The prime minister was at his most impassioned in response to the atrocity that had cost the lives of so many British people.
“We will not be terrorised and we will hold true to the British way of life,” he said. “When they try to intimidate us, we will not be intimidated, we will not be cowed.”
However, this was not David Cameron yesterday (Monday) reacting to the slaughter of more than 30 holidaymakers sunning themselves on a Tunisian beach. It was Tony Blair nearly 10 years ago, in the aftermath of the July 7 bombings on the London Transport.
But the words Cameron used yesterday were virtually identical, because how could they not be? Writing in the Telegraph, the PM said: “We will not be cowed; we will stand up for our way of life. We stand in solidarity with all communities who are affected and outraged by these events, and remain united in our determination not to let them divide us.”
Both Blair and Cameron — and, indeed, Gordon Brown — emphasised the importance of standing up for “British values” as the bedrock of nationhood and community solidarity. Cameron went so far yesterday to say on the BBC that we face an “existential threat” — and he is right, though not necessarily for the reasons that we might think.
Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) may not have the military capability to undermine Western democratic states, but its poisonous ideology does have the potential to infect many thousands of young Muslim men and women living here unless an antidote is found. It also forces governments into adopting policies that are inimical to the concept of a free country, such as intrusive surveillance, ID cards and draconian stop-and-search powers for the police.
These are justified as a proportionate response to the threat, and yet they are invariably watered down or abandoned when tested in parliament or the courts against the values that we hold dear. After 52 people were killed a decade ago by four home-grown suicide bombers, Blair came up with a plan for tackling extremists that led him into a bruising battle with the Commons over the detention of suspects. He lost; and other measures either never materialised or ran into the brick wall of the UK’s human rights obligations. They included powers to deport so-called “preachers of hate’’ with no right of appeal and to close mosques that preached extremism.
The Government is still trying to get the balance between liberty and security right, and the new measures being drafted in the Home Office will, correctly, be subject to the same rigorous scrutiny as Blair’s were in 2005.
Cameron has learnt from that experience not to be overly prescriptive. In his interview for the Today programme yesterday, he was less concerned with bringing in new legislation (we have enough already) than with emphasising once again the importance of articulating the superiority of British values.
The problem, though, is that there are many people living here who do not subscribe to his assertion of Western ideological ascendancy and consider such doctrine to be degenerate. It is the great paradox of a free country that we tolerate the very people who abuse our standards and values and undermine our way of life; it is our strength and our weakness. There is also a danger in using abstract concepts such as fair play and respect for others to define who we are.
Many cultures embrace these; they are not uniquely British. What we have that they don’t, however, are our institutions. When we talk of Britishness, it is really these that we are referring to: the rule of law, the Queen in Parliament, the permanent Civil Service, the Armed Forces, a free Press and a United Kingdom.
These are why so many foreign migrants try to come here and yet all of these are breaking down, to a greater or lesser extent. We have to admit to ourselves that the very idea of Britain is itself in terminal jeopardy.
An “existential threat” was posed by the Scottish independence referendum last September and it has not dissipated, despite the vote to stay in the Union. If anything, with the election of so many Nationalists to the Westminster parliament, it has grown. The Government is shortly to unveil plans for English votes for English laws — not as a direct response to the rise of the SNP, but as a long overdue attempt to include England in the devolution dispensation from which she was excluded in 1998.
Yet justified or not, this will be a further sign of how, at the very time we need the unifying construct of nationhood, it is actually in the process of falling apart. We pride ourselves on the organic development of our constitutional arrangements. Rather than write everything down in a codified way, we like to busk it and see where we end up, which is usually in a good enough place. But for how much longer will that be true? The additional devolution to Scotland, the exclusion of non-English and Welsh MPs from some parliamentary decision-making and the gradual federalisation of the nation will have to be put on a formal footing if it is to work properly.
One idea put forward before the general election was for a constitutional convention where all these matters could be debated. But the Government has ruled this out, saying that since the idea was proposed by parties that lost, there was no need to pursue it.
Ministers are right to want to crack on and implement plans for English votes for English laws without waiting for the outcome of something that could just be an ineffectual talking shop. But these are not mutually exclusive.
It is possible to push ahead with devolution while also stepping back and considering where we are as a country and what happens next. Some Tory MPs, including Bernard Jenkin, even think there is a case for a new Act of Union “to provide a balanced and equal settlement of powers across the four parts of the United Kingdom” and a new mechanism for distributing money.
The point is that if we are to talk about uniting as a nation, then we need to have a pretty good idea what we are defending. We did once; but I am not convinced that we do any more.
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London, 2015
