There is something ominous about Michael Gove’s determination to insist all schools in Britain teach “British values”. The Secretary of State for Education has devised this as an answer to the threat of Islamist extremism in a handful of schools in Birmingham. His concerns are, on the evidence even of so few cases, justified. No school under his jurisdiction should be allowed to treat girls worse than boys, or implant prejudice against those who are not of a strict Islamic faith, or persuade students to regard the entire non-Islamic world as both an enemy and inferior. But his definition of British values does not exactly ring true. It is as if he worked out what he believed to be hard-line Islamic values, and proposed the opposite. That is to let British values be defin