You can't teach values, British or otherwise. You can only live them

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/14/only-valuing-britain-means-to-be-british

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As I write, highly civilised human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me." This is the opening line of the best-loved description of British values, Orwell's The Lion and the Unicorn. (Though at times he writes of England, he tends to use England and Britain interchangeably.) Writing in London at the height of the Blitz, Orwell explains why it's worth fighting for the Britain of "smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar boxes". "We are," he says, "a nation of flower lovers… stamp collectors, pigeon fanciers and amateur carpenters."

Everyone who tries to define Britishness ends up making a list. There's Betjeman's "books from Boots and country lanes,/ Free speech, free passes, class distinction,/ Democracy and proper drains".

All these lists quickly date beyond recognition. Bill Bryson in Notes from a Small Island, for instance, says that Britain is "still the best place in the world to post a letter, go for a walk, watch television, buy a book, venture out for a drink, go to a museum, use the bank". Banks? The post? And bookshops? You'll be lucky.

If you want a current crowd-sourced list, look up #Britishvalues on Twitter. It was trending all last week. It's not just the bric-a-brac of daily life. What's interesting is how much of what Orwell thinks of as our particular genius – our national character – has also changed beyond recognition. "The genuinely popular culture," he writes, "is frowned on by the authorities." Not in a Britain where the Queen appears in a comedy sketch, where Dave the PM talks fondly of the Jam. I'm typing this on the day when the party leaders were suckered into posing as gormless shills for the Sun.

Orwell talks a lot about the privateness of English life. "The most hateful of all names," he says, "is Nosy Parker." Now, of course, no one needs to be a Nosy Parker. Everyone broadcasts their most intimate details on Facebook and we seem largely comfortable with the idea that corporations and GCHQ collect our memories like fond parents. Big Brother is watching us and we'd be hurt if he wasn't.

I'm not saying change is a bad thing – perhaps if there had been more Nosy Parkers in the past we wouldn't now be putting the whole of the 1970s on trial for child abuse. But some things that once seemed "quintessentially British" turn out to be about as quintessential as stamp collecting. Our "horror of abstract thought", for instance. Whatever happened to that? What could possibly be more abstract than the "market", that thing that "regulates itself", but only if we feed it public money?

Michael Gove and David Cameron want to formulate a set of British values, as a riposte not to civilised human beings in Stukas but to the "Trojan horse" of Birmingham. But such values might also be a response to the fundamentalist Britishism of Ukip. Or to globalised corporate culture. Cameron's values turn out to be "democracy, freedom and the rule of law". Not to be rude but those are not values. Those are the basic qualifications for not being a failed state. And there's nothing British about them. The rule of law, for instance, has its origins in the Middle East and is something to do with Moses.

Back in 2007, Gordon Brown's The Governance of Britain also called for a clearer definition of what it means to be British. One politician responded by saying – and let me quote at length –that Britishness is "best understood as an identity shaped by an understanding of the common law, refined by the struggle between the people's representatives and arbitrary power, rooted in a presumption in favour of individual freedom, enriched by a love of the quirky, local and unique, buttressed by anger at injustice, constantly open to the world and engaged with suffering of others, sustained through adversity by subversive humour and better understood through literature than any other art".

I quite like this. It has some of the warmth and openness that people found in the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony. The author of the paragraph is Michael Gove. And how British is it of me to give him the credit for that?

The trouble is you can't teach values. You transmit values by living them. Well, actually you can teach values but you need a gulag to do it in. "Values" are what we call laws or ethics when they become part of the culture. When we start to breathe them. You can't Ofsted them into existence. I got my values from my parents, my church, from punk rock and the BBC (thank you Oliver Postgate, Blue Peter, Jackanory and John Peel – yes, I'm making a list), but most of all from how the people around me behaved. They paid their taxes, were active in their communities, welcomed strangers. Not what they said, but what they did.

So what are our leaders doing? Posing with the Sun. Leave aside the innate comedy of the pictures – the fact that Clegg looks like a hostage and that Miliband looks like it's just beginning to dawn on him that he has just fucked the camel. The headline says: "This is OUR England." Who is the "we" to whom that "our" pertains? News Corp. All three leaders look owned – both in the legal sense and in the current internet sense of humiliated. If you want to celebrate a value such as "the rule of law", do not pose with a paper whose owner is mired in the phone-~hacking scandal and that actively colluded in the cover-up of the Hillsborough massacre (please let's stop calling it a disaster as though it was the weather that did it).

Seeing the pictures, my daughter asked the question our leaders did not ask: "If they want to support the England football team, why don't they pose with the England team? Or a football? Or a flag?" The answer is, of course, because even their patriotism is for sale. Don't talk about the value of Britishness if you're actively involved in flogging off every nut and washer of the apparatus of Britain. If you want a narrative of Britishness, you could begin by cordoning off some core of services and assets – a common wealth – and say this is owned by all and for all.

If you want some British values, start by valuing Britain.

Let's leave the last words to Orwell. Britain, he says, "is not being true to herself while the refugees who sought our shores are penned up in concentration camps, and the company directors work out subtle schemes to dodge their Excess Profits Tax… Nothing ever stands still. We must add to our heritage or lose it. We must grow greater or grow less."