I see you're going to require all your schools to teach British values. If you think you're going to have the support of all parents in this project, you'll have to count me out.

Your checklist of British values is: "Democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, mutual respect, and tolerance of those of different faiths and beliefs." I can't attach the adjective "British" to these. In fact, I find it parochial, patronising and arrogant that you think it's appropriate or right to do so.

I've heard the weasel explanation: you're not saying that these are uniquely or specially British, simply that they are ones that British society abides by. But that's not how we use adjectives, is it? We use adjectives to describe, modify, define, colour and infuse the noun that follows it. It's clear from David Cameron's absurd words about the Magna Carta (which handed power to warring despotic princelings) that your government would like us to think that there is indeed something specially British about the items on the checklist.

So let's go through it. I like democracy. I don't think you do. You've replaced the democracy of local government control over schools with the marketplace.A tiny number of speculators, debt-sellers, rate-fixers and gamblers have altered the lives of millions of people. No one voted them in. No one can vote them out. We have an unelected head of state and an unelected second chamber.

We have some democracy but it's absurd to claim that the bit we have is solely or uniquely British. The great struggles by working people to wrest some power from your predecessors were often informed by events in France and America, while British women were still fighting for the right to vote as some others abroad already had it. I am struggling to imagine what fibs you would like to impose on schools requiring teachers to imply that democracy is British.

Excuse me for sniggering about the "rule of law" requirement. Didn't your leader flout the law last week over his statement on the Coulson affair, made before the trial was over? Don't we know that Tony Blair will never have to face a court of law in which the legality of the invasion of Iraq will be tested? Again, when it comes to the history of law as enacted in this country, shouldn't it be described as having evolved out of many cultures including, say, Jewish, Greek, Roman, Christian and, in the modern era, "western"? Don't you folks in parliament talk about "European" laws?

On to liberty – well, in an era of the never-ending soup-kitchen queue and rising child poverty there's no better time to be informed on this matter by the non-British writer Anatole France, who praised: "The majestic equality of laws which forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal bread." I daren't think of the guidelines you will issue requiring teachers to pretend that liberty without equality is liberty.

Mutual respect? Before you put that one out, perhaps you should spend some time talking to the families of people who have lost loved ones while in the care, "protection" or custody of HM government. In the guidelines to teachers, perhaps you can explain why this mutual respect doesn't seem to result in anyone being prosecuted for violating the fundamental part of "respect": the right to live.

Tolerance is a good idea but practised unevenly across Britain, surely. Still on the statute books we have the requirement that all schools in England and Wales should have a daily assembly that is "wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character". Most parents do not know that they can take their children out of this assembly – and out of any RE lessons.

Many of those who do know feel that to opt out would cause difficulties for their child and the school. And we should remember, surely, that our unelected head of state is head of the Church of England, which is "tolerant" even as its official status and role dominates the public interpretation of values. To tell the truth, I don't know how we can have tolerance while our state schools are required by law to favour one faith.

So, I look forward to these guidelines on British values, if only for the fact that it will give our children the chance to put them up for scrutiny. By the way, did it ever occur to you to call them just: "Values"?

Yours, Michael Rosen