Outside the system
&

‘A Disunited Kingdom? For Younger Minorities, Britishness is an Identity We Can Work With – A Quest for Englishness Must Confront This’

Developing a stronger sense of Englishness cannot merely be looked at through a political lens – our identities are personal and multiple, conflicting and shifting, writes Hardeep Matharu

Stormzy headlines the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury Festival 2019 in a stab vest designed by street artist Banksy. Photo: JEP Live Music/Alamy

Newsletter offer

Subscribe to our newsletter for exclusive editorial emails from the Byline Times Team.

Sign up

I am a Londoner. I am the Sikh Punjabi daughter of immigrants. I am British.

My parents were born and raised in countries of the British Empire: my mother two years after partition in Delhi; and my dad in Nairobi, where he lived under British rule in one of British East Africa’s stratified societies (the whites above; the Kenyans below). ‘Great Britain’ was a country they, like many Asian immigrants, then came to; aspired to thrive in, were proud to be part of. The mother country. 

Having long explored Britain’s imperial project with my parents growing up, I have never bought into the uncritical exceptionalism of Britain’s ‘greatness’ but the acknowledgement of my Britishness is a sort of recognition of my parents’ history. And how this history was and is British history. Those times may have passed, but for some of us they haven’t. They are living legacies. More British than the British.

And it was the British National Party that had its headquarters, disguised as a bookshop and meeting room, opposite the house I grew up in south-east London, where I was born. And it was the Union flag its supporters carried when they rioted with police outside my living room window following the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence in nearby Eltham in the 1990s. 

For the generations who came before me, that flag is a terrifying symbol of the violence of far-right extremism in modern Britain: p*ki-bashing; the National Front chasing black skin. It wasn’t their flag. But their struggles, historic and continuing, made my journey easier and helped change our country. So I was frightened too: why were these rioting hooligans carrying my flag? 

And it was ‘Cool Britannia’ the tabloids talked about when New Labour came to power and Noel Gallagher went to Downing Street. And when Geri Halliwell wore the Union Jack dress at the Brit Awards.

The Spice Girls reunited years later for the London 2012 Olympic Games. It was a moment many of us felt proud, perhaps, never more British: outward; diverse; plural; confident.

And it’s good old British goodwill I think of when strangers daren’t jump the queue or pull together on a packed, packed-up train. Or when I think of the NHS and our welfare state. Decency. 

Art work/graffiti in Waterloo, London. Photo: Hardeep Matharu

But what is it, to me, to be English?