The patriotic predicament, British style

This is about the sheer futility involved in the attempts at developing a new, as it were, minority-led, ‘progressive’ and ‘alternative’ yet still grand-national British patriotic predicament by the very ‘secular’, ‘liberal’, ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘unprejudiced’ representatives of the British ethnic minorities themselves (Afro-Caribbean, Muslim…). The clip below offers a possible way of linking the particular and the universal. 

Despite periodical and well-publicised xenophobic outbursts, ideal(ist) discursive fantasies fueled by the promise of a frictionless and harmoniously integrated (multicultural) society have underpinned, at least until recently, a gracious desire on the part of the dominant indigenous ethnic majority population in Britain to positively engage with the different other; – leaving aside, that is to say, the almost invariably tokenistic nature of such engagement: Yes to experiencing the authentic Tikka Massala in Brick Lane, East London; No to barbarian blood spilling rituals as goats’ throats are slit in the back streets of Birmingham, let alone forced marriages…

As things stand, however, it could also be argued that this dual approach of the civilised and cultivated metropolitan towards the subordinate ethnic culture of the other is increasingly irrelevant nowadays. Needless to say, customary cultural procedures and practices will still dictate that praising – and consuming- the enigmatic, the exotic and the mysterious in the primitive other will always be kind of right on, to put it in cool, colloquial American idiom. But (and this is far from a mere rhetoric opening to a disjunctive clause) as you may recall the rules of the game changed a few years ago on the waking of the London bombings. In a context, therefore, in which the hitherto distant global war on terrorism finally hit home with the vengeance of the bombers speaking a ‘perfect’ south Yorkshire dialect, new answers had to be found to confront the new intercultural conundrums that must be faced. New answers that certainly leave aside the superfluous question of knowing whether it was ever possible though to speak a ‘dialect’ in a perfect way, and which require instead a far more urgent modification in the traditional three-course menu that authentic locals in Britain speaking a perfectly understandable and accent-less received pronunciation language offer now on a take it o leave it basis: for starters, a standard bureaucratic rebuke on health and safety grounds; as a main course, a warm appeal to embrace the superior moral standing of our way of life (human rights, gender equality, democracy and freedom…); and finally, yet most importantly, a newly devised dessert where the sweet discourse of civil liberties is heavily supplemented with, if not replaced altogether with the increasingly sour emergency discourse and ideology of national security.

As the emergency discourse and ideology of national security hovers around all aspects of our public and private lives, a crucial condition no critic should forget when engaging in cultural debates, Britishness is now the only possible meaningful cultural container and British national identity the only political horizon remaining which forever defines what the highest form of self-identification one can find. In this respect Left-wing cult popular singer Billy Bragg’s , attempt to “reconcile patriotism with the radical tradition” in his The Progressive Patriot (2006) gave us a clear indication, for instance, of the new major neo-nationalist repositioning that is taking place in Britain. A progressive neo-nationalist repositioning from which it is allegedly possible not only to overcome traditional, Conservative Middle England politics, but also to challenge the re-emergence of the xenophobic BNP together with the threat of religous aka. Muslim fundamentalism.

In addition, British Minority Ethnics  such as Trebor Phillips and Tariq Morood, to all intents and purposes of self-definition and self-portrayal, both progressive liberals and / or centre-left thinkers, are always quite adamant in pointing us towards such a forced choice: to choose, that is to say, between British national identity or nothing else; or do we instead, as Morood does not fail to ask in his Remaking Multiculturalism After 7/7, although with a certain amount of ironic disdain…

…just take the view that if inspiring and meaning-conferring identities can be found elsewhere – in some internationalist movement- that’s just fine and if that’s at the expense of your country and its citizens, well they don’t really matter all that much in the ultimate scheme of significance? (6)

As so it should be, however, the straightforward answer to this intelligent question is a very admittedly un-pragmatic and indeed silly: yes, I do take the view that inspiring and meaning-conferring identities can only be found in some unconditionally un-attainable internationalist universalism. Moreover, it is the very impossibility of a truly universalistic politics that transcends national, sexual, religious… identities and determinations which should function, nevertheless, as a central structuring point of reference. After all when from the Commission for Racial Equality Trebor Phillips said that “[I]n recent years we’ve focused far too much on the ‘multi’ and not enough on the common culture”, what is however the main kernel of such a common culture: that (1) we, foreigners and ‘minority ethnics’ aspire to conform to the dominant British way of life, now ever so idiosyncratically defined by pragmatic and utilitarian concerns as to their fate having been left in the hands of greedy irresponsible bankers, or that (2) we are bound together on our own subordinate marginality, which I am sure also extends to a total lack of worry regarding our nonexistent saving accounts?