rose-tinted specs at this great moment, we decided to enshrine this cosy, fuzzy feelgood factor by drafting the Bill of Rights, 1689, which details many of the rights most believed or had been led to believe were in the Magna Carta: the limiting of power held by the big guys; the rights of ordinary folk, or at least those extraordinary enough to be considered ordinary enough to influence Parliament; the rights of the individual, although Protestant individuals were considered more important than Catholic ones; the right not to be treated cruelly and inhumanely, although we did carry on hanging and flogging people for nearly another 300 years until the 1960s and only eventually abolished capital punishment for all offences about eighteen years ago.
The Bill of Rights also gave us our now oft-quoted freedom of speech, although we couldn’t use that freedom in relation to all things religious because of our blasphemy laws, which we only got rid of in 2008, and it didn’t extend to anything the law forbade us speak about. So, yes, we had freedom of speech but we also made laws which restricted this freedom, ensuring we exercised the right responsibly. Even now, our right to freedom of speech currently enshrined in the Human Rights Act, 1998, is not absolute and can be, and indeed is, restricted to prevent crime or disorder, preserve national security and ensure child protection.16
Many of these ‘British values’ from the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights were codified and thus more accessible to the ordinary man through the European Convention on Human Rights, 1953 (ECHR), itself inspired by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948. I’m incredibly proud of the British involvement in the creation and drafting of the ECHR and the enshrinement of these rights in a UK Act of Parliament in the now sadly much-despised Human Rights Act of 1998. We, Britain, stand proud, chest puffed, when we think Magna Carta; we swell with patriotism at the mention of the Bill of Rights and British values. But having seen what man can do to man, the Holocaust being one of the most extreme examples, we felt it necessary to once more declare the rights of human beings after the Second World War, despite Magna Carta and our Bill of Rights. Importantly, we felt it necessary to once again declare the universality of these rights. So, however much we dislike one another, we still afford each other the rights we hold dear for ourselves. We didn’t feel confident enough to simply leave it to age-old religious principle of ‘do to others as you would have them do to you’,17 or trust our belief that our western values are so unshakeably right that we in the West would instinctively get it right. It was, of course, other westerners who committed one of the world’s most heinous crimes, the Holocaust, where both sides were fighting in line with their western values, even if many of those dying in the ditches were easterners like my grandfathers.
Each generation asserts its own ‘British values’, based on the society that makes up Britain at that time. Britain is on a constant journey where it redefines and reaffirms its values. The Rt Hon. Liam Byrne, MP, is a former cabinet minister and author of Black Flag Down, in which he argues that the ‘problem with values is they often smack of the past’18, a past, I would argue, which is often at odds with our so-called ‘values’. He suggests a forward-looking, inclusive coming-together in what he calls ‘ideals’, future aspirations that we, wherever we come from, can build together.
The importance of this inclusiveness was what underpinned the value of ‘multiculturalism’. In the 1980s and ’90s the concept of multiculturalism was an expression of our Britishness, the acceptance of other cultures, faiths and practices, a belief in plurality and a respect for an alternative way, even if it wasn’t a way we would choose for ourselves. More recently it has generated reams of newspaper column inches on why it has failed Britain and the current ‘mess’ we are in with ‘the Muslims’ is cited as the most striking example of this failure.
So what is multiculturalism? It can mean many things to many people. It can be a demand for equality of worth, a rebuttal to entrenched institutional racism, a slapdown of advocates of racial superiority, a humanitarian rebuff to supporters of ethnic cleansing, a sign of a comfortable global citizen, one who can be different and a part of the whole at the same time. It’s an acceptance of equal value for different cultures. It can simply describe the practical manifestation and existence of multiple cultures living alongside each other in a defined space, it’s the Chinese takeaway on one corner and the balti house on the next, it’s the steel drums and carnivals alongside pomp and pageantry as we celebrate our Royals, it’s saris blending effortlessly with cocktail dresses at nice dinner parties and it’s modern menorahs in Muslim homes as pieces of art and decor. Multiculturalism can be the promotion of difference, an invitation to experience difference, a commitment to raise awareness of difference and not simply to tolerate but to celebrate difference.
But multiculturalism can also become a policy of segregation, division and siloing of communities so that each is engaged, supported and accommodated as a section of society rather than as part of a whole. It’s the – thankfully rare – installation of squat toilets as a result of ‘cultural awareness training’, which makes for great headlines and destroys all that is positive about multiculturalism.19 But a need to tackle a manifestation of multiculturalism is not a reason to reject the idea and many benefits of multiculturalism.
At its best, multiculturalism can create a society in which all feel as if they matter and they belong; at its worst it can leave majority communities feeling ‘their way of life’ is under threat and minority communities feeling ghettoized and left behind. It’s why the debate on multiculturalism needs to be informed, evidence-based and conducted in language which explains in detail exactly what it is we mean.
The Conservative Party under David Cameron rejected multiculturalism, citing it as a doctrine that ‘tolerated segregated communities behaving in ways that run counter to our values’. He saw it as the reason why we ‘failed to confront the horror of forced marriages’ and as being the root cause of radicalization, which leads to terrorism. He advocated a new approach that he called ‘muscular liberalism’, an approach that I define as the ‘we need war to find peace’ doctrine.
But this approach, this war on multiculturalism, can be traced back to the Tony Blair era.20 The world after 9/11 and 7/7 was one of shifting political priorities, with the focus on anti-terrorism and protection, to which question Britishness and British values became the new answer. But what New Labour said and what they did were at odds. They spoke of liberty and yet proposed months of pre-charge detention in the name of anti-terror laws. They spoke of democracy and yet cosied up to dictators, Gadaffi being one of the most stark examples. They spoke of human rights and yet acquiesced to Guantanamo Bay. They spoke of the rule of law and yet found themselves answering questions about the UK’s involvement in rendition flights. New Labour’s commitment to equality on the one hand – championed via the Human Rights Act, 1998, the Civil Partnership Act, 2004, and the Equality Act, 2010 – didn’t inhibit the then home secretary, Jack Straw, who felt it appropriate to tell women what they could and could not wear when they visited him in his constituency surgery.21
The Law Lords stepped in to strike down Labour’s anti-terror legislation on the basis that it contravened the European Convention on Human Rights,22 a move described as ‘a much-belated judicial awakening’ to ensure respect for the rule of law.23 New Labour reacted by implementing the Prevention of Terrorism Act, 2005, which introduced control orders to replace detention orders. Once more the judiciary stepped in, with the High Court in 2006 finding the legislation to be incompatible with the right to a fair trial.24
So New Labour started to build a new policy rooted in the mantra of values and yet seemed consistently not to act in accordance with the very values they sought to champion.
Internal rumblings about multiculturalism had apparently been many years in the making in New Labour, with the likes of David Blunkett, Ruth Kelly and John Reid wanting to pursue a more muscular approach after the 7/7 bombings, which provided the perfect dramatic backdrop for Blair, who was never one to miss a media opportunity, to demand a duty to integrate.
In 2005, after his last election, Tony Blair abandoned Labour’s long-held support for multiculturalism and set out a new deal, a new contract for ethnic minorities, many of whom had been here for generations. Blair’s ‘duty to integrate’ speech in December 2006 called time on the multiculturalism project, arguing that it had led to ‘a separation and alienation from the values that we hold in common’. He defined ‘our values’ as ‘the belief in democracy, the rule of law, tolerance, equal treatment for all, respect for this country and its shared heritage’.25 But the speech was flawed on a number of levels.
It painted a post-racism Britain which simply did not exist in all parts of the United Kingdom, and if we kidded ourselves into believing it did then the post-Brexit rise in hate crime demonstrates we were fooled.26 Tony Blair spoke of media that are ‘more sensitive’, arguing that ‘racism has been for the most part kicked out of sport’ and that ‘offensive remarks and stupid stereotypes have been driven out of conversations [and] basic courtesies have been extended to all people’. A decade on, these words seem naive at best and political platitudes at worst.27 He spoke of these values as being values for us all, including those on the far right, and yet the duty to integrate was firmly aimed at the non-white folk: the ‘adopt our values or stay away’ comment was aimed at the foreigner, the outsider. In reality, it was a speech in response to 7/7 aimed at Muslims.28
The 7/7 bombing was a horrific coming-together of many issues from identity to exclusion, from poverty to a polarized community, from ideological interpretations of Islam to violence expressed as a form of political dissent which resulted in a tragic loss of life and terror on British soil. It also became the basis of bad policy, such as the outright rejection of multiculturalism and dangerous policy-making such as the extended pre-charge detention. It toxified good policy-making on integration by connecting all things integration to all things Muslims and terrorism, a flaw still present in government’s thinking on integration as presented in the Casey Review in 2016.29
A debate on our responsibilities as Brits was long overdue. We have a duty to create a space for all to belong, and a discussion on the kind of Britain we needed to build together was welcome. But instead 7/7 was the start of a long walk away from historic freedoms enshrined in our laws, with politicians on both sides making announcements that allowed them to posture and look tough, and thus feed the very divisions that terrorists needed to exploit young minds.
Years of experience in negotiations in business, politics or even with my children has taught me that win-win solutions are the best ones, that public face-saving oils the wheels of agreement, and ultimatums rarely work.
I agreed with Blair’s statement that ‘no distinctive culture or religion supersedes our duty to be part of an integrated United Kingdom’. I resented his decision to direct it at ‘the Muslims’, to suggest that I was less British.
Britishness became a very popular theme within New Labour. Labour had traditionally had an ambivalent relationship with the concept of a ‘British nation’, many within the party viewing it as being synonymous with the Tory ideas of empire and ‘reactionaryism’. For Labour ‘the nation’ had been about ‘the people’, with the British nation sustained by the ‘social democratic state’: full employment, redistribution, social justice.30
A need to appeal to the splintering working-class vote in some of England’s northern cities, to rebalance Labour’s reputation of being ‘soft’ on immigration and to be seen to be fighting the war on terror at home as well as abroad saw a concept which had traditionally been a Conservative Party ‘issue’ adopted firstly by Blair and then by his Scottish successor, Gordon Brown, who additionally needed to be seen as a prime minister for the whole of the UK, a very British prime minister.
Britishness and British values allowed New Labour to grab the flag of patriotism which traditionally had been the preserve of the Tory Party. It allowed New Labour to redefine itself. It began the most recent process of defining ‘values’ in a way that was, as one Labour minister put it, ‘inspiring as a dusty heirloom’ and Britishness ‘done to’ communities rather than ‘with them’.31
Gordon Brown took up the Britishness rallying call, choosing early on to flex his muscles at his first party conference speech as prime minister in 2007. The International Centre in Bournemouth, beautifully decked in patriotic red, white and blue, provided the backdrop for Brown’s vision of Britishness, the place where he uttered those well-crafted, headline-grabbing but illegal and inapplicable words ‘British jobs for British workers’.32
Politics seemed to have switched around: Labour using the language of the nationalists and the Tories being the party of inclusion. David Cameron’s response at the dispatch box to this outburst, calling Brown out for his dog-whistle politics, was one of his finest moments on the issue of immigration, a glimpse of what David could be. His reference to the term as a phrase borrowed from the National Front and the British National Party33 signalled a place where the Conservatives could have pitched their case for a truly inclusive Britain. I often wondered in government when and how we lost the Cameron of 2005–7.
The David Cameron of that era was talking about our shared values, which had over time evolved through our shared experiences; he spoke fondly of his time living with a family in Birmingham, the Rehmans, Abdullah and Shahida, who welcomed him into their home and gave him a glimpse into British Muslim life.34 He spoke affectionately of Abdullah’s mum and the multi-generational home she headed as a matriarch. He was inspired by the collective family effort to better lives and the notion of respect for the elderly, values, he said, all Brits could learn from and adopt: ‘Not for the first time I found myself thinking that it is mainstream Britain which needs to integrate more with the British Asian way of life, not the other way round.’35 He spoke of ‘the British way of doing things … calm, thoughtful and reasonable’, he insisted that we must ‘never give the impression that this question of Britishness, this question of community cohesion, is all about terrorism, or all about Muslims’.36 And yet by 2011 Cameron was talking about muscular liberalism and Christian values. The debate had moved away from how much we could accommodate in our nation through multiculturalism to how many we could exclude.
The Conservatives became as bad as Labour at inventing a post-multiculturalism narrative by attempting to write off the experience of multiculturalism as a failed project.37
We could have drawn communities together in an understanding of a shared past and the optimism of building a shared future. Sadly the ‘British values’ debate has achieved neither. Instead, it has made the challenges of divided communities worse and has on its journey sown a destructive path of policy-making towards British Muslims which has made neither them nor us any safer, or happier. I will discuss the many mistakes made on this journey in Part Two.
The British values debate has two major flaws. Firstly, there is a suggestion that ‘the list’ of values is exceptionally and exclusively British, and secondly, our history doesn’t always support an adherence to these values. No one religion, race or nation has a monopoly over good or a responsibility for all that is bad. Progress has been the preserve of most races and religions over time and history. Let’s not forget that great civilizations existed around the world thousands of years before we on these shores were introduced to Christianity, what we today profess to base our values on.
Let’s also not forget that one generation’s immorality is another generation’s liberalism. The debate on homosexuality within British society, the Church and indeed the Tory Party has taken many twists and turns before settling where it sits today. Many western Christians, in line with their western Christian beliefs, still travel to Africa to preach to the natives and warn them against allowing their society to fall into moral ruin as they perceive the West has. As Roger Ross Williams a writer and producer of news and entertainment and director of God Loves Uganda, a documentary on the influence of conservative American Christians in Uganda, said: ‘the anti-homosexuality [laws] would never have come about without the involvement of American fundamentalist evangelicals’.38
Our western Christian values took far longer to give women the kinds of rights that were enjoyed by women in other parts of the world, other cultures and other religions. Women in ancient Egypt, for example, enjoyed far greater rights than their sisters in ancient Greece and certainly more than in Christian Britain in the eighteenth century. Indeed, India, Israel and Sri Lanka had female leaders long before we did, whilst Pakistan and Bangladesh have had female heads of states on multiple occasions; the US in 2016 was still not ready to be ruled by a woman, instead preferring a man who thinks it’s OK to grope women and believes in ‘treating ’em like shit’.39
Every community, every generation, every individual is on a journey where views change: some become more conservative, some less so. To acknowledge that would be a good starting point. To go on to acknowledge our own positions, and indeed failings, of the past would give us the much-needed humility to ensure we got things right when trying to define British values and when trying to measure others against these values.
Britain is an amazing country which, despite some of her not-so-glorious moments of the past, has over time always found a way to accommodate those that come to these shores. As a British Muslim there have been moments when I’ve landed back in Britain from some faraway, sometimes Muslim, land and wanted to literally get down on my knees and in true eastern style kiss the tarmac at the airport. Not because I’d travelled budget airline for many hours and was grateful to step out of my chicken-coop seat in one piece and feel land underfoot but because I was grateful to the Almighty that I was born a free person in a free land, where difference isn’t just protected but celebrated; where, despite all our challenges, the daughter of a penniless immigrant millworker could come to sit at the cabinet table, become a privy councillor and pay the higher-rate tax; where as a woman I feel safer than I’ve felt anywhere in the so-called ‘Muslim world’; where I can be my opinionated self without official sanction or censure; where, despite our great love for animal welfare, we can ‘understand’ and ‘accommodate’ the dietary needs of Jews and Muslims with their very prescriptive slaughter methods; and where, if I want to pray, I can pretty much get my prayer mat out almost anywhere publicly or privately and check in with the Almighty, possibly even on the tarmac as I disembark.
But it was multiculturalism that made the above possible. It was the basis of what led to deep affection and pride-filled admiration from minorities all over the world who made this island their home. It has made Britain stronger. So let’s not dismiss one of our greatest values, the value of equal worth. By all means suggest ways of improving it but don’t throw out all that went before.
We have a duty to lay out what this country stands for whilst accepting that what it stands for will change and evolve over time, and that what we criticize others for today were ‘our values’ not so long ago. And just as we over time have changed our ‘values’, so will others. The election of Trump and the ‘values’ he espouses also shows that the direction of travel is not just one way: we cannot take our current values for granted.
Let’s lay out a vision of a future, ideals upon which we can build a home together, as described by ex-Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks, a set of virtues that lay the foundation, the basis of belonging, and let’s make sure we demand the same of all for whom Britain is home.
This shared home must have foundations formed from history, walls based on virtues evolved through our collective shared experience and a roof where all can feel sheltered. And these are laid block by block, brick by brick. It’s something we build together. Britain never has been nor ever will be the finished product. It is ever-evolving and, whatever we say about Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights, today’s Britain in gender, race, religion, ethnicity or sexuality is a very different place from what it was when these great documents were written. It is even a very different place from what it was after we signed up to Human Rights Convention obligations, a different place from when the Human Rights Act was born in 2008 and indeed a different place since we’ve decided to leave the European Union. It’s a different place to the one my grandfathers fought for, my parents migrated to, and I was born into. Our so called unshakeable Christian British values have evolved and will continue to do so and should acknowledge and encompass the history of all communities that make up today’s Britain, the diversity of faith practices and the journeys of those different faiths. This history is colourful and complex and unlike the British national identity that is based on generalizations that ‘involve a selective and simplified account of a complex history’, where ‘many complicated strands are reduced to a simple tale of essential and enduring national unity’.40
And what makes the current-day debate on Britishness and British values even more problematic is that we have developed a notion which is neither clearly defined, nor honestly underpinned, nor transparently or consistently applied. We do not have an agreed single definition of Britishness and British values. There is no Act of Parliament, no debate in Hansard, no common-law precedent, no agreed guidance and no applied casework. It’s a vague, abstract notion which has the potential to destroy reputations and marginalize communities, as I will discuss in Chapter 5.
The deeply worrying part of the debate about British values – in all its murky glory – is that it is often only directed at British Muslims. I’ve yet to see a politician go to a synagogue, gurdwara, temple or church and address the Jews, the Sikhs, the Hindus, the Christians or indeed any other group and talk British values. I’ve yet to see a policy announcement on British values which is directed at a specific ethnic or religious group other than ‘the Muslims’, despite the fact that many a Jewish girl in London isn’t permitted to study beyond sixteen and her role is deemed to be to bear children and be subservient to her husband; many a Sikh girl has suffered physical and emotional abuse for simply daring to marry the man of her choice or forced into and trapped in marriage for years (indeed, much of the early campaigning against forced marriages was led by an impressive and courageous Sikh woman, Jasvinder Sanghera);41 many a Hindu man has been told he is not as good as another Hindu in the workplace because of the caste/tribe he was born into;42 many a child has been branded a witch and abused43 with the Church’s knowledge; and many a ‘cure’ has been developed by evangelical Christians for the immoral and sick gays.44
Now there are those who will argue, as Twitter trolls regularly remind me, that the reason these policies are aimed at British Muslims and not other communities is because they, ‘the Muslims’, are the ones blowing themselves up. Indeed, in Britain four terrorists who were Muslim have blown themselves up. But this ‘Muslims are fair game because some terrorists claim to be Muslim’ approach is flawed for two fundamental reasons. Firstly, because it’s crazy negotiation tactics to assume we will get what we want from a community of 3 million by treating them all like they are viewed through the prism of the actions of a tiny number of them. And secondly, the moment we impose a set of rules, laws and demands on one community and not on others we have stepped away from our own supposedly inviolable values of equality, rule of law and sense of fair play. We must lay out what it is we find unacceptable and implement it consistently across communities. The duty to integrate must apply to all of us, all faiths, all races, and must target both religious and cultural separatists and white-flighters.
Sadly the modern-day debate on British values and Britishness is a yardstick with which we measure the views and conduct of a minority of a minority. A senior Catholic cleric described it to me as a ‘loyalty test’. There have been rare examples of ‘others’, not Muslims, being caught in the net, but these are exceptions, rarely profiled in the mainstream media and rarely quoted, indeed often defended by politicians.45
‘British values’ has become the space where we police views and thoughts, where we punish opinions which do not break the law. It is government’s version of what it, from its particular political and ideological perspective, finds acceptable at this moment in time. It’s a criterion against which we measure what we today define as non-violent extremist views – so, not terrorism, not action, not even views that are inciting, encouraging or promoting violence or even hatred, because we have criminal laws which cover all this, but views which neither break the law nor incite others to break the law.
This issue was in the 1990s an abstract debate in right-wing think tanks, amongst neo-conservative writers and commentators predominantly in the US, and yet today, sadly, it has become an integral part of our children’s lives through newly designed Ofsted inspections following the Trojan Horse affair.46
From September 2014 all schools – independent schools, academies, free schools and all local authority-run schools – are required ‘actively to promote fundamental British values’.47 This teaching of British values was rejected in 2016 by teachers, who passed a motion at the annual National Union of Teachers conference arguing that the approach set an ‘inherent cultural supremacism, particularly in the context of multicultural schools and the wider picture of migration’.48 A teacher speaking at the conference said that the term was both unnecessary and unacceptable and ‘belies the most thinly veiled racism and a conscious effort to divide communities’.
It’s a concept that children don’t understand. When questioned, schoolchildren cited ‘fish and chips’, ‘drinking tea’ and ‘celebrating the Queen’s birthday’ as manifestations of British values, whilst others ironically defined them as ‘Pick on someone different to you’ and ‘We need to get rid of these immigrants, they’re taking our jobs.’49
A report by Open Society Foundation suggests that the concept of British values could be alienating and counterproductive, with Scottish government officials cited in that report saying that they don’t use the term because it could promote a ‘them and us’ thinking.50
If the notion of British values is revisionist in its view of history, if the teaching of British values does not acknowledge the real journey we took to get here, if it fails to balance our successes as a nation against our failures and if it isn’t honest and inclusive it will not act as the glue that binds our nation. What binds us is a strength in who we are based on our past, good and bad, an acknowledgement that we got much right but others got it right too, an honesty in acknowledging the time and route we took to arrive at our current understanding of ‘our values’, an acceptance that some got to this destination long before others and some are still finding their way here, and an acceptance that the values we speak of today have been many years in the making with much contribution from others, either those whose lands we went to or those who came to our lands, others including ‘the Muslims’. Championing values without following those values simply backfires and renders our values valueless. In promoting tolerance we can’t be intolerant of others’ views, experiences and contributions. As a nation, whenever we have found a view or type of behaviour or conduct intolerable we usually make it a criminal offence or a civil wrong. We have had laws to enforce what at any point we perceive as the standard of acceptable behaviour. We did it with race relations legislation, with disability protection, with laws against domestic violence, with gay rights and with human rights laws. Our laws, British laws, lay out what is acceptable and what isn’t, and all of us as citizens of this nation are equal before the law and have equal rights of recourse to the law, which is applied equally to all of us. This is the rule of law, another cited British value.
Unfortunately the current debate on British values has done exactly the opposite. An intolerant view about others is viewed as non-violent extremism in government circles, but the only form of ‘extremism’ which is specifically and extensively defined is Islamist extremism. No detailed definition and explanation was given of far-right extremism, animal rights extremism or even the everyday extremism and sectarianism we sadly still see in Northern Ireland.
The British values debate has most recently taken on a sinister tone, expressing a view that there are ‘the others’ amongst us who don’t think like we do, don’t behave like we do and don’t believe in what we believe. They are unique, different, don’t fit in, don’t belong, need to be dealt with in a way quite different from ever before, because they are, as described by Trevor Phillips, the ex-chairman of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, a ‘nation within a nation’. Phillips wasn’t talking about the cast of Geordie Shore or TOWIE, he was talking about your local corner-shop guy, your taxi driver, your dentist and your GP, the enemy within, ‘the Muslims’.
In his documentary What Do Muslims Really Think?, Phillips tried to show that ‘the Muslims’ were uniquely out of step with the rest of Britain in their values,51 a view subsequently contradicted in a report only months later which found that ‘Britain’s Muslims are amongst the country’s most loyal, patriotic and law-abiding citizens … upstanding members of society, who share many of the same ambitions and priorities as their fellow non-Muslim Britons’.52 And yet Phillips suggested that not only were they not ‘like us’ now, but because ‘the Muslims’ were unlike anything we had encountered before they were never going to be ‘like us’, they were not going to ‘join our values’, as other comers-in before them had done. We couldn’t sit by and hope that ‘the Muslims’ would simply join the values that we, whoever we are, had in the Britain of 2016. In other words, ‘the Muslims’ were exceptional and needed to be treated in a way we hadn’t treated ‘others’ before them. He justified his views by referencing British Muslim views on homosexuality, on women’s rights and on violence.53
Phillips’ focus on points of difference and disregard for points of similarity between communities, his failure to refer to a plethora of polls conducted over the last decade or so which showed that Muslims have a strong sense of belonging and support for British institutions, more so than white Brits, damaged and muddied an important and necessary debate.54 Indeed, polls after the Brexit vote showed that, where large numbers of white voters felt English and voted to leave Europe,55 Muslims felt both British and pro-European in larger numbers.56 So the approach in this documentary was both disingenuous and divisive. By using British values as a measure of belonging, we are undermining those values.
Viewers of the documentary were not told that the poll in its methodology had targeted those Muslims who were likely to be living in segregated, poor communities rather than those who live in less segregated and more mixed communities. It wasn’t highlighted that the comparison of the ‘Muslims’ views’ was not with those of the Jews or the Christians or indeed other faith groups but with those of the general public, which in large numbers identifies itself as having no religion or faith.57 The documentary failed to tell the journey of how ‘other communities’, including white British Christians, had over time changed their views on homosexuality and women’s rights and it failed to place the poll in any historical context. Had Phillips done so, he would have found that many in my own political party, the Conservatives, and many in evangelical Christian and orthodox Jewish, Sikh and Hindu communities probably held the same views now and indeed much worse in the not-very-distant past. Indeed, they are views that columnist Melanie Phillips in 2011 felt were very legitimate, lamenting that ‘Anyone who goes against the politically correct grain on homosexuality or who has robust Christian views must be considered a bigot and thus have no place in public life … [this] obsession with equality has now reached ludicrous as well as oppressive proportions.’58
There is much anxiety amongst communities that a notion which all believed was about dealing with ‘the Muslims’ is now having much broader consequences. Indeed, other faith communities are starting both to feel the heat and to raise their concerns about the application of ‘British values’.59
A British identity is more than a citizenship, it’s a belonging. It’s a shared identity around which the descendants of migrants from Africa and Asia, English patriots, Scottish nationalist and ‘Muslims’ of numerous varieties can coalesce. It’s the space that belongs to all of us for whom Britain is home.60 As Bikhu Lord Parekh argues, just as Britain ‘has learned to respect the diversity of its four nations over time it should respect the diversity of its immigrants’, others who now make up this nation.61
Values are transitionary; they are a snapshot of our sensibilities at a moment in time. Principles, virtues and historic truths are enduring, good travelling companions which root and anchor us, sustain and strengthen us in this journey our nation is on. Building a shared identity, forging ideals we all aspire to be true to rather than making demands to endorse values is the approach we need to adopt to build a resilient nation which lives out what it actually stands for rather than a nation that simply talks about what it thinks it stood for.
I am absolutely of the view that in Britain we can build such a resilient, cohesive nation, but to do so well let’s start with admitting the mistakes of the past, especially the decade after 7/7.