Judge them by thir actions, not their words

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The Home Secretary has announced that because people from certain countries who come to the UK as students are more likely than those from other countries to then apply for asylum, she will ban anyone from those countries coming to the UK on a student visa. She could just as easily – and just as truthfully – have said that students coming from a country where there is conflict are more likely to apply for asylum than those from countries where there is no conflict. Who’d have thought it? It’s almost as though people coming from places where they have genuine reasons to seek asylum might be more likely to seek asylum.

Treating people on the basis of being able to place them in a certain category rather than looking at them as individuals is always going to be problematic. I’m pretty certain that people with dark skin coming to the UK on student visas are more likely to apply for asylum than people with fair skin, although I’ll admit that I don’t have hard evidence to back that up, other than the entirely coincidental fact that it is true of all the countries she has selected. If the Home Secretary banned all those of a darker hue from applying for student visas, she would be more roundly condemned than she has been. Her announcement yesterday was not as overtly racist as that would be, even if the effect might end up indirectly discriminating on race. It is, though, much the same thing – treating people on the basis of a collective attribute rather than their individual circumstances.

It is essentially a lazy response to a complex issue. “Some of that group might apply for asylum, so we’ll ban all of them from studying here” might attract a positive headline from the right wing media, but it doesn’t reflect any sense of fairness or compassion. Insofar as I understand ‘traditional British values’, it’s also deeply un-British. But then again, I’ve long stopped trying to understand those values in terms of what people say they are – actions tell an entirely different story.

Hooray for English culture...

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‘Culture’ is hard enough to define; it’s even harder to prescribe it. Yet that, apparently, is what the Tories under Badenoch are proposing to do. If only a single, universalised form of British culture could be inculcated into young people, the British nation would be more united, resolute and generally happy than it is today. Allegedly. How this would be achieved is not entirely clear, but there would be something called an ‘integration and cohesion plan’, and schools would play a role in teaching a single ‘national story’. I’m struggling a little, though, to distinguish between what she is proposing and what Russia is doing, not only in its own territory, but also in occupied areas of Ukraine.

It is, of course, heavily Anglo-centric. Whilst the culture warriors of Britishness are generally keen on promoting Shakespeare and the benefits of Empire across the whole of the UK, they’re not usually so keen on introducing Dafydd ap Gwilym or Robert Burns to English pupils. It also takes us into the realm of those ‘great British values’ which distinguish – in their eyes – the people of these islands from everyone else in the world. Things like deference to the rule of law (except international law, obviously, given Badenoch’s complaint yesterday that Starmer was too slow in supporting Trump’s illegal war against Iran). Things like parliamentary democracy (unless ‘silly people’ in parliament might dare to vote the wrong way). Things like due process (unless that process gets in the way of the government doing whatever it wishes).

Harri Webb’s somewhat irreverent caricature of English culture (“tuneless songs and tasteless jokes and blowsy bags undressing”) was not particularly complimentary; nor was it the sort of language a serious politician would use today. Refuting it, though, requires a definition of what exactly English culture is, and that is something which sound-bite Badenoch hasn’t even attempted. We shouldn’t be surprised, though. Defining culture is hard – and it’s a moving target, because no culture stands still. That statement might, however, go to the heart of the problem with Badenoch’s proposals. It’s a good rule of thumb that any politician seeking to inculcate a particular view of the world – whether it be based on values, culture, history or whatever – is usually espousing an idealised or romanticised version of how things were in some unspecified golden age in the past. Invariably, it wasn’t even accurate then.

Holding up a whole civilisation

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Perhaps it’s inevitable that a person elected to the leadership of a major political party starts to believe that the whole world is hanging on his or her every word. It’s a heady position in which to find oneself, with access to media coverage all but guaranteed. An exaggerated sense of self-importance comes with the territory. But there’s the ordinary, everyday exaggerated sense of self-importance – and then there’s Kemi Badenoch. In her case, it’s not just an inflated sense of the importance of what she has to say; she genuinely seems to believe that the whole future of Western civilisation is now hanging on her ability to renew the English Conservative and Unionist Party. ‘Renew’ is another of those ‘interesting’ words which means whatever the person using it wants it to mean, but is intended to convey some sort of revival. In her case, it seems to include the elimination of dissident thought, another of those British values which seems to have passed me by.

Uniquely, it seems, in her deluded understanding of world events, the values that make the West what it is – or at least, her interpretation of those values, which just possibly, maybe, might not be the same thing, although it would be a brave person that might try and tell her that – are now uniquely to be found amongst those in that party who think like her. And she seems not even to realise the extent to which she is carving out a minority status for herself, even amongst the dwindling ranks of her party’s membership.

The thing is, it’s actually difficult to discern from what she says what her understanding of those values is. Certainly it seems to include the right to hold and express racist or misogynistic views, to discriminate against anyone who doesn’t conform to ‘the norm’, and to believe that some entire cultures are inherently inferior to the one to which she thinks that she belongs (although, whisper it quietly, at least some of those to whom she is seeking to appeal might just harbour some doubts as to whether she can ever fit into their own definition of the superior culture). The problem with banging on about British or Western values is that they are pretty poorly defined. What the term actually means seems to depend on the perspective of the person banging on about them at the time. But to the extent that there are some underlying shared values, I had thought that they included things like the rule of law, fairness, equality, compassion and tolerance, none of which actually seem to shine through her words on the issue. Perhaps the values changed at some point and I just didn’t get the memo.

They know their members

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Those great British values so beloved of the Home Secretary, or at least her new degraded version of them, have been making a number of outings in recent days. Apparently, showing any sympathy for people who end up sleeping rough is now un-British, as is failure to support all of the institutions of the state, and holding a demonstration of any sort on 11^th November. One rather suspects that they actually wanted to criminalise failing to kick homeless people, failure to wear a poppy, failure to observe the two minutes’ silence, and failure to be an ardent monarchist. And, probably, failure to be a member of the Tory Party. The only thing that stopped them is the realisation that they don’t have enough prison cells or detention camps to house all the people who would thereby be criminalised. Yet.

In truth, they will have real difficulty in drawing up legislation to implement these totalitarian views, unless it simply says that the police can and must do whatever the Home Secretary tells them to do. Keeping it simple. Barring that, for instance, if they ban giving tents to the homeless, will they also ban giving them money for a cup of tea? And if it’s OK to give them money, will there be a limit on it, or can we give them enough to buy a tent? And even if there is a limit, what if a group of people gang together and collectively give someone enough to buy a tent?

The devil, as they say, is in the detail, and the detail will give the legal draftsmen nightmares, if it ever gets to the point of drawing up legislation. I doubt, thought, that it ever will; it’s all about winning votes rather than passing laws. I don’t know how many voters at large will be attracted by such a programme, although I’m sure that the number isn’t as low as I would like. But that isn’t the target electorate in this case: the target is those people who will have a vote in the forthcoming leadership election in the Tory Party. Those putting forward this sort of proposals have used their best judgement and concluded that that particular electorate contains many of the most nasty, cruel, inhumane, unempathetic, jingoistic, backward-looking, and mean people in the UK. It’s not often that I concur with the judgement of Suella Braverman.

Forming an orderly queue

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The Tories are fond of reminding us of the importance of what they like to call ‘British’ values, albeit occasionally prefaced by the counter-productive adjective ‘Great’ with its implication that Northern Ireland is excluded. They are rather less proficient at articulating what those values might be, or at least of doing so in a way which makes their actions in any way correspond to the values expressed in their words. When I try and compile a list of what I always thought were key elements of ‘British’ values, what immediately springs to mind is the way in which the current government undermines them rather than supporting them: think honesty, integrity, rule of law (domestic and international), fairness, justice and compassion, just for starters.

There is, however, one British attribute to which Tory MPs do indeed seem to subscribe in both word and deed, and that is the propensity for forming an orderly queue. It’s not a uniquely British trait, of course – Russians, particularly from the Soviet era, could teach us a lot about the etiquette of queuing. But perhaps the biggest problem with this particular element of Britishness is to do with what they are queuing for. And in the case of Tory MPs, it’s the queue to take their place in the scandal stakes. No sooner does Sunak allow himself a small sigh of relief as one of his MPs is effectively expelled from the House, than another manages to get himself arrested. It’s all very courteous, the way in which they patiently wait their turn to grab the headlines, and it’s been going on for a long time now. I’ve lost count of how many have patiently stepped up to the plate, but one way or another, the Tories are down from 365 at the last election to around 352 today. And the arrow is pointing in only one direction.

The thing is that nobody, not even – or perhaps, especially not – Sunak, knows how many more are currently standing in the queue. All we know is that as soon as the one at the head of the queue gets ‘processed’ another steps forward to take his or her (usually his) place in the headlines. The only good news for Sunak is that, at the rate of, say, one a fortnight, we are unlikely to get far enough through the queue to completely destroy his majority. Only his reputation, mental balance, and hairline. I can almost imagine that he might rather prefer that they abandoned that patient British attitude to queuing and all of the MPs currently in the queue rushed forwards at once. At least he’d then know the scale of the problem. On second thoughts, that’s probably something he’d rather not know. And spotting an empty queue would probably only encourage more of them to join it.

Could Braverman be right?

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The Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, has been roundly criticised for recent speeches in which she has argued that immigration threatens the UK’s identity and values. But there are two possible ways in which her claim that immigrants and their descendants are “not embracing British values” may not be entirely inaccurate.

If we look at a few prominent second and third generation immigrants, there is indeed some evidence that they are not embracing traditional British values. Take, for example, er, Suella Braverman. This is someone who believes that lawyers should not be allowed to use the provisions of the law to aid their clients, that the UK should renege on its international treaty obligations, that people should be detained without trial in camps, that homophobia is normal and widespread, that British values include hostility and cruelty to distressed people arriving on our shores, and that racists are afraid of expressing their views for fear of being labelled as racists. Or take Priti Patel, who believes that British values allow the UK to use wave machines which would probably overturn small boats, with an accompanying risk of drowning people as a result. Then there’s Kemi Badenoch, another advocate for reneging on international treaties. Or how about Rishi Sunak, the man who appointed all of these people to high office, validates their positions and words on an almost daily basis, and for whom dishonesty in his words is second nature. Oh, and who also believes, somewhat bizarrely, that British values revolve around the use of the private motor car. (Maybe he’s forgotten where he is, and is referring to his preferred home in California?)

The argument that this provides evidence for her thesis that immigrants are not embracing British values falls down however, because these values aren’t restricted to immigrants and their descendants. The values held by all of these individuals may not be the traditional values which many of us thought were widely held in Britain, but they’re not out of line with the ‘new’ British values of the Conservative Party. That brings us, however, to the second sense in which she may be right after all.

I have no figures or hard evidence to back this up, but observation and experience lead me to believe that many immigrants and their descendants are more firmly wedded to what one might call ‘traditional’ British values than the modern Conservative Party. Things like the rule of law, tolerance, fair play, honesty, a sense of justice, welcoming others. And immigrants and their descendants may well be more resistant than others to swapping those for the ‘new’ values of intolerance, dishonesty, disregard for the law, and cruelty to others which have taken hold in the Conservative Party. If by “not embracing British values” she really means that most immigrants and their descendants don’t share her values, then she may have a point. Her error is in seeing that as a bad thing.

Values are reflected in actions, not words

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The news that the Home Secretary’s response to critical inspection reports at immigration detention centres was to stop the inspections ought to be shocking, but in the case of Suella Braverman it is entirely in line with her general approach. The decision, taken after the last report in September 2022, and accompanied by a decision not to extend the term of office of the ‘independent’ inspector, does not augur well for the implementation of the report of the latest inquiry into conditions at one centre. Apparently Home Office officials were reported as saying that the reports were “excessively critical”. From their perspective, it seems, the purpose of an ‘independent’ report is to tell the government what a wonderful job it is doing, not to report on actual conditions.

The inquiry report, along with the undercover Panorama programme which provoked it, tells a dismal story of inhumane and degrading treatment being meted out to vulnerable people as though it were an entirely normal way to behave. The overall culture, of course, starts from the top: even if she didn’t intend (and that’s giving her an awful lot of benefit of the doubt) people to behave quite so brutally, the Home Secretary’s language and rhetoric has repeatedly suggested a degree of contempt and disregard for those people detained on her orders. And culture set from the top filters down through the ranks, and gets reflected in appalling behaviour at the level of those in direct contact with those whom she clearly regards as people without rights.

Yet there is something about this which worries me more. Those doing the degrading and the insulting are, outside of their work, probably indistinguishable ordinary citizens. People with families and friends; people who shop and socialise in the same places as the rest of us. However normal they may appear when out and about in society, in the workplace they have become brutalised and desensitized to the needs of other human beings, whom they have come to see as somehow less than human. It’s not the first time in history that it’s happened and nor is it the worst example, but here, close at hand, we can see how easy it is for inhumanity to express itself through apparently ordinary individuals. Once a culture sets in, it spreads. Most of us would like to think that we’re immune, but a famous psychology experiment in the past has shown how easy it is for people to become cruel when ‘authority’ tells them to.

‘I was only obeying orders’ (even if, in the specific case of the detention centre, it isn’t direct ‘orders’ as such, merely a question of falling in with the general culture) has always been a poor excuse. Fear of the consequences of failing to follow orders is easier to understand, although the effect is the same. But the evident and proven facility with which people can fall into cruel patterns of behaviour when encouraged to do so by those in authority places even more responsibility on those setting the culture, as well as those managing an organisation at all levels, to take care with their words and actions. It’s a responsibility which Braverman cannot even begin to comprehend. And knowing what she’s doing whilst doing nothing to stop it makes Sunak every bit as complicit. When we want to know what are those great British values which allegedly unite us, the actions, or inactions, of the government tell us a great deal more than their words.

Not doing as we do

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It says a lot about the current state of the Conservative Party that the living, breathing refutation of the concept of nominative determinism is rising through the ranks of those considered possible next leaders, with the party’s internal league table showing only two ministers ahead of him: one who is obviously mad and another who is leaving parliament at the next election. As if being appointed to his current job was not adequate proof, in itself, of the dearth of talent in the party.

He's taken himself off to China this week to ask the country’s leaders very politely if they will please be a little nicer in their relationships with the rest of the world, stop being quite so friendly with Russia, and perhaps think about respecting the human rights of Chinese citizens. The last part of that is something where he feels himself to be under some sort of obligation to say he’s raised the issue, but it may actually be more akin to a study trip, to enable him to make a better contribution to the next cabinet discussion on restricting the rights of UK citizens. Indeed, I wonder how long it will be before leaders of other countries visiting the UK will be obliged to excuse their visits by saying that they’ve raised the issue of human rights abuses with UK ministers. Perhaps they already have; but it isn’t the sort of thing we should expect to be reported here, just as the People’s Daily is unlikely to report that particular part of Cleverly’s discussions with the Chinese government. Whatever he himself might learn from the trip, he’ll probably be hoping that those travelling with him will not be studying the way in which the Chinese government can make Foreign Ministers disappear, whatever hopes some of us might harbour.

In a move which will surely help Cleverly in his attempts to influence China, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Commons chose today to publish a highly critical report on China, including a statement which implies recognition of the independence of Taiwan, although whether it will influence China in the desired direction is open to debate. The Chair of that committee said it was crucial that Cleverly communicated during his meetings that “we will not stand for transnational repression or drift towards authoritarianism”. As a statement of the UK’s position, it’s only a half-truth – the sub-clause, “unless it’s in or by the UK”, seems to be missing. That omission helps to underline, however, that the whole basis for the visit is the deranged belief that a middling size state actively isolating itself offshore from the most integrated continent on the planet can seriously hope to influence a country rapidly becoming the world’s biggest and strongest economy by appealing to a set of values which it itself is busily abandoning. It’s a classic piece of English exceptionalism in action.

Free speech and values

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There seems to be a general consensus amongst politicians that banks should not be allowed to refuse to serve customers on the basis of their views, but I wonder how robust that consensus is, and how general its application. We know, for instance, that Nigel Farage certainly believes that businesses should be allowed to refuse to provide services to those who offend his own particular sense of morality, since this was actual UKIP policy when he was its leader. Can we really draw such a clear distinction between views on homosexuality and views on politics as supporters of Farage would suggest (the former being, in their eyes, purely a ‘moral’ rather than political standpoint)? If staff or owners of some companies providing services to the public were to have the legal right, as he suggested, to refuse to provide some of those services on the basis of their interpretation of their religion, should staff in other companies really be obliged to deal with racists and misogynists? At what point do political views diverge so far from socially accepted norms that it becomes reasonable for staff to refuse to serve those who hold them? At the risk of finding myself in breach of Godwin’s Law, would Coutts (in an admittedly completely hypothetical situation) be justified in refusing an account to a Hitler, or a Stalin?

It suits Farage and his supporters, of course, to paint this as a simple issue of freedom of speech, in which Farage, rather incredibly, emerges as the victim. In truth, it’s rather more nuanced than that. If a company is allowed to subscribe to a set of values (and most of them claim to do so these days, apparently) rather than simply being compelled to serve anyone and everyone who meets a set of strictly commercial criteria, then expecting that company to facilitate those who seek to undermine or negate those values defeats the objective. There is a case for compelling any organisation providing services to the public to use only commercial criteria and forget about ‘values’ – but that isn’t the case that Farage and his ilk are making. And nor, I suspect, is it what many would want. He has – not for the first time – succeeded in dominating the news agenda on a completely false prospectus.

Drifting apart

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The main driver for the establishment of the European Convention of Human Rights in 1950, on which the European Court of Human Rights was based, was a certain Mr Churchill, and most of the drafting was done by British lawyers. It was heavily based on the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and was intended to provide a framework to prevent the sort of inhuman treatment of some groups which had bedevilled the European continent over the previous two decades. The values underpinning it were at that time generally (outside the UK at least) believed to be close to universal, with only rogue states declining to ratify the convention and join the court. It was one of the earliest and best achievements of pan-European co-operation and understanding.

It is strange that the state which did so much to ensure that it was written and implemented should now be the one most critical of its very existence. Even stranger is some of the language being used to justify that scepticism. A few days ago, the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman (and it continues to astound me that those four words can be used in conjunction), declared that "… it's a court which is politicised, …” and “I think sometimes the jurisprudence from the Strasbourg court is at odds with … British values more generally." For a court largely based on British values and the British interpretation of human rights to have strayed so far from its original mission would be quite a change. But wait – we need to allow for that strange Anglo-centric view of the world which has infected the Tory Party here. Because what’s changed isn’t the values – those ‘universal’ values – which were at the heart of the establishment of the court, but the values and beliefs of the English Government. Only a perverse Anglo-centric view of the world could conclude that it's everybody else who is out of step with ‘us’. And her suggestion that the court is politicised seems to be code for failing to do what the greatest nation on earth, as they see it, requires of it, which is to allow it to erode, step by step, those rights which the court is bound to uphold.

It might have been the British government and British lawyers who led the process of establishing the convention and the court, and the supremacists and exceptionalists amongst them (of which there were many) may well have believed that they were imposing British values on the rest of the continent in order to save it from itself, but they were not and are not exclusively British values. And they’re no longer even commonly-held in the UK. In the 1950s, it would probably have been fair to assume both that those values were commonly held across the UK and that many in the UK really did believe them to be uniquely British. Today, it is obvious that they are wrong on both counts. Not only is the English government increasingly an outlier within Europe, it is also becoming an outlier within the UK itself. The gulf between the values being expressed by the English government and those being expressed by the governments in Wales and Scotland is increasingly wide, and it’s hard to see how they can be reconciled in the long term. Whilst much of the debate around independence centres on economics, the question of shared values and a shared ethos is equally important. When those things no longer exist, what is the glue which makes people feel like part of a single whole? Just as England is drifting away from its continental neighbours, so it is also drifting away from those who share these islands with it.

The values that unite us

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Those ‘great British values’ which apparently unite all of us who live on this island and distinguish us from the rest of the world have been on display again in recent days.

Yesterday, the PM praised ‘greed’ as a motivating factor before realising that he might have gone a bit too far and desperately asking people to allow him to unsay it. It was a rare moment of honesty from an inveterate liar (the saying of it, that is, not the attempt to unsay it) and an insight into the way the Tory mind works. It isn’t actually true, of course – not everyone, and not even every capitalist, is motivated solely by personal greed; if it were true, then capitalism would have collapsed a long time ago. And in the specific context of the vaccination programme, whilst Johnson may see their role as secondary to that of the pharmaceutical companies developing the vaccines, the role of volunteers and underpaid and dedicated NHS staff has been crucial. If greed were their only motive, there wouldn’t have been much of a programme. It is, though, part of the mindset of people like Johnson that the ‘little people’ don’t really count and contribute little – ‘success’ is measured by the ability of the ‘winners’ to extract great personal wealth from the economy at the expense of the rest of us, who are seen as ‘losers’.

Also yesterday, the Home Secretary made further announcements on the proposed new regime for handling asylum-seekers. Fresh from the news that she was planning to ship them elsewhere (it doesn’t matter where and neither does it matter whether the places to which they are to be shipped are happy to take them or not), she is proposing that even some of those granted asylum will remain liable to deportation indefinitely. This is the same Home Secretary who is behind the plans to outlaw many expressions of dissent.

Meanwhile, a few days ago, we had a Tory MP suggesting that anyone who does not love the hereditary monarch and the union flag should be encouraged to go and live elsewhere, and another Tory MP decided to use a parliamentary examination of the BBC to complain about the lack of union flags in the BBC’s annual report and demand that there should be more next year.

Veneration of greed, contempt for any display of altruism, inhumane treatment of refugees, outlawing dissent, unconditional support for heredity as a means of choosing the head of state, and a demand that a cloth symbol hanging from a pole be the object of love and admiration if we want to stay in the country of our birth – these are the ‘great British values’ on display this week. These are the values which they claim as unifying factors. They really are their own worst enemies.

Morality in trade

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There’s nothing particularly new about the idea that morality, standards, and values have a role to play in deciding whether, and with whom, to negotiate international trade deals. Whilst trade usually promotes greater prosperity, the impact of that on the way a country is governed is a lot less obvious. On the one hand, increasing prosperity may help to legitimise a regime and encourage people to be less critical of their own government; on the other, people who aren’t spending their whole lives scratching a bare living can find they have more time for involvement in debate and politics, and greater international links can help them to understand better the freedoms which they don’t have. So, whether increasing trade helps to suppress or encourage opposition to unpleasant regimes is far from being clear-cut – both sides in the argument can draw on some evidence for their point of view.

The question has come to the fore over recent weeks as the UK attempts the hopeless task of replacing what were, until this year, extremely close trading links with near neighbours with necessarily looser links with countries much further away. And there are some pretty unsavoury regimes involved. Some MPs in all parties have been questioning whether the UK should continue to seek trade deals with countries run by authoritarian regimes, countries which outlaw dissent, and countries which don’t respect human rights or international law. The concerns are valid; not all countries can be depended upon to uphold the same standards, and the issue, at its simplest, is to what extent any country should be signing deals with countries which adopt lower standards than itself.

The UK has, though, come up with a novel approach which could eliminate the question, and which is entirely in line with the Brexit way of thinking. It is that the UK should lower its own standards to match more closely those of the regimes with which it wishes to do trade deals. More authoritarianism, less democracy, clamping down on protest and dissent, opting out of human rights legislation, and breaching international treaties and laws – these are the core elements of the current government’s programme. Whilst this might remove any need for moral considerations when the UK is negotiating trade deals with similarly unsavoury regimes, that English sense of exceptionalism which characterises the current government’s approach may be preventing them from seeing the slight little problemette which may arise as a consequence, which is that other countries may simply add the UK to their own lists of countries with which signing trade deals raises some serious moral issues. Believing that morality in trade is a uniquely British value, and that morality can therefore be defined as being whatever the UK does, might just turn out to be as silly in practice as it sounds in theory.

Saturday was not just a one-off 'mistake'

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Throughout the pandemic, there have been regular calls from some for the police to be more pro-active against those breaking the coronavirus rules, demanding a crackdown with more fines and arrests. On Saturday, the Metropolitan Police gave us a clear demonstration of what a crackdown looks like. Suddenly, it seems that some of those previously egging the police on to do more to enforce the rules aren’t quite so sure – or, rather, they want to apply different rules to different groups and causes. Clearly the police could and should have adopted a different approach to the proposed vigil and worked with the organisers to ensure that the event could take place in as safe a way as possible; the flat refusal to do so underlines a degree of incompetence and lack of empathy which is hard to understand. But on what basis do we expect the police to distinguish between, say, a beach party and a vigil, both of which involve an assembly of a greater number of people than is permitted under current legislation? That is not to argue that there is some sort of equivalence there; clearly there is not. But distinguishing between the two involves the application of values and judgement, and there is a real question as to whether the police are the best people to make that call, particularly if their role is defined simply as ‘upholding the law’.

Differential application of the law is, of course, one of those traditional British values of which politicians are so fond, although that isn’t the way they usually describe it. In practice, Lady Justice has never been as unseeing as the blindfold she traditionally wears might lead us to believe. Being part of the ruling elite has long bestowed a degree of indemnity – the Covid rules applied to Cummings were clearly not the same rules being applied to others, to quote just one recent example, and there was never the same expectation that someone like him should abide by the rules. It hasn’t always been as blatant or rampant as it has become since England elected a fundamentally dishonest man as its Prime Minister. Previous regimes haven’t always been as confident about what they could get away with, but the current regime seems to be pushing at an open door. The new Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill currently wending its way through parliament actively seeks to extend police powers to decide what is or is not ‘acceptable’ behaviour, including criminalising any assembly of people which causes “serious annoyance”, effectively giving the police on the spot the power to decide the meaning of both ‘serious’ and ‘annoyance’. They are targeting dissent and opposition.

For many of us, Saturday’s events underline the need for policing in a democracy to be based first and foremost on consent and a sense of social solidarity; but the current government is taking us in a completely different direction, where policing is seen as enforcement of rules by whatever means are necessary. To them, Saturday will look simply like a one-off mistake, rather than a problem with the approach. If they come under enough pressure, a sacrificial head might roll to protect other more culpable heads, but they won’t see it as a reason to change their approach. The question is whether, and to what extent, people at large go along with that view. The way in which so many have been calling for the police to be more heavy-handed in other circumstances is not exactly a cause for optimism. Wales doesn’t have to follow England on this, but following England towards becoming an authoritarian state is precisely what will happen if we don’t take control of our own future.

Is there a case for the Union? 2: Great British Values

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One of the favourite arguments of unionists is that the UK is held together by a strong set of uniquely British values. On closer examination, these turn out to be not uniquely British at all. Precisely what these values are is generally left vague, but it seems to include things like democracy, rule of law, fair play, and linking rewards to merit. That there is nothing uniquely British about any of these should be obvious, but somehow seems not to be to many. Worse still is that the claimed values aren’t even adhered to much of the time. Earlier this week, in response to the government’s decision to drastically reduce aid to Yemen, Jeremy Hunt said that "…abandoning a forgotten country and people is inconsistent with our values”. Whilst it’s true that it goes against what he wants us to believe the UK’s values are, it is in fact entirely consistent with the UK’s practiced values. It isn’t the first time that the UK has abandoned a forgotten country and people, as the Kurds, to name just one example, could readily attest. Yesterday, we saw the former president of France sentenced to a term in jail for dishonesty in office - can anyone seriously imagine that happening to the UK's current cabinet, where the rule of law is also supposed to be the norm?

It isn’t just in the field of foreign policy that the UK’s stated values and its displayed values are at odds.  We know that the majority of the UK’s lawmakers are unelected and hold their positions by dint of government appointment, heredity, or high office in one particular English Christian denomination. We have a compulsive and inveterate liar at the head of the UK government, and ministers who breach the law with impunity. Bullying is acceptable, and awarding jobs and contracts to individuals and companies with no open procurement process has become almost the norm. Inequality is significant and growing. More resources are devoted to tackling benefit fraud than tax avoidance and evasion, although it is the latter which has the greater cost.

An objective observer would rapidly conclude that the following are closer to being key British values than those generally claimed:

·        Autocracy is better than democracy.

·        Lies are worth more than honesty and truthfulness.

·        Poverty is the fault of the poor themselves, but those who already have plenty should receive more whether they work for it or not. And money made through speculation against the interests of the majority of citizens is the most highly-prized of all.

·        Inequality is a good thing, and the more unequal people are the better.

·        Obeying the law is optional for governments and the privileged, and not paying taxes is acceptable as long as you’re rich. Donating lots of money to the governing party can help with both of these.

·        Foreigners are to be looked down on and kept out.

·        Awarding jobs and contracts to friends is easier than assessing merit.

·        Britain is superior to all other countries in all respects, and others should know their place.

In fairness, most of the above list (apart from the last) aren’t actually uniquely British either, but the combination does more to define the 21st Century UK than the pretend values so often mouthed by its leaders. If I were looking for a strong argument for the union which would appeal to those currently inclined to support independence, I wouldn't try and base it on some vague reference to abstract and theoretical 'British' values which aren’t even the ones by which the country lives.

Shared values?

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Faced with confused and confusing statements from government ministers, many of which seem to be at variance with the detail of the laws that they have rushed through, it is no surprise that the enforcement action taken by police over the coronavirus pandemic has itself been patchy and inconsistent. Why should they be expected to understand the detail of what those responsible for designing the rules are unable to agree with each other about?

It is clear that most people are accepting of the need for exceptional rules in exceptional circumstances, and understand that the goal of protecting us all is both valid and important; a short-term interference with civil liberties is a small price to pay for the protection of the vulnerable. I’ll admit that I do have a concern that governments which take powers to themselves in a crisis tend to find it difficult to relinquish those powers later, identifying excuse after excuse for keeping legislation active.  And it doesn’t help that, in Priti Patel, we have a Home Secretary who gives a good impression of someone who’d like to lock up as many as possible of those citizens who she has not either had deported or hanged.

More worrying has been the way in which events have brought out an authoritarian streak in people. It isn’t just an occasional bit of heavy-handed policing where a quiet word might have been a better approach, it’s the way in which some people have been urging the police to come and arrest their neighbours for various perceived infringements of the unclear and inconsistent advice. I don’t want to understate the importance of us all following the guidelines as closely as we can, but there’s something very ‘un-British’, dare I say it, about some of what we’re seeing. The ‘British values’ that the government is always banging on about turn out to be rather more ‘flexible’ than even I had thought.  A crisis like the current one can provoke either a growth in social solidarity – and there have been many good examples of that – or else an outbreak of authoritarianism. Both cases require rules under which we operate and both require that those rules be enforced, but the way in which we collectively choose to enforce those rules tells us a lot about which approach we prefer and our own core values.  Not all of it is turning out to be entirely comfortable.

Where are those 'values' again?

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Despite the restrictions placed on Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee by an overly secretive government about who they could question and what they could question them about, the committee managed to produce a damning report last week about the extent of British complicity in the rendition and torture of suspects by US agencies.  It’s easy, of course, for the MPs (and for me, sitting comfortable well away from the events) to be horrified at what was done and at the apparent complacency of those acting in our name.  And there are the inevitable calls for action to be taken.

But for me, the real underlying lesson of all of this wasn’t that there are rogue individuals, condoning and participating in activities which they knew to be wrong.  It is, rather, about the thinness of the veneer of civilisation, and how easy it is for people to simply ‘fall in’ with whatever is being done.  Unacceptable actions become – or perhaps it might be more appropriate to say ‘appear to become’ - acceptable when those involved are under pressure to produce results or to work with 'allies' who have a different attitude or approach. 

It isn’t the first time in human history that we’ve seen people simply slip into a way of operating or take a lead from their superiors.  And it won’t be the last either.  But amongst the recriminations and justifiable criticisms of a failure of leadership, we should also reflect on what it tells us about how deeply those infamous ‘British values’ which the politicians keep banging on about are – or rather, are not – ingrained.  It turns out that, when push comes to shove, they’re actually pretty superficial - more talked about than adhered to.

Mirror, mirror...

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…on the wall, who’s the stupidest of them all?

The Foreign Secretary seems to be spending much of his time and effort criticising the leader of the Labour Party for not immediately condemning unequivocally those whom Johnson holds responsible for both the Salisbury poisoning and the use of chemical weapons in Syria.  Johnson claims that Corbyn is the ‘Kremlin’s useful idiot’ in response to which Labour have in turn called Johnson an idiot for undermining the UK Government’s position by lying about what the man from Porton Down did or did not tell him.  If Johnson is right, than at least being useful to someone puts Corbyn a step ahead of Johnson, who has never been demonstrably useful to anyone.

We can all swap insults, but it isn’t the most helpful or enlightening approach to grown-up politics, and given Johnson’s reputation for lying, time and again (having been sacked from jobs twice for doing so, without even starting on the £350 million a week for the NHS), he’s not in a good position in the credibility stakes.  Bluster and diversion are his standard recourse when challenged, but surely people are seeing through that by now.

As I’ve posted before, it may well be that he and the government are party to some secret intelligence not shared with the leader of the opposition, let alone with the rest of us, which enables him to be as certain as he is.  But given his record, his demand that people fall into line and agree with him is unrealistic and unreasonable.  It’s true that there is something very British about supporting ‘my country, right or wrong’, but it’s an approach which hasn’t always exactly worked out well.   Not for nothing is patriotism regarded as the last refuge of a scoundrel, although scoundrel seems a bit mild as an epithet to apply to Johnson. 

There’s something very un-British, however, about demanding that people be found guilty and punished without due process and proper examination of all the evidence.  I always thought that the adage that ‘justice must not only be done, it must also be seen to be done’ was one of the core values that we’re all supposed to share.  It isn’t the first time, though, that I’ve discovered that my understanding of ‘British’ values is different from that of those demanding that we all sign up to them.

Retaliation is futile. Apparently.

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It’s not quite what the daleks say, although the image of Boris Johnson speaking through a dalek voice synthesizer is an interesting one.  I doubt that he’d make much more sense, but he probably couldn’t make much less sense either.  In Borisland, it seems that when the UK government takes action against Russia, this is a way of punishing Russia.  And when Russia responds, the only people hit by its actions are Russians.  It all sounds like a very cunning plan to me, albeit more Baldrick than Doctor Who.  All we have to do is punish the Russians a bit more, and they’ll end up doing even more damage to themselves.  I’m sure that there’s a flaw there somewhere, though.

There was also (yet another) echo of the UK’s colonial past in the reasoning of the Foreign Secretary in saying that the closure of the British Council’s offices in Russia would remove Russian access to opportunities to learn English.  It harks back to the days when the colonial masters set about inculcating knowledge of the English language and culture in the natives in place of their own, and completely failed to understand why the natives weren’t eternally grateful.  It’s only a very colonial mind-set which believes that promoting the UK’s language and culture abroad is done primarily for the benefit of the foreigners rather than the UK.

As I noted a few days ago, I really don’t know whether the Russian state did or did not have a hand in the Salisbury attack, although they must remain major suspects.  As a response to that post stated, it’s entirely possible that the government have access to information that was gathered either clandestinely or illegally and which is more definitive than anything so far made public.  The Foreign Secretary suggested as much yesterday, when he claimed that “We actually have evidence within the last 10 years that Russia has not only been investigating the delivery of nerve agents for the purposes of assassination, but has also been creating and stockpiling Novichok”, although he didn’t go so far as to tell us the nature of that evidence, or explain how even that information ‘proves’ that Russia was responsible in the specific case.  On the basis of past claims about ‘evidence’ from intelligence sources – dodgy dossiers and 45 minutes to launch weapons of mass destruction – and in the absence of any immediately obvious benefit to Putin or Russia, I remain at least a little sceptical, and reluctant to trust anything the government says without seeing more hard evidence.  From that perspective, I saw nothing wrong with Corbyn’s response in saying that we should exercise caution before jumping to possibly unwarranted conclusions.

The way in which Corbyn has been pilloried for taking an entirely reasonable position – not just by the Tories and the media, but even by prominent members of his own party – left me wondering, not for the first time, what exactly are those great British values in which we are all supposed to believe?  Sometimes I think I know, and at other times I’m left baffled.  I don’t remember how and when those values included the idea that people were guilty until proved innocent, or that punishment should be meted out before guilt had been formally established.  I thought that the approach of the Queen of Hearts to such matters in Alice in Wonderland was that it was a fantasy, not a documentary.  And I certainly didn’t think that failing to support the implementation of the sentence before due process had been completed constituted some sort of treason, which seems to be the position of Corbyn’s opponents in his own party.

The rush by Labour members of parliament to uphold the ‘tradition’ that the opposition should always support the government on foreign affairs has been a pretty dismal spectacle.  It exposes yet again (as if it needed further exposure) the deep-rooted jingoistic nationalism of many of that party’s elected members.  Yet still far too many people cling to the idea that Labour is somehow ‘progressive’ and deserving of support.  What does it take before they realise the truth that, when push comes to shove, they're little different from the Tories?

Where's the alternative?

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Whilst the extent of their success may have been somewhat overplayed by the press and media, there can be no doubt that last Thursday’s local elections were a boost to the Tories.  But if there’s one thing that must be even more pleasing than the actual results to the Welsh Tory high command, it’s the reaction of the other parties.

This response from Wayne David was typical of the complacency coming from Labour in particular.  It is of course true that the Tory advance in Wales was not as great as some polls had been suggesting, and was less than in England, but at least part of that is down to the fact that there are large swathes of the old Glamorgan and Gwent where the Tories can rarely even be bothered to stand.  Holding off a Tory surge in areas where the Tories have few or no candidates hardly counts as a huge achievement.  At a time when yet another election has demonstrated that many parts of Wales are becoming similar to England in terms of voting behaviour, suggesting that Welsh Labour has somehow got it right and can teach English Labour a thing or two looks more like ignoring reality than facing up to it.

As voting behaviour in Wales increasingly changes to match that in England, few things will please the Tories more than to see Welsh Labour reverting to its default – and only – strategy of not being the Tories.  I suspect that Labour will have to suffer even more damage – possibly even terminal damage – before they realize that the strategy is of increasingly limited value.  Harking back to Thatcher and the miners – let alone Churchill and Tonypandy – is appealing to a demographic which is inevitably and inexorably declining due to natural causes.

But one of the problems facing us in Wales is that it isn’t just Labour which is depending on this out-dated strategy.  Much of what I‘ve seen of Plaid’s messaging for the General Election so far seems to be based on the idea that they’re even more anti-Tory than the Labour Party.  It looks as if we’re facing an election where the two main opponents of the Tories in Wales are going to spend much of their time arguing over who’s best-placed to defend us from those who will, yet again, be painted as baby-eaters or worse.

It’s an essentially negative approach, with little by way of vision for an alternative future.  Worse still, it fails to present an alternative set of values.  One of the reasons for the increasing success of the Tories has been that they have managed to get increasing numbers of people to buy in to what is essentially a selfish political philosophy.  Whether they’re talking about looking after Brits first, controlling the borders, cutting benefits, or cutting taxes, the underlying theme is one of an appeal to individualism and selfishness amongst the target demographic and demonising the non-target demographic.

In much of their response to this approach, the self-styled ‘progressive’ parties seem largely to accept the implicit values and propose minor variations to policy; what they’re not doing is promoting an alternative set of values based around community solidarity and collectivism.  The existence of that alternative set of values amongst the Welsh electorate is simply assumed, despite the growing evidence to the contrary.  But failure to promote an alternative set of values leaves a situation in which people are being asked to choose which of the parties will best deliver on the one set of values which is evident.  Why wouldn’t voters increasingly turn to the Tories?

Forward to the past

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There’s nothing new about the Tories’ commitment to ‘British values’, or about them trying to find new and interesting ways of ‘enforcing’ them, but I’m as vague as ever about what these values really are.  Or rather, what I’m unclear about is what makes them specifically British. 

There’s nothing wrong with valuing tolerance, democracy, freedom of speech, and the rule of law, but these values seem to me to be shared with many other countries.  The only thing uniquely British that I can see about them is the uniquely British belief that they are uniquely British.  It’s a reflection of that casual superiority which the (largely English, in this context) establishment possesses without seeming even to realise the fact – Johnny Foreigner and those upstart colonials may profess to value the same things, but they are either aping ‘us’ or else completely insincere.

My first reaction to the latest pronouncement by Sajid Javid, that he wants all civil servants and elected officials (and perhaps all BBC staff and other public sector workers as well) to swear an oath of allegiance to this set of values was that there was actually something profoundly un-British about it.  Oaths are all very well for Americans, and perhaps some of those European chappies, but they’re not the sort of thing ‘we’ do. 

But then I thought about it a bit more, and realised that it’s actually very British – just not in the twentieth or twenty-first century.  But in the past – which is where most of the current government seem determined to reside – it was very much the norm.  And for Cabinet Ministers, who seem to think that kneeling and kissing the hand of some unelected woman whilst swearing undying allegiance to her and her heirs rather than the electors is an entirely normal thing for grown-ups to do, it is not as strange as it otherwise appears.  (And that’s without even mentioning that many in the establishment engage in the strange rites of freemasonry as well.)

But what is perhaps most ‘British’ about it all is the touching belief that having sworn such an oath, people will then abide by it.  Because that’s what we do, right?  I mean, no 'decent chap' would ever swear an oath to get a job and then proceed to challenge those who have a divine right to rule, would he?

My real objection to this sort of approach is that it seems to be increasingly the case that ‘tolerance’ is limited to tolerance of orthodoxy, and ‘freedom of speech’ is limited to freedom to agree with the government.  Faced with an uncertain future (and having themselves contributed greatly to that uncertainty), their only response seems to be to attempt to return to the certainties of the past.  I suppose it’s a possible response, but it belies their oft-stated confidence about a great new future for Britain post-Brexit.  If the only future is the distant past, then perhaps Private Frazer was right after all in his assessment of the capability of those in leadership positions - and we really are all doomed.