After empire

Conservative Party British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has set a general election for July 4. (We'll be in that country floating the inland canal system on a narrowboat, so I may or may not see something of this.) 

I had been holding Alex Massie's commentary on the contemporary United Kingdom for our visit, but Sunak's surprise move makes it worth publishing now. 

There is much truth in the post-imperial line, “We are here because you were there” but even this undersells the real transformation of the British population.

To observe this is simply to note reality. There is nothing wrong or deplorable about any of this and I see no reason to regret it.

And, overall and with obvious counter-examples to complicate the picture, this transformation has been achieved with comparatively little trouble or fuss. That is not to downplay the experiences of black and asian Britons but, rather, to try and see the larger picture.

High-profile leadership positions are not everything but nor are they nothing. The prime minister is a Hindu whose parents hail from India, the mayor of London is the son of a Pakistani bus driver, the first minster of Scotland is Scots-Pakistani (and so is the leader of the Scottish Labour party), Kemi Badenoch, who may yet be the next leader of the Conservative party, was born in Nigeria, the next foreign secretary, David Lammy, is the son of Guyanese immigrants, and Vaughan Gething, the new first minister of Wales, is a black man born in Zambia.

It is exaggeration to say that among western nations only the United States has political leadership of such diversity (and even then, some of that American diversity is a matter of political appointment rather than electoral success).

Ten million people living in Britain today were born overseas. The paradox of immigration politics in Britain is that politicians talk tough on immigration while presiding over a system of unprecedented liberalism. The rhetoric may sometimes be ugly; the reality is rather different.

Britain is no longer the quaint antiquarian museum of castles, cathedrals, and the slightly absurd monarchy of American imagination. Nor is it the land of a wondrous, universal national health system won by unionized labor. I am looking forward to a glimpse (only) of a more complex reality.