David Leask: Do British or Scottish values even exist?

We often see such language as platitudinous, as meaningless political noise. And sometimes we are right to do so.

But not this time. Mr De Croo is one of a number of EU leaders who believe the governments of Poland and Hungary are undermining the very ethical, democratic principles the EU was set up to defend.

“This is not an issue of West against East, of old against new,” Mr De Croo said. “This is about the overwhelming majority of member states – from the Baltics to Portugal – who agree our Union is a union of values, not a cash machine. You cannot pocket all the money but refuse the values.”

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These are live issues. The EU, for example, is considering action against Poland over its failure to ensure an independent judiciary.

Mr De Croo was speaking at the College of Europe in Bruges, a centre of learning explicitly set up shortly after the war by the founding fathers of the future EU, including Winston Churchill, to promote and instil European values.

The rise of the reactionary, often authoritarian Viktor Orban in Hungary and the Polish rule of law crisis both present clear challenges to such values. So, hinted Mr De Croo, does Brexit.

People, he declared, have not given up on Europe. “They understand very well what’s going on in the world,” he said. “They unmask fake news and disinformation, even if it’s written on a very large, red bus in the centre of London.”

But have UK voters given up on the values Mr De Croo calls European? Me? I do not believe they have. Would not many people in Britain, including those who voted Leave, agree with Mr De Croo on his core values?

Last month, one detailed poll found more than three-quarters of citizens in Scotland, England and Wales were “united in their belief that equality, tolerance and diversity are important to making them proud of their nation”.

Differences between the three nations of the island of Great Britain were marginal.

The survey was commissioned by a pro-UK think-tank called Our Scottish Future set up by former Prime Minister Gordon Brown. His conclusion? That these “British” values can hold the UK together.

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“Is it not time to ask [nationalists] why they don’t want to cooperate with neighbours who share their values and ask who benefits when cooperation fails?” he asked after the poll was published.

His question was aimed at SNP and other pro-independence voters. It might just as well have been put to Brexiteers.

Mr Brown tried to champion British values – and therefore, he thought, British unity – when he was in No10.

His aim – and that of his supporters – is to demonstrate a common ethos. But to do so they assert a single demos, British people, or nation, and where its borders lie.

Just look at where Mr Brown’s think-tank polled.

It did not ask any questions in Ireland, or France, or Denmark, countries whose values I don’t think differ that much from our own.

To be fair, surveys commissioned to accentuate commonalities across these islands rarely have a non-British control group. And, of course, cross-border or multi-language exercises of this kind are expensive and tricky, especially when they focus on institutions like the NHS.

But it remains telling that the border of this poll was the island of Great Britain, that the line those commissioning polls choose to draw on a map coincides with their default concept of nation and of people.

The common values they uncovered in polling are therefore presented as British rather than European or universal.

There is nothing particularly surprising in this kind of banal nationalism. And it is not only found on the pro-UK side of Scotland’s constitutional divide.

Even a cursory Google check will come up with SNP politicians talking about “Scottish values” when talking about principles that are definitely not confined to this side of the Tweed.

Michael Keating, professor of politics at Aberdeen University, has been thinking about independence and union for decades, and not just in the UK.

Last month, he responded to the Our Scottish Future poll with an article on the website of the Constitution Society.

It deserves a bit of attention. Why? Because Mr Keating reckons in places like Scotland, Catalonia and Quebec supporters and opponents of independence are often “fighting for ownership of the same moral high ground”.

The SNP has Scottish values. Mr Brown, British ones. Mr De Croo, European. They are all trying to pin a flag on essentially the same bag of ethical and political principles. Why?

“The stakes here are not about ethos,” Mr Keating explained. “They are about demos, how we define the people for the purposes of democracy. They are about telos, which level is best fitted to achieve the aims. They are about sovereignty, or the location of ultimate authority. These are struggles to define the boundaries of the public space within which issues of policy are played out and contested.

“We may all be committed to the idea of universal health coverage, free at the point of use. This does not mean that we need to share the same health service or even the same state.”

Mr Keating in recent years has documented a rise in British nationalism as the traditional unionist idea of a polyvalent, multi-formed Britishness loses ground. He sees the attempt to push a UK ethos in that light.

“We might say that the main threat to the Union no longer comes from the nationalisms of the periphery,” he wrote, “but from the attempt by unionism to monopolise universal values and dress them with the nationalising language of Britishness.”

Do we want unionists and nationalists fighting for ownership of democratic values? Maybe, if doing so means they actually challenge those who would undermine them. And they, as some of the heat generated by Brexit has shown, are not just to be found in Poland and Hungary.

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