We are exhorted by politicians of all major parties to cherish and embrace ‘British values’ - against which, reportedly, stands 'Islam'. We won’t have much to say about 'Islam' here, except to note that for the purposes of this conversation, ‘Islam’ bears roughly the same relationship to the religion of Mohammed and one billion adherents as ‘the Jew’ in anti-Semitic discourse does to actually-existing-Jews. In fact, both components of this doublet seem curiously lacking in definition. Attempts to define ‘British values’ yield statements resembling, not a logical exposition, but a tag cloud consisting of nebulous themes, grandiose claims and euphemisms. Here is Tony Blair attempting a definition of ‘British values’ in 2000:

“Qualities of creativity built on tolerance, openness and adaptability, work and self improvement, strong communities and families and fair play, rights and responsibilities and an outward looking approach to the world that all flow from our unique island geography and history.”

It would be tempting, but mistaken, to characterise this rhetorical soufflé as meaninglessly pneumatic. It is easy to point out that ‘tolerance, openness and adaptability’ are complex attributes that don’t attach themselves to nation-states much less to just one nation-state, while ideas of ‘work and fair play’ mean different things to a postal worker, Jamie Oliver, a GP, Prince Charles, a call centre worker or a self-employed plumber. This is not the point. Blair’s tribute is a meaningful construction, but its meaning works through allusion and condensation. It indirectly mentions the material modes of existence of polyglot social layers, retaining its ability to do so precisely through its indirectness. It thus universalises (within its parochial national purview) experiences which have a particular social origin.

For example, the appeal to “strong communities and families” most directly touches on the experiences and aspirations of those inhabiting small towns, villages, and enclosed urban spaces. There, the very compactness of social organisation, the miniature scale of societies contained therein, and the spatial allotments of wealth and status within them, create highly localised identities – this street, that estate, our household. In the posh, prim looking terraces populated by small families, often with both parents in full-time, ‘skilled’ employment, and Neighbourhood Watch schemes on the go, the strong community and family is a by-word for the social facts – interpreted as cultural, behavioural qualities – which seem to set them apart from the sink estates. ‘Race’ penetrates this psychic terrain in complex ways, inasmuch as the social facts adduced above can be seen by some as traits of a possessive ‘whiteness’, so that this respectable looking little street with its white families and smug lower middle class conservatism, can be opposed to that dirty little conurbation at the other end of town where Asian or black citizens live with disproportionately high levels of unemployment, poverty and crime. Such social facts give the appeal to ‘strong communities and families’ a charge that it lacks in the flux of big metropolitan areas where people are as likely to live alone, communally, or with lodgers or friends, as they are to inhabit a traditional nuclear family unit, and where the delineations of race, ethnicity and culture constantly give way to hybridity.

And yet, few who have grown up in nurturing families would object to the idea of ‘strong families’. Even with all their usual patriarchal tyrannies and exploitation (there will be parents reading this who treat their kids as a source of bonded labour – their punishment awaits in the maelstrom of adolescent rebellion), functional families seem to be a source of security, love, mutual care and, not insignificantly, economies-of-scale. It is not strictly relevant here whether this perception is even accurate. The point is that it resonates with widespread experience. Similarly, the community is just that loose company of friends, acquaintances, busybodies, and helpful, moronic or batty individuals that one has known on one’s estate, terrace or flat block. Few would reject the idea that such communities are a ‘good thing’, needing strengthening. As the BBC frequently reminds us, “everybody needs good neighbours”. Strong communities and strong families can be claimed as ‘British values’ not because the UK is distinguished by such aspirations, but because only a minority are likely to object to them.

Politically, New Labour mobilised such ideas in support of a variety of objectives – providing tax credits to working families, coercing single mothers to seek waged labour, imposing curfews and ASBOs on working class children, installing CCTV on estates, boosting two-parent families, and so on. This brew of modest social democracy and strident social authoritarianism is hardly unobjectionable, or lacking in opponents. But it is embedded in a hegemonic language whose ideologemes, originating largely in the experiences of the lower middle class, were universalised and could thus provide a normative basis for such policies. Yet, this is no explanation in itself as to why such affirmations should be drafted in support of a notion like ‘British values’, or why politicians felt compelled at the turn of the millennium to assert the existence of this elusive creature, even as the irresistible winds of ‘globalization’ were supposedly laying waste to passé conceits such as nations.

For, if the tempo and urgency of such attempted interpellations – ‘Britain needs YOU’ – escalated in the poisonous atmosphere of the ‘war on terror’, the ‘Britishness’ bug was doing the rounds in Westminster well before the évènement of 9/11 and its ensuing wars. To answer this question is to say something about the “unique island ... history” that Tony Blair adverted to, particularly the shift from colonial white world supremacy to a defensive white nationalism signposted by Powell and Thatcher, the breakdown of racial comity in some former industrial redoubts, the state of British social democracy in the wearied, cautious, conservative dog end of the twentieth century, and the caesarist mode of the British executive under Blair.

I shall restrict myself here to the following observations about that. National identity, as with other identities, is relational, dependent on its situation vis-a-vis Others. Britishness was historically defined first in its imperial capacity, as the union between the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland in 1707 provided the consolidated strategic base from which two aggressive colonial powers could make an undivided bid for world power. Together, Perfidious Albion and Imperial Caledonia set out to create a new world order. Linda Colley makes the case that British identity was decisively formed through Britain’s imperialist extensions into the Americas, Africa and South Asia, and its encounters with various Others. Imperialism obviously does not represent itself as predation, but rather as a wider moral and social mission which should engage the whole of the society, direct its overall efforts, orient its sense of identity. So, performances of Britishness took place in relation to the Indian, the Chinese, the African, and the Arab. Britishness was also, for as long as Ireland was seen as a property of the British crown, bound up with Protestant chauvinism, which provided much of the working class base of support for imperialism and Toryism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the latter half of the 20th Century, Britishness was reproduced through constant, historically disembodied 'memory' of World War II. Yet as that cachet lost its persuasive power amid colonial retreat and relative decline, a newer sense of Britishness emerged through Powellism and the search for a culturally pure, white Britishness. Britishness thus shifted from its orientation toward a global white world supremacism to a defensive white nationalism.

In the Thatcher era, a brief festival of British revivalism harnessed the remaining energy behind this decaying idea on a series of spectacles from the royal wedding to the Falklands jubilee. These dramas of rebirth and tradition helped to congeal the policy mix of Thatcherism - White Brittania was defended through immigration controls, Ruled Brittania through intensified policing and public order crackdowns, Ruling Brittania through imperial reassertions and Atlanticist hyper-globalization. But by the end of the 1980s, the potency of this revival had been discharged. Partly, this was because the class alliance that made Thatcherism viable was breaking up under the weight of Thatcherism's social consequences. Partly it was because the world order was changing as the Cold War ended, and the Tory base divided over Britain's future global orientation - toward Europe, entrenched Atlanticism, or toward a garrisoned island-state? This was not something on which the manufacturers, financiers, and small traders who made up the Tory base could agree on. Obviously, 'Islam' comes into this, having played an important in British Aryan identity in the colonial era, both explaining anti-colonial revolts as 'native fanaticism' and justifying their suppression. For contemporary purposes, 'Islam' begins to become relevant to the formation of an anxious-aggressive 'Britishness' at the tail end of the 1980s, as 'black' political identities begin to break down into localised constituents and Thatcherite 'Britishness' is increasingly exhausted.

The British Labourist tradition had always incorporated the pro-empire Left, represented signally in the Fabians, and in the post-war period had developed a pronounced Atlanticist strain, which favoured managing imperial decline through the ‘special relationship’ with the United States. If Labour had a pacifist, internationalist tradition, it also boasted a monotonous parade of establishment sycophants, imperialists, race-baiters and opportunistic patriots. New Labour comprised in essence an alliance with Whiggish Liberals and social conservatives. Its turn of the millenium attempt to reflate and re-define 'Britishness' derived more from the managerial, Whiggish ideas dominating British social democracy at the depleted, dog end of the twentieth century than with major global antagonisms. The Blair administration attempted to pioneer a centre-left nationalism that would provide a basis for social cohesion (if necessary, helped along by social authoritarianism), a mobilising discourse for social reform, a competitive rationale for social democratic acquiescence to 'globalization' (Britain must punch above its weight), and a hegemonic doctrine underpinning Blair's autocratic executive style.

These ingredients were already evident in the 1997 election campaign, but Blair's caesarist moment came with the Kosovo war, through which he proved his mettle not as a daffy airhead 'Bambi' figure, but as a hardened ideological warrior, someone capable of whipping public opinion into line. Following this venture, which won him many ecstatic plaudits from journalists and the political establishment, he began to articulate more clearly his brochure for Britishness based on international competitiveness and military assertion. Following the riots in north-eastern towns and cities in 2001, New Labour ratcheted up those aspects of its Britishness agenda concerned with social cohesion, scapegoating Asian minorities for allegedly failing to integrate. Minorities were ordered to internalise a 'core of Britishness', which meant being politically compliant, quietist, lawful and generally effacing those culturally specific excesses that supposedly made them unacceptable to their white counterparts. But as of 9/11, Britishness was destined to have its run in with 'Islam'.

From the Rushdie affair onward, 'Islam' became an object of official ideological interrogation, as the media increasingly devoted attention to 'Islam' as a security threat, a source of political instability, and particularly a menace to the nation's values. In relation to the 'war on terror', Britishness was aggrandised through the constant belabouring, surveillance, harassment and outright repression of Muslims, even as the British state itself underwent dramatic changes, and its constituents loosened in centrifugal fashion. 'Islam' is seen as at one and the same time, too radical and too rooted; a source of instability and of exaggerated, embarrassing cohesion; revolutionary and reactionary; a politicised religion, or a pseudo-religious politics; a de-nationalised revolutionary creed, or a smug, conservative, violent upholder of 'family values' in their worst sense. Its very ability to be represented in such a shape-shifting manner makes it the ideal foe, the perfect foil for Britishness. This 'Islam' can accumulate enemies on the Left as well as the Right, among secular liberals as well as religious conservatives, among feminists as well as patriarchs. Through negative contrast, it gives 'Britishness' a force and attraction that it would otherwise lack. 'Britishness', thus defined through the encounter with 'Islam', has been routinely performed routinely by squaddies in Afghanistan, as well as by police squads, and belligerent journalists, for almost a decade now.

So, where do we stand today? The Cameron executive is, like its caricature in Steve Bell cartoons featuring the Prime Minister suited in a pink condom, slippery, soft-edged, and impossible to pin down. It lacks definition. Sitting at the apex of a weak, fractious neo-Thatcherite government, slowly pulling apart over the unlikely issue of AV, Number Ten seeks to re-deploy the elements of 'Britishness' through renewed imperial bloodletting, more tough talk about immigrants, and of course an incredible amount of bullshit and insincere sentimentality over the royal wedding. But, as polling data has more or less consistently shown, there's little enthusiasm for more war, and this one doesn't have a narrative capable of engaging 'British' sentiments even if the nation's imperial appetites hadn't been exhausted by the alliance with Bourbon Bush. And while the media, police and local councils will probably succeed in cutting out most expressions of republicanism on the day, the royal wedding is a topic of satire or bored indifference for most. Only the immigrant-baiting, which is a divisive issue for the coalition, actually seems capable of summoning the requisite temper, and even there the evidence is mixed. Yes, polls do show that the constant propaganda about immigrants and minorities has a pronounced effect on popular attitudes, and encourages a vicious minority to engage in racist violence. But on the other hand, there's no sign that talking a lot about immigration makes the Tories popular - far from it, in fact. There seems to be no doubt that a re-organised 'Britishness' could potentially provide a rightist counterpoint to social struggles against austerity, but the present signs are that 'British values' have lost touch with some of the material bases that gave them their peculiar charge and universal validity.

I've seen a very large number of people in different fora suggesting that Cameron, in his over-eagerness to get into Libya, is seeking a repeat of the Falklands, a prelude to a khaki election in which he can strut about under the bunting with the spectacle of victory rallies unfolding in the background. This may be true. But if so, it suggests that Cameron has both misunderstood that particular imperial jubilee and misread the current situation.

Such allusions correctly estimate that the primary importance of the Falklands was domestic, rather than international. Geopolitically, there was no sense in what Thatcher did. The islands were of little strategic importance, the British claim to them was far weaker than Argentina's claim, and at any rate a negotiated settlement was certainly both available and the logical long-term solution. The idea of Britain holding on at great expense to these purloined territories in the South Atlantic was bizarre. (And yet, there they still are, hoisting the Union Jack over someone else's Shetlands, no negotiations even plausibly in sight despite polite entreaties from Kirchner and Fernandez). Until 1982, no one knew anything about the Falklands, or cared. Their importance was solely symbolic.

Amid a generalised sense of British decay and decline, the loss of empire followed by a series of deepening economic crises, the seeming stalemate of industrial relations, the disorientation of the Left, the widespread sense of a crisis of public order, everything seemed to be going to the dogs - and then these Argentinians think they can walk onto British territory and take it over, just like that? Thatcher successfully took control of this furious resentment and used it to sideline her critics inside the Conservative Party, including the Foreign Secretary Francis Pym (who was a bit of a 'wet' and was apparently in serious, nearly successful, pursuit of a negotiated settlement). Determinedly seeking one outcome, that of a bloody victory, she mobilised the forces of jingoism the better to hammer the Left. Eric Hobsbawm, writing at the time, suggested that the war was like the world cup with guns, providing a victory as purely symbolic and spectacular as that which comes from a football match. (Unfortunately, Hobsbawm's wider argument was in favour of a leftist appropriation of 'patriotism', a tactic drawn from the Popular Front tradition whose virtues he always, in my view, wildly overestimated).

But the Falklands factor has always been overestimated if it implies that this won the 1983 election. Yes, the Tories' vote increased by about 15% between the invasion and the British capture of Port Stanley:



But deeper psephological research showed that this increase was already under way due to macroeconomic factors. With the revival in the global economy beginning, and flush with North Sea oil money, the government began a process of investment and stimulus that was intelligently and cynically designed to make people feel better about their prospects. In contrast to the hawkish, deflationary budgets since 1979, it was expansionary, increasing pensions and personal allowances, reducing stamp duties, etc. People accustomed to being hammered by the government were now being given some relief, after the hurricane of mass unemployment. At last, the decline was over. One study found that the Falklands added about three percentage points to the government's popularity in the three months of the war, and that this added popularity was short-lived and was not a major factor in the 1983 election. It's striking, reading the left literature from the time, that people expected the Falklands to resonate for long years, decades, after the war itself finished. It did not. But what it did do was provide a temporary rallying cry for the hard right amid the general economic recovery, giving Thatcher a little caesarist moment in which she could stand aloof from bourgeois opinion (and it does seem that bourgeois opinion was largely sceptical of the war), and rearticulating the various themes of British renaissance that underpinned the Thatcherite project. It gave Thatcherism a macho virility, with paras, SAS and ghurkas animating the drama of British resistance to decline, and soldiers returning home with the sign: "Call off the rail strike, or we'll call an air strike". And then, it was over, the wholy noisy hysteria and the choruses of 'Rule Britannia' (a tribute to the British navy's imperial adventures, long forgotten until the Falklands) drowing in egoistic calculation. What won for Thatcher in 1983 was what was always going to win for Thatcher - the historic split in the Labourist bloc and the revival in the global economy.

Were Cameron seeking a replay of the Falklands, he would be misreading today's situation quite dramatically. There is no latent passion for another round of blood-letting, and post-colonial melancholia is mainly expressed in hostility to 'multiculturalism'. Even the reactionaries have turned antiwar these days. And whereas the Falklands war was a lone adventure that the Americans didn't particularly like, a costume replay of Suez with a redeeming outcome, Cameron has no desire or ability to lead Britain alone into any conflict. Overstretched in Afghanistan, making deep cuts to the military budget, Britain can barely maintain its current imperial commitments. And, as he has discovered to his cost, the US is not overly keen to give Cameron a chance to strut about in front of the troops in the standard issue white shirt with open collar and rolled up shirt sleeves. There is also the obvious problem that were he to drag Britain into a war now, even were it popular the pay off wouldn't last until he next intends to stand for election. Perhaps, he may calculate, a war would be a good way of ratcheting up the government's control of the media narratives, creating an atmosphere of patriotism and 'supporting our boys', such that it would demobilise the Left and kill off any chance of mass strike action and protests bringing his government down prematurely. But this would imply either that he has lived under a rock for the last ten years or that he is desperate enough to try anything.