The typical peace and tranquility of Twitter was disturbed last week by a review of a book published eight years ago. That the review also seemed to be an attempt to “cancel” a writer online based on allusions of racism seemed quaintly appropriate for a book that came out in 2016. 

Journalist Joshi Herrmann took to the pages of The Londoner to tear into Ben Judah’s This is London, which he held to be libel against the nation’s capital — an offence rendered all the more grievous, and more relevant, due to the author’s current appointment as chief advisor to the Foreign Secretary David Lammy. 

Herrmann seemed to feel vindicated by the fact that it was the online right who rode to Judah’s defence, rather than the author’s own left-liberal milieu or supporters of the Labour government which he now serves. Indeed, a lot of what Judah wrote does appear to sit uncomfortably with the mores of today’s progressive Britain, and I suspect that a lot of Judah’s natural admirers will have tended to agree with Herrmann’s critique. 

But it’s worth taking a closer look at why it’s come to be the right who would defend a book that offers a gritty examination of the most marginalised elements of our capital city, rather than the progressives who would typically prize such perspectives. Judah’s going undercover to live among recently arrived migrants in bleak and precarious conditions would seem to put him in the tradition of Orwell’s earlier works. But the reaction from Herrmann and others on the left seems to be bafflement that anybody might be interested in such people, and suspicion at the author’s motives for exposing the world in which they live and work. And Judah’s blunt renderings of the interactions he experienced, and his sometimes graphic visual imagery and physical descriptions of his subjects, has sent his progressive critics lurching for the smelling salts. 

For all they like to talk about the “enrichment” that diversity brings, pro-immigration liberalism in Britain often insists on a studied lack of curiosity or observancy about either the individuals or their cultures; or the new cultures that emerge as they mix in our cities. They seem wedded to a comfortable narrative that any conflict or chauvinism around immigrants and their status in Britain is a clean dichotomy between immigrants (and their supporters) and domestic reactionaries. The fact that Judah documents animosity between immigrants and their descendants upsets this apple cart. 

But one really would need to live an extraordinarily sheltered existence in contemporary London to be surprised that different diaspora groups found themselves in conflict occasionally. For example, Herrmann is incredulous that Romanians might have adopted offensive English slurs for people of Pakistani origin.  

It’s possible that somebody might be unaware of the prominent role that a small number of Pakistani landlords have assumed in offering cheap, cramped lodging in areas of some British cities, or that their operation of cash businesses makes them ubiquitous casual employers of new arrivals who struggle to market their skills in the formal job market. It’s also possible that somebody might be unaware of the rich tradition of ethnic and national rivalry in Central Europe and the Balkans, and that this has led to an irreverent culture among peoples like the Romanians for observing and commenting on different nationalities in inventive and often derogatory ways. But can somebody who has managed to remain insulated from such things really offer much insight on the urban Britain of the 2020s? 

Liberal commentators seem surprised that the author might take an interest, and have developed some ability, in determining the national origin of the new Londoners based on their appearance. For example, Herrmann seems to take umbrage at the idea that it’s possible to discern a visual difference between somebody of Afro-Caribbean heritage compared to somebody of more immediate African origin. Other commentators expressed similar surprise that one might be able to determine that a person is of Somali ancestry without seeing their passport and, lest anybody be concerned that this was aimed solely at people of African ancestry, Herrmann also notes disapprovingly that Judah made a judgement that a registrar was clearly Polish based only on the evidence of his own eyes. 

What is interesting here is the way in which British progressives retain the taboos of a homogeneous society with regard to noting physical differences associated with ethnicity and origin. Partially, this may come down to simple politeness, but I think it must also reflect the comparatively limited tradition of anthropology in British intellectual life. There’s a similar joke about almost every tribe of the interior of Africa that their typical family structure includes a mother, a father, two children and one French anthropologist. In any Russian university, the humanities department is dominated by the anthropologists who have studied the indigenous populations of Siberia, or the peoples of the Far North. But in the British context, such study was traditionally limited to colonial officialdom, and died off with that most unfashionable of callings. And so the language and physicality of anthropology can seem jarring to contemporary liberal discourse.

In truly heterogeneous cultures, discussion about the physical attributes of ethnicity or origin are a staple of conversation. These include details such as skin tone, physiognomy and head shape, which can give relatively reliable clues as to people’s heritage. In several West African countries, I observed local acquaintances who would pass long hours of the day speculating about the tribal or ethnic origin of passers-by based on such detail. And of course, in cases where people from slightly different ethnic origins marry, speculation among friends and family about any resultant offspring’s appearance is all part of the fun of a new baby coming along. 

Such details explain how it is quite possible to determine that a particular individual is likely to be of solely African heritage, rather than Afro-Caribbean or African American. Despite a great deal of inter-mixture, in Africa there remain pockets of mono-ethnicity, and individuals who retain the distinct physical features of a single ancestral group, whereas in the Americas, such distinctions have long since vanished. This means that any individual strongly bearing the physical attributes of a single West African ethnicity, such as the Wolof or the Mandinka, is likely to be a member of the African diaspora rather than Afro-Caribbean.  

Of course, there are plenty of people from West Africa whom one could not distinguish from a Jamaican or an African American, just as there are plenty of Polish or Irish people who are completely indistinguishable from Germans or English people. But there are specific physiognomic attributes that can be observed as distinctly Polish or Irish, and those who are familiar with them can identify them when they see them. 

To my colleagues and friends as we sat in Dakar or Bissau guessing the ancestry of people walking past the cafe or the office, the ability to draw such distinctions was an important life skill. It allowed them to judge whether to address a person in the European lingua franca or one of several local languages. They would be aware of critical differences in the social and commercial rules of engagement between different tribal groups, and what redress they might be able to draw upon in case that person wronged them. It might give them information about the individual’s religious persuasions. Of course, to a modern, secular British progressive, the idea that you could draw any inferences of this kind based on physical cues about somebody’s heritage is completely anathema, as it robs that person of their individuality. 

For somebody working in a professional job, who mainly interacts with other people with university educations, an appreciation of individuality trumps an understanding of culture and subculture. People in that world have often transcended the constraints of their families and hometowns, and grown to become more like the people they studied with and work with than the people who brought them up. Their children grow even more alike one another, regardless of their skin colour, or the religion or nationality of their grandparents.  

However, for people who have travelled far from home, to live and work precariously in the margins of a wealthy, foreign city, retaining a keen eye for cultural or traditional differences remains a critical survival skill. Faced with more established diaspora groups who control access to semi-legal accommodation or employment, knowing how those groups tick can be the difference between getting shafted or not. Protection is best found among those with whom one has affinity; be it cultural, religious, national or ethnic. In the cramped and mouldy house shares of Plumstead, and on the forecourts of the hand carwash; culture endures in urban Britain. And it will continue to defy individualistic liberal expectations. 

It raises the question of how long Britain’s progressive establishment thinks it can continue leaving an interest in contemporary anthropology to people it regards as latter-day Enoch Powells. The country’s crippling failure to address the backlog of claimants for asylum and settlement is a result of its refusal to consider claimants on anything other than a strictly individual basis — and it’s not as if the system has any capacity to discern between subgroups even if it allowed itself to. It is that failure which, more than any other, now threatens to bring the country’s hitherto tolerant attitude to new arrivals crashing down, and the authority of the state with it.

It’s notable that Herrmann’s broadside against This is London came in the same week that Britain’s new opposition leader Kemi Badenoch chose to refer to herself, unprompted, in specifically tribal terms as a Yoruba. The reaction to this, and to her description of the Muslim tribes of northern Nigeria as her people’s “ethnic enemies”, has been oddly muted among the kind of people who would normally scour an interview with the leader of the Tory party for sources of fresh outrage. 

Insisting that anthropological examination of new arrivals to the country is weird and suspicious doesn’t sound like a position that liberals will be able to sustain

It seems that mainstream progressives lack the language to address issues around Kemi Badenoch’s identity and origins, even when she is clearly comfortable doing so unambiguously herself. If a conservative candidate for prime minister is going to identify herself clearly as a Yoruba, surely they must have some curiosity as to how that might shape her view on morality, social structures or even her attitudes to other groups? From a liberal perspective, there are clear reasons to do so; for example the insinuation in her justification for rejecting the “Nigerian” label, that she associates the terrorist group Boko Haram with the tribes from which they emerged (presumably the Kanuri people) collectively.

Such discussions are going to be overwhelming for liberals who still see cosmopolitanism in the most superficial terms possible. How are a class of thinkers who still associate diversity primarily with different types of cuisine supposed to contend with a potential prime minister who talks of ethnic enemies? It seems very unlikely that Kemi Badenoch will be the only prominent British politician who combines an intense commitment to one of Britain’s traditional ideological camps, with cultural baggage and resentments from their ancestral homeland. Already, we see party political divisions within British parliamentary constituencies being conscripted into ancient ethnic divisions and hatreds between diaspora groups. Insisting that anthropological examination of new arrivals to the country is weird and suspicious doesn’t sound like a position that liberals will be able to sustain much longer.