Exclusion and Intolerance Can Be British Values

In 5th century BC Athens, Pericles introduced the “double descent law”, which required that for a child to become a citizen of the state, they must be born to two Athenian parents. The measure was an attempt to guard the Athenian constituency from both barbarians and rival Greeks. After all, when you make citizens the masters of the state, the state is duty-bound to discriminate against foreigners, lest they become its masters.

Athenian suspicion extended to the body politic itself, with assembly members granted the power to ostracise, or banish its citizens. Cimon, the son of Miltiades, was ostracised for his alleged pro-Spartan sentiments, and Aristides was ostracised because he was too honourable. By these means the Athenian constitution helped to preserve a unity of purpose, direction and motivation. It explicitly excluded the outsider exactly because it afforded rights to the insider.

The double descent laws were introduced at the end of the Greco-Persian wars, a fifty-year effort by the Persians to conquer all of Greece. Theirs was a true clash of civilisations, between the Athenians, who saw themselves as servants of the law, and the Persians, who were slaves to a king. While the Athenians were insular and nativist, the Persians were expansionist and tolerant. Their empire, which stretched from the Balkans to modern-day India, guaranteed religious and cultural freedom throughout the vastness of their territory.

Somewhat paradoxically, while the democratic Athenians put Socrates to death for some Reddit-tier trolling, the Persian empire indulged all manner of deviations from the rights and norms of the Persian interior. Local religions carried on as usual, cultural practices continued unmolested and provinces were administered according to local customs. Herodotus observed of the Persians that “No nation is so ready to adopt foreign customs.”

Athens, the world’s first democracy, and Persia, the first global empire, reveal something important about the essence of each system. As history would keep demonstrating, a successful empire must engage in a degree of pragmatic tolerance, because it is not possible to enforce conformity at scale. A democracy, on the other hand, vests power in the people, and therefore must keep watch over who those people are and what they believe. These are ultimately two mutually exclusive systems of government.

If we apply those lessons to the modern world, and to contemporary Britain, what do we see? We see a small, quasi-homogenous democracy, pockmarked by conflict with the Celts and internecine battles amongst Christians, which at the turn of the 20th century made the conscious decision to optimise for maximising difference, rather than fostering cohesion. Britain is attempting to absorb all the peoples and cultures of the world, like the Persians, while giving them a vote, like the Greeks.

Blair wanted to massively increase public, private and consumer spending, while keeping inflation and interest rates low

This is a project that is fundamentally motivated by economics, but underwritten by post-war anthropology — that being that humans are blank slates to be deployed as economic units. Its architect in our country was Tony Blair, for whom Britain was a province — or commercial zone — of the American empire. When he came to power in 1997, Britain was a bigger manufacturing powerhouse than China and India combined, and 95 per cent of the population was white. For Blair, this was a problem, which he set about solving.

Blair wanted to massively increase public, private and consumer spending, while keeping inflation and interest rates low. The availability of cheap credit could fuel growth, but it threatened to overheat the economy. In order to square the circle, Blair dislocated the price of goods and labour through outsourcing, and dislocated the price of services and labour through insourcing, or mass migration. From 1997 the UK “lost” 1.5 million manufacturing jobs, while at the same time welcoming around 3.5 million migrants. This was a concerted effort to reshape the demography, culture and the economy of the nation. But as Prime Minister, Blair could hardly come out and say that — instead, he would need a narrative that voters could rally behind.

Blair promoted the meme of “British values”, which aimed to clarify what it meant to be British amidst a vortex of change. Virtually unheard of prior to the 1990s, British values are now viewed as axiomatic of the British essence. For example, the political Right will tell you that illegal migration is bad because it challenges the British sense of “fair play”. The political Left will tell you that the British sense of fair play calls for the Briton to accept those same migrants.

Fairness can be read to mean both closed borders and open borders. It can mean retributive justice or rehabilitative justice. It can mean low taxes or high taxes. Tolerance can be understood to mean both free-speech absolutism and draconian hate speech laws. It can mean decriminalising female genital mutilation, or punishing its practitioners in the harshest of terms.

British values have no meaning — they are unmoored from British history, and don’t speak to the British story, which is one of war, innovation, colonisation, sea-faring and adventure, about which there is not much tolerant, fair or inclusive. But they do serve a purpose, and that is to hold people together in their difference. The credo is an attempt to redefine Britishness as the negation of itself. Being British is about being tolerant and inclusive of every other culture, except for your own.

Herodotus said it of Persians, but it is just as apt to say of Britain that there is “No nation is so ready to adopt foreign customs”. The Persian empire was tolerant of other cultures, fair in its dealings with them, and inclusive of all — not because it was benevolent, or nice, but because it was pragmatic. Ironically, there is something distinctly Eastern about Blair’s British values, which were conjured up as a means to codify the relationships between rival tribes and clans.

Having imported millions of Africans, Indians, and Pakistanis, the British establishment is now utterly aghast that these groups are beginning to elect their own people to rule in their own interests. The legacy of Northern Ireland ought to be that it can be very difficult for two quite similar groups of white Christians to get along well — but successive governments have welcomed in radically different people, and then feign shock when the differences manifest themselves.

While the likes of Blair contend that the future is not just inevitable, but better, I believe the ancients were more wise than us. They showed that if you want to live in a high-trust democracy, you must be wary of outsiders. As Sweden found out to its detriment, a closed ecosystem is a prerequisite for positive liberalism and democracy.

Just as it would be preposterous to hold an election in the Persian empire, so too will British elections become more farcical. Contrary to the ramblings of Blair — or more recently, Starmer and Polanski — mass migration is not a feature of a tolerant, liberal democracy, but its antithesis.

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