As this suggests, Britain is changing fast—off the football pitch as well as on it. Having absorbed the end of empire and the collapse of its industrial base, Britain is now facing new pressures. Chief among them is the greatest wave of immigration in British history: in 2004 and 2005 alone, more than 600,000 immigrants poured into the country, mostly from Eastern Europe, increasing Britain’s population by a full 1 percent. Equally important is a growing concern, verging on dread, that terrorism has rooted in and is being nurtured on British soil.
For these reasons, the so-called Britishness debate, once confined to think tanks and the chattering classes, has gone public. The new prime minister, Gordon Brown, has put the debate at the heart of his agenda. While it would be folly to try to impose a definition on the British public, Brown is hoping to at least clear a path in that direction—enabling Britons to come to terms with the big changes of the last few decades and find a new sense of themselves by, among other things, augmenting the teaching of British history in schools and teaching citizenship in Britain’s 1,000 madrassas. The pillars on which British identity once rested are either gone or have been weakened: the empire, the great industries, the monarchy, the Church of England. Even the English language suffers in its birthplace: it may rule the world, but according to a Home Office study, only 26 percent of the 1.3 million British residents of Pakistani and Bangladeshi descent are fluent in it.
For better and worse, globalization and immigration have rendered Britain virtually unrecognizable over the last decade. London’s financial district now rivals Wall Street as the world capital of finance. At the same time, every second child in London is now born to an immigrant mother. Most of these profound changes to Britain’s character have been patently or at least arguably beneficial, but they can be unsettling nonetheless. Even before Brown took over from Tony Blair five weeks ago, he began to lay the groundwork for the Britishness agenda he’s now putting in practice. Last year, prepping for his new job, he proposed a day of national celebration like the Fourth of July in the United States and, conjuring up a dewy-eyed vision of the Stars and Stripes “in every garden” in America, called for Britons to similarly embrace the Union Jack, which in recent decades has been overshadowed by regional symbols like England’s red-and-white St. George’s Cross. He sought something broader, more concrete and more fundamental, too—a redefinition of Britishness itself around such values as tolerance and fair play. As he said at the time: “We have to be clearer now about how diverse cultures, which inevitably contain differences, can find the essential common purpose … without which no society can flourish.”
A week into his administration, Brown announced a series of important reforms. Striving to banish the much-criticized “presidentialism” of Blair’s Downing Street-centric governing style and restore broad popular support for the ancient cornerstones of British governance, he proclaimed the transfer of certain powers from the executive to the Parliament, such as declaring war and making key public appointments. He also raised the prospect of even more dramatic reforms to Britain’s unwritten constitution, making explicit what is now implicit, by constructing a “Bill of Rights and Duties” and possibly even a full-fledged written constitution. “As we focus on the challenges we face and what unites us and integrates our country,” he told Parliament, “our starting point should be to discuss together and then—as other countries do—agree and set down the values, founded in liberty, which define our citizenship and help define our country.”
Brown’s historic proposals went largely unnoticed by the outside world, thanks to another story erupting at the same time: the attempted terror attacks in London and Glasgow. The plots, allegedly planned by immigrant doctors and medical technicians working for the National Health Service, were a stark reminder of the divisions that run through British society and can be exploited by foreign or homegrown radicals. It was such terror, at home and abroad, that proved to be the undoing of Blair’s own attempts to give Britons a new sense of identity. Following his “new dawn” electoral triumph in 1997, he made a conscious effort to turn away from the past and toward a “new Britain.” It worked—but not for long. The first shocks came during the so-called Summer of Violence, in 2001, when the country’s bloodiest race riots in 15 years tore through the old mill towns of Oldham, Bradford and Burnley in the postindustrial north, injuring several hundred people. Official inquiries into why the disturbances occurred showed that, despite the prosperity of the 1990s, British society remained deeply divided along ethnic and class lines. The country had long prided itself on its laissez-faire multicultural approach to immigration (bolstered by a generous welfare state), reckoning it was preferable to the assimilationist strategies of the French or the Americans. The summer of 2001 rattled those assumptions.
Then came July 7, 2005. In the aftermath of the attacks on the London transport system, Britons learned that three of the suicide bombers had been born in Britain and the fourth had come to the country as a child. Perhaps even more unnerving was a videotape aired by Al-Jazeera two months later. On it, one of the attackers—Mohammed Siddique Khan, a 30-year-old primary-school “learning mentor” born in Leeds—addressed the nation in Yorkshire-accented English. “I and thousands like me are forsaking everything for what we believe,” he says. “Until you stop the bombing, gassing, imprisonment and torture of my people, we will not stop this fight. We are at war and I am a soldier. Now you too will taste the reality of this situation.”
In a seminal and controversial speech later that month, Trevor Phillips, a black politician who at the time headed the Commission for Racial Equality, perfectly captured the eerie moment in British history. Just a day before 7/7, London, projecting itself, in Phillips’s words, as “a beacon for diversity across the globe,” had won its bid to host the 2012 Olympics. Suddenly, after the bombings, “we, here, watching, could not imagine British people behaving like this,” he said. “Really?” he added in mock surprise. He challenged the " ‘anything goes’ multiculturalism" that discouraged integration to the detriment of “the common culture”: “The aftermath of 7/7 forces us to assess where we are. And here is where I think we are: we are sleepwalking to segregation. We are becoming strangers to each other.”
Since then, what was once desirable—to give Britons a sense of shared identity—has become an imperative championed by virtually all sectors of British society. As a Scot, Brown has his own political reasons to promote Britishness in a country where 90 percent of the electorate lives in England. If Brown’s promotion of Britishness is less than controversial, that’s because the quest for what he calls a “shared national purpose” is supported by all of Britain’s political elites, regardless of party. Britain is a “shared home,” David Cameron, leader of the Conservative opposition, has said. “We need to build that home together. We need to reassert faith in our shared British values which help guarantee stability, tolerance and civility.” In the Britishness debate, Cameron will not be taking any cheap shots at Brown. It wouldn’t be cricket.
