The Spectator’s Notes

20 May 2006

The worst thing about being conservative is that it is so bad for the character.

To be fair to Gordon Brown, his preoccupation with ‘core British values’ is not a recent fad to please the Daily Mail, but something he has talked about the whole time Labour has been in office. But it is not very clear what he means. Now he wants these values to be taught in schools. They include ‘freedom, fairness, civic responsibility and democracy’, apparently. No doubt these are British values, but aren’t they also American values, Dutch values, maybe nowadays even German values (though not French values, obviously)? What’s the distinctively British bit? Besides, I don’t really see how values can be directly taught. Values are visible in institutions and in the history of those institutions; they can’t be found in the wild and then served raw. Those institutions — Parliament, good universities, a non-political Civil Service, county police forces, the monarchy, etc. — have been relentlessly attacked by this government. Amid the ashes, Mr Brown’s ‘values’ are a pretty bedraggled phoenix.