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Drummers banging out Bhangra beats. Blue-shirted, brown-skinned fans cheering and chanting, dancing and singing, from opening bell to stumps. India’s tricolour waved in all corners of the ground. Sweltering heat and humidity with the occasional driving downpour. If it wasn’t for the £5 samosas and Brummie burrs you’d be forgiven for thinking you were in Eden Gardens rather than Edgbaston. This is England 2025 in the week in which Lord Tebbit died – and proof that his infamous ‘cricket test’ turned to ashes long ago.
It was 35 years ago that the then Norman Tebbit, former Conservative Cabinet minister and Margaret Thatcher’s rottweiler, came up with his infamous ‘dog whistle’ – so long ago that 20 of the 22 players in the second Test weren’t even born – and it hasn’t stood the test of time.
In 1990, ahead of a previous India tour of England, he said that people from ethnic minorities in Britain couldn’t be truly British unless they supported the England cricket team, telling the Los Angeles Times: “A large proportion of Britain’s Asian population fail to pass the cricket test. Which side do they cheer for? It’s an interesting test. Are you still harking back to where you came from or where you are?”
More recently, he doubled-down on his ‘test’ – taking it into the realms of the absurd – asking an Asian BBC reporter during the 2019 cricket World Cup, which was being held in England, “were we to find ourselves in a war, which side would you support?”, adding that “it makes you a bit less British” if a person supports another country.
Tebbit appeared to have conveniently forgotten the 2.5 million Indians who did fight for the King and Empire in the Second World War and the 1.5 million in the first – the biggest volunteer armies in history, with hundreds of thousands of them dying for the cause.
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Fast forward to the present day and you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone of Indian heritage supporting England in the current series.
Whatever Tebbit had hoped to achieve all those years ago, to pressure or shame or force ethnic minorities into supporting England or tone down their backing for their mother land, has failed spectacularly. They still cheer for who they want, just as Brits who moved and live abroad, and their children – like the millions in the EU – haven’t changed who they support at, say, football. But then, they’re ex-pats, not immigrants. Different terms, different rules.
Speaking of football, one might also wonder why Tebbit didn’t choose that sport as the barometer of loyalty. It wouldn’t quite fit the narrative he was looking to push, given that most of us who support India at cricket cheer for England when it comes to football – watching them in finals, suffering the pain of penalties first-hand, with a side order of violence and racism to complete the experience.
Moreover, the ‘lack-of-loyalty’ trope is further undermined if one actually talks to ethnic minorities and asks them how they feel. Research by British Future – a think tank specialising in attitudes to immigration, integration, and identity – found that three-quarters of ethnic minority respondents in England felt a “strong sense of belonging” to England, while a third felt “equally British and English” when asked about how they felt about their British and English identities.
Tebbit may also have pondered why it is that so many people of Asian and Caribbean origin are in the UK. To paraphrase that immortal line of his: we’re here because our fathers didn’t riot, they got on a boat – the Empire Windrush or, as in the case of my dad, one from Bombay to Tilbury via Suez – and came here to look for work and kept looking until they found job(s), often holding down more than one, paying taxes, studying in their spare time, bringing up families, and helping to build the Britain of today. All the while suffering racism, discrimination, and abuse for their troubles.
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Supporting the team of their choice is the least they and their children should be entitled to do.
Another factor in the disinclination to support England lies in the attitudes of the ruling powers that be, with racism scandals engulfing the British game in recent years – from the Azeem Rafiq case, to the Cricket Scotland revelations which I have written about in these pages previously. There has also been a slew of sexism scandals in cricket of late.
The England and Wales Cricket Board has recently plucked players from other countries to play for England, as Peter Oborne notes in the July 2025 print edition of Byline Times, weakening those nations and the future of Test cricket.
Indeed, in just the past week, while Jofra Archer helped England to a thrilling win over India at Lord’s, the West Indies, for whose under-19s side he had played, was humiliated by Australia, skittled for 27, the second-lowest score of any side ever in the format. As Oborne observed, “it is impossible to exaggerate the arrogance, greed, selfishness, and rank stupidity of the people who have been running English cricket during the last few years”.
So here we are, 35 years on, a raucous Edgbaston, with India fans dominating even the Hollies; a majority India crowd at that most traditional of English venues, Lord’s, the home of cricket. Everyone having a fantastic time watching a spellbindingly brilliant, classic Test series. Lord Tebbit’s cricket test deeply unlamented by a large circle of celebrating supporters and players.