Recently, a myriad of ‘difficult’ issues have gained prominence both in popular and policy discourses: concerns about immigration, the belief that diverse values threaten national identity and damage ‘social cohesion’, and ‘radicalisation’ in UK society. In the UK, successive governments have embarked on a “civic rebalancing” project (Keddie, 2014, p.540) aimed at creating “a cohesive citizenry” to counter these purported threats. This has entailed two strategies: Firstly, a liberal-nationalist approach to develop “a sense of belonging to and identification with the nation-state” (Vincent, 2018, p. 12) based on the assumption that the fractiousness witnessed in society is caused by a breakdown in patriotic loyalties to the state. To ‘solve’ this ‘problem’, the teaching in schools of “fundamental British values of democracy, rule of law, individual liberty, mutual respect and tolerance for those of different faiths and beliefs” (DfE 2014) has been institutionally mandated. Secondly, a strategy of the “securitisation of education” was promulgated (Farrell, 2016, p.282). The introduction of the Counter Terrorism and Security Act (2015) placed a duty on teachers to have “due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism”. A significant corpus of literature has criticised the assumptions that underpin these ‘Fundamental British Values’ (FBV) (Farrell, 2016). Some have questioned why the values are defined as ‘British’ rather than universal (Elton-Chalcraft, 2017). This paper extends some of these critiques by arguing that the notion of “Britishness” advocated for in these values is exclusionary as it is underpinned by an assimilationist logic that declares that loyalty and belonging to the nation is ‘singular’, notably for ‘the common good’. Concomitantly, ‘diversity’ is recast in the discourse of FBV as “failed corrupting plurality” (Gilroy, 2012 p. 384). The promotion of FBV in the curriculum is an “attempt to promote the salience of national boundaries” (Starkey, 2018, p. 159). The reductive effect in the abstracted notion of Britishness implied in significations such as freedom, democracy and equality always anticipates the arrival of the unnamed other as dangerous and ‘a trouble’ to the nation state that is morally beyond reproach, and thus such unnamed other needs to be contained, pacified and assimilated. This speaks to the double entendre in the title of the paper, ‘troubling diversity’. Here, diversity is a concept that is troubling to the state, but it also hints to the idea that this version of reality in respect of ‘diversity’ needs troubling.

Elton-Chalcraft, S., Lander, V., Revell, L., Warner, D. and Whitworth, L. (2017). To promote, or not to promote fundamental British values? Teachers’ standards, diversity and teacher education: British Educational Research Journal, 43, 29-48. Farrell, F. (2016). ‘Why all of a sudden do we need to teach fundamental British values?’ A critical investigation of religious education student teacher positioning within a policy discourse of discipline and control: Journal of Education for Teaching, 42(3), 280-297. Gilroy, P. (2012). ‘My Britain is fuck all’: zombie multiculturalism and the race politics of citizenship: Identities, 19(4), 380-397. Keddie, A. (2014). The politics of Britishness: multiculturalism, schooling and social cohesion: British Educational Research Journal, 40, 539-554. Starkey, H. (2018). Fundamental British Values and citizenship education: tensions between national and global perspectives: Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 100(2). Vincent, C. (2019). Cohesion, citizenship and coherence: schools’ responses to the British values policy: British Journal of Sociology of Education, 40(1), 17-32.