13
ISSUES: Citizenship
Chapter 1: Citizenship in the UK
Multiculturalism can foster a new kind of
Englishness
An article from
The Conversation
.
By Tariq Modood, Professor of Sociology, Politics and Public Policy and Founding Director of the
Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship, University of Bristol
T
o many, multiculturalism as a
political idea in Britain suffered
a body blow in 2001. In the
shock of 9/11 terrorism and after race
riots in some northern English towns,
many forecast that its days were
numbered. If these blows were not
fatal, multiculturalism was then surely
believed to have been killed off by
the 7/7 attacks in London in 2005 and
the terrorism and hawkish response
to it that followed. But this is far too
simplistic.
And today, a multicultural identity
among some ethnic minorities could
help to create more of a sense of
‘British identity’ among the English.
Multiculturalism in Britain grew out
of an initial commitment to racial
equality in the 1960s and 1970s into
one of positive self-definition for
minorities. One of the most significant
pivots in this transition was
The Satanic
Verses
affair of 1988–89, following
the fatwa against its author Salman
Rushdie, which mobilised Muslim
identity in a way that ultimately
grew to overshadow much other
multiculturalist and anti-racist politics.
It is significant that multiculturalism
in Britain has long had this bottom-
up character, unlike say Canada
and Australia, where the federal
government has been the key initiator.
The Labour legacy
Nevertheless,
anti-racism
and
multiculturalism
in
Britain
still
required
governmental
support
and commitment. The first New
Labour term between 1997 and
2001 has probably been the most
multiculturalist national government
in Britain – or indeed Europe.
Its initiatives included the funding
of Muslim and other faith schools,
the MacPherson Inquiry into
institutional racism in the London
Metropolitan Police and the Race
Relations (Amendment) Act 2000,
which strengthened previous equality
legislation. This agenda continued to
some extent in the second and third
New Labour Governments, primarily
with the extension of religious equality
in law.
Yet, after 2001, and especially after the
2005 London bombings, there were
significant departures from the earlier
multiculturalism. But it is inaccurate
to understand those developments as
the end of multiculturalism. They mark
its ‘rebalancing’ in order to give due
emphasis to what we have in common
as well as respect for difference.
At a local level, this consisted of
programmes of community cohesion.
This was premised on the idea of plural
communities but was designed to
cultivate interaction and co-operation,
both at the micro level of people’s lives
and at the level of towns, cities and
local government.
At a macro level, it consisted of
emphasising
national
citizenship.
Not in an anti-multiculturalist way
as in France – where difference is
regarded as unrepublican – but as
a way of bringing the plurality into
a better relationship with its parts.
Definitions of Britishness offered
under new Labour, for example, in the
2003 Crick report, emphasised that
modern Britain was a multi-national,
multicultural society, that there were
many ways of being British and these
were changing. As ethnic minorities
became more woven into the life of
the country they were redefining what
it meant to be British.
The idea that an emphasis on
citizenship or Britishness was a
substitute for multiculturalism is quite
misleading. The 2000 report of the
Commission on the Future of Multi-
Ethnic Britain – known as the Parekh
Report, after its chair the Labour
peer, Bhikhu Parekh – made national
identity and “re-telling the national
story”, central to its understanding of
equality, diversity and cohesion. It was
the first public document to advocate
the idea of citizenship ceremonies,
arguing that citizenship and especially
the acquisition of citizenship through
naturalisation was – in contrast to
countries like the US and Canada –
undervalued in Britain.
Questions of Englishness
Yet over the last couple of decades a
new set of challenges have become
apparent, initially in Scotland but
increasingly throughout the UK. In
none of the nations of the union
does the majority of the population
consider themselves British, without
also considering themselves English,
Welsh, Scottish or Northern Irish first.
The 2011 census is not a detailed study
of identity but it is striking that 70%
of the people of England ticked the
‘English’ box and the vast majority
of them did not also tick the ‘British’
box, even though they were invited
to tick more than one. This was much
more the case with white people than
non-whites, who were more likely to
be “British” only or combined with
English. Multiculturalism, then, may
actually have succeeded in fostering
a British national identity among the
ethnic minorities.
Multiculturalism in this case, then,
offers not only the plea that English
national consciousness should be
developed in a context of a broad,
differentiated British identity. But also,
ethnic minorities can be seen as an
important bridging group between
those who think of themselves as
only English, and those who consider
themselves English and British.
Paradoxically, a supposedly out-
of-date
political
multiculturalism
becomes a source of how to think
about not just integration of minorities
but about how to conceive of our
