Israel’s plight exposes the truth about virtue-signalling ‘values’

Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, recently took a pop at immigrants who she accused of failing to ‘embrace British values’. But these newcomers to our shores might be forgiven for being confused about what these ‘values’ are. We live in a country, after all, in which misgendering someone can land you in hot water but chanting for ‘jihad’ on the streets of London is deemed acceptable. Britain is a place where we frequently express solidarity with victims of terror attacks and atrocities yet stay strangely silent on the plight of Israel after the slaughter of hundreds of its citizens.

We hear talk of ‘values’ all the time but no one seems able to define them. Rishi Sunak told us last month that 20mph zones ‘aren’t the right values of the British people’. When Nigel Farage’s bank account was closed by Coutts, an internal dossier revealed that his Brexity views didn’t fit with the bank’s ‘values’.