Who gets to be British?
Jeevun Sandher’s attempt to declare Matt Goodwin “not very British” reveals a shallow, ahistorical and politically convenient vision of the nation
I learned a great deal from Labour MP Jeevun Sandher last week. He published an article in the New Statesman on “British Values” headlined “Matt Goodwin isn’t very British”, and posted a video monologue on the same topic. Both the article and the video tread similar ground, in which Sandher presents his definition of Britishness and a fanciful history of this nation. In his (presumably humorous) attempt to denationalise Goodwin and advance a particular view of Britishness, Sandher has revealed how little he understands Britain and its people.
What is Britishness then, according to Sandher? He begins by telling us that Matt’s opinions are “just not British” and that Goodwin himself is “not very British”. This is a radical reshaping of what nationality is, where ancestry and birth count for nothing, and a person’s Britishness is dependent on them holding beliefs which Sandher approves of.
In order to justify this radical redefinition, Sandher twists history. In the MP’s account, “Britain is and has always been made up of different communities”, “that come together to create one nation”, and that those communities, despite having “dozens of accents” were able to “merge because we share common values”. It’s initially unclear which period of British history Sandher thinks this describes. It does match the English ethnogenesis in the post-Roman period, in which Brythonic peoples were pushed to the Western fringes of our isles in the wake of invasions by Saxons, Jutes and Angles. “Come together” is a peculiar expression which also does not describe the conquest of Ireland, nor the violence, religious and political wars of the 17th and 18th centuries after which Great Britain emerged as a unified nation.
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All becomes clear when Sandher claims Britain formed “when different migrant communities came from across the Irish Sea, from India, from across … what was a former empire” and that “those different communities came together to forge one British nation”. This would place the formation of the British nation some time after 1945, which no doubt would have surprised Churchill, Lloyd George, Palmerston, Wellington, Castlereagh, both Pitts, Robert Walpole, and monarchs as far back as Queen Anne. Indeed, according to Sandher’s account, the British nation was not forged until after the British Empire had ceased to exist.
If Britain is centuries old then it can never be the entirely inclusive proposition which Sandher wants it to be
It is impossible to make sense of this. For if Britain is centuries old then it can never be the entirely inclusive proposition which Sandher wants it to be. Instead he presents a British nation whose “modern British values… were forged when we stood together to defeat fascism in the Second World War”. Confusingly, those modern British values are not those found on the infamous Blair-era “hand”, produced in response to Islamist terrorism.
No. Sandher bypasses democracy, the rule of law, tolerance, mutual respect and individual liberty. Instead, we are told that the real British Values are “unity, decency and determination”, which he also describes as “standing together”, “treating people from different backgrounds equally and not giving up”. These values are even more anodyne than the Blairite British values, while also being even less identifiably British in their rejection of law, liberty and democracy. Sandher’s values are also particularly out of step with the actually existing British nation and it’s history. Unity has, frankly, rarely been visible amongst the squabbling and fractious peoples of these Isles, except in the myths of 1940, and claiming that a nation with such a visible class system as Britain treats “people from different backgrounds equally” is either laughable ignorance or desperate mythmaking.
In Sandher’s myth, British values were created by the peoples of the British Empire, “including over two million from India and 500,000 from Africa” who “fought together… to defeat fascism”. The Empire, in this account, saw how its people “came together to fight fascism not join the other side”. This account leaves no room for the 43,000 Indians who fought for the Japanese in the Free Indian Army, nor for the Waffen-SS Indian Legion which fought against the Allies from France all the way to Berlin.
Nevertheless, according to Sander, “we” did this in “a fundamental rejection of petty ethnonationalism”. This account of the Second World War is a perfect example of the 21st Century understanding of Nazism, not as an actually-existing historic ideology and state, but rather as a cypher for Evil, or merely anyone who rejects a particular left-liberal consensus. Thus the unique horror of the Nazi regime, its mechanisation of genocide and the barbarity it visited upon Europe are reduced to “petty ethnonationalism”, in order that Sandher can paint his political opponents as evil, and “not British”.
Having articulated his unique account of history, untroubled by such matters as facts, linear time or mere logic, Sandher then explains what Britishness really is. It turns out that “we have created a rich, intertwined British culture”. This is where Sandher comes off the rails. British culture for him is not our great playwrights, poets, authors and composers. Nor is it our scientists, explorers, visionaries and conquerors. No. All Sandher has to offer is a British culture “where 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, and so on”. We also, it turns out “come together” (that peculiar phrase again, suggesting that even Sandher knows there is some inherent reason that modern Britain might fall apart), in national moments like football tournaments, the Olympic ceremony and even royal weddings.
This Paddington Bear Nationalism is a peculiar combination of qualities which are true of almost any country, (for who doesn’t like football tournaments and hosting the Olympics?), and a list of popular stereotypes about British people. None of this is, needless to say, a nation-forming proposition. Nations are made from deep bonds of faith, ancestry and history, not a preference for curry and tea. This is where all values-based conceptions of nationhood fall short. In seeking to knit together disparate, multicultural and multiethnic communities the creators of these values can only grasp for the vapid, universal and dull.
Unfortunately for all of us, similar values-based conceptions of Britishness are everywhere in our society
No matter how laughable the idea that a nation can be built from vague “values”, there are many like Sandher who will advocate for such nonsense. The natural end-point of their beliefs is stripping Britishness from those ancestral Britons like Matt Goodwin who do not share their politics, while granting our nationality to anyone who likes football, curry and a cup of tea. Similarly, versions of British history which ignore all those centuries before 1945 are disturbingly common, with some even treating Windrush or the Human Rights Act as the point which our nation began.
Sandher’s idea of Britishness also reveals how little he understands the nation. The British traits he chose are cheap stereotypes which the average man on the street in Bogotá, Beirut or Bombay might provide. It’s surprising that Sandher, who has spent most of his life here, is unable to articulate anything deeper or more true about this nation.
All of this would be merely laughable and a little sad, were it not so sinister. This man sits in our centuries-old Parliament, and denies both our history and existence. He tells us that our nation didn’t exist before 1945, and that we were nothing before the vast waves of migration which have taken place since then. A man like this has no right to define what Britishness is.
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