The Debatable Land #25: A Land for All?
The Debatable Land #25: A Land for All?
What the Conservative leadership contest reveals about modern Britain
Welcome to the latest edition of my newsletter. Another should follow towards the end of the week. This one uses the Conservative leadership contest as a lens through which some of the more hopeful realities of modern Britain may be discerned.
Red and White and Blue and Black and Brown
If the contest to become the next leader of the Conservative and Unionist party was not being held in such a rush - if it were prolonged by another week or two - I suspect Kemi Badenoch would have had an excellent chance of becoming Britain’s next prime minister. And if this were a contest taking place while the Conservative and Unionist party were in opposition I think she would have won it. She may still do so, of course, even if the odds remain against her.
Badenoch is not, in my view, remotely ready to be prime minister. She may not even be ready to be leader of the party. But across a range of issues - climate, tax, culture - she has a connection to the Tory party’s inner convictions and she is happy to bluntly say things others are too reticent, or simply incapable, of saying. Assuming she does not win this time, she seems likely - right now - to be the favourite the next time the Tories gallop round this course.
Still if we put aside the circumstances which led to this contest, its defining feature is plainly the diversity of the candidates seeking to succeed Boris Johnson. The next prime minister will certainly not be a white man and may well be Britain’s first black or brown prime minister. This is a significant - and positive - part of David Cameron’s legacy for without his intervention it is doubtful the Conservative party would have selected so many ethnic minority candidates for winnable seats. When Cameron won the leadership, every candidate was a white man. This time, four of the eight who received the support of at least 20 of their parliamentary colleagues are black or brown.
The dog which did not bark here was the dog which objected to any of this. On the contrary, in fact. It all seems entirely normal even if it is also unprecedented. That, more than anything else, may be a reflection of the manner and pace with which Britain has changed in recent years. No Tory MPs are voting for Rishi Sunak or Kemi Badenoch because they’re from an ethnic minority and no Tory MPs are voting against them for that reason either. I strongly suspect this will hold true for Conservative members too and, more broadly and if it comes to it, the country as a whole too.
There is still a long way to go and it would be foolish to pretend otherwise but we are not too far away - at the highest level of representation - from the point at which being an African, Asian or Caribbean candidate for mighty office is little more remarkable or noteworthy than being a Welsh or Scottish one.
As so often, the particular should not obscure the general. There are a distressing number of bigots; the population as a whole is not. In like fashion, most BAME citizens have experienced racial prejudice of one kind of another - most commonly, though not exclusively, racial slurs - but the overall trend towards a more tolerant, relaxed, society is clear. Two years ago, Ipsos polled on this subject:
The vast majority, 89%, claim they would be happy for their child to marry someone from another ethnic group, and 70% strongly agree. This is an improvement from January 2009, when 75% said they would be happy overall, and 41% strongly.
Similarly, the vast majority (93%, nearly all of them strongly disagreeing at 84%) disagree with the statement that, “to be truly British you have to be White”. In October 2006, 82% disagreed, 55% strongly. The proportion who agree with the statement has fallen from 10% to 3% in the last 14 years.
However, seven in ten (69%) think there is at least a fair amount of tension in Britain between people of different races and nationalities (one in five – 20% - say there is a great deal of tension). However, this is a slight improvement from April 2008 when 76% felt there was a fair amount of tension.
This kind of caveated-optimism seems reasonable. And so too, I think, does what Badenoch told the Sunday Times last week:
“What is amazing is how when you talk to some people in Labour they are still pretending it’s 1955 or 1948 and exactly the same as when the Windrush generation arrived.
“It is as though they have to pretend nothing has changed in order to justify their own argument. It is destructive for young people, because what they hear is the message that it doesn’t matter what you do, people are going to try and stop you. It means that they don’t bother, they are defeated before they start.
“The argument I make to people is that we have all been the victims of crime, but we don’t all think that our country is institutionally criminal. That is not to say there is not racism in this country, but to pretend that is all that is going on and to . . . overemphasise it will make the country more divided.”
Again, the particular - the Home Office, the Metropolitan police, and too much else besides - should be acknowledged without crowding out a more general truth. The idea, which is encouraged by the (reasonable) greater emphasis put on racial issues today, Britain is a more racist society now than it was fifty years ago is preposterous. (If there is more to do in terms of “representation” - and much more to do in other policy areas - it’s also true that this is something which will be taken care of by time even if nothing else were to change or no new policies put in place.)
By way of demonstrating this - and as a further reminder that the United Kingdom is not the United States - consider that Asian and Black African kids do better at GCSE in English state schools than “White British” children even though they are also more likely to qualify for free school meals. This success continues at A-Level where one in four children in England and Wales getting at least AAA is from an ethnic minority or mixed background. At Oxford University - to take a single but high-profile example - 24.6 percent of UK-resident undergraduates admitted in 2021 were BAME students. (The number of applicants from black and asian backgrounds has increased by at least a third in the past five years, though white students are still a bit more likely to receive an offer than their BAME peers.)
Viewed from Scotland, in particular, I think we often fail to appreciate just how much and how quickly England has changed in the past 40 years. Since a changing England means a changing United Kingdom it follows that people in Scotland - and Northern Ireland and, though to a lesser extent, Wales - do not always understand either England or the modern UK quite as well as they think they do. Scottish independence presents itself as a reimagined state fit for the modern world and, of course, it could be this. But to become that it also requires a conscious uncoupling from one of the modern world’s most modern places (albeit that modernity is often disguised or lost amidst bumph and flummery).
I tread carefully here, of course, but offer this provocation: the United Kingdom is a composite and deeply unusual country. It is four nations within one but that one also exists distinct from its four constituent parts. All of these contribute to the multifarious, overlapping, identities evident on this island. This has long been a place of hyphenated identity in which people may toggle from one sense of themselves to another without contradicting themselves in the slightest. England, Scotland, Wales, and (Northern) Ireland formed not so much a melting pot as a stew in which individual ingredients could still be discerned - indeed that was a necessary part of the dish - even as they contributed to the greater whole.
As then, so now. Much more now, in fact. For other hybrid identities are now available. Britain’s ethnic minority population is itself strikingly diverse. On one level a Muslim from Oldham, a Hindu from Harrow and a Sikh from Wolverhampton have very different experiences and different identities. But I wonder if - conceptually, anyway - it is possible to consider Britain’s ethnic minority population as an unofficial but significant fifth constituent nation within the greater United Kingdom? If so, it might enjoy the same questioning, sometimes ambivalent, often ironic, always complex relationship to the whole as other, longer-established, minority nations.
An increasing number of hyphenated-citizens now attach themselves to Englishness as well as the more traditional, capacious, sense of Britishness that has historically been both open and attractive to ethnic minority citizens. This is a non-binary country now, if you like, and there exists the possibility of being more relaxed about these matters.
Thus this very New Britain - just 75 years old, really - is in certain respects a larger, multi-coloured, refreshment of an older United Kingdom which, conceptually, anyway offered a kind of Britishness to people across the world. For example: Andrew Bonar Law was a Canadian-Scot but it would be anachronistic to consider him a “migrant” prime minister as he would never have considered himself such.
Britishness was an imperial identity and there is a certain irony in reflecting that post-imperial Britain is closer to fulfilling the promise of that ideal - for some and in some respects, anyway - than imperial Britain ever managed. In the curious way history works, Britain has looped back upon itself to become something new while remaining true to at least the rhetorical exposition of some of its older ideas.
And I suppose it is this sense of layered identity - and layered possibility - that contributes to my disinclination to support Scottish independence. Something would doubtless be gained from hiving ourselves off but much would be lost too and not all of what would go can easily be measured.
My Britain has always been multi-national and multi-cultural and so what has been happening in England, in particular, recently - and happening very, very fast - is both proof of concept and something which makes Britain - and England especially - one of the most interesting places in Europe. Why would we wish to leave or cease being a part of that?
Far from being signs of decline - as conservative pessimists and polemicists aver - I suspect this is quite the opposite: a promise of rebirth, growth, and cultural confidence. An England - and thus, in part, a Britain too - of dizzying differences and possibilities in which there are many roads to personal and communal fulfilment; an experiment, perhaps, but one worth being part of .
For in the end, these are old countries yet also new ones; places where diversity is tradition even if many have lost sight of this ancient reality. Global Britain is become true once again in ways that eclipse political sloganeering (and yes, despite Brexit too).
And while there is, of course, no final point of completion, no moment at which a “post-racial” or wholly “colour-blind” country is achieved, the importance of this Conservative leadership contest as a moment of significant symbolism should not be underplayed. For, whatever you may think of their politics, the plain fact of the matter is that the ethnic diversity on display during this campaign has been incidental to the contest itself. Almost every aspect of this story would have been unthinkable just a generation ago but this may be the most remarkable bit of all.
Preach, Dorothy, Preach
Dorothy Parker puts into words the feeling all of us who live on Grub Street sometimes endure. Also: looking folk in the voice is over-rated anyway.
Insert Westminster/Tories/England Joke Here
Round up the usual suspects.
And finally…
I am not much of a Wagnerian but Philip Hensher, the novelist, who very much is, recommends that newbies start with Parsifal on the grounds that “Those ideas about easy introductions to the great are misguided - if you’re going to like Wagner, it’s Parsifal you’re going to like.” So here is the prelude. It’s pretty good.
That’s all for today, folks. As always, thanks for subscribing to The Debatable Land and thanks too, to those of you who support it with your hard-earned. It does make a difference. See you - so to speak - soon!
One good thing about this campaign is that it is a final reminder to ppl that the UK is not the US and has no need to import US Ideas about race into a place that already has more than enough of its own culture wars to be going on with
Now lets hope the campaign can start talking about the upcoming energy crisis, the scandal of foodbanks and peoples wages not keeping up with inflation, you know, real proper grown up politics
Looking at the diverse candidates for Tory leader does indeed put other parties to shame. The UK is a wonderful melting pot, with tensions yes, but a warm and welcoming place that people flock to. Scotland breaking away to follow a bunch who have to dress up, paint their faces, wave flags and find a grievance under every stone, would be an act of utter senselessness. For all Nicola Sturgeon’s virtue-signalling rantings, up here we remain a small parochial country that would do well to learn from our southern neighbours about looking outward.