I came under some criticism following my last article on “one land, one law, one language”. In particular I was challenged to identify what the classical British values look like.

Sometimes this sort of questioning is nihilistic – a request for some sort of conceptually pure vision that can then be academically picked apart endlessly, as a way of not engaging with the presenting issues themselves. It is a way of muddying the waters and avoiding discussion.

Yet answering the question about values is also an opportunity to spell out a little more about what the “one land, one law, one language” vision acutally looks like in practice.

So I want to talk about women, specifically British women, and even more specifically the idea in British society that women have rights, rights to determine their own paths in life in order that they might be enabled to become all that they might be.

These rights have been built up over many years, through progressive political battles – the rights to property, to vote, to be educated and so on. One key right is the ability that women in our society have to make their own decisions over their sexuality and fertility. That is, they have the right to make decisions about what to wear, who to associate with, who to have sex with, when and how to conceive a child and so on.

This is where the sort of cultural clash that concerns me manifests itself clearly. For there are other cultures that deny these rights to women; where, for example, what clothes are worn, what men are associated with, who to marry, whether to have children and so on – these are matters decided by the dominant relative male, normally the father.

Consider the recent case of Amina al-Jeffery, a girl born in Wales to a Saudi Arabian father. When she was 17 she was taken to Jeddah by her rather, purportedly for a holiday, and then placed under and effective ‘house arrest’. Her father is trying to exercise control over Amina in accordance with his own cultural norms – yet Amina grew up in Wales, has a Welsh accent and follows Welsh norms – she kissed a boy, thus displaying ‘un-Islamic behaviour’, and was taken away into exile as a result.

The High Court has now ruled that Amina should be returned to Britain by 11th September. This is good, but will Boris Johnson actually act in accordance with the High Court? I rather doubt it, simply because we know that the Saudi Arabian government is allowed to get away with all sorts of terrors simply because they pay for large military contracts like Al-Yamamah. As is so often the case, it is not just a matter of the law but of the will to apply the law in particular cases, in particular ways.

This is simply one example of the much wider trend related on the one hand to ‘honour’ killings in this country – that is, those women who choose differently to the dominant male of their families are murdered in cold blood – and the systematic child abuse and rape of white women in this country, in staggering numbers, as with Rotherham. In sentencing some of the perpetrators of the Rotherham case, Judge Gerald Clifton told the men “All of you treated the victims as though they were worthless and beyond any respect – they were not part of your community or religion.” Both forms of criminality arise out of a rejection of the British value that grants women a significant measure of authority and autonomy in their own lives, equivalent to that enjoyed by men.

It is clear that there is a particular strain of South Asian Muslim culture which comprehensively rejects our approach, and which has taken advantage of a politically correct culture to embed itself in several of our cities. So do we actually believe that these hard-won rights are worth protecting? Is a woman born in this country entitled to the protection of the British state when she tries to assert British cultural values? Or do we look the other way out of fear of being called racist?

This is the dilemma of the politically correct – which of these two competing values are worth defending? Do you virtue-signal solidarity with women or with minorities? Reality is forcing the choice. We either say that we must discriminate between different cultures, in order to protect British women from the violent exploitation of these minority cultures; or we say that it is always wrong to discriminate culturally, and condemn those British women to yet more decades of abuse.

For me the choice is clear – I want my daughters to grow up in a place that respects their full humanity and their capacity to make informed choices for themselves. That seems to me to be a ‘British value’. The same thing applies to other questions of gender and sexuality – I don’t want to live in a society where gay people are afraid of admitting who they are, or where trans people are scared of being beaten senseless by morons. Yet if we do nothing, that is a present reality for some and an increasing reality for others.

I want to live in a place which is tolerant and accepting, where every single human being is enabled to make decisions about their own lives in a way that makes it most probable that they will be able to live full and fulfilling lives. That’s a British value worth defending, but if we are to defend it, we need to wake up and realise just how undermined those values have become. We need to discriminate culturally and say – some cultures are worse than others, and we choose the better one.

A Jeremy Creake article for the Courier