Introduction: Tolerant Britain?

Britain has a reputation for tolerance (see, for example, Paxman, 1999). In the first half of the twentieth century, tolerance was regarded as one of several British virtues experienced by foreign travellers, compared to the alternative characteristics of other nationalities. International socialites such as Odette Keun (1934) described the ‘adorable things’ she liked about the English as including ‘courtesy, kindness, obligingness and tolerance’. In the post-war period, the creation of the myth about the virtues of the British that had both helped us to achieve victory in the war and also justified our ascendancy, included proclamations about British tolerance, in contrast to the less attractive virtues of both our erstwhile enemies and our allies (Calder, 1991).

In the early twenty-first century, New Labour has, at one level, adopted the language of tolerance as part of its attempts to promote multicultural Britain and shore up British identity in the face of inter-ethnic tensions and working-class disaffection. Tony Blair, in December 2006, argued that tolerance was ‘what makes Britain, Britain’, that Britain's ‘hallmark’ was its ‘common culture of tolerance’. Tolerance was one of the ‘essential values’ that minorities had to share in order to integrate. Blair's successor, Gordon Brown, in the early stages of his crusade about Britishness in March 2007, said that ‘When people are asked what they admire about Britain, they usually say it is our values: British tolerance; the British belief in liberty.’

Reputation and rhetoric, therefore, support the notion that Britain is a tolerant place. The realities of public opinion and public policy, however, suggest otherwise, as we show in the next section. But while policy uses the language of tolerance and respect, it does not offer a clear definition or understanding of these terms: in the second and third sections, we seek to define tolerance and specify its relationship to respect and civility. While we argue that active engagement with others is an essential foundation of tolerance, we go on to show in the following two sections that such engagement and tolerance are less likely to arise as a result of a purified public realm, and that tolerance is very context specific.