essay on british values

The 5 British Values – Explained for Students

In 2014, the UK Government created five fundamental values that it proclaimed were the unifying values that were fundamental to British society and cohesion.

The values were designed to balance freedom of thought, expression and choice in a liberal society with the need to maintain a safe and secure society.

The five British values are:

Rule of law
Individual liberty
Mutual respect

British Values Definition

The five British Values are democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect for and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs and for those without faith. These are the 5 fundamental values that have been developed by the UK Government in an attempt to create social unity and prevent extremism.

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How to Teach the 5 Fundamental Values in the Classroom

The Government guidance on the implementation of the fundamental values framework provides both examples of what students should know, and what to teach.

Examples of what students should know include:

How to influence society through lawful democratic participation;
That the freedom to religion, including the freedom of others to hold faiths other than your own, is enshrined in British law;
That people of diverse faiths should all be respected and not be discriminated against as a result of their religious affiliations;
That it is everyone’s responsibility to identify and challenge discrimination wherever it occurs.

Examples of teaching strategies include:

A critical analysis of democracy, its strengths and weaknesses, and how it contrasts to other forms of governance;
Implementation of small-scale democratic processes within schools that focus on childhood citizenship . This might include allowing students to have a voice on matters of importance to them and how their school is run;
Hold mock elections, including mock election debates, through which students can voice their differences of opinion in respectful and tolerant ways.

Related: 27 Universal Morals Examples

Why do the 5 Values Exist? | (The Prevent Strategy, 2011)

The 5 Values were first outlined in the Prevent strategy of 2011.

The prevent Strategy’s purpose was to quell extremism. Both white nationalist and Islamic extremism were listed as threats to national unity within the Prevent Strategy document.

Within the document, extremism is defined as:

“vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance for those with different faiths and beliefs.”

Within the Prevent strategy, teaching of the 5 values is not made compulsory. Rather, educators are asked to:

Respect the 5 fundamental values;
Report students who appear to be radicalized, as defined by contravention of those 5 values.

Later, in 2014, it would become compulsory to actively implement the 5 fundamental values outlined in this definition in British schools. The move to compulsory implementation is outlined below.

Why are British Values Compulsory in Schools? (The Trojan Horse Affair, 2013-14)

The 5 values were a response by the UK Government to fears of Islamisation of British Schools. In particular, they were a response to the moral panic caused by the release of a fake letter titled ‘Operation Trojan Horse’. The letter supposedly unveiled a plot for the takeover of Birmingham school curricula by religious extremists.

Here is the complete timeline of events:

November 2013: Operation Trojan Horse Letter

The values were created in response to rising fear of religious extremist thought in English schools, in particular the Trojan Horse Affair in Birmingham.

In November 2013, an anonymous person send Birmingham City Council a photocopy of a letter. It was claimed the letter was found on a boss’s desk.

The letter outlined plans to stealthily take over the operations of local Birmingham schools and implement an extreme Islamist curriculum.

The letter outlined five steps to the plan:

Find schools where the majority of students are from a Muslim background;
Identify a small group of parents within those schools who will agitate from within for an Islamic curriculum;
Select staff members sympathetic to hard-line Islamism to cause trouble among staff resistant to any moves;
Run an anonymous campaign aimed at getting the head teacher to resign. This would be done through letters to local parents and community members.

The letter also claimed that this operation had already succeeded at several schools in the Birmingham area, which were listed in the letter.

January 2014: News Reaches the Media

In December 2013, the ‘Operation Trojan Horse’ letter was handed over to the Department for Education and Home Office.

The letter was subsequently declared a fake by investigators.

Nonetheless, the letter was also leaked to the media in January 2014. When the media got their hands on it, the story grew very quickly with headlines like:

The Daily Mail: “Revealed: Islamist plot dubbed ‘Trojan Horse’ to replace teachers in Birmingham schools with radicals”
The Birmingham Mail: “Council leader calls for fightback on ‘schools jihad plot’”

Mid-2014: Snap OFSTED Inspections

OFSTED, the office in charge of monitoring schools’ competencies and compliance to laws, conducted snap inspections of 21 schools in Birmingham. Some of the schools had previously been rated ‘Outstanding’ by OFSTED. However, after the inspections, 5 schools were placed in the lowest rated category: “Special Measures”, indicating that the schools are inadequate.

Among the charges leveled against the schools were:

Sex education classes were inadequate;
Schools failed to provide sufficient education on religions other than Islam;
Some classes were found to have been segregated according to gender;
Girls and boys were discouraged from socializing with one another; and
Teachers who voiced opposition to changes were found to have been bullied into compliance.

Furthermore, according to The Guardian , there was general agreement on the facts by all parties involved in the school inspections. These facts included:

Schools in East Birmingham made strides to employ more Muslim educators and governors in order to align the teachers’ values with parents’ values;
Prayer rooms and calls to prayer were introduced in some schools;
Emphasis on creative arts, drama and music was dropped and preference was placed on basic literacy and numeracy.

Following this affair, education minister Michael Gove released statutory guidance insisting that democratic values be actively taught in schools – see below.

Do Schools have to Teach British Values?

In response to the Trojan Horse Affair and its aftermath, satutory guidance was released on 27 November 2014 requiring schools to put in place a clear action plan to implement the 5 values into their schools. While previously schools were required to ‘respect’ those values, from that day forward schools needed to clearly demonstrate how the values would be implemented in their school community.

Criticisms of the British Values | ‘Moral Panic’ Argument

There have been some criticisms of the move to implementing 5 national values in schools, including:

The ‘Moral Panic’ Argument: The Trojan Horse Affair was widely found to have been discredited. The letter was believed to have been a hoax. Suspicious leaking of the letter to the media led to widespread moral panic at something that had little basis in fact, and which blew up to the extent that teaching of the 5 values are now compulsory in all schools
The ‘Surveilance’ Argument: While white supremacism is mentioned in the Prevent strategy, it may be a thinly-veiled attempt at hiding the fact that this strategy is directly designed to increase surveilance on Muslim students and pressure them into assimilating.
The ‘Libertarian’ Argument: The idea that there should be a list of government-mandated national values possibly flies in the face of liberalism, freedom of thought and freedom of speech . Forcing people to hold certain values is profoundly undemocratic.

Final Thoughts

The 5 fundamental British values are a controversial set of values. The controversy is linked as much to the reason behind their development (fear os Islamic extremism) as it is of their substance. The values themselves appear to represent the small-l liberalism that modern Britain, and indeed modern Europe, is founded upon. Nonetheless, there are some tensions within the framework. For example, does insisting that people hold certain values contravene their rights to freedom of thought and expression?

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1 thought on “The 5 British Values – Explained for Students”

I have become familiar with the values

Roch Dunin-Wasowicz

July 20th, 2018, defining british identity: is it about “values” or “proper behaviour”.

1 comment | 2 shares

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Brexit is something of a boom industry. Even before it has officially happened, the UK’s departure from the European Union gives plenty to do to policy-makers involved at the core and peripheries of UK-EU negotiations , British (and other) media outlets covering the Brexit process, interest groups , comedians , academics and so on.

Highlighting yet another angle of the Brexit story contains a risk of contributing to “Brexit Fatigue Syndrome”, a label for the perceived oversaturation of Brexit-related discussions introduced by The Independent not even a month after the EU referendum had taken place . Nonetheless, based on findings from a 2017 exploratory project consisting of 16 semi-structured interviews and participatory photography in Great Yarmouth, we [1] – a group of researchers from the School of International Development at the University of East Anglia (UEA) – believe that this is a risk worth taking. For there is one issue that stood out as central in our findings but remains highly ambiguous in the academic and policy-making discourse surrounding Brexit to date: the relevance of “British values” in discussions about the further political, economic and social development of the UK, and the manner in which “Britishness” is invoked as a concept of inclusion or exclusion.

So far, two main scholarly narratives seem to have been emerging that – in a not unproblematic conflation of possibly related but nonetheless distinct research questions – seek to explain both the outcome of the Brexit referendum and attitudes towards immigration in the UK: one centring on issues of economic, the other on issues of cultural development ( Gidron and Hall 2017 ). In a nutshell, the former builds on the “left behind” argument and identifies (real or perceived, current or impending, economic, social and/or political) inequalities at the group level as key drivers of political attitudes (see e.g. Goodwin and Heath 2016 ). The latter, by contrast, focuses on issues of identity and values felt at the level of the individual, and regards them as separate from structural conditions such as economic inequalities (see e.g. Kaufmann 2016 ).

As Gidron and Hall (2017 ) and a long tradition of academics working on questions of social modernisation (see e.g. Inglehart and Norris 2016 ) have pointed out before us, it seems artificial at best and erroneous at worst to treat economic, cultural and political developments as self-contained processes, and to neglect interaction effects between structural conditions affecting the group level and values felt at the individual level. Without going too far down the rabbit hole of how group levels can be defined by national, regional, local, sex, age, education or other markers, something struck us during our own research in Great Yarmouth, which ranks in the 20% most deprived districts in England and the top five areas for Leave support in 2016 : On the one hand, the vast majority of our interviewees who had come to live in Great Yarmouth as adult international migrants from Portugal, Poland and Slovakia [2] explained their personal experiences of anti-immigration views and action (both prior and subsequent to the 2016 referendum) as something to be expected for socio-economic reasons, such as lack of job opportunities, severe economic deprivation, lack of knowledge about different cultures due to the lack of opportunities to travel, and a related loss of hope. By contrast, most of our interviewees who had been born to British parents and lived in the UK for most of their lives explained the origins of anti-immigration and nationalist defensive views (be they their own or those that they have observed in others) with the perceived inability of immigrants to “do the right thing” and adapt to “British values”.

These findings open up a plethora of follow-up questions, not least what “British values” actually mean and how the discourse of “Britishness” is interpreted, used and invoked by different actors and in different spheres of political interaction, from everyday encounters at the individual level to formal government decisions at the national level. While politicians may define “British values” as a set of high-flying concepts such as democracy, rule of law or freedom of speech , our respondents in Great Yarmouth typically emphasised more immediately felt, practical interpretations of “proper British behaviour”, such as when “doing the right thing” and adapting to British values is defined as parking in designated parking areas, not throwing rubbish onto the street and not standing outside cafes chatting loudly until late at night.

None of the aforementioned things are necessarily quintessential or exclusive to a British identity, but the fact that they are stated as identifiers of who does and who does not exhibit traits of a “foreigner” raises important questions about the content and political salience of “Britishness” across space and time. Values, culture and identity are famously ambiguous and malleable concepts , so that we need to ask how something as difficult to define as “British values” becomes a political justification for inclusion or exclusion; what role structural conditions play in shaping the content and everyday salience of British values and identity at the individual level; how this interplay of structural conditions and values shapes political behaviour; and how this behaviour contributes to feelings of security or insecurity of belonging among different identity groups in the UK.

With the UK’s official departure from the EU only months away, these are fundamental questions that need to be asked more prominently as they are likely to shape the country’s future social, political and economic trajectory.

This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of LSE Brexit, nor of the London School of Economics.

Dr Ulrike G. Theuerkauf is Lecturer in Politics and International Development, University of East Anglia.

[1] Dr Maria Abranches, Matthew Barwick, Marta da Silva Lopes, Dr Caitlin Scott, Dr Mark Tebboth, Dr Ulrike Theuerkauf and Dr Carole White.

[2] some of whom have left the uk by now due to, as they told us, insecurities for their future and a perceived rise of anti-immigration views following the brexit referendum..

About the author

Although brought up in the UK, I’ve been living in Germany for many years. All the proposed “British values” listed above could equally well be quoted as “German values”. I expect they could also feature in an “Australian values” or “American values” test. So this isn’t so much about defining British identity, as listing various values which are typical for liberal democracies. People living in liberal democracies tend perhaps to think that the country they are living in has some kind of exclusive patent on democracy, the rule of law, and keeping the streets clean, or is at least better at them than anyone else.

There are differences in norms of approved behaviour between Britain and Germany, but they are not what you might expect. For example, in Britain, I think it is quite common to say “piss off” to friends who are being slightly annoying, or maybe even stronger expressions where “piss” is replaced by a word beginning with an “f” or a “b”, while if one German says “verpiss dich” to another you can be pretty sure they are not on amicable terms.

Historical amnesia is undermining European democracy

September 8th, 2017.

I’m not British – why should I care about Brexit?

September 4th, 2017.

Feeling vulnerable and unwelcome: the impact of Brexit on EU nationals

June 18th, 2019.

Using it, losing it: what has EU citizenship meant to young people in Britain?

May 29th, 2018.

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British Values: Democracy and The Rule of Law

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Why British values should be folded into character education

Lecturer, School of Education, University of Birmingham

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Tom Harrison works for the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues at the University of Birmingham. He receives funding from the John Templeton Foundation and the Department of Education.

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For the last year, schools around the country have been obliged to promote fundamental British values. So far, little officially has been said about how the new policy is being received in schools, but the conversations I’ve had with teachers suggest to me that it is lukewarm.

As a result, I have come to the conclusion that if schools really are going to deliver on their obligation to promote British values, the policy needs to be rethought. It should be expressed in terms of “universal virtues” and delivered through the growing field of character education – which could either be taught as a discrete subject or through and within other curriculum subjects.

I have received many questions from teachers about the theoretical and practical implications of the requirement to promote British values in schools. Questions from teachers include: “What are British values? Why are they necessarily or exclusively British? Can they be taught? And, if so, how?”

Some teachers are more provocative and challenging than others – often on ideological grounds. Some state that they are uncomfortable with the term “British values” and believe the concept is divisive and could actually be counter-productive.

Despite this, as British values is part of the Ofsted framework for school inspection, most schools are seeking ways to show they are compliant when the inspector calls. This has led to a profusion of initiatives in schools. Some primary schools have displayed “values trees” or posters to prove their commitment to the cause.

As far as I can judge, many schools are delivering on the agenda more in fear of Ofsted, than because they believe in it. News stories about Ofsted inspections have not been particularly helping matters: one rural school, for example, was marked down by Ofsted for being “too white”.

Universal virtues

It seems clear that the policy around British values was developed with good intentions and was designed to help deal with significant concerns, sparked by the Trojan Horse extremism scandal in Birmingham, that some schools were not doing enough to promote tolerance. If it is not implemented successfully in schools, a chance to educate young people about these issues, particularly religious intolerance and radicalisation will be lost. So we need to think about alternative ways to deliver the agenda.

One would be to link British values to a broader notion of universal virtues and address the agenda through character education. After all, two of the fundamental British values according to the Department for Education (DfE) guidance are mutual respect and tolerance. These “values” might also be considered “virtues” – in that they contribute to individual and societal flourishing and are constituent of a person’s character.

Other virtues, such as courage, compassion, self-discipline, justice and humility are also generally present in people who show tolerance and respect. These virtues, and others, are some of the more important building blocks of character. I believe that they are also universal – widely acknowledged to be recognised and embraced by representatives of all cultures and religions.

These virtues, alongside others, are also understood by the DfE to be priorities for character education. The department recently funded character education grants that would enhance tolerance, respect, honesty, integrity, dignity, neighbourliness and community spirit among other virtues in children and young people. The call for the education of these virtues through character education is gaining momentum .

An easy shift to make

Some of the British values, for example those of democracy and the rule of law, appear, on the face of it, to be more difficult to teach than others. Yet a reinvigorated citizenship education curriculum or a newly conceived character education curriculum could cover these.

Another value, individual liberty, could also be dealt with in a well-constructed and implemented character education programme. This is where the virtues come in: as when students debate values such as liberty – the right to free speech, for example – it is important for them to respect others’ positions, show tolerance, be courageous to stand up for what they believe in, but always do so with a care and compassion for others. A discussion about different values is more likely to be constructive if undertaken on the foundation of these commonly agreed virtues.

The teacher’s job is to provide their students with a language and understanding of character, an opportunity to critically engage with ethical dilemmas and guide their students towards making “wise” and virtuous decisions. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle called this practical wisdom, or the ability to do the right thing, at the right time, in the right situation.

To encompass the British values agenda within character education would not require a huge shift in policy from the government. The foundations are in place and the signs are there that a focus on character is popular with teachers, parents and politicians. To re-position the policy on the back of character education might in the long run also prove to be a more successful strategy. It would provide schools with the permission, as well as a framework, to deal with some of the biggest issues facing our country, and the world.

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Fundamental British Values, Michel Foucault, and Religious Education Teacher Subjectivity pp 105–129 Cite as

Research on Fundamental British Values

Francis Farrell 2
First Online: 18 May 2023

112 Accesses

This chapter offers a review of the critical theoretical and empirical research produced in response to the civic nationalist turn in education policy. The review considers literature covering the period from New Labour’s citizenship review to the introduction of fundamental British values and the Prevent duty under the Coalition and Conservative administrations. The literature offers researchers a range of perspectives providing critical insights into the impact of civic nationalist education policy teachers practice and theirs and their students’ sense of identity. The literature draws from critical race theory and post-colonial theory, post structuralism and theories of racist nativism. Some of the papers are conceptual offering philosophical insights into the nature of belonging in the light of the exclusionary incitements of fundamental British values. The chapter concludes by focussing on how the Foucauldian approach adopted in this study extends and contributes to the literature by offering a theory of social subjectivity and a theory of power to an analysis of teachers’ enactments of fundamental British values.

Critical literature review
Fundamental British values
Post-colonial theory
Post structuralism

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Farrell, F. (2023). Research on Fundamental British Values. In: Fundamental British Values, Michel Foucault, and Religious Education Teacher Subjectivity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30687-7_5

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Dear Mr Gove: what's so 'British' about your 'British values'?

I see you're going to require all your schools to teach British values . If you think you're going to have the support of all parents in this project, you'll have to count me out.

Your checklist of British values is: "Democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, mutual respect, and tolerance of those of different faiths and beliefs." I can't attach the adjective "British" to these. In fact, I find it parochial, patronising and arrogant that you think it's appropriate or right to do so.

I've heard the weasel explanation: you're not saying that these are uniquely or specially British, simply that they are ones that British society abides by. But that's not how we use adjectives, is it? We use adjectives to describe, modify, define, colour and infuse the noun that follows it. It's clear from David Cameron's absurd words about the Magna Carta (which handed power to warring despotic princelings) that your government would like us to think that there is indeed something specially British about the items on the checklist.

So let's go through it. I like democracy. I don't think you do. You've replaced the democracy of local government control over schools with the marketplace.A tiny number of speculators, debt-sellers, rate-fixers and gamblers have altered the lives of millions of people. No one voted them in. No one can vote them out. We have an unelected head of state and an unelected second chamber.

We have some democracy but it's absurd to claim that the bit we have is solely or uniquely British. The great struggles by working people to wrest some power from your predecessors were often informed by events in France and America, while British women were still fighting for the right to vote as some others abroad already had it. I am struggling to imagine what fibs you would like to impose on schools requiring teachers to imply that democracy is British.

Excuse me for sniggering about the "rule of law" requirement. Didn't your leader flout the law last week over his statement on the Coulson affair, made before the trial was over ? Don't we know that Tony Blair will never have to face a court of law in which the legality of the invasion of Iraq will be tested? Again, when it comes to the history of law as enacted in this country, shouldn't it be described as having evolved out of many cultures including, say, Jewish, Greek, Roman, Christian and, in the modern era, "western"? Don't you folks in parliament talk about "European" laws?

On to liberty – well, in an era of the never-ending soup-kitchen queue and rising child poverty there's no better time to be informed on this matter by the non-British writer Anatole France, who praised: "The majestic equality of laws which forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal bread." I daren't think of the guidelines you will issue requiring teachers to pretend that liberty without equality is liberty.

Mutual respect? Before you put that one out, perhaps you should spend some time talking to the families of people who have lost loved ones while in the care, "protection" or custody of HM government. In the guidelines to teachers, perhaps you can explain why this mutual respect doesn't seem to result in anyone being prosecuted for violating the fundamental part of "respect": the right to live.

Tolerance is a good idea but practised unevenly across Britain, surely. Still on the statute books we have the requirement that all schools in England and Wales should have a daily assembly that is "wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character". Most parents do not know that they can take their children out of this assembly – and out of any RE lessons.

Many of those who do know feel that to opt out would cause difficulties for their child and the school. And we should remember, surely, that our unelected head of state is head of the Church of England, which is "tolerant" even as its official status and role dominates the public interpretation of values. To tell the truth, I don't know how we can have tolerance while our state schools are required by law to favour one faith.

So, I look forward to these guidelines on British values, if only for the fact that it will give our children the chance to put them up for scrutiny. By the way, did it ever occur to you to call them just: "Values"?

Yours, Michael Rosen

Letter from a curious parent
Michael Gove

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Home Essay Examples Life Values

Critical Analysis of British Values

Category Life
Subcategory Myself
Topic Values

The British Values are a fundamental part of creating a diverse and modern community, within the UK. The British Values consists of Democracy, Rule of Law, Respect and Tolerance, and Individual Liberty, all of which are important aspects to personal and work life.

Democracy comprises of everyone being aware of their rights and responsibilities. It is a culture which is built upon equality and freedom. Democracy is one of the main values which is present within the workplace as some examples include receiving and giving feedback, team meetings and accountability. Outside of work, one example of democracy would be the right to protest and petition. If you feel strongly about something and believe that protesting could make a difference, you are free to do so. This might affect personal relationships in the sense that people will see you to be passionate about that agenda.

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The second value, Rule of Law, is about having certain rules and laws to keep everyone safe and happy. This could be, for example, certain health and safety regulations at work, or sticking to the speed limit when driving home from work. They are all there for a reason, to create a safe and secure environment to live and to work, to enable everyone to create meaningful relationships with one another.

Another British Value is Respect and Tolerance. Being able to understand and respect that everyone has different values and beliefs, whilst ensuring to not push our own values onto others. This point can hugely affect personal relationships and work relationships. If you have something in common with someone, i.e. religion and beliefs, you are more likely to converse with them due to that commonality, rather than someone who isn’t religious and has no beliefs. If you do create a relationship with someone who has different beliefs, you need to ensure that you do not discriminate, label or stereotype due to this.

Finally, the last value is Individual Liberty, the protection of your rights as well as the rights of the people you work with. This includes items such as human rights and equality, personal development and respect and dignity. In this day and age, this should be something that is employed throughout all businesses and work relationships, such as banishing the gender pay gap and respecting people for their sexual orientation etc. In your personal life, it is important to remember that everyone is equal and no-one is above another. If you adhere to this, your personal relationships will have great benefit.

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Fundamental British Values: Prevent Strategy Ideas for Teachers

The Prevent Strategy places a mandatory duty on education professionals to promote fundamental British values.

This guide explains what these values mean and offers ways to incorporate them into everyday life through lessons and special events.

What are the Fundamental British Values?

“Fundamental British values” are a set of social attitudes thought to maintain social cohesion and equality. These values are:

The rule of law.
Individual liberty.
Mutual respect for, and tolerance of, those with different faiths and beliefs.

A teacher discussing British values with students

British Values Explained

Democracy describes our national electoral system and the skills needed to participate in it successfully. Democracy relies on listening to the needs of everyone and adapting a decision until the vast majority agree. The democratic process requires rigorous thinking, perspective-taking, patience, and understanding.

Individual liberty is the right of British citizens to make choices regarding the elements of their life that are outside of government control. This refers to freedom of speech and the right to make choices about our education, food, beliefs, opinions, work, family, etc.

The rule of law refers to creating an attitude of accountability and respect towards the laws and rules of institutions and nation-states.

Mutual respect and tolerance is an attitude that recognises and respects the individual liberty of others – even if their choices, lifestyle, and beliefs are ones you don’t share.

As well as promoting these values to students, the conduct of all school staff should reflect them. Teachers can be issued with a Misconduct Order where there is evidence that their behaviour undermines British values or promotes political or religious extremism.

How Can I Embed British Values in Lessons?

Schools should have a clear strategy for promoting these values, in their work, as well as methods of showing how this strategy has been effective (e.g. through lesson plans or pupil voice).

Some subjects, such as PSHE, health and relationships education, history, citizenship, and religious education, offer quite explicit subject links. The statutory programmes of study across all key stages, for these subjects include learning outcomes relating to understanding stereotyping, promoting tolerance, respecting differences, and understanding the role and workings of democracy in Britain.

However, opportunities should also be found for embedding British values in lessons within subject with less explicit links – for example, through the texts that are chosen to be studied in English, or in discussions related to the works and artists studied in art and design.

The following are some ideas to further promote British values within school. We have split these up into age ranges, although most strategies can be adapted to suit different age groups.

Teaching British Values in Early Years

Early years settings are well placed to begin to establish the fundamental British values, and they are embedding in many of the routines and learning experiences children will encounter.

Examples of ways to foster this include:

Incorporate Choice

By providing child-initiated learning experiences, where children are given opportunities to decide on the activities they wish to pursue, you can help to foster the concept of individual liberty, whilst providing a framework of rules which nurture tolerance and respect. For example, a child may need to wait for an activity to become free if another child has chosen before them.

You can also begin to develop an understanding of democracy by offering choice at a group or class level. This can be something as simple as offering two stories to be read aloud and asking for a show of hands to make the decision. Children will experience having a vote that counts, contributing to a decision, and also abiding by group choices that may or may not reflect your personal wishes.

Reflect children’s individual interests

Anyone who has worked with young children has witnessed the power of show and tell. Children enjoy sharing their interests and news with their peers. Viewed from a perspective of British values, this simple forum for sharing offers both a reinforcement of their individual liberty, showing that their interests and ideas are valued, and promotes ideas of difference and tolerance as they learn about the things that are important to their peers.

Learning experiences within the early years should reflect and build upon the interests of the children, providing them with stimuli to encourage questions and engagement.

Establish clear and consistent rules

By establishing clear and consistent rules for behaviour, you are able to reinforce the importance of rules, alongside the values of tolerance and respect. These should be expressed in child-friendly terms which are easily understood – for example ‘kind words’ might be enough to remind children that we do not call people names or try to hurt their feelings with our words.

Teaching British Values in Primary Schools

School Councils

Most schools recognise the importance of including pupil voice in their decision-making process. School councils allow children to put themselves forward for a position of responsibility. Representatives are usually voted for by their peers to represent them (often one or two councillors per class), in order to put their ideas, questions, and sometimes concerns, to a larger meeting of the school council.

Representatives usually hold the position for a set period of time (e.g. a term) and then other children have a chance to put themselves forward.

As children get older, they could be encouraged to put forward a more detailed pitch for why they think they should hold the position and what they would want to do for their peers, as their representative.

This process works for all school-age children and gives them a chance to be involved in a democratic process on many levels – as voters, representatives, and constituents.

Mock Elections

Sometimes schools take the opportunity to mirror current events and hold mock elections in line with general elections or occasional referendums. This gives children an opportunity to learn about what is involved, and deepen their understanding of the importance of such events that they will encounter in the media.

Depending on the age of the children, this could provide excellent learning opportunities to look at party political agendas, with an emphasis on tolerance of differing viewpoints.

Co-constructing class rules or values

In primary schools, the first week of term often provides a good opportunity to write a set of class values or rules which will form a contract for the year ahead. This allows opportunity to discuss why rules are needed and how they benefit the whole community. Teachers can tie this in with learning about laws in a wider sense.

Once the ideas are agreed, the class can work together to create a display for the classroom so that they can be easily referred to, or perhaps a charter that is signed by every member of the class – including the teaching staff.

Try to make these positive values or rules – so rather than ‘We do not interrupt’, opt for ‘We listen to each other’.

Teaching British Values in Secondary Schools

Strategies such as school councils or mock elections will also work well in a secondary setting, although you will be able to delve further into the intricacies of the democratic process with older children.

With regards to older children, some secondary schools have successfully created ‘school values’ in consultation with pupils. These can then become the basis of reward system – for example if one of the chosen values is ‘kindness’ then children who are found acting kindly to a peer can be rewarded with achievement points or some other form of recognition.

Both class and school rules should be reflective of a wider school culture of tolerance and respect.

Want to Learn More?

Our Prevent Duty Training gives you a clear and concise overview of the Prevent duty. There are opportunities throughout to apply your learning through scenarios and case studies, and Choose Your Path sector-specific content. You can also find our Prevent Duty Guidance Pack for Teachers here .

Embedding British Values in the Wider School Culture

Across all key stages, lessons and strategies on the British values will not be successful in isolation. The key values need to be embedded in every area of school life, from official policies, to the ways children are greeted in corridors.

Children need to see the values reflected in the school culture, and to feel that they as individuals are treated with respect and tolerance, and they are in turn expected to treat others that way.

The following are some ways that schools can help cement such a culture:

Behaviour policies – the values of tolerance and respect should be reflected in a clear and consistent behaviour policy.
Celebrating differences – again this needs to be done on many levels, from choices in books for story time to acknowledging and celebrating a range of festivals in assemblies.
Actively rewarding the values that you seek to instil – again this can be reflected in behaviour policies but it can be as simple as remembering to thank someone for their kindness.
Valuing pupil voice – this needs to go further than having a school council because it is the ‘done thing’. Pupils’ views should be sought, listened to, and acted upon in an appropriate way. There should be a number of ways for students input into this – for example, focussed email surveys (where there is an opportunity to remain anonymous) can be useful.

Part of the Prevent Duty for the education sector is to promote British values and to be able to evidence this, through lesson plans and policies, etc. However, these values are not new to education. They are something you will already be promoting through your teaching practice – from teaching nursery-aged children to share resources and take turns, to encouraging A-level students to examine an issue from multiple viewpoints in an essay. We hope some of the strategies in this article will help you to recognise where you are already promoting British values in your practice, and to build upon them.

Further Resources

Free Prevent Duty Quiz – Test Your Knowledge
Prevent Duty Guidance Pack for Teachers – Free Download
Tips for Managing Controversial Topics in the Classroom
Professional Development Plan for Teachers

Post Author

Her favourite article is Why is Child Development So Important in Early Years?

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Education, training and skills
School curriculum
Spiritual, moral, social and cultural development

Guidance on promoting British values in schools published

Strengthened guidance on improving the spiritual, moral, social and cultural development of pupils.

The Department for Education has today (27 November 2014) published guidance on promoting British values in schools to ensure young people leave school prepared for life in modern Britain.

The guidance aims to help both independent and state-maintained schools understand their responsibilities in this area. All have a duty to ‘actively promote’ the fundamental British values of democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs. These values were first set out by the government in the ‘Prevent’ strategy in 2011.

Until now schools have been required to ‘respect’ these values, but as a result of changes brought in earlier in the year all schools must now have a clear strategy for embedding these values and show how their work with pupils has been effective in doing so. In a letter to the Education Select Committee in March, the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Schools Lord Nash explained the changes were designed to “tighten up the standards on pupil welfare to improve safeguarding, and the standards on spiritual, moral, social and cultural development of pupils to strengthen the barriers to extremism”.

Ofsted and the independent inspectorates now take the work of schools in this area into account during inspections.

Publishing the guidance today, Lord Nash said:

A key part of our plan for education is to ensure children become valuable and fully rounded members of society who treat others with respect and tolerance, regardless of background. We want every school to promote the basic British values of democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance for those of different faiths and beliefs. This ensures young people understand the importance of respect and leave school fully prepared for life in modern Britain.

Examples of the understanding and knowledge pupils are expected to learn include:

an understanding of how citizens can influence decision-making through the democratic process

an understanding that the freedom to hold other faiths and beliefs is protected in law

an acceptance that people having different faiths or beliefs to oneself (or having none) should be accepted and tolerated, and should not be the cause of prejudicial or discriminatory behaviour

an understanding of the importance of identifying and combatting discrimination

Examples of actions schools can take to promote British values are to:

include in suitable parts of the curriculum - as appropriate for the age of pupils - material on the strengths, advantages and disadvantages of democracy, and how democracy and the law works in Britain, in contrast to other forms of government in other countries

ensure all pupils within the school have a voice that is listened to, and demonstrate how democracy works by actively promoting democratic processes such as a school council whose members are voted for by the pupils

use opportunities such as general or local elections to hold mock elections to promote fundamental British values and provide pupils with the opportunity to learn how to argue and defend points of view

consider the role of extra-curricular activity, including any run directly by pupils, in promoting fundamental British values

The government today also published its interim response to a consultation of the revised Independent Schools Standards ( ISS ). The revised standards cover independent schools, academies and free schools, ensuring they - along with local authority-maintained schools - must promote British values.

Notes to editors

See the SMSC guidance for maintained schools and for independent schools, academies and free schools.

See also the government’s consultation interim response on part 2 of the Independent School Standards , covering the SMSC development of pupils.

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Projecting the UK’s values abroad: Introduction

Article by Adam Hug

December 3, 2020

Projecting the UK’s values abroad: Introduction

This essay collection asks, and tries to answer, the question ‘what can Britain do now?’ It is an examination of the emerging tools and strategies the UK can use to support and promote its values in its foreign policy. While in a number of areas there is continuity in British rhetoric and policy, outside the European Union (EU) the UK is required to rethink the way it operates in order to continue to exert influence on the world stage. [1] Not only must it build on its existing strengths, as set out earlier in this publication series, but find new ways of working.

Building on the cross-governmental principle behind the Integrated Review, the UK’s emerging foreign policy must effectively use all available resources inside and outside government, hard and soft power, to support its foreign policy objectives and its chosen values. [2] As set out in the first collection in this series, The principles for Global Britain , and in Cat Tully and Sophie Middlemiss’ essay in this publication, a sensible approach has to start from a clear understanding of Britain’s place in the world and buy in from the public, particularly the younger generation and others often excluded from the policy making process – a ‘whole of nation strategy’ as Tully and Middlemiss put it. [3] In their essay Ruth Bergan and David Lawrence make the case that this principle applies equally to ensuring public participation in discussions over trade policy. A positive and transformative agenda for the future of UK foreign policy and how it can be a force for good may, at least have a chance to begin healing some of the divisions over the country’s future. As a middle power in a fast changing world, enduring polarisation and division over the UK’s national strategy is not a luxury we can afford.

Prior to Brexit, although participation in the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy did not prevent the UK from showing international leadership where there was the necessary political will, the need to participate in determining and supporting sometimes lowest common denominator positions generated by consensus dulled the edge of some of its decision making. The UK now has the opportunity, if it so chooses, to show greater speed of action, and greater creativity and skill in the delivery of its foreign policy to compensate for and potentially outweigh the loss of diplomatic clout given by EU membership. [4] In broad-terms, the UK’s foreign policy planners will need to recognise the implications of the UK being a less important market and partner for other world powers, most notably the US, seeking to access and influence the EU. It retains key strengths but will need to lean into the greater flexibility that the post-Brexit environment provides.

There is a need for policy makers to accept the unavoidable fact of the UK’s ‘ relative ’ decline in geopolitical influence, but also understand that with the right level of political will it does not mean the UK has to do less in absolute terms and that it can still make a real impact with the right policies and strategies. [5] The politically expedient, but somewhat strategically confused, recent decisions of increasing defence spending while cutting international aid pull in opposite directions the effort to reposition the UK on the world stage. [6] However this shift, relative to other powers, makes it all the more important that it uses its time now wisely to help shape the international architecture that it will live with into the future and find innovative ways to burden-share in areas where the UK lacks capacity alone. Ignoring or denying the need to respond to these shifts in the geo-political landscape will hasten and exacerbate British decline, in both relative and absolute terms. Finding the right tone in the Integrated Review and the Government’s wider messaging will be key, focused on national pride about what Britain can do without resorting to jingoism, striving for the UK to be exceptional without claiming exceptionalism.

Finding a new role: The ‘Library of democracy’

It’s far from original to reference the old Dean Acheson quote about Britain having ‘lost an empire and has not yet found a role’, but it feels once again relevant with Brexit and shifting US priorities untethering the UK from its more recent mooring as a balancing force between European and US interests in the wider Trans-Atlantic partnership. [7] Often that recent role was described as being a bridge, something that led more cynical critiques to claim, usually unfairly, that Britain was being walked over by either of those partners. So part of the current process of reassessing the UK’s position post Brexit is trying to identify and agree on its new role in the international order. To help Britain find that niche it could well be worth seeking to adapt another mid-20 th Century aphorism to meet today’s challenges.

In the early phase of the Second World War, prior to Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt described America’s role as being the ‘Arsenal of Democracy’, where the US would provide tools used by others in the fight for the future of democracy. [8] Despite recently promised increases in defence spending there is little public appetite to use such power widely to try to impose its values on others given the troubled legacy of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, as set out in the FPC’s previous Protecting the UK’s ability to defend its values publication, in a number of overlapping areas including academia, NGOs, media outlets and cultural institutions the UK remains a leading global player. [9] If the UK wants to build on these strengths to be a force for good in the world, it could perhaps start to frame its emerging global role as becoming a, or even the, ‘Library of Democracy’.

Like the role of the library in communities around the country, the UK could act as an important resource and meeting place for the community of democratic nations. Similarly, as with libraries, there have sometimes been questions about their role in the modern world but they have adapted to become hubs that provide access to technology, hosting support services and activities that enable citizens to make change in their own lives. This new positioning would build on the UK soft power strengths and longstanding role as an international hub.

To play this role effectively care must be taken to protect the UK’s globally focused NGOs, academic centres of excellence and international media platforms (not least the BBC) during the current economic downturn. It must also look at ways, through a truly Integrated Review, to reform Home Office practice to ensure the UK is better able to provide asylum to human rights defenders, independent journalists and other dissidents seeking a place of refuge from persecution, while similarly making it easier for international experts to visit for conferences and other short-term research collaborations. There needs to be greater recognition amongst policy makers that, irrespective of the rights and wrongs of the UK’s negotiating objectives with the EU, the Government’s willingness to actively embrace even a ‘specific and limited’ breach of international law in undermining a treaty it had only recently signed has hurt its standing in the wider international community, not only amongst EU member states with whom the UK seeks to work with diplomatically in future. UK Aid must also fully support the Government’s Open Societies strategic objective by supporting human rights defenders and NGOs abroad, while working to avoid conflicts between human rights and development priorities.

Some of the noises coming out of the initial stages of the Government’s now delayed Integrated Review suggest that it is thinking creatively about other ways for the UK to make its mark. These include placing a more active role in some of the more ostensibly mundane but important international bodies that set international standards and regulations, particularly in the digital space. In the past some authoritarian states obtained outsized roles in bodies such as the Internet Governance Forum by committing resources to them, including hosting the annual conferences, when others lacked the focus. If the UK wants to play a more prominent role it can build on its strong academic, legal, NGO and service sector resources to help take a more active role in global rule setting, and to compensate in part for no longer being able to directly influence the development of rules in its largest export market, the global rule and standard setting EU.

Another way the UK hopes to enhance its role on the global stage is to be a place for mediation in the world’s conflicts. To support this objective it can draw on a strong pool of talent in the UK’s peacebuilding and development sector to assist its experienced diplomats in this endeavour. However the UK will need to be strategic around understanding where its history and present policies support (or at least do not hinder) it to play a brokering role, given that in large parts of the world Britain brings certain baggage to the table that a Norway or a Switzerland do not.

The determination to make a policy pivot to the Indo-Pacific remains clear in the ongoing discussion around the Integrated Review, albeit it is less certain to what extent resources and capability will follow the shifting of policy focus. The narrative of burden sharing seems sensible in this context but needs clearer articulation of why our regional partners would want the UK to play a more active role in their backyard, what we might be able to bring to the table to support them and where they may wish to see reciprocal assistance elsewhere. The UK will need to find areas where it can ‘add value’ in a region that is not our own rather than simply mimic capability and roles played by the US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea and other allied Pacific powers. As Ben Judah and Georgina Wright note in their essay strengthening bilateral partnerships with Australia and Japan will be important, as too could be exploring what membership of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) for the UK could mean, though many thorny issues around agriculture and labour rights may make this strategically appealing opportunity unviable. [10]

The desire to root new partnerships in the principles and promotion of democracy is a positive response to the strategic challenge of rising authoritarian powers; a topic set out in the earlier The principles for Global Britain publication in this series. The topic of new organisations and groupings tasked with that purpose will be addressed again in the upcoming Partnerships for the future of UK Foreign Policy publication, but it also a feature of a contribution by in this collection by Jonas Parello-Plesner from the Alliance of Democracies. Parello-Plesner’s essay points out that democracy promotion is likely to feature highly in President-Elect Biden’s upcoming administration. [11] However, it is also worth noting that another major, often intersecting, policy theme in Biden’s administration is tackling the impact of kleptocracy and transnational corruption, an area where the UK still has a lot of work to do. [12]

Transparency and accountability

Getting Britain’s house in order on issues around transparency and tackling corruption are essential if the UK wants to play a positive role in the world. It is also an important part of efforts to improve how the Britain is perceived around the world, as for too many countries the UK and its territories and dependencies are where their unscrupulous leaders and oligarchs park their money, acting as a global hub of opaque financial practices and corruption. So there is a need for the Government, through the Integrated Review and wider work, to look at the extent to which money flows into UK jurisdictions, through the British property industry, its legal, public affairs and service sectors from authoritarian elites, shady businesses or criminal groups. It should look at the ways in which these illicit money flows are used to influence the UK and how UK firms that are complicit in enabling criminal or ethically dubious behaviour abroad undermine the reputation of this country.

In these times of COVID pressure on the public finances there has never been a better opportunity to link these issues around tax justice, anti-corruption and transparency to ensure those benefiting from the UK’s property market and financial sector pay their fair share (both to the UK and to their home countries). Despite the ongoing challenges it is important to recognise that there have been some positive recent steps that start to tackle these long-standing problem. Proposed changes to improve and verify the data of Companies Households are welcome but will need to be built on, legislated and implemented. [13] Similarly, the current requirements on beneficial ownership and the use of Unexplained Wealth Orders are important but the institutions responsible for administering them need to be resourced properly. The Government must make Parliamentary time to introduce the Registration of Overseas Entities Bill to move this agenda forward. [14]

The recent 2020 Spending Review has set out plans for ‘an additional £63 million to tackle economic crime, including support for the National Economic Crime Centre (NECC), along with £20 million for Companies House reform’. [15] Expanding the capacity of the NECC and the enforcement ability of its constituent partners such as the National Crime Agency, Serious Fraud Office and HMRC could facilitate more investigations into transnational corruption and to increase the use of Unexplained Wealth Orders but further funding is likely to be required. [16] Nevertheless, this cash injection should help to give Companies House greater capacity to conduct proper verification of the information provided to existing beneficial ownership registers. The Government should also look at ways to crack down on the use of paid proxies and examine possible restrictions on the ability of opaque corporate entities from jurisdictions without properly equivalent transparency rules from registering without proving information on their ultimate beneficial ownership. Further measures could also include ensuring that at least one accountable person for each UK registered entity should be based in the UK. [17]

Beyond Companies House, improving and opening access to Land Registry data could assist investigative journalists and other researchers by potentially removing or reducing the access fees to help them cross check information with other registries. In the medium term the Government should look at how to better join up information about assets held by different institutions such as considering the development of a consolidated national asset registry, a case made strongly in the essay in this collection by Alex Cobham, Andres Knobel and Robert Palmer. Improved access to relevant data should support efforts to pressure the UK property industry to increase the number of Suspicious Activity Reports filed to HMRC when buildings are being bought by opaque international investment vehicles. [18]

Despite progress being promised in 2018, the Government has yet to find Parliamentary time to address the transparency problems facing a number of forms of UK investment vehicle. [19] A notorious example are the Scottish Limited Partnerships that, unlike their English equivalent, have their own legal personality and combine both limited disclosure requirements but no taxes on the partnership itself. The term ‘Scottish Company’ has become synonymous with corruption across the Former Soviet Union and UK-based tax advisors promote them on the basis that: ‘there are no taxes in the UK, providing that the partnership does not trade in the UK and partners are not residents of the UK’; ‘no requirements to submit financial statements; ‘no requirements to submit tax declaration’; and crucially ‘high confidentiality’. [20] Irrespective of the Government’s anti-corruption commitments if the UK Government is keen to prevent further erosion of support for the Union then it should urgently consider removing something legislated in London that besmirches Scotland’s reputation.

There remains a fundamental question: what benefits do corporate entities that register in the UK but do not provide goods or services in the country, do not pay tax here and do not have owners based here actually bring to Britain, other than damage to our national reputation? For example the UK’s reputation was recently brought into question when it was found by RFE/RL that a company believed to have been gifted a substantial slice of commercial development land in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, was in fact based in the Hertfordshire market town of Kington. Given that the companies’ directors are based in Belize and according to RFE/RL the owners are believed to be in Uzbekistan it is unclear how the UK gains from such an arrangement. [21]

A related area where the UK needs to do better to improve its reputation is on libel reform. Worryingly, UK law firms are at the forefront of global efforts to intimidate journalists and other investigators into the proceeds of financial crimes through the use of strategic litigation against public participation (‘SLAPP’). [22] This form of vexatious legal action can have wide reaching consequences far beyond the UK’s borders. Despite the reforms made in the 2013 UK Defamation Act, there are still significant challenges for journalists and media organisations around the world when defending themselves against UK libel claims. [23] The cost of mounting a defence is extremely high, the burden of proof required places an enormous onus on the defendant, proceedings can be lengthy and a negative verdict can result in a potentially crippling damages pay-out.

The UK libel system’s significant chilling effect makes journalists, researchers and activists uniquely mindful about the reach of potentially being dragged into the UK courts even if both they and the subject of their inquiries are based abroad. Journalists have reported that claimants often rely on the mere threat of the cost involved in UK libel proceedings being so intimidating that “journalists won’t even try to defend themselves” and remove the article in question. [24] Libel tourism, and the threat of such extra-territorial action, significantly undermines the UK’s values leadership internationally by chilling freedom of expression and undermining the UK’s global leadership on these issues.

UK legal firms have been hired to send journalists all over the world cease and desist letters threatening legal action if they do not halt their investigations or remove investigations from their publications. For example at the time of her murder in October 2017, the Maltese investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia had at least 42 civil libel suits open against her, many of which were brought through UK-based law firms, acting for foreign banks and wealthy individuals and continued to be pursued against her family after her death. [25] In January 2020, a libel case filed against Paul Radu, co-founder of OCCRP and a Romanian citizen, was due to go to trial in the UK. The claimant, who was named in an award-winning OCCRP report investigating concerns around money laundering, successfully filed the case by stating he lived in London despite being a serving MP in Azerbaijan. [26] On the eve of the trial, the claimant offered to settle on favourable terms for Radu, but as OCCRP noted this settlement ended almost two years of being embroiled in a costly and time-consuming lawsuit. [27] A common theme of SLAPPS is how they are used as an attempt to distract from important public interest reporting, harass journalists and tie them up in legal action as a way to disable their ability to continue investigating. Often cases might never reach court, having achieved their aim prior to that stage. [28] A recent Foreign Policy Centre survey of global investigative journalists networks found that the UK was by far the most common source of legal pressure on their activities and that 61 per cent of their investigations had found a link to UK financial or legal jurisdictions. [29]

Many countries have struggled with meeting best practice standards when responding to pandemic procurement given the urgency of the crisis, but some of the concerns raised about close proximity between suppliers and the British Government raise issues not only domestically (some of which is beyond the scope of this publication) but it will have a lingering impact on the UK’s reputation and its ability to support international best practice standards. There needs to be a transparent and independent review into recent procurement problems in order to learn lessons for the future. [30] The need to improve transparency and accountability in domestic processes, as well as providing better value for money for tax payers, would help improve the UK’s reputation and give it greater credibility when advocating for change internationally.

As mentioned earlier in this publication series the UK’s introduction of ‘Magnitsky’ personal sanctions against international human rights abusers, through an amendment to the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act 2018, has been an important step forward in giving the Government powers to put pressure on rights abuse around the world, particularly given the concentration of ill-gotten gains stashed in UK jurisdictions as mentioned above. The current Foreign Secretary has been a longstanding advocate of such measures and so far has been willing to use them against those of regimes traditionally friendly to the UK, such as Saudi Arabia over the murder of exiled journalist Jamal Khashoggi, as well as traditional rivals. There is a strong argument to ensure the relevant teams in the newly merged Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) are properly resourced to ramp up the number of sanctions issued. The remit of the sanctions needs to be formally widened to include concerns around corruption as part of the wider suite of tools available to tackle that issue. One difference between the US Global Magnitsky Act and the UK provisions is the lack of a formal role for the British Parliament in proposing potential cases where such sanctions should be applied. While the differences in capacity between Parliamentary and Congressional staffs should be noted, giving Parliament a formal role could help ensure the tool is use to cover a wider range of cases and encourage the FCDO to overcome institutional or perceived diplomatic barriers to its use.

Trade and aid

This publication comes out just after an important decision about Britain’s role in the world, the decision to cut the proportion of national income spend on Official Development Assistance (ODA) aid from the legally mandated and manifesto committed 0.7 per cent to 0.5 per cent from 2021, and ahead of an even bigger one on the details regarding the UK’s future trading relations with the EU. [31] The aid cut is a decision taken ostensibly due to the impact of the pandemic on the public finances (something which had already triggered a separate £2.9 billion in year cut for 2020 as a function of the reduction in national income). [32] However given it occurred less than a week after a major uplift in defence spending, to tackle capacity shortfalls, it is clear that this represents the Government having ‘moved £4 billion from aid to defence’ in the words of Foreign Affairs Select Committee Chair Tom Tugendhat. [33] One small area of comfort for the cause of international development is that the Government restated its commitment to the OECD’s ODA rules in the face of backbench pressure to loosen requirements to enable UK funds to be spent in a wider number of ways to support the armed forces or trade promotion. This pressure on the ODA rules is likely to persist and must be guarded against for the UK’s credibility as a donor to be maintained. However, the Government does remain committed to attempting international reform of the shared criteria at some point. Part of that necessary reassurance to the development sector should be a swift and comprehensive completion of the review of the Independent Commission for Aid Impact ( ICAI ) in a way that protects and strengthens its independence and oversight. [34]

Concern over the impact of aid reduction is not only, or indeed primarily, about damaging Britain’s reputation and influence, but at its core it is about the impact of an over £5bn cut (compared to 2019) on the lives of those most in need around the world. [35] Many Government decisions have significant real world impacts, for good or ill, on people but if former International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell is correct that the scale of the cut could lead to 100,000 preventable deaths, mainly in children, this should have given the Government greater cause for pause. [36] The cut has been announced as a temporary measure in response to COVID-19, yet despite this stated framing of the action the Government has made it known that it seeks to repeal the 2015 International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Act. This is because it believes, as a planned rather than accidental cut, legal change is required but it is a move that could pave the way to make the cut de facto permanent. [37] The Foreign Secretary has said both that the Government “cannot see a path back to 0.7% in the foreseeable, immediate future”, and the somewhat more positive but vague “we will revert to 0.7% as soon as the fiscal position allows”, which could mean anything from the point at which the economy initially rebounds through to any number of politically contingent assessments of the deficit or national debt. [38]

Although the Integrated Review has yet to be completed the Foreign Secretary has announced in a letter to the International Development Select Committee that all aid spending will be focused on addressing seven global challenges: Climate Change and biodiversity; COVID and global health security; Girls’ education; Science, research, technology; Open societies and conflict resolution; Humanitarian preparedness and response; and Trade and economic development. [39] It also states that spending will focus only on countries where the UK’s development, security and economic interests align, such as sub-Saharan Africa and the Indo-Pacific region. While it may be that poverty reduction is a cross-cutting theme of these priorities it is not explicitly stated in either the letter or the subsequent Parliamentary Statement, despite previous ministerial statements that reiterated its importance. Therefore, if the Government wishes to retain a focus on poverty reduction as part of its plans it should publically state this in order to provide reassurance on this hugely important issue. Plans also announced to consolidate the FCDO’s strategic overview of ODA spending across Government and move away from reliance on enormous contracts with consultancies are broadly to be welcomed.

The UK’s new ability to set its own international trade agenda provides a powerful tool for the UK to back its international values if it is willing and able to use it effectively. This publication builds on arguments set out in the earlier Finding Britain’s Role in a Changing World: Building a values-based foreign policy published jointly with Oxfam UK and The principles for Global Britain publication. [40] As set out briefly in the latter publication, new UK trade deals should seek to support rather than undermine regional trade integration by developing countries, learning from the initial mistakes of the EU’s Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) and with an emphasis on it being a full and inclusive partnership. [41] The UK should seek to build on the EU’s ‘Everything but Arms’ approach, but give developing country partners greater flexibility, including a more generous interpretation of the ‘substantially all’ requirement on rules of origin so that they can protect infant industries and support regional supply chains, allow for longer phasing periods and a pro-development use of schedules, as well as giving partner countries the maximum policy space possible to allow them to implement rules in ways most suitable to their development. [42] The UK should seek to move away from the use of Investor-State Dispute Settlements (ISDSs) and instead look to coordinate with its aid policy by supporting rule of law initiatives in partner countries where possible, something that should fit within the Government’s current ‘Trade and economic development’ priority. [43]

The imminent withdrawal of the UK from the EU’s Single Market and Customs Union has led to a rush to try to conclude bilateral trade deals, many of which copy over existing arrangements that currently apply to the UK as part of EU membership. One area of ongoing dispute is around the extent of Parliamentary and public scrutiny around the development of trade deals, with both the Government and campaigners identifying examples that support their respective cases that the UK’s new arrangements are more or less transparent and accountable than their peers. What would seem undoubtedly true is that the UK’s Parliament and stakeholders have less structured input into the development and decision making around such deals than the European Parliament, and therefore UK representatives within it previously, has over the direction of EU trade deals. Getting these scrutiny arrangements right is important to help improve accountability and quality of the agreements entered into, not least given their potentially significant implications for domestic law and policy if a deal is substantive. In this collection Ruth Bergan and David Lawrence suggest a number of sensible suggestions for improving Parliamentary scrutiny, including publication of the Government’s initial negotiation objectives that is subject to a debate and vote, providing a regular release of negotiating texts (or at least headline information) after each round, leading to a final guaranteed debate and vote on the final deal. This enhanced Parliamentary scrutiny should be supported by ‘regular engagement with civil society, including environmental groups, businesses and trade unions, and the publication of an independent Sustainability Impact Assessment.’

In terms of the deals the UK is currently trying to negotiate there is clearly scope to strengthen human rights and environmental clauses to make them actionable in the case of a breach by either party. Given that the UK is not envisaging formal human rights dialogues or other consultative mechanisms attached to its deals, greater enforceability will be required in order for these UK deals to not be seen as a diminishing the importance of values compared to the previous, still very imperfect, EU deals the UK used to be part of. Both the EU’s various different models of agreement (from Partnership and Cooperation Agreements to Association Agreements) and the innovative mechanisms such as the Agreement on Climate Change, Trade and Sustainability (ACCTS) created by New Zealand and others, as explained in Bergan and Lawrence’s essay, can provide a blueprint for the UK to frame trade as an integrated strand of building improved bilateral relationships. [44] So as the UK moves forward and the immediate post-Brexit rush subsides, the UK should look at how it can better make trade an integrated plank in the development of new Strategic Partnership Agreements that bring trade agreements alongside more detailed plans for security cooperation, and scientific, academic and cultural collaboration; as well as environmental partnerships (including potentially new international carbon trading arrangements if the UK is unable to formally link with the EU ETS in future); people-to-people contact; and, finally, where relevant aid support.

Emerging challenges

In this collection, Luke Murphy and Dr Joe Devanny respectively tackle two of the most pressing global challenges, climate and cyber security, and give ideas for how the UK should respond to them.

Along with the G7, the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow will be a huge opportunity for the UK to show global leadership to tackle a pressing challenge, if handled with care and the level of political focus required. It will also create an opportunity for engagement with China on an issue of shared interest, allowing for a parallel diplomatic track that maintains opportunities for dialogue, even as the UK takes action on the defence of democracy and human rights, digital security and other areas that recognise the risks of China poses to the values the UK espouses. Murphy outlines a number of practical measures in terms of domestic investment and regulatory change that can help boost Britain’s position but it is also in the diplomatic arena where the UK needs to show greater focus if they are to emulate the success of the French leadership of the COP that led to the Paris Agreement.

While COVID-19 has understandably disrupted preparations, not least in delaying the Glasgow Conference by a year, between late January and early November the UK lacked a standalone lead for the process, between the removal of Claire O’ Neill as COP President and the arrival of former International Development Secretary Anne-Marie Trevelyan in a somewhat more constrained role as International Champion on Adaptation and Resilience for the COP26 Presidency. Trevelyan’s appointment may help take pressure off the somewhat overburdened Business Secretary who is formally acting as President of the COP, and it is to be hoped that her work will be backed by high level support from the Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister to show that the COP is a genuine diplomatic priority. Climate action provides a useful mechanism for engaging the incoming Biden administration, whose appointment of former Secretary of State and Presidential Candidate John Kerry as the US’s climate envoy is a signal of its importance to the new US leadership. Despite Trevelyan’s appointment and in light of Kerry’s there are still calls for the UK to appoint a more senior political figure, a ‘grand fromage’ in the words of Defence Select Committee Chair Tobias Ellwood MP, to act as full-time President of the COP. [45]

The UK should also look at the history of successful interactions between Government and Civil Society, such as the Make Poverty History campaign in the 2000s around the UK’s 2005 G7 Presidency and the role that it played in the promotion of UK global values leadership and in their implementation. This may require wider work to build trust between Government and the third sector in light of recent disagreements over aid and other matters.

The Government’s recent defence announcement makes clear that improving the UK’s cyber capabilities will be a central part of Britain’s security over the years to come. [46] As Devanny makes clear in his essay, along with the additional funding the UK needs a clearly defined ethical framework to underpin its new Cyber Strategy and there is also an important role for enhanced oversight. Devanny rightly urges a focus on cyber defence and limiting offensive capability to its role in tackling defence and security infrastructure rather than seeking ways to target civilian infrastructure.

Brand Britain

After several years of introspection around its relationship with Europe the UK now needs to get on the front foot facing the world; not only through its policies but also in how it is perceived. This approach needs to be based from a clear understanding on how other countries currently perceive the UK and the need to ensure the UK is still seen as being outward looking and engaged, exploring new ways to boost its soft-power attractiveness. To that end, work needs to be done to effectively map attitudes towards the UK, both in key power centres and in countries that the UK is looking to grow its influence and engagement.

Presenting Britain’s message to the world should flow from the priorities and strategies set out in the Integrated Review. It is to be hoped that there is an emphasis on developing a positive vision for the country that can reach out beyond the domestic rancour of the last few years. A vision that rests on a narrowly partisan assessment of the UK’s interests and priorities would not achieve the buy-in of the wider public, including many that are critical to the UK’s soft-power success, and therefore lack the longevity only obtained through coalition building.

The current Government should learn from the still relatively recent experience of the 2012 Olympics, which were used to present a clear positive vision of the UK (centred on the UK being a young, dynamic, diverse and tolerant country) and how the idea of sustainability and legacy were a core part of the message, showing the UK has a long-term plan. It will need to look at the scope for the Commonwealth Games and other cultural and sporting events over the coming years to help shape perceptions of the UK and enhance its soft power, helping these vital industries for Britain’s global standing recovery from the horrific toll of COVID-19. To that end, it is to be hoped that the Festival UK 2022 initiative can disentangle itself from the Brexit culture war, in part a product of its initially unhelpful genesis as Theresa May’s ‘Festival of Brexit Britain’, to be a genuinely inclusive showcase of the talent the UK has to offer and provide a focus on ideas and principles that can unite across political and ideological divides. [47]

The Government needs to find a way of working collaboratively with the UK’s City Regions (Combined Authorities) and devolved nations to help promote the country on the world stage. Once the immediate impact of COVID has abated and the rancorous Mayoral elections have passed, the UK should look at the importance of retaining London’s position as a global city, while strengthening the ability of Metro Mayors, devolved nations and other regional and local leaderships to strengthen the country’s voice abroad as well as supporting trade and investment as part of the Government’s levelling up objectives. [48] The Government also needs to find a way to engage more effectively with the UK’s diaspora of British leaders in international institutions, businesses, NGOs and cultural institutions abroad to learn from them and provide new opportunities for dialogue. [49]

Effectively projecting the UK’s values abroad will require a clear vision of what the Government intends to do, combined with sufficient resources, political commitment and a commitment to reform the status quo both at home and abroad. This publication hopes to give some suggestions about how it might deliver such an ambitious agenda.

Image by Rian (Ree) Saunders under ( CC ).

[1] Ben Judah, Surprise! Post-Brexit Britain’s foreign policy looks a lot like the old one, The Washington Post, July 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/13/surprise-post-brexit-britains-foreign-policy-looks-lot-like-old-one/

[2] What those values should be.

[3] Finding Britain’s role in a changing world: The principles for Global Britain, FPC, September 2020, https://fpc.org.uk/publications/the-principles-for-global-britain/

[4] Dominique Moisi, The isolation of the United Kingdom is no longer splendid, Institut Montaigne, July 2020, https://www.institutmontaigne.org/blog/lisolement-du-royaume-uni-na-plus-rien-de-splendide

[5] Recent polling data suggests the British public is perhaps more attuned to the UK’s position than some it is political class by answering the question ‘Do the British overestimate or underestimate how important the UK is on the world stage?’ as Overestimate: 44%, Underestimate: 19% and Get it about right: 17%. See: Twitter Post, YouGov, Twitter, November 2020, https://twitter.com/YouGov/status/1328378446565748736?s=20

[6] In terms of managing the Government’s political coalition.

[7] Like the many US leaders who would follow, with a brief interregnum during the Trump-era, Acheson was adamant that the UK’s future (and its future utility to the United States) lay through greater integration and cooperation with Europe. See: Guardian Century, Britain’s role in world, The Guardian, December 1962, https://www.theguardian.com/century/1960-1969/Story/0,,105633,00.html

[8] Radio Address Delivered by President Roosevelt From Washington, December 1940, https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/WorldWar2/arsenal.htm

[9] Finding Britain’s role in a changing world: Protecting the UK’s ability to defend its values, FPC, September 2020, https://fpc.org.uk/publications/protecting-the-uks-ability-to-defend-its-values/

[10] Greater collaboration with likeminded Pacific partners could help increase the UK’s role in region in line with stated Government objectives. However there are clear concerns being raised by important stakeholders. See: Comprehensive and Progressive Transpacific Partnership: Submission to the Department for International Trade, TUC, https://www.tuc.org.uk/sites/default/files/TUC%20CPTPP%20consultation%20final%20response_0.pdf ; and Government starts bid to join the CPTPP, NFU, https://www.nfuonline.com/news/eu-exit/eu-exit-news/government-starts-bid-to-join-the-cptpp/ . The incoming Biden administration may seek to join the deal and in doing so may seek to renegotiate the deal in ways to mollify concerns of the US Trade Unions that form an important part of his political base which may have positive ramifications for the UK’s potential membership.

[11] See: Dr Robin Niblett CMG, A New US-UK Democratic Agenda Could Be on the Horizon, Chatham House, November 2020, https://www.chathamhouse.org/2020/11/new-us-uk-democratic-agenda-could-be-horizon?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=organic-social&utm_campaign=us-election&utm_content=uk-us-partnership

[12] Josh Rudolph, Covert Foreign Money: Financial Loopholes Exploited by Authoritarians to Fund Political Interference in Democracies, Alliance for securing democracy, August 2020, https://securingdemocracy.gmfus.org/covert-foreign-money/

[13] Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy, Companies House, Lord Callanan and The Rt Jon James Brokenshire MP, Reforms to Companies House to clamp down on fraud and give businesses greater confidence in transactions, Gov.uk, September 2020, https://www.gov.uk/government/news/reforms-to-companies-house-to-clamp-down-on-fraud-and-give-businesses-greater-confidence-in-transactions

[14] Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy, Draft Registration of Overseas Entities Bill, Gov.uk, July 2018, https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/draft-registration-of-overseas-entities-bill

[15] HM Treasury, Spending Review 2020, Gov.uk, November 2020, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/spending-review-2020-documents/spending-review-2020

[16] NECC, Improving the UK’s response to economic crime, NCA, https://www.nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/what-we-do/national-economic-crime-centre ; Ed Smyth, The UK’s new National Economic Crime Centre, Kingsley Napley, November 2018, https://www.kingsleynapley.co.uk/insights/blogs/criminal-law-blog/the-uks-new-national-economic-crime-centre

[17] The Dark Money Files Podcast – Episode Companies House: It’s time to reform (maybe, if we can find the time and money), https://www.thedarkmoneyfiles.com/podcast

[18] HM Revenue & Customs, Estate agency business guidance for money laundering supervision, Gov.uk, October 2020, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/money-laundering-regulations-2007-supervision-of-estate-agency-businesses/estate-agency-guidance-for-money-laundering-supervision ; Estate Agents only made up 0.13% of SARs in 2019 according to the National Crime Agency. See: UK Financial Intelligence Unit: Suspicious Activity Reports Annual Report 2019, NCA, https://www.nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/who-we-are/publications/390-sars-annual-report-2019/file

[19] Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy, Limited partnerships: reform of limited partnership law, Gov.uk, April 2018, https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/limited-partnerships-reform-of-limited-partnership-law

[20] Scottish Limited Partnership (SLP) and Main Advantages, TBA, https://www.tba-associates.com/company-formation-scotland/scottish-lp/limited-partnersh/advantages-and-uses/

[21] “Gift” for $ 11.5 million – Mayor of Tashkent Artykkhodzhaev donated land to about a hundred entrepreneurs to a company associated with the president’s son-in-law, Radio Ozodlik, November 2020, https://rus.ozodlik.org/a/30975077.html

[22] Unsafe for Scrutiny: Examining the pressures faced by journalists uncovering financial crime and corruption around the world, FPC, November 2020, https://fpc.org.uk/publications/unsafe-for-scrutiny/

[23] A gathering storm: The laws being used to silence the media, Index on Censorship, July 2020, https://www.indexoncensorship.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/a-gathering-storm.pdf

[24] Paul Radu, How to Successfully Defend Yourself in Her Majesty’s Libel Courts, Global Investigative Journalism Network, February 2020, https://gijn.org/2020/02/26/how-to-successfully-defend-yourself-in-her-majestys-libel-courts/

[25] Letter: press freedom campaigners call for action on ‘vexatious lawsuits’, The Guardian, July 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/20/letter-press-freedom-campaigners-call-for-action-on-vexatious-lawsuits

[26] Miranda Patrucic, Madina Mammadova and Ilgar Agha, AvroMed May Have Received Millions Through Laundromat, OCCRP, September 2017, https://www.occrp.org/en/azerbaijanilaundromat/avromed-may-have-received-millions-through-laundromat

[27] OCCRP, OCCRP-Related Lawsuit Settled, January 2020, https://www.occrp.org/en/40-press-releases/presss-releases/11496-occrp-related-lawsuit-settled

[28] The editor is thankful for the input of his colleague Susan Coughtrie who leads the leads the FPC’s Unsafe for Scrutiny project.

[29] Unsafe for Scrutiny: Examining the pressures faced by journalists uncovering financial crime and corruption around the world, FPC, November 2020, https://fpc.org.uk/publications/unsafe-for-scrutiny/

[30] To fix procurement, the UK has to open it up, Centre for the Study of Corruption, November 2020, https://scscsussex.wordpress.com/2020/11/30/to-fix-procurement-the-uk-has-to-open-it-up/

[31] 2015 Act Michael Moore commits to 0.7% ODA. See: International Development (Official Development Assistance Target), Act 2015, UK Public General Acts, https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/12/contents/enacted/data.htm ; The Conservative and Unionist Party, Get Brexit Done – Unleash Britain’s Potential, Manifesto 2019, https://assets-global.website-files.com/5da42e2cae7ebd3f8bde353c/5dda924905da587992a064ba_Conservative%202019%20Manifesto.pdf

[32] Department for International Development, Foreign & Commonwealth Office and Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, Official Development Assistance (ODA) spending for 2020: First Secretary of State’s letter, Gov.uk, July 2020, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/official-development-assistance-oda-spending-for-2020-first-secretary-of-states-letter/official-development-assistance-oda-spending-for-2020-first-secretary-of-states-letter

[33] Cristina Gallardo, UK curbs Global Britain ambitions as coronavirus bites, Politico.EU, November 2020, https://www.politico.eu/article/coronavirus-forces-uk-to-downsize-its-global-britain-ambitions/

[34] Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, Independent and Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI) review: terms of reference, Gov.uk, October 2020, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/independent-commission-for-aid-impact-icai-review-terms-of-reference

[35] William Worley, Breaking: UK cuts aid budget to 0.5% of GNI, devex, November 2020, https://www.devex.com/news/breaking-uk-cuts-aid-budget-to-0-5-of-gni-98640

[36] Eleanor Langford, A Foreign Office Minister Has Resigned From Government Over Plans To Cut International Aid, Politics Home, November 2020, https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/minister-resigned-international-aid-baroness-sugg-andrew-mitchell-spending-review

[37] International Development (Official Development Assistance Target), Act 2015, UK Public General Acts, https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/12/contents/enacted/data.htm

[38] Official Development Assistance: Volume 684: debated on Thursday 26 November 2020, Hansard, https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2020-11-26/debates/A2442925-0DA2-4262-B564-1C6FEE24881A/OfficialDevelopmentAssistance

[39] Rt Hon Dominic Raab MP, Letter to Sarah Champion MP, Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, November 2020, https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/3683/documents/36094/default/

[40] Programme: Britain’s role in the world, FPC, https://fpc.org.uk/programmes/britains-role-in-the-world/

[41] The EU’s new Africa strategy now has a clear pivot: High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Joint Communication to the European Parliament and the Council: Towards a comprehensive Strategy with Africa, March 2020, https://ec.europa.eu/international-partnerships/system/files/communication-eu-africa-strategy-join-2020-4-final_en.pdf

[42] Preferential Market Access – European Union Everything But Arms Initiative, UN, LDC Portal, https://www.un.org/ldcportal/preferential-market-access-european-union-everything-but-arms-initiative/

[43] For discussion on this issue see: Royal African Society and APPG on Africa, The Future of Africa-UK Trade and Development Cooperation Relations in the Transitional and Post-Brexit Period, February 2017, https://royalafricansociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/APPG-for-Africa_Future-of-Africa-UK-Relations-Post-Brexit.pdf ; and the upcoming contributions by Ruth Bergan- who has kindly advised on some of these policy suggestions.

[44] The UK has kept the title ‘Partnership and Cooperation Agreement’ in some of the deals rolled over from the EU but there is a need to expand more on the non-trade elements of the deal, which shorn of access to previous EU support mechanisms feel somewhat light’.

[45] Jessica Parker, Alok Sharma ‘overloaded with day job’ to juggle UN summit role, BBC News, December 2020, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-55143808

[46] Prime Minister’s Office and 10 Downing Street, PM to announce largest military investment in 30 years, Gov.uk, November 2020, https://www.gov.uk/government/news/pm-to-announce-largest-military-investment-in-30-years

[47] Also can provide much needed financial support to a Covid raddled arts sector. See: Gaby Hinsliff, Don’t snark – this ‘Brexit festival’ may turn out to be just the tonic we need, The Guardian, November 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/27/brexit-festival-eu-national

[48] Aware of the challenges posed by the current position of the Scottish Government in that regard for a directly cohesive message though there remains opportunities both to sing from the same hymn sheet about the shared values irrespective of Scotland’s future in the UK and around the importance of

[49] This was to be a larger section of this project but will now be a bigger piece of work in 2022.

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How The E.U. Referendum Exposed How Toxic “British Values” Really Are

The campaign to leave the e.u. traded on people’s fear of difference, and the u.k. may never be the same again..

Back in April, an audience member on the U.K. topical debate show Question Time made an impassioned plea through choked-back tears : "I want my country back. I want Britain to be Britain ." This woman, a resident of the northern English city of Hull, which is home to some of the most deprived areas of the country, wasn’t just addressing political pundits, politicians, and commentators on the prime time television programme on the subject of the then-forthcoming E.U. referendum — she was also speaking directly to a country divided. “I don't believe our country's free anymore,” she went on. “You only have to look at the European Union and what's going off there.” It was a regurgitated line that galvanized a movement.

This line, “We want our country back,” has been heard for years, in pubs across small towns in the mainly rural county of Shropshire, on EDL marches, and on Twitter, but it was inescapable in the weeks leading up to June 23’s E.U. referendum. It was heard from politicians’ mouths, across the political spectrum, displayed on placards at political rallies from racist political organizations such as Britain First, and shouted down megaphones by the likes of far-right party UKIP’s leader Nigel Farage while on a chartered flotilla sailing down the River Thames . It ended up becoming the unofficial slogan for a campaign spearheaded by Conservative politician Boris Johnson to leave the E.U., which scraped a win with 52% of the vote last week .

The idea that a very distinct notion of “British identity” needs to be reclaimed, and the reassertion of an abstract notion of “lost” sovereignty, has been key to the Leave campaign. As any one of the U.K.’s 7.5 million foreign-born residents knows, what “We want our country back” ultimately translates to is the promise of Britain without immigrants. By manipulating the idea of leaving the E.U. to fit into people's own pre-existing fears and prejudices, the Leave campaign neatly provided an explanation that Britain’s problems stemmed from immigration, and that stopping it was the remedy. For many white working class communities, still living with the crippling economic policies of Margaret Thatcher (U.K. Prime Minister 1979-1990), the fear and lived experience of unwelcome change is a real one. The Leave campaign plainly spoke to those uncertainties, trading on fear-mongering about the numbers of migrants in the country, and offering the solution of tighter border controls. To much of the country, who might have previously felt voiceless, it was a rousing argument, and one that led them to articulate their experiences through the vote. In the same way that Trump is “finally” speaking to the “common man” (a byword for white, working class Americans), the hard right has spoken to the U.K.

Politically and culturally, the Us and Them binary has never felt more distinct.

The consequences of a nationalist rhetoric are already starting to be felt. The National Police Chiefs’ Council reports that there has been a marked increase in hate crimes since last week’s referendum, with initial figures reporting a 57% increase in incidents in the three days directly following it. Online, disturbing video footage of such incidents has been circling; one filmed in the West Midlands town Sheldon in the days following the vote featured a crowd of people opposite a mosque holding banners with the slogan “Rapefugees not welcome” while chanting “Who the f**k is Allah?” London’s Metropolitan Police reported r acist graffiti outside a Polish cultural centre in west London's Hammersmith , while Twitter provided a platform for anecdotal instances of individually targeted racism with the hashtag #PostRefRacism .

While incidents of racism are on the rise, perhaps it is the insidious racism normalized through political rhetoric that has ignited racist attitudes to boiling point. The seemingly single narrative of the Leave campaign was effective because it aligned with attitudes that politicians across Labour, Conservative, and UKIP have been rolling out since last year: that the so-called “British Values” — of liberty, independence and strength — have been squashed by new immigrant populations who have muddied the waters of British Values. The referendum result provided the catalyst for attitudes towards immigrants to come to a head — and those who may have been quietly nodding along to Prime Minister David Cameron's claims might now feel legitimized to protect national identity through any means necessary.

This is not a new narrative. Last March, during the general election campaign, British Home Secretary Theresa May pledged to Britain that if the Conservatives came into power she would introduce, among other things, “a positive campaign to promote British values.” After her party were re-elected (this time, as a Tory majority), Prime Minister David Cameron, tweeting after Ramadan last year , stated how we, as the British people, could "tackle the poisonous Islamist ideology that is so hostile to British values."

What that looks like in education is a requirement, as of November 2014, for schools to promote “fundamental British values.” Advice from the Department of Education is to do so through SMSC (Spiritual, Moral, Social, Cultural) development, and describes these values as “democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs.” On paper, this seems like it could be a positive measure encouraging inclusion; in practice, it feels like a demand to prove a one-dimensional idea of Britishness in all facets of your life.

For those who don’t actively appear to embody these British Values (i.e. who are non-white), then allegiances must be proven, and the pressure to prove them is amping up. (This might partially account for why a small number of those from immigrant communities were swayed towards Leave : a third of Asians and a quarter of black voters.)

Politically and culturally, the Us and Them binary has never felt more distinct. In urban centres like London, confused members of the liberal intelligentsia are collectively head-scratching at just how the rest of the country can feel such amnimosity. ( Only five London boroughs voted Leave, and the majority vote was to Remain across the city ). For many people of color, the outcome of this campaign that preyed on prejudice might only confirm what we had long suspected: that there are people across the U.K. that don’t like people that look like us.

Immigrant communities are forced to show and prove their allegiance to the core values of Britain — and if we’re found lacking, then there is a punishment.

This insight is at odds with a historic moment that seemed to indicate things were getting progressive. In May 2016, Sadiq Khan , a Muslim son of Pakistani immigrants, was appointed Mayor of London after winning an election mired in Islamophobic character assassination . There was hope that this might send a message to the world: this is our home and racism won’t win. Despite Khan's attempts at trying to reinforce this point, that message has been slightly derailed. Addressing Europeans attending London’s Pride event two days after the vote, he tweeted , “To every European resident here at #Pride2016 and across our amazing city — you are welcome here.” The very fact that Khan needed to insist that indicates that the opposite might be closer to the truth.

This narrative of “We tolerate differences, we love you, honestly!” is a protestation that tries too hard. In a relationship, hearing “I treat you bad but I love you honest” is abuse. In the U.K. today, the emotional abuse has come to a head. It has become violent .

So how do you process the events from the last few days? For creatives, journalists, filmmakers, and beyond, there may be a collective push to see work and ideas commissioned, to take over spaces, to drive frustration beyond 140 character rage and into tangible solutions. This might be an opportunity for those communities who have long felt like their concerns were erased from the hallways of power to be heard. In a period of uncertainty, it might feel obvious to say that moving forward is our generational challenge, but it is a point that needs to be remembered. As we move into a new Britain, we need to think creatively how to use the resources available to us.

Back in August 2015, I made a zine celebrating immigrant communities called British Values . It had Theresa May as the cover star (in a photoshopped hijab, making a point about her aggressive immigration proposals). Her stringent approach to tackling immigration seemed extreme at the time (like a proposal to deport non-E.U. migrants who didn’t attain a yearly salary of £35,000 within their first five years in the country — this was later scrapped). Nearly a year later, following the resignation of David Cameron as Prime Minister following the Leave campaign’s success, she's in the running for the leader of our governing party . Now, making issue two of my zine, the joke isn't funny anymore. Pulling quotes as satire to highlight government lunacy or side-eyeing political rhetoric has taken on a new edge. How do you make jokes when the joke becomes real? How do you make a point about visibility when no-one seems to care? The result is a win for the idea of Britishness as the Holy Grail, and as the western world appears to shift ever closer to the right, immigrant communities are forced to show and prove their allegiance to the core values of Britain — and if we're found lacking, then there is a punishment.

For me, as a child of Indian immigrants, reclamation of immigrant identity is crucial. Remembering to see myself through my own lens, rather than aggressive political projections, is more crucial still. It’s something I hope fellow children of immigrants in places like Hull can do for themselves now. The wish by the hard right has been granted and the country has gone back — to a time of trauma, and aggressive enforcement of its values. Britain has been claimed “back,” to throwback “Go back to your own country” racism, and it might never feel the same again.

Things look like they may get worse before they get better; these are testing times for proud first, second, and third generation immigrants, and for British identity across the U.K. Deep down, we have always known that our contributions, as people from immigrant communities, enhance day-to-day British life. It’s why we reject the idea that we are “lucky” to be here. For people used to being tolerated, not celebrated, we’ve lost hope that Britain will ever realise that it’s lucky to have us. Our economic and cultural contributions are widely documented in our own communities, and while many of them are often written out of history and culture, perhaps it is up to us to shout louder about them if no one else will. For real allies with structural power to showcase our stories, perhaps it’s time to put the safety pins to rest and use this as an opportunity to provide real solidarity through proper platforming of our history and future in this country. For people who have spent their lives making a home here — working, studying, and thriving despite unimaginable obstacles — it may be a comfort to remember: this is our home, and we’re not going anywhere.

Issue 2 of Kieran Yates's zine British Values will be out later this year.

Essay on Fundamental British Value Through SMSC in the United Kingdom

Introduction

Fundamental British values in the United Kingdom should be implemented in each school as a way of promoting delivery of education. Educational policies that are in place within the United Kingdom have significant impact on the outcomes and there is a need to explore the scope of legislation that impacts learning institutions (Carlile, 2018). The essay explores the need to implement fundamental British values in all institution as a way of promoting learning. The paper introduces basic policies that have been fundamental in the running of learning institutions in the country. It is also vital to establish basic values in the United Kingdom that impact learning in various institutions. A background check on policies existing can help understand matters to do with their launch and implementation within learning institutions (Soo and Elliott, 2010). The main policy that is the center of interest is the British core values included in the Education Act of 2002. It is vital to explore existing literature on the British core values in a bid to gain a deeper insight into the matter in question. It is also the interest of the paper to provide recommendations on the implementation of various policies that affect educational outcomes (Parkes, 2012). In essence, the paper seeks to answer the question, “Should British schools promote and reinforce fundamental British values as part of SMSC in schools?” An exploration on existing literature can help gain a deeper insight into the discussion topic. For instance, the education Act of 2002 is elaborate on various guidelines that should be followed in schools in a bid to improve the delivery of services. Some of the most important British values include the rule of law, democracy, individual liberty, mutual respect, and tolerance (Kok et al., 2010). Implementing policies that promote such values in institutions can prove strategic towards improving learning outcomes in a significant manner. The paper will utilize information from existing literature and legislations in the United Kingdom to reach a conclusion that is informed.

Introduction to Specific Policies

The Education Act of 2002 is elaborate on what schools should do or implement as a way of promoting British core values. The act was enacted in 2002 as a response towards UK’s adoption of the Human Rights Act (Parsons and Lewis, 2010). It is important to note that the enactment of the policy has helped change the scope of operation in the education sector in a significant manner. One of the most important aspects of the act is that it requires safeguarding of children and the young in institutions from harm or neglect (Starkey, 2018). Section 175 of the education act is elaborate on how institutions should safeguard the wellbeing of children and the young in schools. It is the duty of management at any institutions to explore the right strategies that promote mutual respect within the institution (Carlile, 2018). For instance, it is through the act that most institutions have developed a culture of protecting each student in a bid to create a comfortable and involving learning environment.

The Education Act of 2002 is detailed enough and provides guidelines on how institution should handle students. For instance, students with special needs in schools should be handled in a a manner that promotes equality and fairness (Soo and Elliott, 2010). In essence, fundamental values in the United Kingdom should be extended to institutions in a manner that promotes learning outcomes (Starkey, 2018). Discriminatory practices by the school towards people with disabilities and special needs can be detrimental to maintaining individual liberty and mutual respect. It is the duty of institutions in the United Kingdom to advocate and comply with the education act of 2002 as it impacts learning outcomes and the wellbeing of students (Parkes, 2012). The act requires anybody handling children to provide information regarding the safety of students and pupils in society. The act is a development that should be implemented fully in a bid to promote learning practices in institutions.

Basic Values of the United Kingdom

There are various policies that have been implemented in the United Kingdom that significantly impact learning in various institutions (Parsons and Lewis, 2010). It is vital for the paper to explore various British values that are fundamental as stipulated by policy in the country. The first important value that is widely accepted as a fundamental aspect is the rule of law. The rule of law in institutions is essential and should not be overlooked in any way (Soo and Elliott, 2010). The value requires that each student and individuals in institutions are subject to and accountable to law that is fairly applied and enforced (Yettick et al., 2014). The second value in the United Kingdom is democracy, where the society is supposed to be characterized by equality in every sector and principle.

The third value is tolerance towards those with different faiths and beliefs in society in a bid to promote mutual co-existence. Schools in the United Kingdom should be at the forefront of advocating for tolerance (Graham, 2015). Intolerance can spark conflict and lead to challenges that impact learning outcomes. The fourth aspect that is important in the United Kingdom is mutual respect, where each individual should purpose to respect others’ opinions in a bid for them to reciprocate the same (Yettick et al., 2014). Classroom code of practice and school ethos statements form important strategies that are utilized to promote mutual respect in schools. The last fundamental value in the United Kingdom is individual liberty. Each person or student should be given the freedom to exercise other things that are outside government control (Parkes, 2012). For instance, offering students autonomy of choices regarding academic preferences can be strategic towards promoting educational outcomes. The fundamental British values are essential in schools and the society should help in implementing the same for conformity.

Background and Launch Process of the Policy

The Education Act of 2002 is an important enactment in the United Kingdom that has seen many institutions change their management approaches (Graham, 2015). Learning environments can pose a challenge to specific children in society and it is the duty of the government to put in place the right strategies to handling of the same. The act was established UK’s response towards the adoption of the Human Rights Act. Students and young children in learning institutions must be accorded human rights without discrimination as stipulated in the act (Yettick et al., 2014). Institutions should not be the basis for failed implementation of human rights within society. In essence, the government of the United Kingdom must take into consideration the fact that children should be protected in various learning institutions (Kok et al., 2010). The aim of the policy is to promote spiritual, moral, social and cultural development for the young in various learning institutions. Failure to utilize the policy can be detrimental towards achieving balance in various institutions.

It is essential for the paper to explore the launch process of the policy to determine how effective the approach was towards its implementation. The act was launched in 2002 with a view of safeguarding and ensuring children and learning institutions are protected from harm (Starkey, 2018). Section 78 of the Education Act of 2002 is elaborate on how the legislation was established in the United Kingdom. It launching has helped students develop a sense of direction regarding spiritual, moral, social and cultural development. Failure to put in place the right strategies can be detrimental to successful implementation of the policies as introduced by the education policy (Taylor, 2006). For instance, schools should allow students and children to voice their concerns regarding operations of the institution. Much needs to be done to ensure that the policy has taken effect in a bid to promote and improve learning environments for all students and children.

Implementation and Current Status of the Policy

The paper should explore the implementation and current status of the Education Act of 2002 in a bid to ascertain how effective the process has been in promoting educational outcomes. Its implementation has mandated institutions to find ways of assessing the safety of learning environments in a way that promotes core values of the United Kingdom (Britain, 2014). Local authorities, the government and other stakeholders must join hands to ensure that children are well handled in a bid to guarantee the right spiritual, moral, social and cultural growth. It is important to note that besides the rule of law, institutions should foster various values that can promote mutual existence and respect in society (Yettick et al., 2014). For instance, the legislation was put in place to help students with disabilities receive an equal level of attention as others within learning institutions. The implementation process must take into account financial implications associated in a bid to promote the policies effectively.

The policy is currently widely applied in the United Kingdom as guiding principles in handling safety matters in various institutions. The policy stipulates important aspects on students with disabilities and how they should be handled (Graham, 2015). Equally, it is through the legislation that the UK education sector has been able to provide safety to children and financial aid. Every child within the United Kingdom has a right to education as stipulated by the act (May, 2005). According to the act, schools should maintain the right spiritual, moral, social and cultural aspects that impact the development of a child. It is important that institutions teach children on other important aspects besides educational success (Kok et al., 2010). In essence, the implementation of the policy has been a success as it has helped shape the scope of handling children in various institutions. Policies in place must observe the wellbeing of students in the education sector in a bid to promote and improve the learning environment.

Benefits of the Education Act of 2002

The Education Act of 2002 is an important legislation that has helped learning institutions to administer SMSC values. The first benefit that can be attributed to the Education Act of 2002 is supporting the wellbeing of children and students (May, 2005). It is through the act that institutions have been compelled to provide the right learning environment that can nurture children. Many schools in the country have adopted various guidelines as presented by the act in a bid to ensure compliance. The enactment has helped the government safeguard the wellbeing of students in learning environments in a significant manner. The second benefit associated with the act is promoting equality in institutions, which has adverse impact on society in a significant manner (Taylor, 2006). Students from different ethnic backgrounds are accorded equal opportunities to access education as a right within the United Kingdom. Institutions have learnt to treat all students and children equally in a manner that safeguards their human rights.

Third, the Education Act of 2002 has been helpful in setting up teams that can help students develop SMSC practices. Students need to grow emotionally, morally and spiritually and it is vital that institutions take into account the same (Britain, 2014). Children must grow spiritually and ensure that the society promotes freedom and tolerance towards important aspects in society. The fact that the act has guidelines on handling of various matters that impact learning and developmental outcomes within the United Kingdom makes it beneficial in a significant way. The fourth benefit of the act is that it has enabled the education sector to plan its activities in a way that promote organization (Struthers, 2017). Each school must come up with strategies to implement the Education Act of 2002 that can help change the scope of operations in learning institutions. Much needs to b done to ensure the implementation process is successful for an improved effect in society.

Shortcomings of the Policy and Social Response

It is essential that the paper explores the shortcomings of the Education Act of 2002 in a bid to determine what can be done to change the same (May, 2005). The first shortcoming that should be examined is the failure to put in place clear guidelines on the composition and teams that should address fundamental values in the UK. The fact that the government does not control such activities can be detrimental towards the implementation of the policy (Struthers, 2017). The Education Act of 2002 has failed to state ho institutions should achieve success in promoting SMSC values in the United Kingdom. The second shortcoming of the policy is that there are no proper avenues to assess the success that has been achieved by the policy in the United Kingdom (Hoffman and Rowe, 2010). Another important shortcoming is that there is a lack of adequate personnel to propel the policy to another level in society. For instance, there are few teachers who can help administer the right values as there are many students in various schools.

Quality of education that is provided in the United Kingdom schools is a matter of concern. With less staff, institutions are overwhelmed by a high number of children who need help. It is important that institutions in the country take into account professionalism in delivering education for better outcomes (Mansfield, 2019). The third shortcoming that can be attributed to the Education Act of 2002 is lack of supportive facilities in institutions. It is important to note that installing the right facilities for children and students in various institutions can be helpful towards achieving balance. For instance, students with disabilities need supportive services that can promote their learning and development in a significant way. Inadequate facilities make it difficult to implement some of the practices highlighted in the Education Act of 2002 (Hawkes, 2010). In essence, the enactment did not take into consideration the insufficient resources for installing facilities that are required. The shortcomings associated should be handled in a manner that promotes efficiency and effectiveness of the Education Act of 2002.

The act has been useful in one way or the other in promoting fundamental British values within institutions. It is important that to note that the society has advanced and supported the act that has seen the scope of learning change in various institutions (Arweck, Nesbitt and Jackson, 2005). According to most people in society, the enactment has helped promote mutual respect and liberty in a significant way. Local authorities have utilized the policy to come up with guidelines that have promoted spiritual, moral, social and cultural values in the United Kingdom (Mansfield, 2019). It is vital to always assess the implementation strategies utilized towards promoting compliance in a bid to gain a deeper insight into the discussion topic. The government has also benefitted from the policy as institutions have been able to provide feedback on what has been achieved (Hoffman and Rowe, 2010). For instance, information on financing of various projects and what should be avoided by institutions is provided by the act, which has proved helpful for all learning institutions.

Thoughts and Suggestions

It is vital for the study to utilize information gathered in making a detailed conclusion on the impact of the educational policy within the United Kingdom. The education sector across the world has played a crucial role in promoting British values within the UK (Hawkes, 2010). For instance, schools help create a culture of equality towards achieving the right educational outcomes. The Education Act of 2002 has helped advance the right practices in various schools including mutual respect and democracy (Mansfield, 2019). The act also allows institutions to come up with strategic approaches that can help formulate the appropriate culture for success. British values such as mutual respect must be nurtured in schools within the United Kingdom. In essence, the Education Act has been significant in promoting the growth of appropriate values within society (Arweck, Nesbitt and Jackson, 2005). Institutions that do not nurture the right practices for its learners might face challenges implementing and complying with the requirements of the Education Act of 2002. Much should be done to promote the operations of the education sector in a way that improves spiritual, moral, social, and cultural values in the United Kingdom.

It is vital to provide suggestions on how school principles should implement the Education Act of 2002 in a bid to improve learning outcomes. The first strategy is to ensure that school heads are taken through training and developmental programs (Hoffman and Rowe, 2010). When teachers and principals are subjected to training, they can improve their skillset on how to handle various situations in institutions (Taylor, 2006). Such practices help improve the leadership abilities of individuals. Poor leadership strategies in the education sector have led to deterioration of British values in society. Schools that have principals with a high level of leadership qualities perform better in promoting spiritual, moral, social and cultural values (Parsons and Lewis, 2010). School heads should subject each teacher to further training on how to improve SMSC activities in various institutions. Failure to train teachers can be detrimental to meeting the needs of students and other learners in a significant manner.

To sum it up, the paper explores the Education Act of 2002 in the United Kingdom with a view of providing recommendation on how school heads can implement the same. It is also vital to explore various fundamental British values that are important within the education sector. The role of principles in institutions is organizing operations in a manner that promotes SMSC values in society. For instance, mutual respect in institutions is an important thing that echoes the requirements of human rights. Institutions that uphold human rights are essential towards safeguarding the wellbeing of children and the young in society. Important values within the UK include the rule of law, democracy, mutual respect, tolerance, and individual liberty. It is the role of school heads to advance practices that can promote commitment towards achieving and administering the listed values. The first strategy that principals can apply in promoting outcomes is increasing the number of staff that handles children issues. With enough staff, it is easier for institutions to meet needs of learners and nurture them to develop a sense of spiritual, moral, social, and cultural belonging. Tolerance should be considered as people come from different backgrounds with varied cultural practices.

Arweck, E., Nesbitt, E. and Jackson, R., 2005. Common values for the common school? Using two values education programmes to promote ‘spiritual and moral development’. Journal of Moral Education , 34 (3), pp.325-342.

Britain, G., 2014. Promoting fundamental British values as part of SMSC schools: departmental advice for maintainded schools.

Carlile, A., 2018. School surveillance, control, and resistance in the United Kingdom. In The Palgrave international handbook of school discipline, surveillance, and social control (pp. 17-42). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.

Graham, A.T., 2015. Academic staff performance and workload in higher education in the UK: the conceptual dichotomy. Journal of Further and Higher Education , 39 (5), pp.665-679.

Hawkes, N., 2010. Values education and the national curriculum in England. In International research handbook on values education and student wellbeing (pp. 225-238). Springer, Dordrecht.

Hoffman, D. and Rowe, J.J., 2010. Human rights in the UK: An introduction to the Human Rights Act 1998 . Pearson Education.

Kok, S.K., Douglas, A., McClelland, B. and Bryde, D., 2010. The move towards managerialism: Perceptions of staff in “traditional” and “new” UK universities. Tertiary Education and Management , 16 (2), pp.99-113.

Mansfield, A., 2019. Confusion, contradiction and exclusion: The promotion of British values in the teaching of history in schools. The Curriculum Journal , 30 (1), pp.40-50.

May, H., 2005. Whose participation is it anyway? Examining the context of pupil participation in the UK. British Journal of Special Education , 32 (1), pp.29-34.

Parkes, B., 2012. Exclusion of Pupils from School in the UK. The Equal rights review , 8 , pp.113-129.

Parsons, S. and Lewis, A., 2010. The home‐education of children with special needs or disabilities in the UK: views of parents from an online survey. International Journal of Inclusive Education , 14 (1), pp.67-86.

Soo, K.T. and Elliott, C., 2010. Does price matter? Overseas students in UK higher education. Economics of Education Review , 29 (4), pp.553-565.

Starkey, H., 2018. Fundamental British Values and citizenship education: tensions between national and global perspectives. Geografiska Annaler: series B, human geography , 100 (2), pp.149-162.

Struthers, A.E., 2017. Teaching British values in our schools: But why not human rights values?. Social & Legal Studies , 26 (1), pp.89-110.

Taylor, M.J., 2006. The Development of Values Through. Values education for citizens in the new century , p.107.

Yettick, H., Baker, R., Wickersham, M. and Hupfeld, K., 2014. Rural districts left behind? Rural districts and the challenges of administering the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Journal of Research in Rural Education (Online) , 29 (13), p.1.

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Virtue vs. Value in British Education

En classe, le travail des petits (1889), oil on canvas by Henri Jules Jean Geoffroy (1853-1924)

Jamie Burns
— September 26, 2023

“The very spring and root of honesty and virtue lie in good education.” So said Pseudo-Plutarch in the 1st century. This guiding principle was vital in the establishment of formal education in the UK. In fact, this notion has driven our shared conception of education and its purpose from St. Augustine’s first grammar school in Canterbury, to King Alfred’s belief that the acquisition of wisdom which resulted from intellectual formation was essential to his kingdom, to the grammar school revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, and onwards to the mid-19th century schools and education policy. Yet we see very little of this understanding of education now. With some notable exceptions—the Jubilee Centre in Birmingham, for example—the British educational establishment has lost its once strongly held belief that the purpose of education is to inculcate virtue, replacing this with a different priority.

In 2014, the Department for Education released guidance on promoting what they referred to as “British Values” in schools. These values, outlined in the UK Conservative government’s PREVENT strategy of 2011, were identified as the fundamental pillars of British society that must shape our identity. These ‘values’ were understood to be the rule of law, individual liberty, democracy, mutual respect, and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs. Interestingly, this wasn’t the first time ‘values’ had been emphasised by a Conservative government. Mrs. Thatcher, during her 1983 election campaign, famously spoke of “Victorian values.” Later, in a radio interview with journalist Peter Allen, she elucidated the essence of these values:

Peter Allen: “I would like to begin as well by asking what you meant recently when you talked about Victorian values. What values are they? What do you mean?

Margaret Thatcher: “Well, there is no great mystery about those. I was brought up by a Victorian grandmother. You were taught to work jolly hard, you were taught to improve yourself, you were taught self-reliance, you were taught to live within your income, you were taught that cleanliness was next to godliness. You were taught self-respect, you were taught always to give a hand to your neighbour, you were taught tremendous pride in your country, you were taught to be a good member of your community. All of these things are Victorian values. They are also perennial values as well.”

From Virtues to Values

Mrs. Thatcher’s interpretation of Victorian values seems to me to have been somewhat linguistically anachronistic. What she referred to as ‘values’ would have been considered virtues by her grandmother. This linguistic discrepancy reflects a cultural shift that has occurred, in which the understanding of virtue has waned and given way to a focus on values. This change may be traced back to the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche in the 1880s. Nietzsche challenged the traditional concept of virtues, advocating for their critical examination and re-evaluation. He called for a complete “transvaluation of values,” and sought a radical reorientation of moral perspectives rather than the mere substitution of one set of virtues for another. His concept of transvaluation marked a departure from the long-established understanding of virtue and paved the way for the more subjective and relativistic ‘values-based’ conception of human development. Nietzsche’s emphasis on personal values as subjective constructs of meaning rather than the universal and habitually acquired virtues has since become pervasive across many domains, not least in education.

The shift from virtues to values carries significant implications due to their contrasting nature. Values, being largely subjective in apprehension and interpretation, and influenced by societal trends and market forces, are prone to fluctuation over time. Consumerism and materialism have led to the prioritisation of perceived values such as wealth and success, while the influence of social media has shaped values centred around appearance and popularity. On the other hand, virtues are rooted in the timeless principles of human nature itself, these principles transcend societal changes and personal preferences. Virtues like honesty, courage, and compassion orientate our moral compasses in a way that remains constant across different contexts and cultures, even if lived and applied differently in those particular contexts and cultures.

Many of us are prone to use the word ‘values’ with no ill intent—I use it all the time! But when we apply it to developing the character of our children caution is required. Now, so called “British Values” are ubiquitous in our schools: every school is required to teach them, every teacher is required to model them, and every student must respect them. We are all familiar with the prevalence of tolerance as a value—yet without virtue to temper this value, it has turned into a totalitolerance. We now find ourselves in the position that Lewis describes in The Abolition of Man :

In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.

The impact of this shift in education from virtue to values has been grave indeed, shaping the way students perceive and navigate the moral landscape. Without a solid grounding in virtues, students in the UK now regularly encounter difficulties in grappling with moral and practical complexities, as the focus on values has led to a relativistic and superficial understanding of human flourishing. The effect accumulates over the duration of a person’s lifetime. We see the impact of this superficial understanding all around us. An idea now pervades society that one can demand someone else “does the work” or “educates himself” rather than the old idea of—as the Christian tradition would put it—death to self. The lack of a shared understanding of virtues now hinders the development of character and diminishes a sense of responsibility among our school children, and, indeed, university students.

Paradoxically, then, despite the subjectivist nature of values, their prioritisation has led to an increasing tendency to demand that others conform to ever fluctuating beliefs and principles. This is because, not being rooted in our nature in the same way as virtues, the veracity of values is largely judged according to the number of people who accept them. Thus, we witness mounting pressure to be in step with current opinion, requiring alignment with whatever the prevailing, time-oriented set of values happen to be. The demand from the gatekeepers of these values is that others must “do the work” to come in line. In contrast, orienting oneself around virtues plays a large role in pursuing Saint Paul’s exhortation to the church in Rome, “do not be conformed by this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind.” Emphasis on virtue reminds us that true moral development requires personal commitment and effort first to change oneself. Yet it also allows us to appeal to a set of a-temporal truths which, unlike values, are not dictated by the market or the fashions of the day. It is by becoming virtuous that we may then challenge those around us and those, perhaps, in our schools.

In his book entitled The Book of Virtues , the American conservative politician and political commentator William J. Bennett says:

Today we speak about values and how it is important to ‘have them’ as if they were beads on a string or marbles in a pouch. But [the stories in this book] speak to morality and virtues not as something to be possessed, but as the central part of human nature, not as something to have but as something to be, the most important thing to be. To dwell in [the chapters of this book] is to put oneself, through the imagination, into a different place and time, a time when there was little doubt that children are essentially moral and spiritual beings and that the central task of education is virtue.

This sums up the misstep I believe we have taken and what we need to reclaim. Let’s teach children how they should be and the virtues they should seek to grow in themselves. There is no other way to a happier world.

Tags: British values , education , Jamie Burns , virtues

The Seductiveness of Ideology in Politics

An Uncertain Future for Conservative Christians: An Interview with Rod Dreher

Norman Stone (1941-2019)

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What Have Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule Done to Britain?

By Sam Knight

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My life divides, evenly enough, into three political eras. I was born in 1980, a year after Margaret Thatcher entered Downing Street with the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi on her lips: “Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.” The Conservative-run Britain of the eighties was not harmonious. Life beyond the North London square where my family lived often seemed to be in the grip of one confrontation or another. The news was always showing police on horseback. There were strikes, protests, the I.R.A., and George Michael on the radio. My father, who was a lawyer in the City, travelled to Germany to buy a Mercedes and drove it back, elated. Until Thatcher resigned, when I was ten, her steeply back-combed hair and deep, impossible voice played an outsized role in my imagination—a more interesting, more dangerous version of the Queen.

I was nearly seventeen when the Tories finally lost power, to Tony Blair and “New Labour,” an updated, market-friendly version of the Party. Before he moved to Downing Street, Blair lived in Islington, the gentrifying borough I was from. Boris Johnson, an amusing right-wing columnist, who was getting his start on television, also lived nearby. Our local Member of Parliament was an out-of-touch leftist named Jeremy Corbyn.

New Labour believed in the responsibility of the state to look after its citizens, and in capitalism to make them prosper. Blair was convincing, even when he was wrong. He won three general elections in ten years and walked out of the House of Commons to a standing ovation, undefeated in his eyes. I was turning thirty when Labour eventually ran out of road, undone by the Iraq War, the global financial crisis, and the grim temper of Gordon Brown, Blair’s successor. He was caught in a hot-mike moment describing an ordinary voter, who was complaining about taxes and immigration, as a bigot.

Since then, it’s been the Conservatives again. In 2010, the Party returned to government in a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Since 2015, it has held power alone. Last May, the Tories surpassed the thirteen years and nine days that New Labour had held office. But the third political era of my lifetime has been nothing like the previous two. There has been no dominant figure or overt political project, no Thatcherism, no Blairism. Instead, there has been a quickening, lowering churn: five Prime Ministers, three general elections, two financial emergencies, a once-in-a-century constitutional crisis, and an atmosphere of tired, almost constant drama.

The period is bisected by the United Kingdom’s decision, in 2016, to leave the European Union, a Conservative fantasy, or nightmare, depending on whom you talk to. Brexit catalyzed some of the worst tendencies in British politics—its superficiality, nostalgia, and love of game play—and exhausted the country’s political class, leaving it ill prepared for the pandemic and the twin economic shocks of the war in Ukraine and the forty-nine-day experimental premiership of Liz Truss. Covering British politics during this period has been like trying to remember, and explain, a very convoluted and ultimately boring dream. If you really concentrate, you can recall a lot of the details, but that doesn’t lead you closer to any meaning.

Last year, I started interviewing Conservatives to try to make sense of these years. “One always starts with disclaimers now—I didn’t start this car crash,” Julian Glover, a former speechwriter for David Cameron, the longest-serving Prime Minister of the period, told me. I spoke to M.P.s and former Cabinet ministers; political advisers who helped to make major decisions; and civil servants, local-government officials, and frontline workers hundreds of miles from London who had to deal with the consequences.

Some people insisted that the past decade and a half of British politics resists satisfying explanation. The only way to think about it is as a psychodrama enacted, for the most part, by a small group of middle-aged men who went to élite private schools, studied at the University of Oxford, and have been climbing and chucking one another off the ladder of British public life—the cursus honorum , as Johnson once called it—ever since. The Conservative Party, whose history goes back some three hundred and fifty years, aids this theory by not having anything as vulgar as an ideology. “They’re not on a mission to do X, Y, or Z,” as a former senior adviser explained. “You win and you govern because we are better at it, right?”

Another way to think about these years is to consider them in psychological, or theoretical, terms. In “Heroic Failure,” the Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole explains Brexit by describing Britain’s fall from imperial nation to “occupied colony” of the E.U., and the rise of a powerful English nationalism as a result. Last year, Abby Innes, a scholar at the London School of Economics, published “Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail,” which argues that, since Thatcher, Britain’s political mainstream has become as devoted to particular ideas about running the state—a default commitment to competition, markets, and forms of privatization—as Brezhnev’s U.S.S.R. ever was. “The resulting regime,” Innes writes, “has proved anything but stable.”

These observations are surely right, but I worry that they obscure two basic truths about Britain’s experience since 2010. The first is that the country has suffered grievously. These have been years of loss and waste. The U.K. has yet to recover from the financial crisis that began in 2008. According to one estimate, the average worker is now fourteen thousand pounds worse off per year than if earnings had continued to rise at pre-crisis rates—it is the worst period for wage growth since the Napoleonic Wars. “Nobody who’s alive and working in the British economy today has ever seen anything like this,” Torsten Bell, the chief executive of the Resolution Foundation, which published the analysis, told the BBC last year. “This is what failure looks like.”

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High levels of employment and immigration, coupled with the enduring dynamism of London, mask a national reality of low pay, precarious jobs, and chronic underinvestment. The trains are late. The traffic is bad. The housing market is a joke. “The core problem is easy to observe, but it’s tough to live with,” Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England, told me. “It’s just not that productive an economy anymore.”

With stagnant wages, people’s living standards have fallen. In 2008, Brown’s Labour government commissioned Michael Marmot, a renowned epidemiologist, to come up with ways to reduce England’s health inequalities. Marmot made suggestions in six policy areas, including better access to child care, walking and cycling programs, social-security reforms, and measures to improve people’s sense of agency at work. In 2010, he presented his ideas to the incoming Conservative-led coalition, which accepted his findings. “I thought, Wow, this is great. . . . I was pretty bullish about the whole thing,” Marmot told me. “The problem was they then didn’t do it.”

Ten years later, Marmot led a follow-up study, in which he documented stalling life expectancy, particularly among women in England’s poorest communities—and widening inequalities. “For men and women everywhere the time spent in poor health is increasing,” he wrote. “This is shocking.” According to Marmot, the U.K.’s health performance since 2010, which includes rising infant mortality, slowing growth in children, and the return of rickets, makes it an outlier among comparable European nations. “The damage to the nation’s health need not have happened,” Marmot concluded in 2020. He told me, “It was a political choice.”

And that is the second, all too obvious, fact of British life throughout this period: a single party has been responsible. You cannot say that the country has been ruled against its will. Since 2010, the Tories have emerged as the winner of the popular vote and as the largest party in Parliament in three elections. In December, 2019, Boris Johnson won an eighty-seat majority in the House of Commons, the Conservatives’ biggest electoral success since the heyday of Thatcherism.

How is this possible? The opposition has been underwhelming. For years, Labour drifted and squabbled under two unconvincing leaders: Ed Miliband and Corbyn, my old Islington M.P. It is telling that, since Labour elected Keir Starmer, an unimaginative former prosecutor with a rigidly centrist program, the Party is competitive again. But the Conservatives have not survived by default. Their party has excelled at diminishing Britain’s political landscape and shrinking the sense of what is possible. It has governed and skirmished, never settling for long. “It’s all about constantly drawing dividing lines,” a former Party strategist told me. “That’s all you need. It’s not about big ideological debates or policies or anything.” In many ways, the two momentous decisions of this period—what came to be known as austerity and Brexit—are now widely accepted as events that happened, rather than as choices that were made. Starmer’s Labour Party does not seek to reverse them.

If you live in an old country, it can be easy to succumb to a narrative of decline. The state withers. The charlatans take over. You give up on progress, to some extent, and simply pray that this particular chapter of British nonsense will come to an end. It will. Rishi Sunak, the fifth, and presumably final, Conservative Prime Minister of the era, faces an election later this year, which he will almost certainly lose. But Britain cannot move on from the Tories without properly facing up to the harm that they have caused.

The Conservative Party manifesto for the 2010 election was a plain blue hardback book titled “Invitation to Join the British Government.” After the Party’s longest spell out of power in more than a century, its pitch to voters was “the Big Society,” a call for civic volunteering and private enterprise after the statism of Labour. “There was a feeling that it must be possible to be positive about a better future in a way that wasn’t socialist,” Glover, the former speechwriter, said. “And that wasn’t an ignoble thing to try.”

Beginning in 2005, Cameron and George Osborne, the shadow Chancellor, had modernized the Tories. The duo represented a new generation of Conservatives: deft and urbane, easy in their privilege. Osborne was the heir to a baronetcy; Cameron’s family descended from a mistress of William IV. Cameron embraced centrist causes, including the environment and prison reform. There was talk of a “post-bureaucratic age.” But the main aim was simpler. “Above all, it was trying to win,” Osborne told me recently.

In the spring of 2009, Cameron told a gathering of Party members in Gloucestershire, “The age of irresponsibility is giving way to the age of austerity.” The speech was part of a successful campaign to associate Labour’s public spending with the global financial crash, to which Britain had been badly exposed. “The word ‘austerity’ was deliberately introduced into the lexicon by myself and David Cameron,” Osborne said. “Austerity” evoked the country’s sober rebuilding after the Second World War. “The word didn’t have the connotations then that it does now,” Osborne recalled. “It was, you know, a bit like prudence.”

In 2010, the Conservatives fell short of a majority in the House of Commons and formed, with the Liberal Democrats, Britain’s first coalition government in almost seventy years. The state was running a deficit of a hundred and fifty-seven billion pounds—about one and a half times the budget of the National Health Service. Any incoming administration would have had to find ways to balance the books, but, under Cameron and Osborne’s leadership, austerity was a moral as well as an economic mission. “We allowed it to become the defining thing,” the former senior adviser reflected.

“Austerity” is now a contested term. Plenty of Conservatives question whether it really happened. So it is worth being clear: between 2010 and 2019, British public spending fell from about forty-one per cent of G.D.P. to thirty-five per cent. The Office of Budget Responsibility, the equivalent of the American Congressional Budget Office, describes what came to be known as Plan A as “one of the biggest deficit reduction programmes seen in any advanced economy since World War II.” Governments across Europe pursued fiscal consolidation, but the British version was distinct for its emphasis on shrinking the state rather than raising taxes.

Like the choice of the word itself, austerity was politically calculated. Huge areas of public spending—on the N.H.S. and education—were nominally maintained. Pensions and international aid became more generous, to show that British compassion was not dead. But protecting some parts of the state meant sacrificing the rest: the courts, the prisons, police budgets, wildlife departments, rural buses, care for the elderly, youth programs, road maintenance, public health, the diplomatic corps.

Plan A spooked economists because of the risk to economic growth. But, in 2013, the British economy grew by 1.8 per cent. The government claimed victory. Around that time, Osborne declared that the nation could win “the global race” and become the richest major economy in the world by 2030. “We were in complete command of the political landscape,” he recalled. “The U.K. is the country that is seen to have got its act together after the crash. London has become the kind of global capital. So it has worked—there’s a bit of a dénouement coming—but it had worked.” At the general election in 2015, the Conservatives won a majority in the House of Commons, with proposals to make a further thirty-seven billion pounds’ worth of cuts.

“It was devastatingly politically effective,” Osborne told me, of austerity. It’s just that the effects were so horrendous. Between 2010 and 2018, funding for police forces in England fell by up to a quarter. Officers stopped investigating burglaries. Only four per cent now end in prosecution. In 2021, the median time between a rape offense and the completion of a trial reached more than two and a half years. Last fall, hundreds of school buildings had to be closed for emergency repairs, because the country’s school-construction budget had been cut by forty-six per cent between 2009 and 2022.

In October, I talked with Tony Durcan, a retired local-government employee who was responsible for libraries and other cultural programs in the city of Newcastle during the twenty-tens. Durcan told me that he’d had “a good war,” all things considered. There were moments, he said, when the sheer extremity of the crisis was exciting. Between 2010 and 2020, central-government funding for local authorities fell by forty per cent. At one point, it looked as if sixteen of Newcastle’s eighteen libraries would close. The city’s parks budget was cut by ninety-one per cent. The situation forced some creative reforms: Newcastle City Library now hosts the Citizens Advice bureau, where residents can apply for benefits and seek other forms of financial guidance. (The library is featured in “I, Daniel Blake,” Ken Loach’s anti-austerity film of 2016.) But other parts of the city government fell apart. “Youth services and a lot of community-support services, they just disappeared completely,” Durcan said. Child poverty rose sharply. (About forty per cent of children in Newcastle currently live below the poverty line.) But after a while Durcan and his colleagues stopped talking about the cuts, even though their budgets continued to fall. “There was a view—was it helpful? Were you risking losing confidence in the city?”

Over time, Durcan came to question the official reasoning for the savings. “You can make a mistake, even when you’re acting for the best,” he explained. “I don’t think that’s what happened in austerity.” Newcastle was a Labour stronghold, as was the rest of the northeast. Until 2019, the Tories held only three out of twenty-nine parliamentary seats in the region. A similar pattern was repeated across England. Poorer communities, particularly in urban areas, which tended to vote Labour, suffered disproportionately.

In Liverpool, where the Conservatives have not won a Parliamentary seat for forty years, spending, per head, fell more than in any other city in the country. Public-health spending in Blackpool, one of the poorest local authorities in England, was cut almost five times more, per person, than in the affluent county of Surrey, just south of London, whose eleven M.P.s are all Tories. Durcan and his colleagues noted the discrepancies between Labour- and Conservative-supporting regions. “And so there was cynicism,” he said, “and also great disappointment, a sense of injustice.”

Osborne denies that austerity was ever targeted in this way. “It’s not like we ministers just sit there and go, We’re not going to cut Kensington Council. We’re going to cut Liverpool Council. That is a lampoonish way of thinking about British politics,” he said. But some of his colleagues were more willing to acknowledge that electoral thinking was at play. One former Cabinet minister conceded that there were “big strategic moves” to favor older voters, who were more likely to vote Conservative, in the form of pension increases and interventions to raise property prices. David Gauke, a Treasury minister from 2010 to 2017, agreed that the parts of the country that had benefitted most under Labour had seen their budgets cut under the Conservatives. “There was a rebalancing that went on,” he said. “Did it go too far? Maybe it did.”

What was less forgivable, in the end, was the cuts’ unthinking nature, their lack of reason. In the fall of 2013, a staffer named Giles Wilkes, who worked for a senior Liberal Democrat minister in the coalition, became alarmed by projections that showed ever-reducing government budgets. “I don’t wish to paint the picture of the British state as too chaotic and heedless and amateur. But I was wandering around in 2013 and 2014, saying to people, Does anyone know what this means for the Home Office or the court system, for local authorities and the social-care budget?” Wilkes said. “Nobody was curious .” Wilkes is now a fellow at the Institute for Government, a nonpartisan think tank. “It was very obvious in real time,” he told me. “There wasn’t a central function going, Hold on a mo. Have we made sure that we can provide a decent prison estate, a decent sort of police system?”

And so stupid things happened. Since 2010, forty-three per cent of the courts in England and Wales have closed. No one thinks that this was a good idea. For years, the Conservatives cut prison funding and staffing while encouraging longer jail times. “You kind of had a mismatch,” Gauke, who later served as the Justice Secretary, admitted. The number of adults sentenced to more than ten years in prison more than doubled—until the system caved in, overrun by violence, self-harm, drug use, and staff shortages. In 2023, the government activated what it called Operation Safeguard, in which hundreds of jail cells in police stations were requisitioned to hold convicted offenders, because the prisons were full. In September, a terrorism suspect escaped from Wandsworth Prison, in South London, by clinging to the underside of a food-delivery truck. Eighty of the prison’s two hundred and five officers had not shown up for work that day.

The long-term effects of austerity are still playing out. A 2019 paper by Thiemo Fetzer, an economist at the University of Warwick, asked, “Did Austerity Cause Brexit?” Fetzer found that, beginning in 2010, the parts of the country most affected by welfare cuts were more likely to support Nigel Farage’s U.K. Independence Party, which campaigned against immigration and the E.U. The withdrawal of the social safety net in communities already negatively hit by globalization exacerbated the sense of a nation going awry. Public-health experts, including Marmot, argue that a decade of frozen health-care spending undermined the country’s response to the pandemic. More broadly, austerity has contributed to an atmosphere of fatalism, an aversion to thinking about the future. “It is a mood,” Johnna Montgomerie, a professor at the University of British Columbia who studies debt and inequality, has written. “A depression, a chronic case of financial melancholia.”

Since leaving politics, in 2017, Osborne has enjoyed a lucrative career, serving simultaneously as an adviser at BlackRock, the asset-management firm, and as the editor of the Evening Standard newspaper; more recently, he has been a partner at an investment bank and a podcaster. He insists that the cuts, ultimately, enabled the U.K.’s public finances to withstand the pandemic and the energy crisis that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “There’s no counterfactual,” he told me. Osborne likes to accuse his critics of living in a parallel reality, in which the financial crisis and Britain’s deficit never existed: “It’s, like, Apart from the assassination, Mrs. Lincoln, did you enjoy the play?”

But that does not mean the Tories made good choices. British social-security payments are at their lowest levels, relative to wages, in half a century. Under a steady downward ratchet, started by Osborne and continued by his successors, household payments have been capped and income thresholds effectively lowered. In 2017, a “two child” limit was placed on benefits for poor families. In November, 2018, Philip Alston, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on extreme poverty, toured the U.K. When we spoke, he recalled a strong sense of denial, or ignorance, among British politicians about the consequences of their decisions. “There was a disconnect between the world and what senior ministers wanted to believe,” he said.

The fall in Britain’s living standards isn’t easy for anyone to talk about, least of all Conservatives. The Resolution Foundation, which studies the lives of people with low and middle incomes, is chaired by David Willetts, a former minister in Cameron’s government. Willetts is a tall, genial man, who worked for Margaret Thatcher’s policy unit in the eighties. His nickname in the Party was Two Brains. “What I say to Tories now is, Look, we are behind for various reasons,” Willetts said, carefully. “You can argue about it. But our household incomes are clearly lower than France or Germany or the Netherlands.” Part of the problem, Willetts explained, was that Britain’s richest twenty per cent had largely been spared the effects of the past fourteen years—and that made it genuinely difficult for them to comprehend the damage. “We are all O.K.,” he said. “The burden of adjustment has almost entirely been borne by the less affluent half of the British population.”

In late November, I took a train to Worcester, a cathedral city south of Birmingham, on the River Severn. It was a raw, washed-out morning. Floodwater shone in the meadows. The city is famous as the home of Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce—a dark, sweet yet sour, almost indescribably English condiment, first sold by a pair of chemists in 1837—which has been doused on two centuries’ worth of shepherd’s pie and other stodgy lunches. Worcester used to be a den of political corruption: in 1906, men willing to sell their votes to the Tories could collect payment in the rest rooms of the Duke of York, a pub in the middle of town. More recently, it has been a bellwether. In the nineties, Conservative strategists described “Worcester Woman,” a median female voter—politically aware, married, with two children. (Since 1979, the city’s M.P.s have belonged to the party in power.) I was on my way to Citizens Advice Worcester—part of a charitable network that offers free counselling on debt relief and legal matters—behind a restored Victorian hotel.

Shakira was playing on the radio in the reception and a sign read “If You Are Frightened of Your Partner, Call Us.” Geraint Thomas, a Welsh lawyer who runs the center, was in his office, worrying about a heating bill. A few years ago, it was some four thousand pounds a year, but after recent price hikes it was now about fourteen thousand. In 2017, the charity had started running services in Herefordshire as well. Now funding was tight, and various Covid emergency funds were coming to an end. “Next year, we have got a bit of a hole,” Thomas said. The clock on his wall had stopped.

Since 2019, the number of people seeking help at the center had risen by thirty per cent. Two years of high inflation and rising interest rates meant that the caseworkers were now seeing homeowners and people working two jobs, along with the unemployed and families on benefits. “It’s like a black hole, dragging more and more people in,” Colin Stuart, who manages volunteers, said. Anne Limbert, who oversees the advice team, explained that, until a few years ago, it was usually possible to make a recovery plan for clients. “It used to be that we could help people, you know, and make a difference,” she said. “Now it’s just kind of depressing.” Increasingly, Limbert was sending clients to food banks.

The caseworkers said that they had mostly tuned out politics. Gwen Fraser, a volunteer manager in Herefordshire, which has some of England’s most deprived rural communities, had met a visiting M.P. a few months earlier. “I thought, You’re not in the real world, mate,” she said. Not long ago, a seventy-seven-year-old man, behind on his mortgage, had told Fraser that he was suicidal. The proportion of people coming to the center with a long-term health condition had risen by twenty per cent since 2019. (N.H.S. prescriptions for antidepressants in England almost doubled between 2011 and 2023.) Fraser had recently settled on a phrase that she found useful in her paperwork: “Overwhelming distress.”

Worcester Woman voted for Brexit. In 2016, the city chose to leave the European Union by a margin of fifty-four per cent to forty-six per cent. The perception of the Brexit vote as a cry of anguish from deindustrialized northern towns or from faded seaside resorts isn’t wrong—it just leaves out the rest of England. Two weeks after the referendum, Danny Dorling, a geography professor at the University of Oxford, published an article in the British Medical Journal showing that Leave voters weren’t defined neatly either by geography or by income. Fifty-nine per cent identified as middle class, and most lived in the South. “People wouldn’t believe me for years,” Dorling told me. “This was Hampshire voted to leave.”

Dorling’s politics are on the left. He opposed Brexit and often describes Britain as a failing state. During the summer of 2018, Dorling gave dozens of public talks across the country reflecting on the referendum. He noticed that places that had voted Remain invariably had better rail connections than those that voted Leave. A lot of Brexit supporters were older and economically secure but had a keen sense of the country going downhill. “Something was falling apart,” Dorling said. “They had got a house in their twenties. They’d had full employment. Their children were in their forties and they might be renting. . . . It was an almost entirely unselfish vote by the old for their grandchildren—let’s try it, or let’s at least show we’re angry.”

How you interpret the Brexit vote informs, to a great extent, how you make sense of the past fourteen years of British politics. It is not just a watershed—a before and after. It is also a prism that clarifies or scrambles the picture entirely. One perspective sees the whole saga as a woeful mistake. In this view, Cameron decided to settle, once and for all, an internal Tory argument about Britain’s place in an integrating E.U., a question that had haunted the Party since the last days of Thatcher. In the process, he turned what was an abstruse obsession on the right wing of British politics into a much simpler, terrifyingly binary choice for the population on how they felt their life was going.

In the accident theory of Brexit, leaving the E.U. has turned out to be a puncture rather than a catastrophe: a falloff in trade; a return of forgotten bureaucracy with our near neighbors; an exodus of financial jobs from London; a misalignment in the world. “There is a sort of problem for the British state, including Labour as well as all these Tory governments since 2016, which is that they are having to live a lie,” as Osborne, who voted Remain, said. “It’s a bit like tractor-production figures in the Soviet Union. You have to sort of pretend that this thing is working, and everyone in the system knows it isn’t.”

The other view sees Brexit as an unfinished revolution. Regardless of its origins, the vote in 2016 was a repudiation of how Britain had been governed for a generation or more. In the B . M . J . article, Dorling observed that younger voters—who chose overwhelmingly to remain in the E.U.—were angry with their elders. “They will feel newly betrayed . . . but their real betrayal has been a long time in the making,” he wrote. For a highly centralized country that is smaller than Wyoming, the U.K. is lopsided beyond belief. It contains regional inequalities greater than those between the east and the west of Germany, or the north and the south of Italy—inequalities that have been allowed by successive governments to grow to shameful extremes. On average, people in Nottingham earn about a quarter of what people make in Kensington and Chelsea, in West London, which is some two hours away by train.

During the Brexit campaign, the E.U. came to represent not just a supranational monolith across the English Channel but profound distances within the U.K. itself. And the politicians who defended the E.U. looked and sounded, for the most part, as if they spent more time in Tuscany each summer than they had spent on Teesside in their lives. “The kind of globalism, the internationalism, the liberal élite view, was seized on by people who thought that they’d been spoken down to for decades,” John Hayes, a Tory M.P. and a Brexiteer, told me. “And the more they wheeled out the establishment figures, the more it was, Yeah, that’s them. Those are the ones who don’t get it. They don’t understand us.”

Almost eight years after the vote, what stays with me is how unimagined Brexit was. Overnight, and against the will of its leaders, the country abandoned its economic model—as the Anglo-Saxon gateway to the world’s largest trading bloc—and replaced it with nothing at all. “I can’t think of another occasion when a party has so radically changed direction while in office,” Willetts said. Thatcher was an architect of the E.U.’s single market, which in time became a heresy.

You can marvel at the recklessness of Brexiteers such as Farage, or of Johnson, who spearheaded the Vote Leave campaign. (“He is not a Brexiteer,” Osborne said. “I really would go to my grave saying, deep down, Boris Johnson did not want to leave the E.U.”) But the real dereliction ran deeper. Sensible Britain failed. The Civil Service did not plan for Brexit. Ivan Rogers was the U.K.’s permanent representative to the E.U. from 2013 to 2017. He started warning about the likelihood of Brexit about five years before the vote. “It was difficult to get the attention of the system,” he said. Beyond a briefing paper, demanded by the House of Lords, there was only some “confidential thinking,” in the words of Jeremy Heywood, the former head of the Civil Service. (Heywood died in 2018.) “The mandarins have a lot to answer for on this,” Rogers said. “We were very badly prepared in 2016.”

“I didn’t think it was very wise,” Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England, said, of the official refusal to consider the referendum going wrong. “We did a ton of planning.” After the vote, the Bank stabilized the markets while British politics imploded. Cameron resigned and was replaced by Theresa May, a former Home Secretary with limited experience of the economy or of international affairs. In the second half of 2016, May worked with a small group of advisers to formulate a Brexit strategy that ultimately satisfied nobody. “It was incredibly poor statecraft,” a former Cabinet colleague said. “Absolute shit. Abominable.” The abiding image of the Brexit talks was a photo of Michel Barnier, the E.U.’s chief negotiator, with his colleagues and their neat piles of paper on one side of a table, while their British counterparts, led by David Davis, a bluff former special-forces reservist, sat on the other side with a single notebook among them.

One Friday lunchtime, a couple of months ago, I met Dominic Cummings at a pub not far from his house in London. A light snow was in the air. Cummings, who is fifty-two, worked on education policy in the coalition government before becoming the campaign director of Vote Leave. (He coined its notorious slogan, “Take Back Control.”) Cummings is a Savonarola figure in British politics, an ascetic and a technocrat, who wants to save the state by burning it down. He refers to Elon Musk by his first name and writes Substack essays with titles such as “On Complexity, ‘fog and moonlight,’ prediction, and politics VII: why social science is so bad at prediction & what is to be done.”

Police officer and investigator look at a crime scene within a crime scene.

Cummings reveres the Apollo space program and takes a dim view of almost all Britain’s elected officials. “Where they are not malicious they are moronic,” he told me once. He talks rapidly, with a slight Northern rasp. (He is from Durham, near Newcastle.) Next to our table in the pub, a woodstove emitted a sudden, enveloping cloud of smoke, which dissipated while we talked. Cummings appeared to be wearing two hats, against the cold. He apologized if it seemed as if he were staring at me. He had recently undergone retinal surgery.

Cummings, unsurprisingly, saw Brexit in revolutionary terms—as a chance to break with the country’s ruling orthodoxy. “The Vote Leave campaign was not of the Tory Party,” he said. “It was not a conservative—big ‘C’ or little ‘c’—effort. But none of them wanted to confront the reasons why we did it in the first place. . . . For us, this was an attempt to wrench us off the Cameron, establishment, Blairite line.” Cummings believes that Britain must rediscover its ability to build things—roads, railways, houses, research institutes, products that people want to buy—in order to prosper again. He argues that it is America’s ecosystem of universities, entrepreneurs, and government procurement departments that have helped maintain its economic and technological edge, not just lower taxes or a freer form of capitalism. “When you start talking about this to Tories, they go, Oh, Dominic, you sound like a terrible central planner,” Cummings said. “And you go, That’s America. This is not weird left-wing shit.”

No one would accuse Cummings of having a popular platform. His jam is A.I. and Nietzsche. But, after the Brexit vote, he kept waiting for May’s government to act on what was, to him, its obvious implications: to restrict immigration, reform the state, and explore dramatic economic policies, in order to diverge from the E.U. and to boost the country’s productivity. “I kept thinking, month after month, God, like, it’s weird the way they are just thrashing around and not facing it,” Cummings said. In his view, the election of Trump, that November, provided a perfect excuse for Remainers not to take the Brexit vote seriously. “They just lumped it all in with, Oh, it’s a global tide of populism. It’s mad, irrational, evil. It’s partly funded by Putin,” he said. “They didn’t have to reëvaluate and go, Maybe the establishment in general has been, like, fucking up for twenty-plus years. ”

In July, 2019, May resigned as Prime Minister and was replaced by Johnson, who hired Cummings as a senior adviser. Cummings thought that Johnson would probably screw it up. At the same time, he saw an opportunity to advance what he considered the true Vote Leave agenda. “In some sense,” he said, “the risk was worth taking.”

That fall was the most kinetic, breathtaking period of Britain’s fourteen years of Tory rule. With Cummings at his side, along with Lee Cain, another former Vote Leave official, who became his director of communications, Johnson broke the deadlock that had existed since the referendum. He asked the Queen to prorogue, or suspend, Parliament. He expelled twenty-one Conservative M.P.s—including eight former Cabinet ministers and Nicholas Soames, the grandson of Winston Churchill—for attempting to stop the country from leaving the E.U. with no deal at all.

On a Tuesday in late September, the Supreme Court ruled that Johnson’s suspension of Parliament had been unlawful. “The effect upon the fundamentals of our democracy was extreme,” the Justices found. I stood outside the court in the rain, and it felt as though the thousand-year-old timbers of the state were moving beneath our feet. Someone in the crowd was wearing a prison jumpsuit and an enlarged Johnson head. A woman was dressed as a suffragist. Anna Soubry, a former Tory M.P. who quit the party to fight for a second referendum, shook her head in wonder. “Astonishing,” she said. But Johnson prevailed. Before the year was out, he had cobbled together a new, hard-line Brexit deal and thumped Corbyn at a general election on another three-word Cummings-approved slogan: “Get Brexit Done.”

Johnson was, briefly, unassailable. In the election that December, the Conservatives won seats in places such as Bishop Auckland, in Cummings’s home county of Durham, which they had not held for more than a hundred years. The Party gathered a new, loose coalition of pro-Brexit voters—many of whom were from formerly Labour-voting English towns—to go with its traditionally older, fiscally conservative base. Johnson’s celebrity (the hair, the mess, the faux Churchillian vibes, the ridiculous Latin) was the glue that held it all together. He sensed the public mood. (With Johnson, that was not the same as doing something about it.) He disavowed austerity—promising more money for the N.H.S., new hospitals, and more police—and described a mighty program to redress the country’s economic imbalances, which he called Levelling Up.

Johnson’s premiership collapsed under the pressure of the pandemic and of his own proclivities. According to Cummings, the alignment between the goals of Vote Leave and Johnson’s ambitions as Prime Minister decoupled in January, 2020, just a few weeks after the election. Cummings wanted to overhaul the civil service and Britain’s planning laws. Johnson, for his part, wanted a rest. “He was, like, What the fuck are you talking about? Why would I want to do that?” Cummings recalled. (Johnson did not reply to a request for comment.) “It’s basically cake-ism, right?,” Cummings said, referring to Johnson’s political lodestar: having his cake and eating it, too. “I want to do all the things you want to do, and I want everyone to love me,” Cummings recalled. “I was, like, Yeah, that’s not happening.”

Britain’s first cases of the coronavirus were announced on January 31, 2020, the day the country left the European Union. In March, Johnson ordered the first national lockdown, caught COVID , and later spent three nights in the I.C.U. For months, the country staggered from one set of restrictions to the next—a reflection of Johnson’s inconstant attitude toward the virus. In texts, Cummings used a shopping-cart emoji to indicate the Prime Minister veering from one half-formed idea to the next. Levelling Up became a pork-barrel exercise: of seven hundred and twenty-five million pounds earmarked in June, 2021, about eighty per cent was for Conservative constituencies.

Johnson’s Downing Street was operatically dysfunctional. A rift opened between Cummings and his team and a faction centered on Carrie Symonds, Johnson’s then fiancée, a former Conservative Party communications director. In November, 2020, Cummings accused the Prime Minister of betraying the Vote Leave program and resigned. “I said, Listen, we had a deal. And if you end up breaking our deal there is going to be hell to pay,” Cummings recalled. Cain left as well. A little more than a year later, the Daily Mirror , a left-wing tabloid, broke the news that Johnson and his staff had organized parties while the rest of the country was under lockdown—beginning with the party for Cain’s departure, the previous November. Johnson resigned six months later.

The pandemic bore out truths about the British state. There were bright spots: the vaccines and their rollout by the N.H.S.; the intervention of the Treasury, under Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor, whose furlough plan protected millions of jobs. More generally, though, the virus revealed tired public services, a population in poor health, and a government that was less competent than it thought it was. “It’s very convenient for everyone to blame Boris,” Cummings said. “But the truth is, in January, February, of 2020, it was the civil service saying‚ We’re the best-prepared country in the world. We’re brilliant at pandemics. The reality is, everything was crumbling.”

In October, 2023, Cummings testified at the U.K.’s Covid inquiry, an investigation of the government’s handling of the pandemic led by a retired judge. His written evidence was a hundred and fifteen pages long and began with an epigraph from “War and Peace”: “Nothing was ready for the war which everybody expected.”

The hearings took place in an office building around the corner from Paddington Station. I sat next to a row of bereaved family members, who were holding photographs of their loved ones. Cummings wore a white linen shirt, which came untucked, a tweed jacket with elbow patches, and black boots. He is such a contentious figure—an agent of these disordered times—that people often don’t really listen to what he says. A great deal of the media coverage of Cummings’s testimony focussed on his texting style. In messages during the pandemic, he referred to ministers as “useless fuckpigs,” “morons,” and “cunts.” The inquiry’s lawyer asked Cummings if he thought his language had been too strong. “I would say, if anything, it understated the position,” he replied.

In written testimony, Cummings implored the Covid inquiry to address a wider crisis in Britain’s political class. “Our political parties and the civil service are extremely closed institutions with little place for people who can think and build,” he wrote. Cummings believes that the war in Iraq, the financial crisis, the pandemic, and the invasion of Ukraine all, in their ways, exposed serious shortcomings in the British state that have yet to be addressed.

Brexit, too. When we met, Cummings observed that the country has still failed to confront the full implications of the vote, either domestically or abroad: “You can just treat it as, like, a weird thing, like a witch trial in a medieval village. Now the witch has been burnt, and now the community is getting back to normal. Or you can think of it as part of big structural changes in Western politics, society, and the economy. And if the establishment thinks that you can treat it like a sort of episode of witchcraft mania, then they’re just going to walk straight into recurring shocks.”

I was at Heathrow Airport, refreshing the BBC’s Web site on my phone, when the screen changed to a black-and-white commemorative portrait of the Queen. On February 6, 1952, when Elizabeth’s father, George VI, died, the Prime Minister was Winston Churchill. “We cannot at this moment do more than record a spontaneous expression of our grief,” he told the House of Commons that afternoon. Seventy years later, in September, 2022, Britain was seized again by deference, tenderness, and other, more inchoate, emotions. You could not escape the ritual. Hats, horses, artillery in London’s parks. In her later years, the Queen’s aura of permanence had been enhanced by the recklessness at work in other parts of Britain’s public life. Her survival helped to contain a sense of crisis.

The Queen died on Liz Truss’s second full day in office. When the country’s brand-new Prime Minister and her husband, Hugh O’Leary, arrived at Westminster Abbey for the state funeral, Australian television identified them as “maybe minor royals.” Four days later, Truss launched the Growth Plan 2022, a Thatcher-inspired, forty-five-billion-pound package of tax cuts intended to reignite the British economy. The bond markets didn’t like it. The pound fell to a record low against the dollar. The International Monetary Fund asked Truss to “re-evaluate.” Her approval rating dropped by almost thirty points in a week. Ashen, Truss fired her Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, then left office herself, on October 25th, serving seventy-one days fewer than Britain’s previous shortest-serving Prime Minister, George Canning, who died suddenly of pneumonia in 1827.

It made sense to pretend that Truss and her Growth Plan had been a rogue mission, inflicted on an unsuspecting nation. Truss was depicted as mad, or ideologically unreliable, or both. She had been a Liberal Democrat at Oxford who once opposed the monarchy. She was strangely besotted with mental arithmetic. But the truth is that Truss was neither an outlier nor a secret radical, but a representative spirit of the Conservative Party and its years in power. She was one of the first M.P.s of her intake to be promoted to the Cabinet, brought on by Cameron, before serving both May and Johnson in a hectic and haphazard series of important jobs: running departments for the environment, justice, international trade, and a large part of the Treasury.

In all these positions, Truss was the same: spiky, dynamic, considered skillful on TV. In 2012, she and Kwarteng contributed to “Britannia Unchained,” an ode to tax cutting and deregulation that described the British as “among the worst idlers in the world.” I asked one of Truss’s contemporaries, the former Cabinet minister, if anyone took the ideas seriously at the time. It was hard to catch the attention of the Party’s base under the coalition, he complained. “The easiest way was to show a bit of leg,” he said. “It used to be hanging.” Truss campaigned for Remain before becoming a Brexiteer. As Foreign Secretary, she posed on top of a tank—pure Thatcher cosplay—and dominated the government’s Flickr account, with pictures of herself jogging across the Brooklyn Bridge and standing, ruminatively, in Red Square, in Moscow.

Dachshund and another dog walk together.

“It’s silliness,” Rory Stewart told me. Stewart became a Conservative M.P. on the same day as Truss, in 2010, after working for the British government in Iraq, running an N.G.O. in Afghanistan, and teaching at Harvard. He was ejected from the Party during the Johnson purge of 2019. Last year, he published “How Not to Be a Politician,” a compulsive, depressing memoir of his career during this period. “It’s clever, silly people. It’s a lack of seriousness,” he said, of Truss and many of his peers.

In 2015, Stewart was sent to work under Truss at Britain’s department for the environment. Truss challenged him to come up with a strategy for England’s national parks in three days. “She said, Come on, Rory, how difficult can this be?” he recalled. Truss started firing off suggestions. “Get young people into nature. Blah blah blah blah.” (The plan was announced on time; Truss declined to speak to me.) “I felt with Liz Truss slight affection but above all profound pity,” Stewart said. “Because she’s approaching these big conversations as though she’s sort of performing as an underprepared undergraduate at a seminar.”

On a cloudless summer’s morning, in the dog days of Theresa May’s government, I travelled to Scunthorpe, in North Lincolnshire. In the sixties, Scunthorpe was a growing steel town with four blast furnaces named after English queens. In 2016, the population voted overwhelmingly for Brexit; three years later, the steelworks was at risk of closure, in part because of trade uncertainties caused by the vote. British Steel, which ran the plant, had been sold to private-equity investors for a pound. Four thousand jobs were on the line.

In the afternoon, I sat down with Simon Green, the deputy chief executive of the local council. Green was in his early fifties, angular and forthright. He grew up in Grimsby, a fishing town on the coast, and spent his career in local government—in Boston and New York, as well as in Nottingham and Sheffield—before taking the job in North Lincolnshire, in 2017. Green was sick of reporters, like me, coming up to Scunthorpe from London for the day, to gawk at its predicament and wonder why people could have believed that Brexit would improve their situation. “No disrespect, but we do get a level of poverty porn,” he said. “A lot of doom and gloom.”

Green assured me that the Brexit-related anxiety around the steelworks was a blip. “We’re actually on a bit of a comeback roll,” he said. He was excited about the region’s potential for green technology and the construction of HS2, a new Y-shaped high-speed railway that was going to transform connections between London and cities in the northeast and the northwest. “Rail track, ballast, concrete, cement—you name anything to do with trains, infrastructure, it’s an engineering, Midlands, Northern thing,” he said. Green ascribed the Brexit vote in Scunthorpe to “values and culture” rather than to economics—a sense of dislocation and of feeling disdained by politicians in London.

Recently, I wondered how Green was getting on. In 2019, Scunthorpe was part of the “Red Wall” of Labour constituencies that flipped for the Tories. British Steel had changed hands once more. Now Chinese investors were planning to install new furnaces, which required fewer workers and were fed with scrap metal. For the first time since 1890, the plant would no longer produce virgin steel from ore. I met Green a couple of weeks before Christmas. He had left his job a few days before. He seemed relieved to be done. Seven local authorities in England have gone bust since 2020, including the one serving Birmingham, Britain’s second-largest city. In North Lincolnshire, the council now spends about three-quarters of its budget on services for vulnerable children and adults—roughly double the proportion of a decade ago. “We’re still here,” Green said, ruefully. The saga of the steelworks continued. “It’s endless,” he went on. “Is it closing? Isn’t it closing?” Britain has had eleven different economic programs in the past thirteen years.

We were in a teaching room at the University Campus North Lincolnshire, which opened a few years ago in the former local-authority offices. The old council chamber, built in the shape of a blast furnace, was now a lecture hall. The average student age was twenty-nine. Green was proud of the project. It reminded him of mechanics’ institutes in the nineteenth century. “People are using their own judgment to better themselves,” he said. “If you want a job in this area, you can get a job. We need more quality opportunity.” Green had had a clear strategy for Scunthorpe and the nearby Humber estuary, built around green technology and education. “I asked a question to my colleagues and politicians as well,” he said. “What sort of town do you want this to be in ten, fifteen, twenty years?”

Britain has no equivalent strategy for itself. In September, Sunak weakened several of the country’s key climate-change targets. A few weeks later, he cancelled what was left of HS2, the new rail network. Only the stem of the Y will now be built, from London to Birmingham, at a cost of some four hundred and seventy million pounds per mile , with little or no benefit to the North. “I can get quite excited, agitated by that,” Green said. “It makes us look a laughingstock.” Green was studiously apolitical when we talked. I had no sense of which way he voted. But he despaired of the shallowness and contingency now at the heart of British politics, and the lack of narrative coherence—or shared purpose—about what these years of struggle had been intended to achieve. I asked if he ever worried that the country was in a permanent state of decline. “I think, at the moment, we are at the crossroads,” he replied.

When will it end? Sunak says that he will call a general election in the second half of the year. The gossip in Westminster says that probably that means mid-November: a British encore, to follow the main event in the U.S. But it could come as soon as May. The Prime Minister began preparing the ground last fall, after his first year in office, by presenting himself as a change candidate—a big claim, considering the circumstances.

In October, I went to Manchester to watch Sunak address the Conservative Party’s annual conference. He was introduced onstage by his wife, Akshata Murty, the daughter of N. R. Narayana Murthy, a founder of Infosys, the Indian I.T. conglomerate. (According to the London Sunday Times , Sunak and Murty have an estimated net worth of about five hundred million pounds.) Murty wore an orange pants suit, and she addressed Britain’s most successful political organization as if it were a local gardening society. “Please know that Rishi is working hard,” she said. “He shares your values and he knows how much you care about the future of the U.K.”

Sunak has a quietly imploring tone. British politics was in a bad way, he explained. People were fed up. “It isn’t anger,” Sunak said. “It’s an exhaustion with politics, in particular politicians saying things and then nothing ever changing.” Sunak dated the rot back thirty years without explaining why, but, presumably, to indicate the fall of Thatcher. (Thatcher was everywhere in Manchester; she is the modern Party’s only ghost.) Having positioned himself as the country’s next, truly transformative, leader, Sunak offered his party a weirdly pallid program: the dismantling of HS2, plus two long-range, complex policies, to abolish smoking and to reform the A-levels—England’s standard end-of-school exams. “We will be bold. We will be radical,” Sunak promised. “We will face resistance and we will meet it.”

Increasingly, Sunak has been pulled between the Party’s diverging instincts: to retreat to the dry, liberal competence of the Cameron-Osborne regime or to head off in a more explicitly protectionist, anti-immigrant, anti-woke direction. In Manchester, the energy was unmistakably on the Party’s right. Suella Braverman, then the Home Secretary, magnetized delegates with a speech warning of a “hurricane” of mass migration. Truss staged a growth rally, and Nigel Farage cruised the conference hall, posing for selfies. (There is talk of Farage standing as a Conservative M.P.) Back in London, I had lunch with David Frost, an influential Conservative peer. “Rishi, I feel for him, in a way,” Frost said. “He’s just trying to keep the show on the road and not upset all these different wings of the Party. But the consequence of that is you end up with a sort of agenda which is not politically meaningful at all.”

On January 14th, a poll of fourteen thousand people, which Frost facilitated, suggested that the Party is on course for a huge defeat later this year. The question is what kind of haunted political realm it will leave behind. Under Starmer, Labour has been tactical in the extreme, exorcising Corbyn’s left-wing policies (Corbyn has been blocked from standing for the Party at the election), while making vague noises about everything else. It has nothing new to say about Brexit and equivocates about its own tax and spending plans, if it wins power. The Party recently scaled back a plan to invest twenty-eight billion pounds a year in green projects. There is no rescue on the way for Britain’s welfare state.

Osborne noted all this with satisfaction. “The underlying economic arguments have basically been accepted,” he said, of austerity. “It’s rather like the Thatcher period. Everyone complained that Thatcher did deindustrialization, and yet no one wants to unpick it.” By contrast, Cummings sees the two cautious, hedging leaders in charge of Britain’s main political parties—and the relief among some centrists that the candidates are not so different from each other—in rather darker terms. “They are deluded when they think it’s great that Sunak and Starmer are in. It’s just like they’re arguing over trivia,” he said. “The politics of it are insane.”

I am afraid that I agree. It is unnerving to be heading into an election year in Britain with the political conversation so small, next to questions that can feel immeasurable. I put this to Hayes, the Tory M.P., when I went to see him in the House of Commons. “You’re arguing we have very vanilla-flavor politics, in a richly colored world. There’s something in that,” he said. Then he surprised me. “I think the key thing for the Conservatives now is to be more conservative,” he said. We were sitting in a bay window, overlooking the Thames. A waiter poured tea. Hayes seemed to relish the coming election. It was as if, after almost fourteen years of tortuous experiment, real conservatism might finally be at hand. “Outside metropolitan Britain and the university towns, it’s all up for grabs,” Hayes assured me. “Toryism must have its day again.” ♦

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COMMENTS

The 5 British Values
He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. [Image Descriptor: Photo of Chris] The 5 fundamental British values are: (1) Democracy, (2) The rule of law, (3) Individual liberty, (4) Mutual respect, and (5) Tolerance of others.
Defining British identity: is it about "values" or "proper behaviour"?
What constitutes British identity? In this blog, Ulrike G. Theuerkauf (UEA) explains the relevance of "British values" in discussions about the further political, economic and social development of the UK after Brexit, and the manner in which "Britishness" is invoked as a concept of inclusion or exclusion in society. Brexit is something of a boom industry.
British values: article by David Cameron
العربيَّة. اردو. To mark the 799th anniversary of Magna Carta, the Prime Minister has written an article for the Mail on Sunday on British values. From: Prime Minister's Office, 10 ...
British Values: Democracy and The Rule of Law
Get custom essay. In conclusion, democracy and the power of law - are two main british values. They are important both for government and society.They are fundemantal things that have helped to create the UK as we see it now-a-day. Without the rule of any law crime rates would soar and there would be an increased risk of safety to people ...
British Values essay
This, alongside the problem of impeding British values such as liberty and democracy, results in a clearly defined conflict between British values and the Prevent strategy implemented in the United Kingdom. Reference list: Gayle, D., 2018. UK has seen 'Brexit-related' growth in racism, says UN representative.
Fundamental British Values: Radicalizing British Children Into a
To paraphrase a recent British (who was Scottish) Prime Minister, an understanding of British citizenship and shared British Values should lead to a shared sense of belonging and a celebration of British identity "which is bigger than the sum of its parts" (Maylor, 2016, p. 320).
Why British values should be folded into character education
Some of the British values, for example those of democracy and the rule of law, appear, on the face of it, to be more difficult to teach than others. Yet a reinvigorated citizenship education ...
"Fundamental British Values": What's Fundamental? What's Value? and
"Fundamental British Values," in Badiou's terms, is a polysemous "event," whose performances and contexts should be regarded within a series of theatrical metaphors—an "amphitheatre" of meanings, perhaps, in a "post-truth" world. Thus, these deconstructions should be seen as part of a more generic critique of neoliberal ...
Fundamental British and "The Other" Values—An Analytical Reflection on
Fundamental British Values make explicit the identifying features of citizenry—no longer a passport or birth certificate but a way of life and values marked by allegiance to the law and democracy, to personal autonomy, and to maintaining the collective peace through prescribed mechanisms of toleration.
Research on Fundamental British Values
Conceptual Papers: Belonging, Social Cohesion and FBVs. Mary Healy's 'Belonging, Social Cohesion and fundamental British values' is a critical non- empirical paper which questions the political argument that FBVs are designed to promote social cohesion in response to the 'fragmentation of belonging' (Healy, 2019: 423).
PDF Integration, assimilation and fundamental British values
fundamental British values Invested Citizenship and 21st century 'belonging' By Sean Oliver-Dee Introduction This paper sets out a positive vision of what citizenship in Britain can mean and reasons why Christians in Britain can embrace this vision. In June 2016, the British people voted by a narrow but clear majority to leave the EU.
Dear Mr Gove: what's so 'British' about your 'British values'?
Your checklist of British values is: "Democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, mutual respect, and tolerance of those of different faiths and beliefs." I can't attach the adjective "British ...
Towards a critique of fundamental British values: the case of the
'Fundamental British Values' is understood here as a label, developed in the wake of the 'end of multiculturalism' rhetoric, and is promoted as a new form of discourse for schools. I explore the implications and risks of this vocabulary both for the classroom and for society at large by examining each of the terms 'fundamental ...
Critical Analysis of British Values: Essay Example, 414 words
The British Values are a fundamental part of creating a diverse and modern community, within the UK. The British Values consists of Democracy, Rule of Law, Respect and Tolerance, and Individual Liberty, all of which are important aspects to personal and work life. Democracy comprises of everyone being aware of their rights and responsibilities.
Fundamental British Values: Lesson Ideas for Teachers
British Values Explained. Democracy describes our national electoral system and the skills needed to participate in it successfully. Democracy relies on listening to the needs of everyone and adapting a decision until the vast majority agree. The democratic process requires rigorous thinking, perspective-taking, patience, and understanding.
PDF Embedding British values within English Teaching and learning: A
2. Language and power - exploring British values through English teaching and learning. 3. The exemplar resources - embedding British values into Entry Level, Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3 English lessons. 4. Developing English resources and activities that embed British values - reflections on the process. 5.
How do you promote 'British Values' when values education is your
Research on the promotion of 'fundamental British values' (FBV) in English schools has tended to focus on its nationalistic and securitising elements. Its role within a broader, politically conservative shift in values education, both in England and beyond, has received less attention. This paper addresses the latter, reporting on research ...
Guidance on promoting British values in schools published
The Department for Education has today (27 November 2014) published guidance on promoting British values in schools to ensure young people leave school prepared for life in modern Britain. The ...
Projecting the UK's values abroad: Introduction
This essay collection asks, and tries to answer, the question 'what can Britain do now?' It is an examination of the emerging tools and strategies the UK can use to support and promote its values in its foreign policy. While in a number of areas there is continuity in British rhetoric and policy, outside the ...
How The E.U. Referendum Exposed How Toxic "British Values" Really Are
It was a regurgitated line that galvanized a movement. This line, "We want our country back," has been heard for years, in pubs across small towns in the mainly rural county of Shropshire, on ...
Essay on Fundamental British Value Through SMSC in the United Kingdom
The essay explores the need to implement fundamental British values in all institution as a way of promoting learning. The paper introduces basic policies that have been fundamental in the running of learning institutions in the country. It is also vital to establish basic values in the United Kingdom that impact learning in various institutions.
Virtue vs. Value in British Education ━ The European Conservative
Virtue vs. Value in British Education. En classe, le travail des petits (1889), oil on canvas by Henri Jules Jean Geoffroy (1853-1924) The focus on values over virtues has led to a relativistic and superficial understanding of human flourishing. "The very spring and root of honesty and virtue lie in good education.".
British Values
1201 Words. 5 Pages. Open Document. In June 2014, the secretary of state for education, confirmed that schools would be required to promote British values from September 2014. According to the guidance from the Department for Education, the fundamental British values which schools should promote are: • Democracy • The rule of law ...
What Have Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule Done to Britain?
The Conservative-run Britain of the eighties was not harmonious. Life beyond the North London square where my family lived often seemed to be in the grip of one confrontation or another. The news ...