The new alarming Tory language on Britishness

Good morning. Vicky Foxcroft, the Labour MP for Lewisham North and former shadow minister for disabled people, has resigned as a government whip in opposition to the government’s planned welfare cuts.

I don’t have much new to say on this: Labour’s pre-election promises on tax and spend are forcing them into a painful collision with their own backbenchers, while their various attempts to shift the costs of social policy on to business, rather than doing it through public spending, are going to interfere with their growth mission, in my view.

But, as I write a variation on that an awful lot, I wanted to discuss today the alarming trend highlighted by Robert Shrimsley in his column this week.

‘Just people’

This is one of two posters that Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives deployed in 1983, specifically targeting the ethnic minority vote. And here is its forgotten cousin, reflecting a time in which the term “Black” was used in the UK to describe Britons from both the West Indies and the Indian subcontinent.

I use the term “Britons” quite deliberately because the majority of people who came to the UK in the immediate postwar decades were British citizens from birth, not arrival. They were born in the British empire, educated by it and for the most part saw themselves as British. As one West Indian told the Institute of Race Relations in 1970: “We are not immigrants in the true technical sense: after all, we are members of the realm, we are British.” (And until 1962, British immigration law, if not public opinion, agreed on this score.)

A little over a year ago, the Conservative party was led by Rishi Sunak, a British Indian, and no one in the parliamentary party would have suggested in public that he was anything other than British.

But as Robert Shrimsley notes in his column, the way the British right talks about who is and isn’t British — and who is and isn’t integrated — has changed, and changed quite significantly:

When Robert Jenrick, a man widely seen (not least by himself) as the next Conservative leader, talks repeatedly of the decline of the “white British” population in some towns and says the UK is “already an island of strangers”, his words do not distinguish between non-whites. Apparently it would be just as problematic if Rishi Sunak or Kemi Badenoch moved in. There is no gradation, no separation of well integrated from not.

Third-generation Black Britons whose Windrush predecessors answered the call to fill labour shortages are on the wrong side of this binary ledger. So, too, politicians like Priti Patel or Sadiq Khan, the actor Ben Kingsley or the journalist Mishal Husain, along with many law-abiding citizens of insufficient pallor.

As Robert notes, the term is also used by Neil O’Brien, another frontbencher, in his blog. Because I am intensely self-involved, there is another group in particular that is wholly absent from the right’s new language: those of us in the “Mixed” group.

It’s not as if the maths involved in adding together the percentage of the population that is “white British” and “white British and something else” in the census is particularly difficult. When Conservative politicians do this, and talk about what this means for integration, what are they saying? That James Cleverly, Jude Bellingham, Peter Davison and Cole Palmer are somehow “not integrated” into British culture because they have a parent or grandparent who is not white British? That the children of someone in a mixed-race relationship, like Jeremy Hunt or Kemi Badenoch, are not properly British and are somehow alienated from British culture? In some cases it is because the answer is yes, in other cases it is because they have outsourced their actual research to out-and-out bigots online and have checked in their critical faculties at the door.

When Conservative politicians use a definition of who is “native” to the country that excludes people whose own ethnicity is “white British and something else”, that treats people who have been born, raised and educated in the UK as somehow not part of Britain, they are moving towards a definition of race that hasn’t been part of mainstream British politics for more than half a century. This “one drop” approach was, until very recently, considered to be beyond the pale in accepted Tory thought. It is a position that British voters, too, consider to be unthinkable. Conservative MPs who disagree with the party’s drift should speak up, and soon.

Now try this

Right. I’m off to see Jane Austen Wrecked My Life at the pictures.

However you spend it, have a wonderful weekend!

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