At once I associate the verb "to brand" with cattle, and then with slaves

Staring at me from the front page of the Times is the headline that we, the new immigrants, are to be branded. Apparently, this mad idea fell from the lips of the Home Office minister Hazel Blears, after her much-publicised meeting with individuals from the Pakistani community in Oldham.

At once, I associate the verb "to brand" with cattle and, after a pause, with slaves. We are not animals or commodities to be branded, but human members of groupings in the process of becoming. Those who seek to impose a definition upon us are guilty of arresting this process, boxing us into ill-fitting categories such as Indian British, Caribbean British, Pakistani British and so on. Under these definitions, we can only limp around this society, deformed beings, with no past and a disturbed future.

I doubt very much whether these ill-fitting caps will be donned by the rank and file in our new communities. I recall the original brand that was imposed by our elected masters. We were "coloureds" - Caribbeans, Pakistanis, Africans and Indians alike. This was swiftly replaced by the bold and uncompromising self-definition "black", adopted by one and all. This term galvanised the communities into a fierce anti-racist struggle, which snaked its way from South Africa, through the peoples of the Caribbean and the Dalits in India, and back to the outer reaches of North America. The term "coloureds" disappeared with a whimper. Once this struggle was pacified, a novel series of official definitions appeared: Afro-Caribbean, Indo-Caribbean, Indian, Pakistani, Bengali, with mixed-race being the most offensive of them all. These shifting definitions disappear in the rush of change from within and from without. At every moment of crisis in the world, those of us who migrated from faraway places reach

out to our homelands for a tool or two in order to refashion and redefine ourselves. Caribbean folk gathered around the slogan "Black Power", borrowed from the struggles in North America.

We adapted it to suit local conditions. There is a similarity to Pakistanis and others who seek to grapple with huge difficulties by retreating into Islam and some of its more violent factions.

The only caste within immigrant groups that seeks to reshape itself almost completely in the imagined image of an elusive Britishness is the middle class: its members are easily identifiable by their clumsy and badly tailored garb. But their fixation with identity will vanish into thin air, should the working classes who lurk in suspicion beneath them act for themselves.

We are in the run-up to a new period in history, announced by the turmoil and angst of the moment. Simple definitions bellowed by simple minds may bring some comfort to a frightened autocracy, but they will have no effect on those of us who seek change from below.

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