Should we spend £250 million building a ghetto? Or a Britain that protects us all?
We need is a confident, inclusive Britishness that provides a shared instinct for moderation and resilience against fanatical ideology
Thank you to the outgoing Prime Minister for pledging £250 million to protect Britain’s Jews. I’m sorry to add a “but” — but simply building ever higher walls around our community risks creating a ghetto.
We want a Britain where those walls aren’t needed. Where attackers are punished under the law. Most of all, we want them to be deterred in the first place.
The deterrent lies upstream of policing: a sane, healthily irreverent British culture in which inciteful ideology is marginalised rather than mainstreamed. Political extremists are not to be appeased but satirised.
The loss of that shared culture allows anti-Jewish racism to be indulged, alongside other dogmas about identity, race, gender and history.
Look what happens to British policing when Britain’s sanity filter goes AWOL. Last year, West Midlands Police was so ready to accept an absurd Islamist conspiracy theory about Maccabi Tel Aviv fans, that evidence was fabricated to support it. In Southampton, officers handcuffed the wrong man, Henry Nowak, as he lay dying; the man who stabbed him had told the police that Nowak had racially abused him – a complete lie.
How bizarre is all of this? Our civic institutions have lost confidence in the primacy of Britain’s cultural norms. As Dame Sara Khan recently observed, this has torn up Britain’s social contract. We uncovered the nub of it while delivering anti-Jewish racism training for West Midlands Police – commissioned by the impressive new acting chief, Scott Green. Officers repeatedly told our team that incidents regarded by the Jewish community as incitement often fell below the criminal threshold. Yet they understood the cumulative impact of so many ‘sub-threshold incidents’: a culture which produces the murder of Jews at Heaton Park and stabbings in Golders Green. Even ‘having a quiet word’ has become hard for a police officer. The atmosphere is so febrile and, well, so un-British.
How do we fix it? By bringing the country’s unwritten house rules back to the surface. In a recent survey carried out for Fish & Chips – my new non-profit dedicated to the recipe of a Britishness for all – we found clear agreement about what those house rules are: common sense, fair play, politeness, respectful disagreement, pub banter, taking the mickey. Satirising the swivel-eyed, the po-faced and the preachy. This is the soft culture that has successfully cohered all British citizens – immigrants very much included – and in so doing, gives us the confidence to reject extremism, be it from the far right or far left.
So imagine spending £250 million celebrating that Britishness instead. Could it persuade young people to walk away from destructive ideologies, by giving them something life-affirming to walk towards? It won’t directly get them onto the property ladder, but it might revive other British virtues, highlighted in the survey, that will make it likely: hard work, resilience, wanting to get on in life.
It all depends on strengthening two cultural forces. The first is rational: Critical Thinking. When I ran the National Holocaust Museum, we made it central to our educational policy, because democracy depends on facts, intellectual curiosity and debate. We should re-teach it to those who teach. Largely, they appear to have swapped it for identity politics.
The second is emotional. Behavioural science tells us humans are driven by social sway and use logic to post-rationalise it. In what may come as shocking news, those humans include police officers, judges and policy makers. The sway we need is a confident, inclusive Britishness that provides a shared instinct for moderation and resilience against fanatical ideology.
Rebuilding that culture won’t be easy. Is it too late? Well, in the sweep of British history, from Magna Carta to Only Fools and Horses, today’s culture wars are a brief interruption. So don’t be a plonker, Rodney. The policy makers will listen once we, the silent majority, find our voice. When we insist on the civilising virtues of queuing, self-deprecation and the urge to take the mickey out of un-British dogmas.
If we restate these house rules, and narrate them likeably, we can ensure the civic norms which the vast majority of British citizens want to live in peace by — including the Jewish ones.
Let’s build a positive British narrative that coheres us. Not walls which separate and ghetto-ise us.
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