User blog:Maltalidenta Kwuitidherali/"Britishness" has No Value

(I recently was asked to perform a speech at Trinity School. This is the draft written down on my phone beforehand, with the only differences being the square bracketed redactions. I'd be interested to hear some opinions.)

Britishness Has No Value

To begin with, I'd like to thank (Name) for (his/her) warm welcome.

My name is [you probably all know my name by mow], I’m from [a certain school], in Leicestershire, in England, in Britain. I was born in Burton, and I now live in Swadlincote (Derbyshire). I have a British passport, and so I am British. At my school there are many other British people, of all kinds of shapes, sizes, preferences, interests, religions and ethnicities. There are some people who do not have a British passport at my school, but you wouldn’t know who they were just by looking. When I look around, I don't see British, Chinese, Indian, and so on. I see humans. And in a world of progress like our own, I would hope to not be the only one. Most of us here tonight, maybe all of us, would consider ourselves to be British. Yet why do we do so?

I can imagine that some of us would say that we've lived here for many years, we're culturally British, but perhaps the key reason is simply that it says so on our passport. There is a common theme, though; Britain. It's always coming down to Britain. So, what is Britain? A raised piece of land on a sphere of rock that juts above the salty water we call the Sea. Nothing more.

Yet, if we assign value to simply being from a certain nation, and there is no value to be found elsewhere; are we not seeing value simply because it's a nation - "our" nation, perhaps - but that's still nationalism.

Indeed, nationalism never has been a positive aspect of the world. Factionalism, by definition, is division, which is negative alone, irrespective of how.

We could ask another question of ourselves: how many of us here tonight are human? I hope very much that none of us are in any doubt on the matter. To talk about human values, human dignity, human rights, seems entirely logical, natural, and right. To talk about British values to me ultimately seems divisive and unhelpful. The European convention is on Human Rights, not British rights. I wish to state tonight that if we start trying to talk about British values, then we are making a terrible mistake. To speak of Britain can be to speak in terms of great patriotic pride: As a nation, there is much in our history and culture to value: The NHS Democracy The free press The BBC Great advances in technology and industry that have come from our small island A liberal and enlightened approach to much of life But to speak proudly of British achievements is not the same as to speak of British values. Those who speak of "British values" seem to struggle to define what they mean. Democracy is ubiquitous. Other nations have healthcare provisions and a free press Other nations have great people who have achieved great things also. So what are uniquely british values? Famously, British people are able to queue. I gather in some countries queueing in an orderly fashion is not part of the culture. I regret to say that I do not think we are particularly good at queueing – anyone who has seen the lunch queue at my school when year ten are waiting there would have to conclude that year ten are not British by such a definition. Year eleven however are so much lower on that same scale that they may not be human at all. There is always the famous sense of British "fair play". The rules set out in sport, for example. Again, watching our national team play football we might well suggest that this sense of fair play is not after all so well ingrained in our culture as we would hope. Ladies and gentlemen, there is a very serious issue here. If we define values based on unproven and unprovable cultural assumptions, then we neglect something so much more fundamental: the fact of our common humanity which we all share. To speak of british values is unfortunately the kind of cheap nationalism which sells tabloids; it makes people despise those people from other places. This casual and endemic discrimination results in conflict on ethnic and national bases. Let us all make every effort to speak without shame of our country, but to speak even more warmly of humanity - the true driving force.

Now, I have a question for us all. If nationalism is only division, and it is the same as Britishness, then is Britishness not division also? Indeed, anything we define nationalism as, we define Britishness as too.

The best example of this nationalistic negativity is the Workers' Party of the Veimar Republic. They recruited a young man to their propaganda team, and soon enough they were labelled "Nationalist". It was Adolf Hitler who made them what they were, and it was Nationalism that did the rest - mass genocide amongst its multitude of accolades.

It was nationalism that created the Nazis, Nationalism that causes the world's civil wars, which are very much the main source of conflict these days.

Recently, it was nationalism that affected our decision to leave the EU, and it's nationalism that threatens to break up our United Kingdom by removing Scotland from it.

As Albert Einstein said; "Nationalism is the measles of mankind". We can only hope to overcome such a disease, that we may never feel its ill will again.

We should never say that Britishness has value, as alone it indeed does not - that which gives Britishness value, again, the human race, should we call valuable. It's something I've never quite been able to understand; how such a simple line drawn on a map has any tangible value.