Reclaiming British Identity in troubled times

Recent events have brought to the fore some major fissures in contemporary British society.

We have a ruling class that is unable to pay heed to the anger many common people are feeling regarding the state of the nation. Right-wing demagogues and enablers are capitalizing on the prevailing dysfunctional state of society to further their own agendas of demonizing communities they do not like. the left-wing progressive liberal crowd has wedded themselves to the religion of DEI to such an extent that the truth has, in some cases, taken a backseat.

The ruling class is out of touch with the demands of the common person, and in particular, either misunderstands or chooses to ignore the resentment that has been building up over many years regarding the changing nature of the country.

We have had 25+ years of net immigration into the UK, resulting in approximately 14% of the population being born outside the UK. In addition to this, the proportion of the population that is Muslim is on the increase thanks to a higher than average fertility rate amongst Muslims. Overall, about 1 in 5 people are non-white.

While these demographic shifts have undoubtedly changed the face of Britain, they've also brought to the forefront questions about cultural integration and values.

There's a volume of words regarding immigrants to the UK (both legal and otherwise) acting out their retrograde home-country cultural values in Britain. The proposed long-term solutions for handling these cases tend to be deportation of some sort. The problem with deportation, however, is that the cost to the taxpayer of doing so is extremely high since a person can only be deported if there is a country they can be sent to and their subsequent safety can be guaranteed to a minimum reasonable extent. This still hasn't deterred people from suggesting this as a viable solution en masse.

Overall, deportation seems to have become the solution of choice for any and all grievances people have regarding anyone who looks like a migrant.

I'm not going to argue the ethics of deportation. I just think it's hard to deport people. There are costly logistical issues and human rights issues involved. But more than any of these points...

I think deportation as a solution misses the point.

The reason migrants and their descendants are here in Britain in the first place is because British people have always been interacting with other cultures, going right back to the days of the empire. At its height, Great Britain wasn't just the British isles but that and all of its colonies too. In a sense, Britain was a global nation. British culture is one that has for a long time been open to being influenced by world cultures. And it's within this context that Britain has welcomed immigrants onto its shores. It's why Brits often proudly proclaim that it's one of the most "tolerant" countries in the world.

As a result Britain today is a much more ethnically diverse country than at any other time in its history. Projecting forward from this baseline, a successfully tolerant Britain of the future must be one which is able to continue to welcome people of different backgrounds and merge them into the general British cultural fold such that they become British and take pride in their British identity and culture.

For this to happen there has to be a unifying cultural narrative that ties people together. And since we're all living in Britain it makes sense for that narrative to be British in flavour.

At the moment British culture is mostly implicitly defined through how people communicate and interact with each other, how public institutions and systems operate, as well as the type of media content that gets broadcast.

This last point - about broadcast media - is important. The rise of high-speed internet and social media platforms has led to a globalization of culture. This has resulted in a massive influence from American culture - thanks to a common language - on British minds. Youngsters in particular are much more likely to have watched the latest Tiktok video from an American influencer than the latest episode of Have I Got News for You.

Culture has become increasingly Americanized. Grime and Drill rap music are modelled on American rap music, with the same glorification of the gangster lifestyle and identity. Critical Race Theory concepts are now as prevalent in British public society as they are in America.

Combined with the rise of Islamo-fascism and arrival of mass numbers of migrants with retrograde cultural values, traditional British culture is being crowded out. The resulting degeneracy is eroding the polite and high-trust society we are used to having. This needs fixing asap.

The first step is to define our values as a nation, as a tribe.

One thing I admire about Americans is how often they quote their constitutional rights when arguing about right and wrong. They take pride in their constitution, the founding documents, the very ideas that underpin their society.

What do British folks quote? The closest thing I can think of is the Magna Carta, which over 800 years old. And how many Brits could even quote this? How many of them even know what it says?

I didn't get taught civics at school. I only had a rough idea of how parliament was structured. I didn't know that the Prime Minister is just the monarch's representative in parliament. I didn't know - and most people I speak to still don't know - that the monarch is the ultimate commander of the military.

Having an explicitly defined, commonly agreed upon set of values to refer is important for shaping argument, debate and understanding. It's especially useful for the education of newcomers to the subject. It's the same reasons that every field of study has a textbook of some sort. It's why religions have books. It's such an obvious thing and yet, there is no such document for commonly held British values.

Civics should be mandatory. History classes shouldn't just be on kings, castles and battles but on democracy's history itself. On the history of feminism and women's rights. Alongside this, the history of money (and Britain's outsized role in creating many of the financial structures we have today) should also be taught.

Human Rights legislation caters for the minimum viable rights of individuals and the remaining laws on the books tell us what we can and can't do legally. But these aren't enough for preserving culture.

There needs to be a charter of British values which would specify what we value as a society in terms of character and the quality of our interactions with each other.

The idea is for people to have something to refer to when they wish to argue some definition of "British-ness". The charter will make it easier to contrast and compare a given expression to Britishness in a more measurable manner.

To avoid the risk of the charter being used to censor people, free speech laws must supersede it. This is also why I don't believe it makes sense to give it legal teeth.

But a charter is pointless if people don't use it or refer to it.

It should be maintained by a government-funded but politically neutral organisation. A key objective of the organisation would be to take a broad look at society and urge different people and organisations within to adhere to the charter.

This charter would be crowdsourced. It shouldn't be too long, but instead, easy to remember. It should be a living document since values change over time, although it should require something similar to a referendum to make updates to the charter.

Once values are defined in this way, then comes the work of propagating those values throughout society. Even if people enthusiastically adopt it, it will take (in my opinion) at least two generations to permeate the majority of society - there are no quick fixes to the cultural divides we face.