This country's alliance of tribes has always relied on amiable English compromise

Much to my surprise, I received a greetings card in the post some days ago. It wished me a happy St George's Day and was signed "John". No one came to mind. I thought it might be from Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, who had hectored Sun readers about the need for national celebrations on that day. I dismissed the idea because I have never known Trevor to have a sense of humour. It could only be some wag who had seen me on Sky News's Sunday With Adam Boulton explaining why St George's Day has not taken root here despite yearly debates on the subject.

I told the Sky viewers that England is comprised of a loose and sometimes tenuous alliance of several tribes, each deeply rooted in, if you like, its own ethnicity.

For example, there are Geordies, Scousers and Yorkshire folk who constitute the north. The south, though equally varied, is completely different. I once spent a couple of years living and working in Cornwall. I had the same problems understanding the speech as in the north.

To these divisions must be added the central one of class. It is unthinkable that the flag of St George could shelter all these, from Margaret Thatcher and her followers on the one hand to Arthur Scargill and his followers on the other.

It is hardly surprising that a unity of the tribes flowers only in opposition to the enemy. The crowds wave the flag of St George triumphantly in mock battles against West Indians in cricket, Australians in rugby, the French and Italians in football. At the end of the matches, the flags are neatly folded away for another play day. It is the looseness of the alliance that gives rise to that amiable English characteristic: the art of compromise.

England practised multiculturalism long before the arrival of blacks and Asians. It was because we, the new arrivals, were excluded from this alliance that the term multiculturalism had to be invented. Our exclusion was based on the colour of our skins and the diseased logic that goes with fear of things alien.

If blacks and Asians are to become part of the alliance, we need the complete defeat of racism. There is no question that we will shed and adjust practices - the treatment of women, for example - that we acquired elsewhere. But there has to be compromise; that is the core of the anti-racist struggle. Pandering to racism will not do, even in the face of the successes (minor ones) of the British National Party.

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