BY STEWART SLATER

“We are all a goldfish and the water that we swim in is Christianity,” said the historian Tom Holland, explaining the thesis of his book Dominion. Our beliefs and behaviours (even those of atheists) are so shot through with Christian assumptions that we no longer realise they are there. What are, in reality, the specific outcomes of a specific faith appear so all-encompassing and so familiar that we have come to believe it is universal and natural.

It is tempting to see “British Values” in the same light. For every time a politician talks about them (Lord Blunkett most recently), our inability to define them becomes clear. We fall back on high level generalities – “tolerance” or “democracy” – or on the tweely specific – “queueing” and “pubs”.

It could be that we are so thoroughly inured to our values that we have ceased to see them as values and but rather as immutable facts of nature.

Or it could just be that the task of definition is actually very hard. Tolerance and democracy could just as easily be Belgian Values as British. This should not be a surprise for, while we are geographically an island, we have never been one culturally. Like the rest of Western Europe, we are the children of Athens and Jerusalem, fostered by Rome. It would be odd, given our heritage, if we had come to a completely different conclusion to our Continental cousins.

But we have come to a somewhat different conclusion. Britain is not Belgium. Nor is it Scandinavia which, like us, takes a Judaeo-Christian Classical culture and admixes a dose of Germanness. Similar to chefs in a cooking competition, we have taken the same ingredients and produced a slightly different dish.

Almost as frequently as we discuss British Values, we discuss whether Britain is a nation of immigrants. Oh yes it is go the Left, keen to turn the Windrush into the country’s year zero from which all history flows. Oh no it isn’t go the Right, suffused with childhood tales of ancestral derring do. Both of course have a point. Britain has seen waves of immigration in the past – the Normans, the Romans etc. – but it has not seen them in the recent past. Even the most parochial Cornish village would have long ceased to regard residents with a millennium of local ancestry as a “grockle”.

Of the groups of incomers, the one about whom we talk the least but who probably contributed most to their descendants’ distinctiveness were the Anglo-Saxons. In contrast to their Roman and Norman peers, they came here piecemeal rather than as part of a large-scale organised imperial project. And when they arrived, as history suggests groups do when they come by sea, not by land, they scattered. Standing on the shore, brother said farewell to brother and one struck North, the other West.

Travel was still possible – the rubies in the Sutton Hoo helmet found their way from Sri Lanka to East Anglia, King Alfred had visited Rome twice by the age of seven – but it was difficult and so many of those who arrived together never saw each other again. Thus, while settled populations in other countries lived in clans or tribes, the Anglo-Saxons started to live in small families the extent of which can be shown by the fact they never felt the need to invent a word for “cousin”.

Small families have their disadvantages. There are fewer people to rely on. “Me and my brother against my cousin, me and my cousin against the tribe, me and my tribe…” is not a viable strategy, but also they have their advantages. England is unique in Europe in never developing a feuding culture – clans have enough members to sustain such conflicts, but families do not. Denmark may be similar to us in its cultural roots, but the problem there grew so extreme that a law was passed mandating the payment of a blood price with specific sums to be paid to the relatives of the deceased out to their second cousins.

From this background, as Sam Bidwell showed in a recent Twitter thread, much that is distinctively English flowed. Small family groups increased the importance of self-reliance and raised the importance of having assets of one’s own so property law developed early here. Unable to rely on kinship networks, the English had to be willing to move to seek opportunity and records suggest that the country has long seen much higher levels of internal mobility than others, aided by the early adoption of a uniform national legal system – people are more likely to relocate if they know they will be treated the same in their new abode as in their old. Other modes of living encourage people to see themselves as part of a collective, England’s encouraged its residents to see themselves as individuals.

People who do not see themselves as part of a larger group do not generally think that the group has much right to tell them what to do. So, as the old legal saw has it, “In England everything is legal unless it is illegal, in Germany everything is illegal unless it is legal.” Rather than setting out what its citizens are allowed to do, English law has, instead, focused on what they are not allowed to do and given them carte blanche beyond that.  As Lord Hannan points out in his book How We Invented Freedom and Why It Matters the English state has not traditionally seen inheritance as its area of responsibility, so one can leave one’s property to whomever one wishes. Most European countries, by contrast, have developed rules mandating the passing of at least some of one’s assets to one’s descendants. Here, property belongs solely to an individual, to be disposed of as they will. There, the group retains an interest.

To the French political thinker Tocqueville, the New World colonies took the virtues and vices of their mother countries and stretched them to the extreme. According to the Finnish think tank Hofstede Insights, the U.S. is, as we might expect, the most individualistic country in the world, but the next on the list are Australia, Britain and Canada. Albion’s seed did not fall far from its tree (New Zealand comes seventh). Individualism is the Anglosphere’s special sauce.

We might be tempted to see this as the solution to our problem. British Values are just European Values shot through with a hearty dose of individualism. We have stuck a couple of chillis into the pot and turned the Continent’s marinara into our arrabbiata. But there is a wrinkle.

As the eagle-eyed will have spotted, the preceding paragraphs have used the word “English” quite a lot, and the word “British” not at all. What is true South of the border is not true North of it. Scotland was not a nation of individuals living in nuclear families, it was a nation of people living in clans. Clans which often did unpleasant things to each other (the Glencoe Massacre – never trust a Campbell). As one of the country’s leading historians remarked, when not under the English thumb, it was Europe’s Afghanistan – poor, tribal and violent.

Such societies will form different values to those comprised of sovereign individuals looking out for themselves. Scotland, as we might expect, is more collectivist and egalitarian and perceives itself to be more collectivist and egalitarian than the greedy Sassenachs (the Gaelic word for Saxon, conveniently enough) down South who are merely out for themselves. If the Nats are not exactly correct when they posit their homeland (I refuse to use the words “nation” or “country” since Scotland fails the Pointless test – it is not a member of the U.N. or a sovereign state in its own right) as Scandinavia with the temperature turned up, neither are they exactly wrong. Defining British Values as English Values would miss out an important part of Scottish Values and defining them as Scottish Values would miss out an important part of English Values. Which may be why Britain is like an unhappy couple who stay together for the sake of the oil revenues. Forced into a shotgun wedding in the 1700’s, both countries have always really wanted different things.

There is, however, another wrinkle. For discussions of British values are never purely academic exercises. They are instrumental, an answer to the oft-posed question of building community cohesion. But how can a group which worships individualism force its members to be part of its community? Are attempts to mandate the teaching of British Values not actually an affront to English Values?

Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.