Is there any phrase more sinister and pernicious than the oxymoronic ‘British values’? It's one of those things you hear on the radio after arriving back from a relaxing holiday in a warm country that just makes your heart sink at being home. It has become popular since the ‘Operation Trojan Horse’ scandal in Birmingham in which a number of individuals attempted to introduce a hardline strain of Islam into some schools; since then, under first Michael Gove and now Nicky Morgan, the Department for Education has made installing "British values" a neccessary requirement for all schools. Even at the time this phrase was rolled out it was so obvious that, despite the problem of extremism being limited to Islam and the schools in question not even being “faith schools”, the Department would subsequently target Church schools. And so it has transpired. The "British values" promoted by the state are almost as alien to my grandparents’ generation as the Islam being promoted in Birmingham schools. As Christopher Caldwell once pointed out, “What secular Europeans call ‘Islam’ is a set of values that Dante and Erasmus would recognise as theirs” but the modern “core European values” would “leave Dante and Erasmus bewildered”. In a speech to think tank Politeia last week, education secretary Nicky Morgan summed it up: