Matt Goodwin isn’t very British

Britain’s finest hour was a fundamental rejection of petty ethnonationalism. Reform should remember that

Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

For Matt Goodwin, Reform’s candidate in the upcoming Gorton and Denton by-election, having great-grandparents born in the right place is what really makes you British. Goodwin believes that when people are “unable to trace their lineage on these islands back more than one generation or two; they will have no deep roots in our national culture, collective memory, shared history, identity, and way of life”. He warns darkly of a “demographic crisis” and the decline of “white Britons”. He has repeatedly argued that those born abroad and their children are not really British. Goodwin’s views are not only wrong. They are also just not British.

At the most basic level, the British people simply disagree with him. Just 6 per cent of white Brits believe you can only be British if you are white (or are “Christian/have Christian heritage”). We are one of the least racist nations on Earth.

Britishness is about so much more than race. It is founded in our shared values, how our different communities can come together, and the intertwined culture that comes out of it. The UK has always housed different communities that come together to create one nation, and it has never looked or sounded the same. We have historically been home to at least five languages and dozens of dialects. If you travel ten minutes south of my constituency of Loughborough, “ah” becomes “aar”. If you travel ten minutes north, you’re at risk of being called “me duck”.

Our history is one of different groups coming to the UK and building the nation we see today. In the 1840s, hundreds of thousands of migrants arrived across the Irish Sea, bringing religion and accent with them. They helped revive Roman Catholicism. Over a century later, my own parents came from India to help build the modern United Kingdom.

Britishness is not about homogeneous communities that look or sound the same. We all belong to different, overlapping communities. I can go to the gurdwara (my Sikh community) in the morning and to the pub (my lads community) in the evening. They aren’t the same community, but they overlap through me.

Beyond this, we all come together in national moments like football tournaments, the Olympic ceremony and (I’m told) royal weddings. We have created a rich, intertwined British culture. A culture in which we take the piss out of each other down the pub, go for a curry, have a quiet cup of tea when things go bad, hold the door open for others, queue politely, and so on.

Our different communities can merge because we share common values. Our modern British values of unity, decency and determination were forged when we stood together to defeat fascism in the Second World War. Soldiers from across the British empire, born in different places (including more than two million from India and 500,000 from Africa), sounded and looked different to one another but fought together. What mattered was our values of standing together, treating people from different backgrounds equally and not giving up.

Those are the values we stood for. But we also stood against a set of abhorrent values. Britain’s finest hour was a fundamental rejection of petty ethnonationalism.

To speak, as Goodwin does, of non-whites without centuries of ancestry being unable to understand our national culture implies that it is somehow biologically transmitted. This is obviously untrue – having grandparents or parents born outside the UK does not mean one cannot become part of our national culture.

Goodwin is also implying that our culture has not and should not change. He is wrong on both counts. A national culture is not something set in stone, preserved pristinely for future generations, and handed down like a precious heirloom. It is what we collectively create every day. Culture evolves. After all, we only really started to drink that quiet cup of tea in the 1700s.

I am proud to be British. I am proud of our Britishness that is found in our shared values, our diverse communities and our evolving culture. Britishness is not written in our DNA. Matt Goodwin doesn’t get this. And that’s why he isn’t really very British at all.

[Further reading: Matt Goodwin is going native]