MacDonald’s has recently returned to one of it’s recurring UK marketing campaigns. ‘The taste of America’. This might seem somewhat odd as McDonalds is already a quintessentially American food outlet. It makes the majority of it’s profits from burgers, an American invention. As a symbol of its home country, McDonalds is right up there with Coke and Harley Davidson. Nevertheless, the burger chain has become such an ingrained part of the UK cultural landscape that McDonalds can introduce ‘The taste of America’ without anyone batting an eyelid.

Whatever your opinion of McDonalds and their awful food, there is a very serious point here. Culture, when all is said and done, is primarily about choice. Cultures reflect values, and values underpin those choices. Most importantly, these values change over time. Every choice you make during your life is simultaneously determined by the culture you are enveloped in and is also reshaping that culture on a moment by moment basis. We eat different food to our great-grandparents. We are less religious. We have a different view of what constitutes a healthy lifestyle. We are better travelled. Our language is different. Our attitudes are different. Our culture is different.

These choices are not made in a vacuum. There are always outside factors shaping the choices and therefore the culture of any generation. The Edwardians favoured a hedonism that had gone out of fashion by the time Victoria had ascended the throne. It’s no great stretch to see the Victorian’s Puritanism as a response to the perceived threats to British hegemony in the 19th century, threats that the Edwardians did not have to consider.

A more recent example of cultural change is sport. We have moved from an era of gentlemen amateurs to superstar professionals in the last hundred years. Sport has gone from a healthy pastime to one of the biggest industries on the planet.

Therefore cultures are in a constant state of revision. As a result, any attempts to define a culture or its underlying values quickly become outdated and pointless. This process of change also brings conflict. At many points in history nations have been at odds with themselves culturally. The phrase ‘culture wars’ is very popular in current American politics, but it takes it name from kulturkampf, the conflict between the 19th century politician Otto von Bismark and the power of the Catholic Church which opposed his remodelling of Germany.

Culture clashes are nothing new. When Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Treasure Island in 1883 the main theme of the book was the clash of middle class values (thrift, self-denial and service) versus lower class vices (sloth, dishonesty and self-indulgence). Long John Silver is the one character in the book who bridges these worlds, being the only pirate capable of planning ahead and possessing the discipline to forgo pleasure in return for a potential future reward. Stevenson, a life long Tory, was simply articulating the middle class’s view of itself.

If values are constantly changing and evolving, why would anyone try to define them in the first place? John Major may have been quoting Orwell when he talked of ‘Old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist’. However, his hamfisted attempt to define British culture missed the point by excluding the rest of the original quote. Orwell was talking about the pointlessness of trying to ascribe an identifying character to a nation. The full quote listed the fragmentation of English society. ‘The clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to-and-fro of the lorries on the Great North Road, the queues outside the Labour Exchanges, the rattle of pin-tables in the Soho pubs, the old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning’.

Orwell’s England may been fragmented, but it is a model of cohesion compared to the UK today. Cultural influences are now global, and they travel and mutate faster than at any other time in history. The youngest of adults in the UK read Japanese graphic novels, watch American films, listen to Korean rappers, obsess over Spanish football teams and are far more likely to celebrate St Patrick’s Day than that of St George.

So why do politicians continue to hammer away at the ideas of British culture and British values. And what are these values? When these values are listed, the rule of law tends to come up. Unless there is something fundamentally different about the rule of law in Britain compared to Germany, France, Canada, Spain and a hundred other countries, then it can hardly be singularly British. The British also like to describe themselves as tolerant. To me, as a non-British person living in London this is a loaded word. It indicates that the British view other cultures as something to be tolerated. Not rejected or embraced, simply tolerated. It’s actually more indicative of a superiority complex than anything else.

Fair play gets mentioned a lot. This tends to require a bit of one-eyed observation. Every English football fans remembers the Hand of God yet there seems to be selective amnesia when it comes to Gary Lineker’s brace of outrageous dives against Cameroon four years later. Ultimately, any attempt to define British values either gets bogged down in misty eyed parochialism or, at the other end of the scale, bland universal ideals. But the idea of British values still comes up time and again. The question is why?

There is a terribly cynical attitude in British politics that embraces nationalism only when required. For the most part mainstream UK politicians are internationalist in their outlook, but not in the traditional sense. They tend to see nations and borders as an impediment to business and for the most part have to work around these to achieve their aims. The latest proof of this is the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. This agreement will allow corporations to sue foreign governments for losses caused by such pesky things as safety, environmental or workplace regulations. That doesn’t indicate a nationalist agenda on the part of those politicians helping to draft this agreement in the uttermost secrecy. It proves the opposite. Ultimately members of the UK political classes are most at home with other members of that class, irrespective of their nationality. David Cameron has far more in common with Angela Merkel than with the vast majority of his constituents. But they can’t just say this. No politician is going to admit that the needs of international corporations are greater than your need to have a clean environment or decent job prospects.

They need to project a nationalist perspective, even when they themselves have anything but. So how do they express this faux-nationalism. One of the worst aspects of nationalism is its necessary creation of the ‘Other’. Anything foreign or different has always had a deep hold on the human mind. For most of human history this trait was a necessary mechanic for survival. When the majority of people lived their entire lives within a few miles of their birthplace practically everything that was dangerous or inimical to them came from outside. Strangers and foreigners, were by definition, a threat.

Nowadays we may live in a global culture but the desire to engage and explore this world is heavily counterbalanced by the fear and distrust hardwired into many human brains. Playing to these fears is the easiest form of nationalism available to politicians. Attacking those within the country who are not ‘one of us’. The history of the United Kingdom is replete with the targeting of those deemed a threat to the national or even natural order. In the 13th century the Jews were expelled from England after being demonised as disloyal during a time of war. Prior to this they had their property confiscated and many were forced to wear a yellow patch. Many were executed by order of the crown. This banishment lasted for 400 years. The real reason for their expulsion was economic. Edward the First needed cash to fight a war against the Welsh and the Jews were an easy target, especially given the rampant ant-semitism amongst Christians. It is less than 100 years since women were given the vote in the UK. Those who campaigned for it are now regarded as heroines and role models. However, at the time they were frequently derided as a threat to the natural order. Indeed their very militancy was often held up as a reason why ’emotionally fragile’ women should not get the vote.

In my own lifetime there have been many groups who have been given the mantle of ‘the Other’. The miners, new age travellers, gypsies, single mothers and benefit scroungers have all been portrayed as inimical to the nation and it’s interests. Now we have immigrants. Above all we have Muslim immigrants. Because when politicians talk about British values they have one eye on that part of their constituency who will always respond to such dog whistle tactics. It is Muslims who are accused of not being British. Of not espousing these vague British values. There are so many things wrong with this approach that it is hard to know where to begin examining it.

The two main issues are these. Firstly it assumes that there is in fact, a cohesive Muslim community who all think and act together. A mythical fraternity who bear some collective responsibility for the misdeeds of their co-religionists. This is manifested in the constant demands upon Muslims to repudiate their fellows if they engage in anything criminal. This is not a demand made of others. I’m white. I have never been asked to reject the doings of Combat 18 or the National Front. I have never been asked to publicly repudiate the various racist utterances of the BNP or UKIP. It is only Muslims and to a lesser extent, Eastern Europeans in the UK who have to live by the rules of collective responsibility.

Secondly, it assumes that there is some nebulous undefined Britishness that these people are somehow failing to adopt. As an immigrant to England myself, the basis of citizenship seems pretty straightforward. Pay your taxes, obey the law and get on with your neighbours, i.e. don’t annoy or harass them. There are those communities in the UK who choose not to integrate. That is their business. Even for those who are well integrated there remains the question of identity. I am not English. I never will be and I have no intention of wearing some mantle of Britishness like a coat. That has not stopped me from living here for most of my adult life, getting married, mortgaging a house, having kids etc…

Being a fully paid up member of society and being British are not the same thing, nor should they be. That said, no-one is demanding that of me, and that is because I am not a Muslim. My own ethnic group, the Irish, may have been demonised as inimical to the British for nearly 800 years but that is no longer the case. For followers of Islam it is not so easy. Theresa May and Michael Gove have been fighting like cats in a sack in order to assert their pro-British/anti-Muslim credentials. David Cameron has recently come out and told Muslims they must be more British. This is just another brick in the wall that ring-fences Muslims off from the mainstream. It is a wall not of their choosing. Nor should it be of ours.