Matthew Norman: British values and the Joan Collins paradox

In the light of this anecdote, related to readers of a news-paper yesterday, Joany is inspired to consider the wider state of this country, and she doesn't like what she sees. Britain, she concludes, is on the very precipice of destroying itself from within. Civilised society is imploding before our eyes ... and the enemy is an alliance between suicide bombers and "moronically blinkered liberal do-gooders who seem to hate England and being English as much as the Islamic terrorists".

Taking care to eschew the cliché, Joany develops her argument. "The liberal chattering classes seem to despise the magnificent achievements of the people of our great country," she continues, "Chaucer, Shakespeare, Elizabeth I, Newton, Darwin, to name but a few - great torch bearers who ushered the world out of the Dark Ages into civilisation."

How well she puts her finger on it. If I tune in to Radio 4 one more time to find Melvyn Bragg slagging off Shakespeare to Alan Bennett, or Richard Dawkins haranguing Professor Steve Jones about what an evil maniac Darwin was, I swear I'll leave the country in disgust.

But where to go? Well, perhaps here it's worth looking to Joany's example. It's a sign of her devotion to the England for which she despairs that she spends most of her life in her sumptuous South of France villa, just as her late compadre in the fight to preserve the values of yore, Jimmy Goldsmith, spent most of his in that fabled Mexican hacienda.

Doubtless distance lends useful perspective, but those who choose to live here have a contribution to make on the vexing question of multiculturalism too. A week ago, the London correspondent of a French publication lauded the superiority of her homeland's approach, which by and large means imposing French culture on immigrants. One might wonder about the North Africans routinely murdered in Marseilles, and ask whether we're ready for lectures on tolerance from a country with an infinitely more atrocious record on racism than our own. Yet this might well be another instance of the incivility that so distressed Joany at the revolving door of the Grosvenor House Hotel.

Bubbling under these deliberations is the notion that those unprepared to knuckle down and embrace "the British way of life" should bugger off out of it. It takes a special brand of idiot to come out and say this, of course, which brings us neatly to Gerald Howarth MP, Conservative spokesman on defence. Known to the great parliamentary profiler Andrew Roth as "a hard-right radical whose speeches have often reduced the House to embarrassed silence", Mr Howarth counsels Muslim people either to show allegiance to this country or leave.

Mr Howarth sits on the council of the Freedom Association, an organisation defined by its visceral hatred of the European Union. How he can bring himself to remain within the EU he hates is mystifying. But if asked, I guess he'd reply that he has every right to deny allegiance to a concept he loathes, and to remain within it struggling to make it more to his liking.

Were it just the likes of Joany and Mr Howarth peddling this twaddle, we might simply sneer at them in our moronically blinkered liberal do-gooding Independent-reading way, and leave it at that. However, when the theme is lionised by Mr Howarth's would-be leader, and quite possibly our next Prime Minister, it becomes more menacing.

"Britain has pursued a policy of multiculturalism," writes David Davis, "allowing people of different cultures to settle without expecting them to integrate into society. We should learn lessons from the United States ..." If one such lesson involves adopting the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech, Mr Davis chooses to make the point tacitly rather than expressly. What he does go on to say is this: "Above all we must speak openly of what we expect of those who settle here. We must build a single nation."

It's tremendous to see him complete an odyssey barely less dramatic than Joany's, if a little speedier, from torch-bearer of the New Right to One Nation Tory, but what does any of this actually mean? What conceivable right - legal or moral - do we (and who the hell are "we" anyway?) have to expect anything from minorities except that which we expect of ourselves ... that they obey the law, whether that means not blowing their fellow subjects to pieces or inciting others to commit violence?

What are the values Messrs Davis and Howarth and Miss Collins would impose on those whose possession of a passport makes them identically as British as all other bearers? Would Mr Davis formally oppose the wishes of certain ultra-orthodox Jewish communities to create a world so self-enclosed that it verges on being a voluntary ghetto? Would he encourage or oblige the Chasids of Stamford Hill to dispense with their beards and medieval costumes?

This latest drive for monoculturalism is as nebulous as it is offensive, and as reactionary as it is misconceived. For all the glib drivel about "shared values", no one has a clue what they are, for the simple reason that they do not exist. Mr Davis would no doubt cite tolerance for other people's modes of living as such a value, but in the same sentence as he disdains to tolerate the preference of some Muslims to live according to their own traditions.

Amid a gruesome collection of paradoxes, meanwhile, the one that stands out is this. What underpins the musings of Joan Collins, Gerald Howarth and David Davis is the conviction that if only young Muslims were raised according to the mores of the pre-mass immigration Fifties Britain they venerate, all would be paradise once again.

And yet the young Muslims who exercise their right not to integrate come from homes ruled by domineering fathers in which alcohol is taboo, drugs unheard of, rock music frowned upon, religious observance demanded ... a pretty perfect facsimile, indeed, of the nuclear family in that imagined paradise of 1953.

Logically, then, it is the white indigenous population - hooked, according to the Collins-Davis analysis, on Alcopop-induced brawling and simulated sex on Big Brother - that should embrace traditional Muslim mores, and not the other way round. There's a thought for David Davis to mull as he flails around for the mystical values that will bind us into One Nation.