Education: British Values

Lord Taverne Excerpts

Thursday 26th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Taverne (LD)]

My Lords, unlike the previous speaker, I am deeply sceptical about teaching “British values”. Some that have been suggested are the rule of law, human rights and parliamentary government. But these are no longer special British values. We largely drafted the European Convention on Human Rights, but the Conservatives are now trying to get rid of it. We championed parliamentary democracy, but now it is the referendum which is trumpeted as the ultimate expression of democracy. That, of course, is the doctrine of Rousseau, the hero of dictators and autocrats. I prefer the British tradition of Locke and Burke.

We were once praised for our courtesy and readiness to listen to others, but in many respects Rule Britannia has been replaced by Rude Britannia, such as at Prime Minister’s Question Time, for example. The organised shouting and jeering makes Millwall fans look by comparison like a convention of bishops in Lambeth Palace. Nothing could do more to destroy respect for Parliament.

The invocation of national values is part of our current obsession with national identity. That is a very elusive concept. Tony Judt, the last of the social democratic philosophers, asked what it meant to be a Jew if you were not religious and detested the policies of the Israeli Government. He decided that he was a non-Jewish Jew. Jonathan Miller famously observed that he was not a Jew; he was just Jew-ish. As for being English, and the same could be said for being British, this was summed up long ago by Daniel Defoe as quoted in that splendid book by Robert Winder entitled Bloody Foreigners:

“Thus from a mixture of all kinds began

That heterogeneous thing, an Englishman …

A true-born Englishman’s a contradiction

In speech an irony, in fact a fiction”.

A nation at ease with itself does not have to search for an identity or assert it. Let us teach “civilised values” instead.