Being English is not a matter of your ancestry
This brief debate was unfortunately stopped by the chair so that we could go to the pub. But the day's discussion got huge numbers of viewers on YouTube, a longish report in The Spectator, and a rather overwrought follow-up article in The Critic magazine accusing me (along with other 'self-identifying conservatives' such as Fraser Nelson and Niall Ferguson) of being a defender of multiculturalism, and by implication of mass migration.
Frankly, I thought this was laughable, and have been joking with friends about being a Lefty. But in the present fraught climate, the issue needs to be addressed. I should explain that my intellectual sins had been to praise Katharine Birbalsingh (invariably though inadequately described as 'Britain's strictest headmistress') and to have commented that to see little girls in headscarves reciting Kipling and singing the national anthem showed that 'becoming English was possible', on the condition that it was encouraged, taught, and indeed required.
Is this 'multiculturalism'? I can't see how. Progressives would reject it as 'monoculturalism', as it involves inculcating a common English culture: poetry certainly, and also Shakespeare, the classics, history, mathematics, science, and indeed as many as possible of the educational riches that those same progressives reject as 'colonialist'.
This is a completely separate issue from mass immigration. Uncontrolled, non-selective and far beyond rational limits, it becomes economically ruinous and socially divisive. It corrupts democracy, affronts sovereignty and law, and pulverises national solidarity. I favour narrow limits and strict enforcement.
But the question of integration and eventual assimilation is no less urgent. There are now, and in the future will be, many children in England who were born elsewhere, or who are descended from a foreign-born parent. Many will have darker skin than mine. We have a very clear choice. Either we do everything possible to make them and their eventual descendants part of our nation. Or we treat them as perpetual outsiders, 'ethnic minorities' in a tribalised England.
I am speaking of England rather than Britain. Being British is primarily legal and political. Many newcomers are happy to be 'British'. But we are also English (or Welsh, Scottish or Irish), and that is a deeper kind of belonging. The United Kingdom is technically a 'state nation'. England is a 'culture nation', based on shared history, customs and emotions. Without these, the UK is an empty shell.
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