The report was going to argue that “British” had become a racist word, one newspaper claimed. Another suggested Parekh and his colleagues would go as far as to declare that it was now racist to call someone British.
The coverage left the famously media-focused New Labour government reeling. Ministers were already concerned about the growing appeal of the far-right British National Party, whose hard-line critique of the government’s immigration policies appeared to be gaining traction in Labour heartlands.
At the last minute, panicked by the bad press, Straw ripped up his plans to welcome Parekh’s Report. Instead, he all but disowned it.
At a packed launch in central London on 11 October 2000, Straw openly rejected the commission’s stance on Britishness. “I am proud to be British”, Straw emphasised to a scrum of journalists and photographers. “I am proud of what I believe to be the best of British values.”
The Parekh Report was effectively dead on arrival.
There was just one problem. The report did not contain the views on Britishness that the press claimed it did.
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What the report actually said was that British identity had “racial”, rather than racist, connotations. These were not explicit, the commissioners emphasised. Indeed, most of the time they were left unspoken. But in their view, there remained a widely held assumption in Britain that being British meant being white.
This would certainly have rung true for people from ethnic minority backgrounds.
The mixed-race journalist Afua Hirsch, for example – who grew up in London in the 1990s – has written powerfully about the potency of being asked the question, “where are you from?”
Hirsch found that whether her answer was Wimbledon, London or Britain, because of the colour of her skin there was nearly always a follow-up question: “But where are you really from?”
Today, we live in a world where a man playing in a park with his grandchildren can be falsely accused of being a paedophile simply because the man is black and his grandchildren are white.
Today’s Labour ministers have tried to respond to this climate by clinging to the Union Jack – literally.
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At the Labour Party Conference last week, following a summer during which flags have been erected all over the country as part of a campaign of intimidation against immigrants and asylum seekers – the prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, urged people fly their flags with pride.
“I will never doubt British values,” Starmer declared, echoing Jack Straw a quarter of a century earlier. “With the flag in our hand, we will renew this country.”
What a shame that the manufactured backlash against the Parekh Report in 2000 was allowed to obscure the bigger point the commission was trying to make. Rather than something fixed and unchanging, Parekh and his colleagues emphasised, “Britishness” should instead be thought about as an active, constantly evolving identity.
Successive generations of immigrants – many of whom arrived as British colonial subjects, at the invitation of the post-war Labour government – had over a period of decades put down roots in Britain. As they did so, the commissioners noted, their cultures had emerged as everyday features of Britain’s social fabric.
Rather than shy away from this fact, the Parekh Report argued, the government should instead lean into it. They called on ministers to formally declare Britain a multicultural society. This would be much more effective in opposing the far-right, they suggested, than the well-worn tactic of attempting to mimic the far-right’s language and policies.
In the intervening 25 years, British diversity has become ever more commonplace, even as the far-right’s influence on mainstream politics has also continued to grow. In 2015, for example, 28% of all babies born in England and Wales had a foreign-born mother. By 2021, more than a third of the population of Britain had parents or grandparents born outside the UK.
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What it means to be British today is so much more diverse, complicated and, at times, messy than the simple act of waving a flag. But surely it is more interesting, and better, as a result.
Perhaps it is time for a new commission on the future of multicultural Britain, a quarter of a century after the last one, to chart a route through our present malaise. This time, though, the government will need the courage to listen more carefully. After all, is national pride in our diversity really such a difficult political project?
Kieran Connell is a historian at Queen’s University Belfast. His most recent book, Multicultural Britain: A People’s History (2024), has been shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize.
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