Does Britain Still Have a Culture?

British culture cannot be reduced to twee nonsense like fish and chips.

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Tom Jones is Councillor for Scotton and Lower Wensleydale in England and author of the Potemkin Village Idiot on Substack. You can find him on Twitter (or X) at @93vintagejones

To Americans, the title of this article may seem a strange question. How could a culture which stands atop the shoulders of Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dickens, Turner, Gainsborough, Kipling, Coleridge, Wordsworth, the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer possibly be destroyed? 

Yet, there is an increasing trend for high-status intellectuals to deny that British culture ever existed. In the most recent example, commentator Bushra Shaikh asked “What is British culture? Born in the UK and lived here for 40 years and yet we are constantly told ‘we're not integrating.’ Not Integrating into what culture exactly?”

This, as all high-status beliefs do, is now trickling down into public consciousness. It has never been more worthy for the British to deny that Britain has ever produced anything of worth, and to display their bovine incuriosity for the applause of the left. This imperceptible, unimaginative death of British culture is a downstream effect of the failure of multiculturalism. 

As immigration in Britain began to increase in the 1990s, a new belief — multiculturalism — would see the shared values of British culture eroded. Underpinning multiculturalism is the embrace of a multiplicity of cultures, all of equal value; but that necessitated a rejection of the common culture and history of Britain.

The sheer scale of immigration meant that the idea of what it meant to be British, and the common culture and values that helped defined the national identity, was diluted — both so that it may apply to the maximum number of people possible but because the very notion of multiculturalism could not hold that British culture was the main or leading culture in its own country. The common culture that is the framework of a cohesive society, therefore, was eroded in order to minimize friction for incoming migrants.

This laissez-faire approach to immigration was built on a foundational principle that we could make no demands of new arrivals, or even inquire as to their existing beliefs. By failing to enshrine any notion of Britishness or make any demands that new immigrants lived within the framework of the stable society that had come before, we ensured that immigrants would not be integrated properly within society as they had no notion of what the society believed or expected from them.

This gradual process has loosened the ties of our common culture and eroded any meaningful notions of British identity. This has now become such a powerful thing that one can argue a scorn for British identity is a deeply British trait, as Sebastian Milbank notes:

It’s like the joke of citizenship tests native Brits wouldn’t pass, British history is not taught. English literature is barely taught. Our constitutional tradition is not even theoretically on the curriculum, and is barely named or defended by politicians, who mostly despise it.

Denigrating common culture to twee nonsense like fish and chips, “common values,” and to vague platitudes like “diversity” and “inclusivity” makes it easier to absorb large numbers of immigrants. But, as Nick Timothy writes, “If our national identity really were just about diversity and inclusivity, we would be nothing more than a vacuum to be filled by others.”

And so it has been proved that, in a period of unprecedented social change, we have deliberately stripped society of its understanding of itself because multiculturalism, as Johanna Möhring writes, “neither encourages integration, for fear of upsetting cultural sensitivities, nor does much to foster social cohesion, as it leaves the host Society without a clear understanding of what it actually stands for.” The death of British culture is a visible sign that British society no longer has a clear understanding of what it actually believes.

This is a problem because our common values underpin not only our laws and welfare systems of the state, but the acceptable behaviours governing society. The trebling in antisemitic incidents, the closing of schools in order to protect children, and ethnic conflict induced by a cricket match abroad is physical evidence of the erosion of the common values and assumptions that underpin our society. Britain is now facing the fact that the liberal democratic norms of a “free society” now include allowing demonstrations in support of Hamas.

A cohesive society is based on a sense that each citizen owes — and is owed — rights and responsibilities, both to each other and to the common good. Those mutual bonds and obligations are far stronger when the society has a set of common values and assumptions, because that shared commonality provides an understanding of acceptable practices and interactions. These then form a framework inside which a cohesive society can operate with minimal friction. 

If postliberalism’s quest for community is to be successful, it must restore our common values and a more cohesive, overall national culture. To get there, postliberals must reject multiculturalism and promote policies that act accodingly. Whilst the political consensus has done away with it, we cannot forgot our shared history and culture as a nation, which defines the very essence.

Our current system of immigration, in which new arrivals are under no expectation to join the common culture and we are unable to inquire as to whether their views coincide with British values, has proved itself a threat to the basis of our liberal democracy; as James Vitali writes, “A liberal, democratic society is not self-sustaining, however. Its perimeters must be guarded vigilantly against the aggressive actions of those who despise our way of life.”

Not only must we be more assertive and thorough in our judgement of who may enter and settle in the United Kingdom, but we must also oblige new arrivals to understand the framework which underpins our society and to live within its bounds. We must remove those who refuse. It may be true that no single national story can fully unite us, but the idea that we do not require a single story in a nation with a culture as rich as ours, whose influence has touched every corner of the globe, is ludicrous.

As Timothy further writes, a shared history does not mean shared interpretation: “there can be no single description of a national identity, but it is a complex mix of the places we have in common, our history and shared stories, institutions large and small, language, culture, and norms and rules that set out our expectations of decent behaviour.”

It is now a question of whether assimilation and integration policies can work at all, when faced with the sheer number of new citizens we have accepted since mass immigration began. Restoring a sense of democratic control to the immigration system is essential. At every general election of the last twenty years, the Conservatives have specifically pledged to reduce immigration levels. At every general election of the last 20 years the Conservative vote share has increased.

Michael Howard’s “It’s not racist to impose limits on immigration” line saw the Conservatives gain thirty three seats. David Cameron’s pledge to reduce net migration to the “tens of thousands” helped them gain a further ninety six. The pledge was reiterated in 2015, 2017, and 2019, without even mentioning Brexit, where immigration was a central issue. 

Public disquiet around the rate of immigration in an expression of unease around the erosion of a limited set of common value and assumptions that form the basis of modern liberal states. And they are eroding faster than the White Cliffs of Dover.