A few years back, an old friend invited me up to his and his wife’s glorious Scottish estate where they hold an annual international festival called Beyond Borders. I was asked to be part of a panel where the subject was as the title of this blog. Just before we took to stage, I tugged the jacket of the session’s chair and cheekily asked to go first. Probably because he was a regular at The Cinnamon Club and it was well known that I allotted the best tables to people I liked, he agreed.
This, from memory, is what I said when he asked: “I’ve never really had a choice in the matter as I’ve always been told who I am. When we first came to Britain in the 1960’s, I was a Pakistani, abbreviated by thugs to Paki. Then after liberation in 1971, I was a Bangladeshi. Then everyone was lumped together, and I became coloured, then an immigrant. Then it was considered polite to call me an ethnic minority. Then I was called Black, then Asian, then Black and Minority Ethnic, then some Asians said they weren’t included in this, so I became Black and Asian Minority Ethnic. Then with the rise of extremism, I was called a Muslim (not in a nice way, obvs).
“I’ve probably missed out a few, but no-one’s really ever asked me what I call myself. If they had, my answer would always have been the same: I’m a Londoner.”
Now that nearly everyone has had their say on the “really from” issue, perhaps it’s now time to capitalise on this national embarrassment and explore how we get beyond othering to adopt more inclusive thinking and talking. And here we hit a stumbling block which has largely gone off our radar these past few days because of the Buckingham Palace incident of whether we can ever transition from being British to being English. As Beyond Borders was held just outside of Edinburgh, I also made the observation there that Asians in Scotland called themselves Scottish, but people of Asian descent in England didn’t call themselves English.
The subject is most pertinent right now because of the World Cup, where for 90 minutes we all become English, just as a report found during the last Euros. Both in that study and elsewhere, we have large amounts of evidence to show that the vast majority of white English people say they don’t believe you need to be white to be English, but the same belief doesn’t hold true for most of the rest of us.
I have a friend in Bradford whose family settled there from Pakistan who calls himself a Yorkshireman just as I do as a Londoner. So, what’s holding us back from calling ourselves English – and does it matter? I would say it matters because while we can identify with being British as our nationality and feel part of the particular region where we settled, there’s still that tingling feeling that we’re not there yet. England undoubtedly has bigger class differences than say Scotland or Wales and minorities (or in the case of Leicester and Birmingham, majorities) tend be disproportionately at the lower socio-economic end so the facts rather than the words paint a different story.
The Scots, the Welsh and the Irish of course all demanded independence from England which will have helped a national buy-in from minorities in those parts. With England being seen as the home of empire and elitism, rather than associated with, say, factory workers or miners, there remains a rocky road to travel to get us all to believe that outside of those 90 minutes and despite the diversity of the team, that English still doesn’t just mean white.
It’s more than a skin-deep issue and it’s not one that’s easily solved. But it’s only after we accept this is a problem, which many people feel it isn’t, that we can begin to start fixing it. We’d all be in a better place if we could do that.