Mick Hartley

The UK is a country which, despite being one of the least racist countries in the world, obsesses about whether it’s racist or not. Camille Long:

How racist are we, as a country? It is a question we ask ourselves again and again. We ask it of footballers, of politicians, of actors; we ask it especially of dead people, who can’t answer. The last word on Brigitte Bardot? Nothing to do with her beauty, her iconoclasm. No: she was an “unapologetic racist”. (So British, that — she hated foreigners and didn’t even say sorry.)

We ask the question so much that I suppose it was only a matter of time before a poll confirmed that, yes, we are racist. Amid warnings about a “rising tide of ethno-nationalism” — the new stealth word for “Nazism” — The Guardian reported last week that 36 per cent of people thought it was important, in order to be British, to be “born in Britain”. You just thought: well, there it is.

Only the poll was a lie.

Quietly, later, after a day of panic, a correction was published: no one had said it was important to be “born in Britain” (the front-page headline). What they’d agreed with was it was important to be “born British”, which is different and, in my view, so vague as to mean nothing. So all the claims that the changes were “worrying”, that we are, to quote Keir Starmer, in a “fight for the soul of our country”, were lies.

If anything, the poll revealed us to be kind and tolerant. People bent over backwards to show they weren’t racist. Only 3 per cent of people believe that to be British you must be white. Yes: after Elon, Trump, Tommy, after Farage Faraging 24/7 — only 3 per cent. God, they must have been disappointed. It also presented a clear view of what they thought it meant to be British: helping the economy, raising children well, obeying our laws.

Does Starmer know this?

Starmer, by the way, has a different view of being British. He thinks it is a nothing, a light amusement, a bauble. He welcomed the Egyptian blogger Alaa Abd el-Fattah as a British citizen, in the manner of someone announcing the results of Strictly. Fattah had been a “top priority” for the Foreign Office, he gushed. He would be finally coming over here after 12 years in prison in Egypt. He clearly thought people would be overjoyed.

But they weren’t. After the rape gangs, the small boats, the sex assaults, the synagogue stabbings, the ban on the Maccabi fans; after the experiments on children, the juries debacle, the overt lying about a “black hole”, guess what. No one was in the mood to “prioritise” some random dissident windbag they’d never heard of, who it was later discovered had, before prison, said he “seriously, seriously, seriously” hated white people and loathed “Zionists” (for which read: Jews). He called us “dogs and monkeys”. His apology was nearly 600 mooing words long.

If you really want to know what being British is, it is the opposite of this. It’s not being racist or antisemitic; it’s not inciting violence. It’s valuing what it is to be part of us. Where has Fattah done that? Where has he asked, sincerely, to be part of our liberal democracy?

The supposed racism of the “white working class” is a left middle-class shibboleth, regularly boosted by the likes of the Guardian to preserve that comforting sense of superiority. Yes, the dockers marched for Enoch Powell, but that was over 50 years ago. Things have changed. Nowadays what people care about isn’t race; it’s about those who make no secret of their dislike of this country and its liberal values.

So if I were to really define what it meant to be British — to put it in one simple way — it would be: spending 90 per cent of one’s time worrying you are racist, when you’re not.