”Fundamental ‘British’ Values. Radicalising ‘British’ children into a manufactured ‘them and us’ narrative concept of ‘British’ness. A problematization from an Englishman at Liverpool Hope

Hodkinson, Alan (2020) ”Fundamental ‘British’ Values. Radicalising ‘British’ children into a manufactured ‘them and us’ narrative concept of ‘British’ness. A problematization from an Englishman at Liverpool Hope. International Review of Qualitative Research. ISSN 1940-8447 (Accepted for Publication)

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Abstract

In 2014, the United Kingdom Coalition Government, after the now infamous Trojan Horse incident, insisted that all children learn fundamental British values . Cameron, as Prime Minister , argued that such values, coupled with ‘muscular liberalism’ would “challenge extremist ideology, exposing it for the lie that it is”. This article exists at the place of the apostrophe - as the scare mark (‘ ’) becomes an enclosure, enclosing a manufactured
possession. I want to problematize what they include and exclude in their concept of ‘British values’. What is this ‘British’ they talk about and why do they feel a need for this ‘Britain’ to exist? Within the enclosures provided by ‘ten scare marks’ I present research into historical and contemporary formulations of Britishness taken from academic texts, school textbooks and websites. In addition, by invoking the work of Serres, Bhabba and Billig, I seek to confront Cameron’s challenging discourse. Within this article, I do not though attempt to detail an authentic Britishness but rather from the outset argue that there is, and never was any authenticity in this concept. What I seek to argue here is that their ‘British -ness’is nothing more than a portable, lean-to concept of violence. A ‘manufactured concept’ (Cullingford, 2003) which locates an inclusion but by default formulates an exclusion whose antecedents lie more in the government counter terrorists’ strategies than any substantial historical fact (Kostyuk, 2007). The paper concludes by suggesting that their ‘Britain’is a rhetorical trope. It is itself a Trojan horse - which through flagging and banal nationalism (Billig, 1995) indoctrinates and radicalises our children into an invented- perverted nationalism that the political elite employs to deal with a perceived/ conceived/ contrived threat of an internal other to our geographical, historical an ideological borders.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information and Comments:	This is the author's accepted version of an article, the final version of which is published in the Sage Publications journal International Review of Qualitative Research
Keywords:	Fundamental British Values, Education Values
Faculty / Department:	Faculty of Education and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences
Depositing User:	Alan Hodkinson
Date Deposited:	11 Dec 2019 10:03
Last Modified:	06 Apr 2021 11:12
URI:	https://hira.hope.ac.uk/id/eprint/2976

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