The social commentator and co-host of the famous Triggernometry podcast, Konstantin Kisin, made waves recently with a succinct summary of British Values. In response to, among other things, the recent proposal by Labour MP Tahir Ali of Birmingham Hall Green and Moseley that the United Kingdom ought to explore the possibility of reintroducing blasphemy laws.

Ali’s call led, predictably, to an outcry from those sceptical of both religiously-inspired laws and state overreach into freedom of speech. Mr Ali’s question — specifically over a “commitment” to preventing “the desecration of all religious texts and the prophets of the Abrahamic religions” — was rejected on many grounds. Some were more practical — pointing out that the religious and atheist populations of Britain are nearly at parity — whilst others, including Kisin, attempted to make normative arguments. Kisin’s point ran thusly:

You have to make sure that the people who are here are encouraged by every means necessary to become British in every way, and to integrate into our society and to buy into the values of the UK. To buy into all the things that we believe about freedom of expression, about treatment of women, about sexual minorities, about all sorts of other things on which we agree. We agree that we should not have blasphemy laws… if that’s what you want, you’re not fucking British.

There we have it. The debate on what British Values mean and look like, reduced to “what we all agree” on. Except, the whole point of “liberal principles” is the recognition that there is very little on which we all agree. The project of defining “British Values” as pursued by the Department for Education (DfE) resulted in a summary of these nebulous values in 2014 as “democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs.” Naturally, the web of competing worldviews means this list becomes self-defeating: am I to respect the faiths and beliefs of those who require that we have blasphemy laws? If I do not, am I ceasing to be British — or at the very least, ceasing to express British Values? 

Yet there are multiple problems with Konstantin’s approach that goes beyond those of the DfE. The first, and most glaring, is that, if there really are “all sorts of other things on which we agree,” they should be fairly obvious, and easy to state — and not require government intervention in the first place. And if we “all agree on them”, then Kisin needs to at least make an attempt to identify who “we” are — because clearly it does not include a sitting MP. 

Instead, Konstantin lists three — hardly an exhaustive list — each of which are somewhat ubiquitous across developed nations, and remain abstract and undeveloped in themselves. After all, when he says that we agree “about the treatment of women”, what exactly does he mean by “treatment”? And, not to beat a dead horse, but what does he mean by “women”? This last question goes beyond the important-but-semantic issues of the gender activists’ warping of language — a debate that Kisin seems willing to engage with and, in doing so, not endorse the gender activists’ idea of transgenderism. Do we treat adolescent women and adult women differently? The law certainly does. 

Moreover, and less obvious but more important, Kisin fails to explain why these are specifically British values. If we take this brief list seriously — freedom of expression, respect for women, and respect for sexual minorities — and flip the question around, is agreement with these principles sufficient to make a person British? After all, the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) – another bugbear of the British right — specifies that every individual has a right to freedom of expression (article 10) and the freedom from discrimination (article 14). If a French citizen says he believes in freedom of expression, womens’ rights to work, and that homosexuals should not be physically assaulted in the street, is he handed a British passport? 

Of course not — and I am not pretending that this is Kisin’s argument. He does not claim these are uniquely British values, but at the same time he does not make the argument that these are necessary but not sufficient values — only that they are necessary. Yet even if they are considered necessary, Kisin is making an anachronistic mistake: most British people in history did not agree with these values. Until 1963, it was illegal to be homosexual in Britain; until 2013, it was illegal for homosexuals to marry. Until 1992, it was not illegal for a husband to rape his wife. Before 2008, blasphemy laws were part of the legal landscape of England and Wales — and continued to be so in Scotland until 2021. Was no one really British before these points?

I am not concerned here with the moral validity of each of these laws, but I am concerned with the moral claim that “British Values” flow from, or are expressed in, these legal norms. It would seem to me that Kisin is instead making a civilisational argument, that the values he lists are more specifically ways of thinking and behaving common in Western Civilisation. And he would not be alone in making this argument: on the more “exclusivist” end of this argument, academics like Samuel Huntingdon (The Clash of Civilisations) and Sir Roger Scruton (The West and the Rest) have made full-throated defences of Western civilisation as the most advanced, tolerant and legally-stable civilisation in history, whilst those on the more “inclusivist” end like Tom Holland (Dominion) and Michael Oakeshott (Experience and its Modes) argue that the recent developments within British law identified above are logically inherent within the traditions of the West, and are one of many different options through which those traditions can express themselves. Holland, like John Gray (Enlightenment’s Wake), argues that respect for women, tolerance of sexual minorities, and similar legal developments were not inevitable, but could only emerge in the culture of individualism, tolerance and respect that slowly emerged in Western civilisation through the hegemonic belief of that civilisation — Christianity. How ironic, then, that Kisin would arrive at this critique from the angle of secularism, when many critics of Christianity, and the West’s past of religiously-inspired laws, are at least prepared to recognise tolerance and freedom as its intellectual inheritance (Holland has recently been joined by the likes of Elon Musk, Professor Jordan Peterson and even Richard Dawkins as calling themselves “cultural Christians”). 

Nevertheless, the point stands: Kisin’s list, and therefore identification, of British Values are more realistically termed “Western civilisational values”. But even so, the way that nations that fall into the Western tradition (be it comfortably, such as Britain, or peripherally, such as, say, Hungary) practice these civilisational values varies wildly. Returning to the issue above — the legal definition of “respect for sexual minorities” varies across nations within the Western world, and oftentimes even within those nations. And this is why it was so hard for Kisin to concretely define “treatment of sexual minorities” from his intellectual framework of Western civilisational values — because there is not simply one. 

The British right … needs to be more conscious and proud of the actual, substantive and long-standing cultural inheritance of this country

Likewise, the way that cultural values interact with one another shifts and changes across nations, and across time. Even the method through which these interactions are negotiated are particular and cultural. The British inheritance of common law constitutionalism, for example, means that British law has often been considered more responsive and democratic than the civil law tradition of the continent. And this is, in itself, a political culture that is not unique to Britain, but is uniquely combined with constitutional monarchy, two established churches (the Church of England and the Church of Scotland), the oldest party system in Europe, an instituted political opposition and an instituted aristocracy within, across and between these systems. This point matters because some of these things may be found in other nations:  America has a similarly-constituted common law tradition, but it is not a constitutionalist one; the Netherlands still has an hereditary monarchy and has since 1815, but does not have a parliamentary system like Britain’s; France has religious plurality but does not have a state religion; and so on. Britain’s politico-legal culture is unique, and can be more confidently spoken of with a full appreciation of these histories. And that is just the political culture; the culture of free enterprise alongside extensive charitable welfare, itself combined with the common law tradition, is an economic culture that is distinct from, but connected to, this political culture. And that list is not exhaustive — lest I make the same mistake. 

The British right, to which Kisin is somewhat attached, needs to be more conscious and proud of the actual, substantive and long-standing cultural inheritance of this country beyond the shifting-sands fads of contemporary culture. Democracy, in a conservative sense, goes beyond simply the values of the majority — because tomorrow, they could become unrecognisable. A thought-experiment I often posed to students is useful here: if tomorrow a referendum was held asking the question “should murder be legal?” and was passed with a majority, does that make the outcome acceptable? Obviously not. In the same way, if a referendum was passed on the question “should women be forced to wear religious dress?”, would that make the conclusion acceptable? Probably not. I don’t know how Kisin would be able to argue against it, though, given that it is “what we agree on”. 

What is “British” is not simply “what can be found in Britain”. It is the unique identity that stretches back over 1,000 years and is a product of the relatively stable, peaceful island that saw itself as a culture apart from Europe and eventually the world.