Spreading values

Actions speak louder than words: the expression of values among the community supporting refugees might fly largely under the radar of the wider population, particularly in larger city context, but the action of showing support, is known to the individual refugees and families concerned as well as among the sponsoring community. By requiring groups, NGOs, churches, and others to be broad, registered, and established, the British sponsorship model is essentially requiring both a basic standard and duty of care, and that it is a community, not just one or two individuals, that assists the refugee. The effect of this is to make sponsorship a kind of social gathering place, of community activity. The Church of England, reporting on the impact of sponsorship, says:

The astonishing fact of Community Sponsorship is that it works in any community, large or small, urban or rural. Recent figures published by the Home Office show that the region with the highest number of schemes is the rural South West. A family resettled in Ottery St Mary decided to call their baby daughter Mary in recognition of the friendship and support they have received from the community. The last two years have shown that an increasing number of communities are getting involved. In so doing they have discovered that helping to transform the lives of a resettled family, they have transformed their community for the better in the process, with greater communication, cohesion, and integration.

(Church of England 2019)

In other words, the act of sponsorship is not only an expression of values, but also a strengthening and spreading of those values within and beyond the group directly involved. Indeed, sponsorship brings opportunities to those who sponsor as well as to those they assist

Community sponsorship is a big commitment for any community group but has benefits beyond assisting newcomers to resettle; it offers communities the opportunity to flourish and brings them closer together through active participation and engagement with diversity.

(Alraie et al. 2018: 1)

Research on resettlement to the UK, not necessarily focused on sponsorship, shows that having support from the community, having connections, mentors, and guides to assist in the process, is a positive aspect in advancing the integration process (Collyer et al. 2019: 8). It facilitates other aspects of the integration path, such as access to education, learning the language, finding safe, secure, and stable housing.

As such, it is clear that the early findings on experience with Community Sponsorship in the UK find not only positives in the opportunities for integration of the refugees who are sponsored, but also a strengthening and spread of those values labelled ‘British,’ including tolerance and appreciation of diversity of all kinds.

Tolerance - in short supply in a changing context?

In his 1997 collection ‘On Toleration,’ which started as a series of lectures in Yale’s Program in Ethics, Politics and Economics, Michael Walzer discusses tolerating and being tolerated as ‘the work of democratic citizens,’ work which is neither ‘easy or insignificant’ (Walzer 1997: xi).

Tolerance, as described in the policy papers on British values is about differences - specifically those in faith. Defending toleration, Walzer says, does not have to mean defending difference, although it often does. ‘Toleration makes difference possible; difference makes toleration necessary’ (Walzer 1997: xii).

Toleration is essentially about peaceful co-existence built on some form of mutual respect and acceptance. There are differences, therefore, following Walzer, we need toleration. Where immigration is concerned, however, a fundamental issue arises. Those who do not wish to tolerate see the answer as keeping out the differences by keeping out the migrants. The differences migrants bring (adding to differences already present) require toleration - in trying to reject those differences by rejecting the migrants, those who would oppose their arrival enter a spiral. The British value of tolerance is sorely tested by their intolerance.

Walzer identifies five ‘regimes of toleration,’ or models for a tolerant society: multinational Empires, International Society, Consociations, Nation-States and Immigrant Societies. Great Britain has perhaps been through some of these, but is having difficulties with the last. Arguably, the British value of tolerance would have been grounded in its days of Empire - for all the prejudice and endemic corruption of the regime, the Imperial power may have been more even-handed towards ruling than any local prince or tyrant, as Walzer suggests. Post-empire as a variant on the ‘consociation’ of a United Kingdom of four parts, or as a nation-state (which various British citizens and governments may have viewed differently over time), the UK has had another regime of toleration broadly speaking at home.

However, where the UK struggles is with the consequences of Empire, the immigration of Commonwealth citizens with status and rights based on the changing relationship between their (newly) independent states and the UK, and the immigration of others, including EU citizens in the more recent

Community-based sponsorship of refugees resettling 197 regional/supra-national ‘consociation.’ Walter treats France, and the ‘European Community’ as complicated cases. The Immigrant Societies in Walter’s theoriting on toleration are Canada, the US, and Australia. France is complicated because it is a nation-state that has accepted and assimilated a high-degree of its own colonial immigration pre- and post-independence of those states to which its imperial power spread.

The UK’s difficulties with its essential value of tolerance in the first two decades of the 2000s may come from its changing nature as a society. Those for whom the values are central can tolerate, and show not only tolerance of but also support to a wider range of ‘others’ than those that Britain already contains. Those for whom the nation, Britain, is central, can espouse tolerance of others who are British, but a little different, but have difficulties extending tolerance to others arriving in the UK. The UK has become a very complicated case, where tolerance is espoused, but toleration not shown by all.

Those who represent the value (British or otherwise) of toleration by forming community organizations to support resettled refugees through sponsorship, uphold their country in its fundamental ability to tolerate difference and survive.