What would be the words of a Britishness oath?
by Paul Goodman, Conservative Home:
Sajid Javid is too fly to fall for the myth that there is an inextricable link between not speaking English and practising Islamist terror. But he grasps a truth that the recent Casey Report spells out – namely, that there is a connection between it and cultural isolation. A means of beginning to lessen that isolation, as recommended in that report, is that an oath be sworn by new arrivals.
There are plenty of criticisms to be made of the proposal. One is that such public oath-swearing is unBritish, since Britishness itself is a web of shared assumptions and understandings, and such a subtle mesh cannot suddenly be spun out of a oath. Another is that most of those who need to swear it aren’t coming from abroad at all. They already live here. Another still is there would presumably be no punishment for breaking it.
A sharper one is that much depends not on form, but content. What would be the words of such an oath? What would it be to? An oath to Queen and country would be one thing. One to British values would be quite another. This is because they do not exist – or, rather, because there is no “value” which is distinctly British (as Javid seems to acknowledge in his piece). Americans, say, also value freedom. Germans also value democracy – perhaps all the more so for having been deprived of it within living memory.
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
