Tag: britishness

IS THERE BLACK IN THE UNION JACK?

June 11, 2025 by Kenan Malik

This is the opening to my essay on race, whiteness and British identity, published in the Observer on 8 June 2025. You can read the full version in the Observer. “There ain’t no black in the Union Jack, send the fucking bastards back.” It was a common chant in football grounds in the 1980s, directed at black players, and at black fans, too. Britain is a very different place today, that old raw racism much diminished, both on the terraces […]

Categories: Britain, Politics, Race & Immigration • Tags: britishness, matthew goodwin, national identity, nationalism, racism, union jack, white decline

PRIDE, SHAME AND BRITISH HISTORY

September 11, 2024 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on perceptions of British history in terms of pride and shame, was published in the Observer on 8 September 2024 under the headline “Pride or shame? British history is too complex to be seen in such glib terms”. “Britain’s long and proud history has been trashed by the self-hating left.” “British history is not being taught and people are hugely ignorant of our past.” “We have lost that sense of what was at stake, with a consequent decline of pride in the […]

Categories: Britain, History, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: anti-woke, battle of cable street, british empire, british history, british social attitudes, britishness, oswald mosley, peterloo, pride in british history, social liberalisation, woke

THE ANGLOSPHERE AND THE HISTORY OF LIBERTY

September 28, 2021 by Kenan Malik

. This essay, on the myths of the “Anglosphere”, was my Observer column this week. It was published in the Observer, 26 September 2021, under the headline “We should not allow the Anglosphere to distort the history of liberty“. “A people that idly sips its cognac on the boulevards as it lightly takes a trifling part in the comedie humaine,” Franklin Giddings, professor of sociology at Columbia University, taunted contemptuously in 1900, “can only go down in the struggle for existence with men who have […]

Categories: Britain, History, International • Tags: anglo-saxon, anglosphere, aukus, british empire, britishness, daniel hannan, englishness, freedom struggles, haitian revolution, john locke, liberties, linda colley, nigel farage, radical enlightenment, slavery, spinoza

THE MAGICAL QUALITY OF WHITENESS

September 7, 2021 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on immigration, identity and the obsession with whiteness, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 5 September 2021, under the headline “To be truly British, the country needs to stay largely white. Really, Lionel Shriver?” “They have seen the passing of the American Indian and the buffalo; and now they query as to how long the Anglo-Saxon may be able to survive.” So wrote William Ripley in an essay for the Atlantic Monthly in 1908. Ripley was one of […]

Categories: Politics, Race & Immigration • Tags: britishness, conservatism, douglas murray, identity politics, immigration, lionel shriver, racism, white decline, white identity, whiteness, william ripley

ON BEING A 90-MINUTE ENGLISHMAN

July 7, 2021 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on football and Englishness, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 4 July 2021, under the headline “I love the football team but can’t get tribal about England. What’s going on?” Yes, I shouted with joy when Raheem Sterling scored against Germany last week. I would have been equally joyful had he scored against Scotland. And when India play England in a Test series next month, I will be rooting for England, not for the country of my birth. […]

Categories: Britain, Politics, Sport • Tags: britishness, england, englishness, eric hobsbawm, football, identity, john denham, nationalism, racism, roger scruton, sport, sunder katwala, tebbit test

IMMIGRATION, INTEGRATION AND SOCIAL FRACTURE

April 29, 2019 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on whether the failure to integrate is responsible for social fracturing in European societies, was my Observer column this week. (The column included also a short piece on the Roger Scruton debate.) It was published on 28 April 2019, under the headline ‘Talk of integration is a sideshow in a society where many feel unheard’. Uncontrolled migrant flows have made many in Europe more hostile to immigration. The failure of migrants to integrate has helped create more fractured societies and exacerbated […]

Categories: Politics, Race & Immigration • Tags: bene sagvari, britishness, distrust, europe, european social survey, fear, immigration, integration, migration crisis, populism, social fragmentation, tony blair, trust, vera messing

FOR COMMON VALUES, AGAINST PATRIOTISM

June 21, 2017 by Kenan Malik

The British think tank Demos published this week as a special issue of its journal a collection of essays on British identity called ‘Renewal Britannia’. This is my contribution to the collection, entitled ‘Proud to be British?‘ It was August 2012. I was sitting in the Olympic stadium in London with my daughter. She had red, white and blue braids in her hair and was enthusiastically waving a Union Jack. I thought about when I was her age. Then, I […]

Categories: Britain, Politics, Race & Immigration • Tags: britishness, edmund burke, identity politics, national identity, patriotism, racism

SO, WHAT DO BRITISH MUSLIMS REALLY THINK?

April 12, 2016 by Kenan Malik

This Wednesday, Channel 4 in Britain will broadcast a Trevor Phillips documentary on ‘What British Muslims really think’. On Sunday, the Sunday Times published details of an ICM poll about Muslim attitudes commissioned for the programme and ran an essay by Phillips on Muslim integration. The headlines generated by the poll – ‘Half of British Muslims want gay sex banned says poll’; ‘Most Muslims would not give terror tip-offs’, etc – and Phillip’s argument (‘the integration of Muslims will probably […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Britain • Tags: british asians, britishness, islam, islamophobia, muslims, religion, trevor phillips

CAN SOCIAL COHESION BE IMPOSED?

November 7, 2015 by Kenan Malik

These are my introductory comments to a debate on ‘Can Social Cohesion be Imposed?’, part of the ‘Diverse or Divided?’ conference organised by the IPPR and Canada House, London. Other speakers in the debate were Julian Baginni, Marina Jimenez and Catherine Fieschi. Let me begin with a newspaper account of life in East London: The Bethnal Green poor are a caste apart, a race of whom we know nothing, whose lives are of quite different complexion from ours, persons with […]

Categories: Britain, Multiculturalism, Race & Immigration • Tags: britain, britishness, diversity, identity politics, immigration, multiculturalism, social cohesion, working class

ON FENCES AND FRACTURES

September 26, 2015 by Kenan Malik

This is a transcript of my Stephen Lissenburgh Memorial Lecture that I gave on 23 September at the National Institute for Economic and Social Research. It was entitled ‘What’s wrong with multiculturalism?’ It is inevitable that my starting point for this talk will be the refugee crisis that now engulfs Europe. For many, the crisis is a crisis because of the numbers coming to Europe. But large though they may be, the numbers are not unprecedented, either comparatively or historically. […]

Categories: Multiculturalism, Race & Immigration • Tags: anti-semitism, assimilationism, british politics, britishness, culture, danish cartoons, diversity, fortress europe, france, handsworth riots, immigration, islam, locke, multiculturalism, muslims, racism

GERMANY, BRITAIN AND THE ANGEL OF HISTORY

November 22, 2014 by Kenan Malik

This is the full version of my essay on British perceptions of German history published last month in the International New York Times under the headline ‘Germany’s History Lesson for Britain’. Ernst Barlach was one of Germany’s great Expressionist artists of the early 20th century. A virulent nationalist in the run-up to World War I, Barlach found that his experience of the Western Front stripped him of his jingoism. Much of his subsequent work explored the sorrow and suffering […]

Categories: Britain, Culture & Books, History, International • Tags: britain, britishness, ernst barlach, germany, neil Macgregor

GERMANY AND BRITAIN, MEMORY AND MYOPIA

October 24, 2014 by Kenan Malik

This is my latest column for the International New York Times, published under the headline ‘Germany’s history lesson for Britain’. You can read the full version in in INYT. Ernst Barlach was one of Germany’s great expressionist artists of the early twentieth century. A virulent nationalist in the run-up to the First World War, Barlach found that his experience of the Western Front stripped him of his jingoism. Much of his subsequent work explored the sorrow and suffering that he saw […]

Categories: Britain, History, International • Tags: britain, british museum, britishness, ernst barlach, first world war, germany, holocaust, imperialism, second world war

SCOTTISH INDEPENDENCE: FROM WHAT, FOR WHAT?

September 5, 2014 by Kenan Malik

There are two fundamental issues at the heart of the Scottish independence debate: Independence from what? And for what? The answers to both questions seem obvious. Independence for Scotland means independence from the UK, or, more specifically, from rule from London. And it would be independence for Scotland to pursue its own policies. Dig a little deeper, though, and we find that the answers are not nearly so straightforward. The nationalists seem strangely reluctant truly to break away from Westminster. […]

Categories: Britain, Justice & Liberties, Politics • Tags: british politics, britishness, identity politics, nationalism, populism, scottish independence, ukip

THE MANY MYTHS OF IDENTITY, THE MANY WAYS OF BEING ME

August 28, 2014 by Kenan Malik

This is the full version of the essay on Britishness, patriotism and identity, published last month in the New York Times under the headline ‘On Britishness and Belonging’. How times change. Last week I was at the Lord’s cricket ground in London – the ‘home of cricket’ as England cricket administrators like to boast – to see England play India. I was born in India. Yet, I was cheering on England. Thirty years ago I certainly would not have been. […]

Categories: Britain, Kenan Malik, Race & Immigration, Sport • Tags: britain, britishness, cricket, englishness, identity politics, national identity, patriotism, racism, sport

FROM THE ARCHIVES: BETWEEN CAMPS

August 21, 2014 by Kenan Malik

Continuing to plunder the archives while I am away, this is the third in my series of old book reviews on the theme of race, identity and difference. It is a review of Paul Gilroy’s Between Camps and Yasmin Alibhai Brown’s Who Do We Think We Are?, first published in the Independent on Sunday, 11 June 2000. . Review of Paul Gilroy, Between Camps: Nations, Culture and the Allure of Race (Allen Lane, 2000) and Yasmin Alibhai Brown, Who Do […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Multiculturalism, Race & Immigration • Tags: black identity, britishness, diaspora, englishness, frantz fanon, humanism, identity politics, paul gilroy, racism, yasmin alibhai brown