Is 'Britishness' getting stronger or weaker? What do idealised portrayals of Britishness in fiction, and the establishment of multicultural communities in Britain, mean for Britishness now?
This teahouse took place in the context of the exhibition, Life on Mars, at Stockport Art Gallery. The exhibition looks at the way that Sam, the 2006 television series’ protagonist, ‘experiences a total culture-shock as he grapples with his new reality – a different time and a different place where the values that define who he is are continually challenged’. With this in mind, and with the help of guest speaker Louis Kushnick of The University of Manchester’s Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Relations Resourse Centre.
Lou offered a contextualisation of ‘Britishness’ through historical and personal reference. He introduced himself and the Ahmed Iqubal Ullah Race Relations Resource Centre by describing how he came to live in Manchester from America in 1963, and telling us why he now considers himself as British rather than American. Lou explained how, shortly after he had moved to Britain in 1967, a document was produced by the British government which argued that Britain did not have institutional racism. It reasoning included: that we had not had slavery in Britain itself; that there were insufficient black people in Britain for institutional racism to be possible; and that ‘the British’ are law-abiding people. Clearly, there was good reason to doubt these claims and Lou offered the example that there were specific barriers of access to council properties for black people.
Chairperson Kooj Chuhan asked, “So, what myths about Britain were in progress at the time?” Lou referred to Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech, to which Lou was the first to publicly respond. What this amounted to, Lou suggested, was race-based identity politics. Enoch Powell’s speech referred to ‘them’ and ‘us’, but considered their attitude liberal because they offered to support people who didn’t like national policy by saying that if they wanted to go ‘home’ they would give them money from social security to go. However, as Lou pointed out, people had been invited to Britain following the Second World War when the price of labour had been pushed up for a number of economic factors (including the loss of men in battle).
The subsequent economic situation, where two groups offering labour existed side by side looking for the same jobs, meant that one group could be played off against the other. A similar ‘divide and rule’ methodology was played out outside of Britain. Ex-slaves, now reliant on the land of the plantations to make a living, became the ‘other’ to the existing white labour population. Having said that black people were suitable for enslavement, the implied message was that the poor white working class could define themselves as ‘better than that’, believing themselves to be superior to at least one other social group. It was no coincidence that as the price of cotton fell (placing heightened economic burden on the white labour force) the number of lynches went up. So it could be said that external forces had come into play in the forming of identities.
Kooj asked, “When was this idea of ‘race’ concretised/institutionalised?” Kooj raised the idea that during the 19th century, the British Raj sent out the message of two kinds of Britishness: one for white people and one for slaves.
A member of the public attending the discussion asked, “But what does this have to do with Britishness?” Lou responded that if Gordon Brown says that we should be proud to be British today then we should first address our history of being British.
Lou went on to talk about the notion of Christianity and Britishness, referring back to a point he’d made earlier that it was illegal for a slave to raise their hand to ‘any Christian, white person’. Olaudah Equiano (also know as Gustavus Vassa and the most prominent person of African heritage involved in the British debate for the abolition of the slave trade) asked of slavery, “How can we believe that god would let one race of people have power over another?” The only way that white Christian people could respond to this was to say that black people were not human, and therefore that what applied to them did not apply to black people.
The speaker from the audience asked, again, “But what does it mean to be British today? Is it our shared language, for example? What about people that speak English in America or Pakistan? What about people who live in the UK but do not speak English? Does it matter when we are all part of humanity?” Perhaps, it was suggested, there are a number of different versions of Britishness. Perhaps the definition of Britishness is that it is a concept containing many interpretations.
We went on to discuss, “Is it even important to have a concept of Britishness and who has the right to define what Britishness is?” The point was raised that one person cannot speak for a group of people, even if they feel they are representative of ‘their’ group. This further strengthened the argument that Britishness can perhaps only be defined on an individual or personal basis.
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