Matthew Norman: Naked greed and other core British values

Comedy, so the Glaswegian comic Arnold Brown used to tell his audiences, and perhaps still does, is all about timing. "You're here tonight, I'm here tonight," he'd go on. "Perfect timing!" Politics, on the other hand, in these dog days of this dismal administration, is all about mistiming. So it is that New Labour chooses a gruesome low point in the country's self-esteem to revisit the matter of "teaching the core values of Britishness".

With the questioning of a highly articulate Indian woman's grasp of English by a semi-literate glamour model from Liverpool fresh in the ears, and with the vision of compatriots wading into the sea to snag their treasure trove of cosmetics and engine parts still firmly in the mind's eye, the Education Secretary, Alan Johnson, picks a fine moment to re-roast this manky old chestnut.

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This isn't the first time Johnners has addressed the matter (the postman always knocks twice), and now he has a gleaming new report by Sir Keith Ajegbo, a former headmaster turned Home Office adviser, on teaching standards five years after this vital academic discipline was introduced to the national curriculum.

After raiding the Compendium of Meaningless New Labour Blether for the usual buzzwords and catchphrases ("community cohesion", "unity", "values and ideas which bind different sections of society"), Sir Keith concludes that the subject isn't being taught well. It is left to Mr Johnson to announce the exciting additions of "key courses" on British history and "the development of modern British and its culture" to be taken by all students in the future.

Somehow, I suspect this is not to Johnners' personal taste, and it's easy to imagine him in private muttering "cobblers", after the fashion of Albert Steptoe, at the notion that racism, ignorance, cruelty, avarice and all the other enchantments can be touched, let alone removed, by subjecting bored children to vacuous homilies about the tradition of British tolerance and decency.

A summa cum laude graduate of the school of hard knocks, he does have more intimate acquaintance with life's nasteries than colleagues who waltzed from university to Parliament. He will know that no amount of tuition in good citizenship will penetrate the skulls of kids as wilfully uninterested in being educated as he was once himself.

Still, this Britishness lark is a pet project of a future boss whose frantic attempts at de-Scotchification reached a new zenith with his expression of hope that England wins the 2118 World Cup. If Gordon Brown sees championing the teaching of "Britishness" as a way to assuage English voters concerned about the Union's future under a Scot, it ill behoves anyone who wants a big job in his Cabinet to seem less than gung ho.

It was Gordon, a while ago, who advocated a "Britishness Day", and advised us to emulate America by planting a Union flag in every garden - a dark irony to those of us who doubt that the relentless drive to ape the United States, introduced by the Thatcher-Murdoch axis and rigidly cemented by New Labour, has had a beneficial effect on those "core British values" of which he affects to be so proud.

It's the instinctive belief of every generation that society has gone to hell since its halcyon youth, when gangsters only done it to their own in rare moments, and no one ever locked their front door. Yet there is a dissatisfaction with life here today that has a sharper edge than the generic middle-aged assumption that things ain't what they used to be. Record figures for emigration, and polling evidence that unprecedented numbers would leave if they could, speak eloquently for themselves in a country materially better off than ever before.

The congruence of those recent TV pictures, from the Celebrity Big Brother house and Branscombe Bay, seems to crystallise this nebulous sense that Britain has become unpalatably coarsened and grasping. Whatever the part played by racism in the CBB row, more chilling to me has been the anguished bemusement of the foreign contestants at the obscenity-scattering mindlessness of the young white English people with whom they found themselves trapped. If this is what Britain has become, as Shilpa put it, "it's scary".

Her seclusion has spared her that other manifestation of core values on the beach at Branscombe Bay, but the sight of people helping themselves to that cargo until they couldn't walk under the weight of it would have done nothing to reassure her.

What was startling about this wasn't the thievery itself. Wherever ships have capsized since mankind took to the oceans, people have looted. It was the brazenness... the blithe assumption of these pilferers, in broad daylight and in view of police and TV cameras, that they were entitled to whatever they could get.

If the Government is concerned, it might ask itself why, having watched MPs vote themselves massively super-inflationary rises in salary packages and pension funds for years, the people of Devon and beyond would have felt constrained from filling their boots? Who, recalling how Cherie the part-time judge avoided VAT and duty on pearls she bought on the cheap in China when returning through Heathrow, would think it wrong to snaffle a BMW gearbox for instant resale on eBay without filling in the requisite form?

However carefully disguised in the cloak of Christian Democratic piety, Mr Blair's unquestioning support for the unfettered free market has been a continual restatement of Gordon Gekko's mantra that greed is good ... one long, tacit endorsement of the perfect right of water firms to make huge profits, while neglecting leaky pipes and burgeoning rat populations, and of train company bosses to take colossal salaries when their commuters are forced to stand for hours by scandalous overcrowding.

The temptation to lay every national ill at a government's door is well resisted, and it would be idiotically simplistic to source the celebrity-venerating culture that produced CBB's Jade and Danielle to those hateful showbiz parties in 1997 at No 10, or to trace the scenes on Branscombe Bay directly to the Blairs snaffling every exotic seaside holiday that ever floated into view.

Even so, such iconic memories as a brand new Prime Minister sycophantically joshing with Noel Gallagher about cocaine use, and chartering Concorde to America for £600,000 the week he was flying a kite about cutting single mothers' benefits, must have played their part. Inevitably, a populace takes its moral lead from a long-standing leadership. the core values of the latter seeping osmotically through to the consciousness of the former. So while teaching "the core values of Britishness" in schools is evidently an abject failure, as Sir Keith's report confirms, a crash course for those around the Cabinet table in Downing Street might not be a bad idea.

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