Baljeet Ghale, President of the National Union of Teachers in the UK, is falling into the same trap as the British academic Terry Eagleton, in saying there are no "British values" because the British do not have a monopoly on values such as fairness or decency. Actually I suspect it is perfectly possible she is not inadvertently falling into the same trap, but that she read his article in the Guardian earlier this year and had one of those nice moments of liberal left self affirmation that the Guardian is so good at providing its readers with, and, seeing her gut instinct thus articulated in such an esteemed organ, decided it was therefore OK to take a public stance on it. It played well to the NUT activists, who like any new excuse to attack the Blair government, tied in well with her 'first black President' self titling, and, culiminating with a why can't we be more like Cuba comment, earned her a standing ovation.
It's a trap, or a straw man if you prefer a different metaphor, because noone who seriously studies or tries to define national cultures says that any country has a monopoly on any particular value. What most studies try to do is assess the relative weight given to different values in different societies.
What I find fascinating, and I don't think has been studied enough, is how typical members of a culture react when two strongly held values come in conflict. For example, Japanese people can be very process oriented but when a request comes from a more senior person, the strong sense of hierarchical deference takes precedence, and the process can be crashed. In terms of British identity, it leads to some interesting silent hypocrisies, for example our strong sense of fair play, which conflicts with our enduring class system, producing an apologetic middle class ("don't hate me for being middle class, I'm nice really"), a ruling elite in denial of class differences (you try bringing up class at a chattering classes dinner party and see if you get invited back) and an aggrieved working class - "you say we've got rights, and yet somehow we're still being screwed".
This particular British hypocrisy aside, it is a legitimate government concern, and not state oppression by those who think their political interests are being undermined by the diversity of the People, right, yeah - as Terry says, that there are groups of people in our society who give allegiance to religious values precedence over the rights of people to live unharmed, or who insist on loyalty to family over freedom to choose a husband or retain a clitoris. Yes Christianity has in various forms been in conflict and some wings still are in conflict with the values of our liberal society, but the redemptive aspect of radical Islamism and the value this implies - lives are worth sacrificing for my redemption - cannot be absorbed into British cuture and British values should not be challenged or transformed in the process, as Terry Eagleton says they should.
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