“There is no black on the flag, scum, march out of my country,” was the chant at football matches in the 80s directed at black players and fans. Britain is a very different place today. There is less of the old crude racism, both in the stadiums and in society. And yet the question of whether there are and should be black people in Britain – and how many – is being raised again. This time not in the form of racist chants, but in academic reports and newspaper columns.
The political scientist Matt Goodwin recently published research suggesting that “by 2063, white Britons will be a minority in the United Kingdom.” The claim is being trumpeted across the front pages of the media and debated by readers on social media. Critics have mocked Goodwin’s methodology, such as his definition of “white Britons” as people “whose parents are not immigrants” (which excludes King Charles and Nigel Farage’s children). But the panic about white Britons becoming a minority has a long history. “Whites in the UK to be a minority by 2100,” ran a headline in the Observer a quarter of a century ago. Over the past decade, dire warnings about the decline of whites have accumulated.
The irony is that the debate about whiteness and Britishness is resurfacing at a time when Britain is more liberal than ever in its views on race and identity. But as racist incidents have declined, discussions about identity have intensified. These debates have rebranded racism within the identity debate and reshaped perceptions of nation and race.
Nationalism is understood in two ways: as an embodiment of the civic or the ethnic. Civic nationalists believe that national identity derives from shared political values and institutions. Citizenship is not defined by ethnic origin. For ethnonationalists, a nation is defined by ethnicity and a shared history, language, and culture.
Despite the tendency to separate civic and ethnic concepts, most nations contain both elements in their self-understanding. But in recent years the “ethnic” component has become more prevalent, primarily due to the belief that civic models cannot bear the weight of national belonging. People are concerned about the weakening of social ties and immigration that is undermining national cohesion and turning Britain into an “island of foreigners,” as Keir Starmer recently warned. In order to strengthen the sense of nationhood, many insist on the restoration of the “indigenous” peoples of Europe, their history and culture. Hostility to the universalism of liberal elites is expressed through the celebration of ethnicity and birthplace.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a role model for many conservatives, said three years ago that countries where “European and non-European peoples live together… are no longer nations” but merely “groups of people.” Color blindness is leading us to the downfall of “Western civilization.” “The West is spiritually moving,” Orban says, “to Central Europe,” because nations there refuse “to become mixed-race populations.” His speech sparked outrage, but it is a good example of the reshaping of the concepts of race and nation.
Conservative theories of race eschew the 19th-century idea of white supremacy and draw on the views of the far right since the Second World War. Alain de Benoit, one of the founders of the French New Right (Nouvelle Droite), recognized the need to overcome the discredited arguments of biological racism in the wake of Nazism and the Holocaust. He appropriated liberal ideas of pluralism and repurposed them for racial purposes. He argued that mixing people dilutes their cultures, because the abolition of differences violates the principle of diversity. Europe should ban immigration and become the homeland of white people and white cultures by excluding and repatriating non-white people. Many of these far-right arguments have since entered the mainstream.
“By the end of the lifetimes of most people now alive,” wrote Douglas Murray in his 2017 bestseller The Strange Death of Europe, “Europe will not be Europe, and its people will have lost the only place in the world that has ever been our home.” In this narrative, White expresses feelings of pride and loss, of cultural superiority and distinctiveness, but also of sadness for a world that is disappearing.
Issues of immigration and national identity, multiculturalism and integration are all important. But framing them in terms of mourning the disappearance of white people is a kind of diversion, a racialisation of the problem to avoid any real reflection on it. Goodwin suggests that the fact that white people are becoming a minority in Britain is affecting “the symbols, culture and way of life of the traditionally majority group”. But none of this is coded by skin colour.
There is no single tradition, culture or way of life that defines Britain. The Britain imagined by the Levellers, Chartists and suffragettes is very different from the Britain imagined by Cecil Rhodes, Lord Rothermere or Enoch Powell. Some white men have shouted racist slogans at me and physically attacked me. But some have stood on the barricades with Asian women during the Granwick strike. There are Muslims who advocate for free speech and white men who demand that blasphemy be outlawed. We should not equate nations with values, let alone values with skin colour. The values that define nations are extremely important, but we are constantly questioning them and in so doing we are constantly redefining our identity. We need a debate about values, not skin colour.
(The Observer; Peščanik.net, translation: M Jovanović)
Bonus video:
