David Cameron: British values arent optional, they’re vital

UK Prime Minister on British values:

The second is social. Our values have a vital role to play in uniting us.

They should help to ensure Britain not only brings together people from different countries, cultures and ethnicities, but also ensures that, together, we build a common home.

In recent years we have been in danger of sending out a worrying message: that if you don’t want to believe in democracy, that’s fine; that if equality isn’t your bag, don’t worry about it; that if you’re completely intolerant of others, we will still tolerate you.

As I’ve said before, this has not just led to division, it has also allowed extremism – of both the violent and non-violent kind – to flourish.

So I believe we need to be far more muscular in promoting British values and the institutions that uphold them.

That’s what a genuinely liberal country does: it believes in certain values and actively promotes them. It says to its citizens: this is what defines us as a society.

What does that mean in practice? We have already taken some big steps.

We are making sure new immigrants can speak English, because it will be more difficult for them to understand these values, and the history of our institutions, if they can’t speak our language.

We are bringing proper narrative history back to the curriculum, so our children really learn our island’s story – and where our freedoms and things like our Parliament and constitutional monarchy came from.

And as we announced this week, we are changing our approach further in schools. We are saying it isn’t enough simply to respect these values in schools – we’re saying that teachers should actively promote them. They’re not optional; they’re the core of what it is to live in Britain.

DAVID CAMERON: British values arent optional, they’re vital | Mail Online.

Ironically, given the UK’s citizenship revocation policy, even for those who would be left stateless, he closes with a reference to the Magna Carta, which abolished banishment as a form of punishment (although not for the convicts who settled Australia):

Next year it will be the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta. Indeed, it was on this very day, 799 years ago, that the Great Charter was sealed at Runnymede in Surrey.

It’s a great document in our history – what my favourite book, Our Island Story, describes as the ‘foundation of all our laws and liberties’.

In sealing it, King John had  to accept that his subjects were citizens – for the first time giving them rights, protections and security.