What's wrong with British values? Ask civilians in the Middle East and large swathes of Africa if they would like to live in a country with a society more like ours...where everyone can get an education with no fear of being attacked, where you have recourse to law just for a start.
The problem is they're not British values, they're universal values. They're nothing inherently 'British' about them. It's just a bunch of jingoistic rubbish, the likes of which you'd expect from Michael Gove who apparently never left the 1920s.
What's universal about them (other than the fact that many countries around the world owe their constitutions to Western colonial powers)? Some countries have never had a democratic government, religious freedom(some want to get rid of ours), or free speech. British values are not necessarily unique. Many individual values are shared with other countries, but the combination of values, and their order of priority, is what defines particular cultures.
I agree they are universal values, but outside Europe scarcely anyone lives in a society with these values. We should be proud that we try to uphold values that should be universal, but scarcely are, especially when the Middle East is going back into the Dark Ages and trying to drag us with it.
I may have got this wrong, but wasn't it us (and several other Europeans) that decided to impose our values on others, without asking whether they wanted them or not, that probably caused a lot of the mess in the first place?
I think the England one-day cricketers should also join this fantastic trip to Mars!! I'd also put the French rugby union team there as well for continuing to serve up the dullest rugby imaginable for nigh on 20 years!!
They're universal because they're enshrined within the UN Convention of Human Rights. By suggesting their British this implies that other countries do not share the same values (and pretty much most western countries do) and also implies there is nothing universal about such rights, when what we should be trying to do is normalise such values as universal and (VERY) strongly promote these as universal values of mankind from Argentina to Zimbawe, rather than framing them as something uniquely British.
I'm sorry but that's just some protocol that governments have signed up to and then frequently ignored. Values come from long accepted norms within a society. Also, are you saying that a quality cannot be attributed to a person or culture unless it is uniquely so?
My point is they're universal because they're widely agreed upon as generally 'good things' by a whole host of countries even if they're not acted upon, they're the type of things which are values within many societies. Sometimes.
Can you not see what I mean? Plenty of countries and societies have the same values, even if they're there only in name. That's what makes it universal. If you're arguing tolerance, etc is uniquely British.... then that's slightly worrying. And in answer to your question, when it's so obvious that there's nothing remotely unique about it.
You seem to be hung up on the word "unique" I am not arguing that any value is "uniquely" British. Where does this label come from? I am not saying that to be a "British" value, it has to be uniquely British. I may have a collection of values which differ in total from the next person, and I'm sure that we may have many individual values in common, but none of them would be unique to me. What may be representative of my moral compass would be the combination and priority of those values. What would be these so obvious universal values, which are so ingrained around the world that political systems and cultures automatically apply them?
"Plenty of countries and societies have the same values, even if they're there only in name. That's what makes it universal." "Plenty of", "many" and any other generalist epithet which we may wish to apply to the different cultures of the world, do not equate to universality. To meet this description, "ALL" of the worlds societies would have to meet the criteria.
