I have always been touched by stories of patriotic sacrifice — I have engravings of the deaths of Nelson and Wolfe on my wall, for instance — but one in particular has always stuck with me.
As World War One took shape on the horizon, Lt Col Edwin Hautenville Richardson, living in Carnoustie with his wife, attracted the interest of officers at the nearby Barry Buddon army camp. They let Richardson bring his dogs in to experiment during the training of soldiers.
Although already used on the battlefield by France and Germany, dogs had not yet been adopted by the British Army. Richardson’s work made their usefulness clear, and he was soon asked to set up the British War Dogs training school at Shoeburyness, Essex.
Soon, the Army were no longer just using them as guard dogs, but message carriers, and the Red Cross used them widely too — initially in a Saint Bernard style as first aid carriers, with a small medical pack around their neck, and later to venture into No Man’s Land to find wounded soldiers.
His recruits were initially drafted from Battersea Dogs Home, along with strays sent in from police stations around the country. As with men, this meagre diet of sacrifice could not satisfy the meatgrinder of the Western Front. A call was put out for volunteers — for people to give up their domestic dogs for the front. One Englishwoman sent hers in with a heart-rending letter: “I’ve given my husband and my sons, and now that he too is required, I give my dog.”
A touching story, perhaps, but is it compliant with British Values?
There is only one man we can turn to for judgement. The arbiter of the lofty ideals of the YooKay is the gleaming-eyed Intelligence Corps veteran Mike Tapp, the MP for Dover and Deal, who has been a notable character of the Labour back benches. Tapp is, as I have previously written in these august pages, “trying to take the fight to Reform over working-class patriotism with his constant deployment of vaguely-defined and newly-capitalised ‘British Values’”. Handily, a vigilant patriot has been keeping a tab running:
- Service
- Duty
- Hard work
- Democracy
- Rule of law
- Respect
- Firmness
- Decency
- Opportunity
- Discipline
- Professionalism
- Commitment to protecting those who cannot defend themselves
- Rejection of extremism
- Fairness
- Strength with diplomacy
- Economic responsibility
- Centrism/mainstream politics
- Competence
- Leadership
- Responsibility
- Patriotism
- Kebab at 2AM
Let’s check our story off against them. Service? Certainly. But is it fair that this woman gave her sons, her husband and her dog, when some families — indeed, entire villages — emerged without losing a single person? Hardly. And sending a defenceless dog into the most horrifying warzone man has ever subjected his fellow man to is hardly a commitment to protecting those who cannot defend themselves, either. In fact, it’s questionable whether the men who fought on those battlefields qualify; were the men of the Somme, of Ypres, of Arras fighting for a rejection of extremism? For mainstream politics? For respect?
British Values (they are always capitalised) always seem to fall apart when they are applied to real world situations, but they seem especially preposterous when they are applied to the past. In fact, the term “British Values”, capitalised or otherwise, was hardly used in the Britain of old. Rudyard Kipling, perhaps the most eloquent writer on what it meant to be British, never used the term once. Its usage started to rise in the 1960s, with an almost exponential growth around — yeah, you guessed it — the late 1990s.
It is entirely logical that it would coincide with the process of mass migration, because British Values™️are a fiction, and one that not only coincides with that process but is central to it.
British Values are so weak they might as well be magnolias
There was no need for British Values in Old Britain because it was a culturally and ethnically homogenous nation, bound by a shared history and by unsaid and implicit systems of behaviour — the long-lost “common values” of postliberal thinkers. When Old Britain was replaced by New Britain, a process that began with the end of the war and the birth of the NHS in 1945, a new sense of citizenship was soon to follow — one that took its lead from the American model, with a sense of citizenship based around ethnicity and tradition morphing into one based around values.
This allowed the new arrivals of the Windrush to accommodate themselves more easily into Britain. Here is where we see the first spike in the use of British Values. We could be assured that the new arrivals would fit in well — they came from countries with the same legal systems, they spoke English, they were part of the Commonwealth. They had British Values.
But in the late 1990s immigration began to surge, and with it surged the rhetorical deployment of British Values. That is because a new belief system, multiculturalism, had emerged, and with it declined the memory of Old Britain. Old Britain implied a single national story. A new story had to encompass everyone.
But Gresham’s Law of information always holds true, and with the increase in frequency came a decrease in quality. As I have already written in these most august pages, that is another natural consequence of multiculturalism:
Multiculturalism meant embracing a multiplicity of cultures, all of equal value. In practice, this meant that, in an attempt to assimilate immigrants, Britain’s common values were diluted in order to apply to the maximum number of people possible … The common culture that is the framework of a cohesive society, therefore, was eroded in order to assimilate immigrants with minimal friction. Denigrating common culture to twee nonsense like fish and chips, and our common values to vague platitudes like “responsibility” and “tolerance”, makes it easier to absorb large rates of demographic change.
This is the well from which the officially approved Blairite values of the YooKay sprung from, the same well from which Tapp draws. The problem is that they are so weak they might as well be magnolias — they could apply to almost anyone, and indeed that is the point. Tapp’s only real innovation is that he has attempted to use them in order to frame discontent with this process as un-British.
British Values do not exist because what defined Britain was never its values. It was the intricate threads of a nation and its people. It was a sense, a feeling, an ephemeral notion that was nonetheless grasped intuitively by everyone who encountered it. It’s is Orwell’s old maids bicycling through the mists, it is John Gray’s county churchyard where the rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep, it is the dawn chorus in the spring hedgerows, a roaring fire in winter, the crack of leather on willow underneath a lazy cloudless summer sky, the crimson and auburn of the oak woodland in the lambent burn of autumn, the sound of an empty pint glass on a wooden bar, the butterfly-filled cottage garden, the cold limestone crags of the north and the sudden warmth of Portland stone in soft sun. It is a woman sending her dog to the Western Front. It is a foreign country. It is a place we are now only vaguely conscious of — the shape of it obscured through the mists of great ignorance, eluding our grasp like the half-remembered setting of a dream.
How long before this Britain disappears forever? Well, things are never hopeless. People have endured far longer attempts to eradicate their past in the service of a great future; Milan Hüebl was a Czech intellectual and a key figure in the Prague Spring reform movement. Of the communist regime that would later repress him, he wrote, “The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.”
But there is a Czech Republic. And there will always be an England.
