Surely no season calls for the nation to unite and put its ugly squabbles behind itself more than this one. Sajid Javid has the answer: he doesn’t want a “government-approved, one-size-fits-all identity”, which is fortunate, since the spirit recoils at the identity the government would approve. But he does want to establish some “building blocks of society”, which will involve, in the first place, requiring the holders of public office to swear some oaths of allegiance to British values. “Tolerating the views of others, even if you disagree with them” is the one that would cause the immediate problem for the prime minister, who finds many views, even her own of six months ago, utterly intolerable.

She would also struggle with Javid’s proposed oath of “respect for the law, even if you think the law is an ass”. Isn’t Theresa May explicitly at war with the law in styling herself for a hypothetical snap election, according to leaks, as the “people versus the judges” candidate?

And the oath of “believing in freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from abuse …” would arguably entail, from the prime minister, her cabinet, her party and her Ukip fellow travellers, a rather more rigorous rejection of Islamophobia, so that Muslim women in shopping centres didn’t have to be dragged along the ground by their hijabs in a newly emboldened climate of “saying the unsayable”. Finally Javid has in mind allegiance to “a belief in equality, democracy and the democratic process”, that quintessentially British principle to which almost the entire world at least claims to subscribe.

Sajid Javid proposes 'British values oath' in wake of Casey review of social integration Read more

This is in many ways a Classic Oath, oath-making in the proud British tradition where you dress up as loyalty and patriotism what is in reality an attack on a particular group or religion: in this instance, the oaths are intended to weed out of public life the Muslims of Louise Casey’s report, who aren’t properly British because they fail to castigate Isis strongly enough.

Henry VIII set the gold standard with the original Oath of Supremacy in 1534, which savaged Catholics without ever mentioning them and doubtless – in its segue from “forraine” to “prelate” – managed to inflame hatred among proud Englishmen for other men who were themselves also English. Even in a kingdom with very little migration, it was possible to generate a politics of xenophobia just by ascribing to some natives the characteristics of a foreigner. Henry VIII was, of course, the very distillation of Englishness, an unskippable chapter in the nation’s history.

But there’s a reason we always reach for Winston Churchill rather than Henry when we want to describe our proudest moments in history. And that reason is that Henry VIII was a dick. There’s Britishness and there’s Britishness, all of it authentic, much of it contradictory, not all of it edifying. Oath-making is British all right; it’s just not the best of British.

No oath for public office-holders can ever be effective, since anyone who participates in public life does so for what they believe to be in the community’s best interests, and will bend their understanding of words like “equality” and “democracy” to fit. There may – indeed, there must be a few outliers – people of premeditated evil who assume office for personal gain or other nefarious purpose. But those people would have no problem swearing an oath disingenuously, since they intended from the outset to swindle or bring down the institution anyway.

However, as Captain Black articulated frankly in Catch-22’s Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade: “The important thing is to keep them pledging … It doesn’t matter whether they mean it or not. That’s why they make little kids pledge allegiance even before they know what ‘pledge’ and ‘allegiance’ means.” A loyal person proves their loyalty by not minding how often they’re asked to pledge it. Only the disloyal take offence, thereby proving how much we need the oath. So the muscles of power are flexed and flexed again, and public opinion which would once have had the courage to say “ew, this is too much” is silenced.

This idea flows into the stagnant pool of Tory gesture politics – one part state-aggrandising, one part telling the people, but only the particular, mean-minded, fearful, querulous people of your own devising, that you’re on their side. I can already feel it piling into the garbage segment of my political memory, so that one day in the future, Javid’s oaths will have become I, the undersigned, do hereby promise to defend John Major’s cones around Theresa May’s racist vans, protect them from the vandalism of ridicule, because that is the British way; to tolerate views you disagree with, including this stupid oath.

Sorry, Louise Casey, but Muslim women are held back by discrimination | Aina Khan Read more

Yet there is another British way: a proud history of keeping these things tacit, of not pledging or flag-waving or thumping tables, of finding patriotism in restraint, and being proud to take decency as a default. There is more Britishness in self-deprecation than in jingoism, more national identity in embarrassment than in brash self-assertion.

George Osborne, whose recent pronouncements have the distorted, faint timbre of coming from a great distance, said recently that he regretted having concentrated on the economy (part of his West Wing-obsessed political youth, and we’ll just have to deal with this bullshit self-fashioning another day) at the expense of what he called “identity politics”. He uses the term wrongly; it was neither invented nor ever, until now, used to mean “nativism”, but rather, the act of building a politics around an identity that defined you, whether by gender or race or sexuality.

The distinction is meaningful: when you mobilise as a woman, you don’t require everyone around you also to become one. When you mobilise as British, it is on the understanding that everyone should laud and exceptionalise the nation as you do.

Identity politics is pluralist by definition; the politics of patriotism is not. Javid’s attempt to shore up democratic values with a show of power is, likewise, a misappropriation, taking the principles of equality as garb for a divisive authoritarianism. These conservatives are like reverse Santas, constantly coming down our chimneys to steal our stuff.