‘British values’ are a load of old codswallop

Dec 8, 2016 by

by Ed West, Spectator:

[…]  Integration takes time, and depends on a number of factors, but an absolute condition would be a substantial reduction or pause in the number of migrants arriving from the developing world. If that happened, things would ease, as they did in the 1980s and 1990s, but that’s unlikely to happen because British social mores prevent us admitting that some types of migration bring far higher social costs than others.

Aside from that, economic freedom probably helps, and so the best thing the Government could do to help social cohesion is get out of everyone’s way and let people trade with, employ, befriend and marry each other. State attempts to tackle extremism tend to only encourage extremism, since only people who can activate ‘the community’ are of value to Government and they tend to have an incentive to encourage division and resentment. One thing that is doomed to fail is the idea of ‘British values‘, since they tend to be both ephemeral and weak on the one hand and also rather alien on the other. In reality there are no ‘British values’, any more than there are values attached to a family; most of us are born into our countries, and don’t feel that belonging here entails conforming to a particular mindset. That idea in itself is so contradictorily un-British. What joins us as a people, if anything, is a common history out of which certain traditions and institutions have emerged, many of which we cherish.

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