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28 December 2012updated 12 Oct 2023 10:12am

2012 in review: The New Statesman on… identity

From the new patriotism to Ed Miliband's Jewish heritage, the best NS writing on identity.

By George Eaton

Welcome to the fifth instalment of the New Statesman’s 12 Days of Blog-mas. (Yesterday’s round up, of our best writing on the media, is here.) 

After a year in which the Olympics revived the debate around patriotism and Britishness, today’s theme is identity. Here are a selection of our best pieces – click the headlines to open them in a new window.

The Olympics changed what it means to be a winner

A week after the opening of the Olympics and in the wake of the euphoria that greeted Mo Farah’s first victory, the author and former England cricketer Ed Smith asked what the Games told us about modern Britain. Arguing that our vision of “a champion” was no longer defined by Thatcherite notions of “aggressive individualism”, Smith held out the possibility that the Olympics could provide a basis for national renewal. 

The Olympics, however, is no longer really a sports tournament. Sport provides the surface and the pretext; the real point is the opportunity to reboot a city, perhaps even a country.

Olympics sceptics once used that fact as a criticism: look how detached the Games have become from sport, they complained. Yet if the Olympics aren’t about sport, the logic follows that Britain must have succeeded at something much more important. Perhaps we can’t yet be sure exactly what that is. But the prospect of finding out is thrilling.

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Ed Miliband: the patriotism of a refugee

In a piece for our special issue in May on the British Jewish experience, Ed Miliband reflected on how his Jewish heritage helped shape his political beliefs.

Above all, what I see in so many parts of the Jewish community is a desire to leave the world a better place than you found it. Whatever people’s politics, that is so familiar from the upbringing my parents gave me.

I was not indoctrinated with Marxism. Nor was I brought up with religion. But I was given a sense that the world could be a better, fairer and different place. And we all have a duty in our own way and our own time to seek to make it so. 

Tale of a city: From hell to hipsville

A lifelong east Londoner, Bim Adewunmi explored how Hackeny, the borough that her mother warned her never to go to unaccompanied, became a playground for hipsters. 

There are still the distinctive Caribbean and African accents I remember but there are lots of younger Home Counties ones, too: it’s no coincidence that the Office for National Statistics reported an increase in Hackney’s white population between 2001 and 2007. Hackney is a very young London borough – second only to Newham – and it shows. Come Christmas, the streets empty as the non-natives go back to their parental homes for the break. They leave behind all her old people; and the lifelong Hackneyites come out to play.

“Plastic Brits” – and the Mail’s struggle to decide who isn’t British

Back in March, after the Daily Mail took to describing some foreign-born British athletes as “plastic Brits”, British Future director Sunder Katwala probed the inconsistencies in the paper’s approach. His prediction that the crowds at the Olympic stadium would “cheer for every athlete representing Team GB” proved prophetic.

If Team GB is only nine-tenths British-born, that team meeting will look like Britain itself.

Twelve per cent of people in Britain today are foreign-born. Because that percentage is twice as high in London, the Olympic host city, the team of Olympic volunteers will probably have more multinational roots than Team GB. As a newspaper that celebrates patriotism and integration, the Mail could celebrate that 70 per cent of those born abroad feel a strong sense of belonging to Britain, even slightly outscoring those born in this country (66 per cent), as a State of the Nation poll found.

They don’t think they are Plastic Brits; instead, they fly their flags with pride.

The NS Profile: Tim Soutphommasane

In May, Ed Miliband transferred responsibility for Labour’s policy review to Jon Cruddas, who has since invited a range of international thinkers to address the party on the subject of national identity. One of those was an Australian political philosopher, Tim Soutphommasane, whom I profiled for the NS in August. His call for Labour to develop a “nation-building story” and to “reclaim patriotism” from the right was a key influence on Miliband’s “one nation” speech to the Labour conference. 

In Soutphommasane’s view, Ed Miliband could yet succeed where his Australian counterparts failed and develop a convincing “nation-building story”. “The task of rebuilding and reshaping the British economy after the financial crisis and after austerity is something that could be a patriotic project,” he says.

In 1945, Clement Attlee campaigned on the promise of building a “new Jerusalem” in postwar Britain. Nearly 70 years later, a patriotic vow to “rebuild Britain” has the potential once again to sweep Labour to power.

Girls with toy guns and boys with doll’s houses – what on earth is the problem?

After Swedish toy chain Top Toy produced a gender-reversed toy catalogue, Glosswitch explored the controversy and fear that the subject provokes. 

I don’t have particularly strict ideas about which toys my children should or shouldn’t play with, although I prefer it if said things are one, cheap and two, not mind-numbingly boring. I buy some things which are deemed to be for boys and some things which aren’t. This shouldn’t be a big deal, yet it is. Giving your children gifts that transgress “accepted” gender boundaries can be surprisingly controversial. Even so, those who object the most tend to be the same people who’ll tell you “but they’re only toys!” the minute you point out how rubbish the gender stereotyping that goes into all the advertising can be.

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