In the wake of the Trojan Horse saga alleging a plot by fanatical Muslims to make state schools teach, er, according to Muslim principles, the government has decreed that teaching British values should be part of the curriculum.
This edict has been widely and understandably criticised by cultural relativists and wiseacres alike. No-one knows what British values are so it is impossible to teach them, goes the argument. And who is to say British values are better than Muslim ones, ask the relativists?
I am a passionate enemy of cultural relativism, but I think the Government's critics are half right. British culture and values are the complex sum total of our food, climate, literature, music, architecture, sport and landscape, to name but seven items of what surely is a much longer list of component parts. You can't do more than scratch the surface of that at school.
And that's the trouble. Young Muslims brought up in Muslim families in largely Muslim areas of Birmingham are always going to lead a somewhat schizophrenic existence. They watch British TV, walk around Britain's streets and go to Britain's schools, but even if there were no Islamification in the classroom, they would still spend an awful lot of time at home and in the mosque. Theirs is always going to be a double life.
A friend from Hackney, a woman of Afro-Caribbean extraction, told me that her split existence even extends to speaking a different version of English to family and West Indian friends. But for her no cultural barrier existed remotely as high or difficult as the one which separates devout Muslims from their post-Christian white and black contemporaries.
The subtext of the Government's critics is the demeaning if generally unstated one that there is no such thing as British culture. This must be wrong, because if it were true we'd be just the same as other countries. And we're not.
Nevertheless hearing David Cameron struggling to define some of those British values, I was struck by his use of the word "tolerance". We're a tolerant people, he said. Well yes, in some respects we are. I would prefer to say that we're slow to get angry and willing to put up with a good deal.
But if we're so tolerant, why are we getting so cross about Islamification of British schools? Surely if we were really tolerant we'd just say, OK, you want to drop teaching of evolution and call white girls prostitutes? Fine. We're tolerant. We don't care. Just get on with it.
The reality is that Islamic immigration has exposed the limits of our famous tolerance. We weren't asked if we wanted it; if we had been asked, we'd probably have uttered a polite "no thanks". But now it's here and we have to work out a way of living with it, we must stop pretending what a tolerant lot we are.
If Britain's going to carry on working reasonably well as a nation, we have to get Muslims to assimilate. And if that's going to happen the rest of us have to say, you can do this, and this, and this, but you can't do that. No to Islamification of the classroom. No to forced marriage. No to honour killings. No to FGM. We may be tolerant, but we're not that tolerant.
