At the 2021-22 census, there were 10.7 million people who had been born abroad. But they were not all Wera Hobhouse, née von Reden. They would have included Cliff Richard until he decamped to the Republic of Barbados. They included Boris Johnson. They included Daniel Hannan. They included Peter Hitchens. They included me.
We are all British citizens, but the thing about allowing only British citizens to vote is that Britain has never done it. Almost no other country allows any category of non-citizen to vote. In the United States, you cannot become President unless you were born there. Imagine suggesting there or in Israel that any non-citizen should have the vote. National Conservatives have picked the wrong laboratory here, where an Irish or Commonwealth citizen could in principle become Prime Minister. Is anyone still sitting in the House of Commons for an English, Scottish or Welsh seat without being a British citizen, or for a Northern Irish seat without being British or Irish? That may now be an open goal for rivals to be First Past the Post. Yet it is perfectly possible.
The Migrant Democracy Project is merely stating the obvious when it calls this country's qualifications for voting "colonial". Britain has a long, recent, and arguably ongoing imperial history. It was in the EU for two generations. It is mercantile. De Gaulle was right to call us "maritime", but not to call us "insular". Citizens of countries that were in the French Empire when he said that now have the vote in Britain as citizens of the Commonwealth. We already enfranchise the Commonwealth citizens of Rwanda, Mozambique, Gabon and Togo, none of which was ever in the British Empire. Why let a Gabonese or a Togolese vote, but not an American or an Israeli?
Extending suffrage to citizens of countries with which we had a connection is so British that it is positively Burkean, like the National Health Service. And Britain is now globally noted for its superdiversity, a so far unique combination of having people from every inhabited territory on Earth, of having some level of ethnic diversity down to every neighbourhood and village, and of having a huge and exponentially increasing mixed-race population in the society that accepted mixed-race people and couples more than anywhere else. So, since there would seem to be no remaining example to the contrary, require parliamentary candidates to be British citizens in Great Britain, or British or Irish citizens in Northern Ireland. But let everyone vote.
It would do wonders for re-Christianising our polity.
ReplyDeleteOr Christianising it from scratch, indeed.
Delete"De Gaulle was right to call us "maritime", but not to call us "insular". "
ReplyDeleteNo, he was right to call us that too. It's one of the great paradoxes that despite being a maritime trading nation with a large overseas empire, we were still defiantly insular. As George Orwell observed: "In all countries the poor are more national than the rich, but the English working class are outstanding in their abhorrence of foreign habits. Even when they are obliged to live abroad for years they refuse either to accustom themselves to foreign food or to learn foreign languages. Nearly every Englishman of working-class origin considers it effeminate to pronounce a foreign word correctly.
During the war of 1914-18 the English working class were in contact with foreigners to an extent that is rarely possible. The sole result was that they brought back a hatred of all Europeans, except the Germans, whose courage they admired. In four years on French soil they did not even acquire a liking for wine."
They have now, of course.
DeleteAnd Britain probably now has the most diverse food culture on earth.
The insularity of the English, particularly the working class, is one of the first things my Irish parents remarked upon when they emigrated here. Even on a foreign holiday, English tourists are known for eating and drinking the same things they do at home from kebabs to beer, hanging out with other Brits, often spending most of the time hanging out with other English and never even attempting to speak the local language.
ReplyDeleteOrwell, neatly summarised the insularity and mild xenophobia of the English working class thus: "Nearly every Englishman of working-class origin considers it effeminate to pronounce a foreign word correctly.... In four years on French soil, the English never even acquired a liking for wine."
Kebabs, of course, are not originally English. Fish and chips is East End fusion food, Jewish and Huguenot. And so on.
DeleteOrwell has been dead a long time, and even when he was alive, then he was largely writing (beautifully, but even so) for effect, or to order financially, or both.
Pretty much the same is true now as when Orwell was around. The English still have the worst foreign language skills in Europe (61% of us still don't speak a foreign language well enough to hold a conversation: https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/documents/1848/Born-Global-British-Cohort-Study-Analysis-Full-Report.pdf
ReplyDeleteOf course, globalisation has diversified our food but we're still pretty insular and it's particularly apparent in the way British tourists never really mix with the locals, try to learn their culture or speak their language even when they travel. Our tourists are probably the most hated in the world for their behaviour; only the Americans are close.
Anyone who works internationally knows that there is a nasty side to the British, of complaining too much (the opposite of the comforting national stereotype) and of belittling other people.
DeleteBut Orwell is overrated. He was invoked endlessly by proponents of the Iraq War, and in their own terms they were right about him. The 1954 animated adaptation of Animal Farm was funded by the CIA, and both that book and Nineteen Eighty-Four are still force-fed to teenagers.
As he said, our insularity isn't really hateful, it is merely a preference for our own peculiar habits, customs and way of life (one that is sadly dying out).
ReplyDeleteBut Orwell can hardly help the fact other people misused his work to justify a war decades after he died. They invoked him by drawing ludicrous parallels with World War Two, which is what everyone does when they want to justify a new war.
Orwell is good. He is important. But he is still overrated. Not least, his depiction of Wigan is still resented in the town to this day. His famous remark about the goosestep was just plain wrong, like many of his others. And everyone should read Scott Lucas's The Betrayal of Dissent, London: Pluto Press, 2004, ISBN 0-7453-2197-6.
DeleteHe died a few days later but at the 2021 census the population born abroad included the monarch's husband, father of the present monarch.
ReplyDeleteAs it always does when it is on the rise, the resurgent Far Right has revived its own ancient muttering against the Royal Family's foreign background.
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