Citizenship and Belonging: What is Britishness?
What values and loyalties, if any, must be shared by communities and individuals in all parts of Britain? How should differences between communities be handled? How can we balance the need to treat people equally, the need to treat people differently, and the need to maintain shared values and social cohesion? To help answer these questions, the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) commissioned ETHNOS to carry out research on the meaning of Britishness. The research involved conducting focus group discussions, word association tasks and sentence completion tasks with British people of majority and minority ethnic backgrounds living in England, Scotland and Wales.
The study found that people broadly shared a common representation of Britishness articulated around eight dimensions: geography, national symbols, people, values and attitudes, cultural habits and behaviours, citizenship, language, and various notable achievements.
While most people agreed on their definition of Britishness, not everybody personally identified with Britishness. All British passport holders knew that they are British citizens, but not everyone attached any emotional significance to being British. In Scotland and Wales, white British and ethnic minority people identified more strongly with each respective country than with Britain. In England, white English people perceived themselves as English first and as British second, and most people from ethnic minority backgrounds perceived themselves as British, but none identified as English, a label they associated exclusively with white people.
People from ethnic minority backgrounds also drew on other sources of identification: religion, ethnicity and race or colour. These various identities became more or less salient in different situations. While these additional identities were seen as compatible with Britishness by people from minority ethnic backgrounds, white British people often saw them as mutually exclusive.
The decline of Britishness
The original study on Britishness had shown that most British people shared a common understanding of Britishness, although not everyone personally identified with this notion. The second report discussed why so many white British people strongly felt that Britishness was in decline. They attributed the decline to three main causes: the arrival of large numbers of migrants, the perceived unfair claims made by ethnic minority people on the welfare state, and the perceived failure to manage immigrants properly due to what respondents saw as “political correctness”.
The perceived demise of Britishness was experienced with distress by some white British people. They felt victimised and frustrated, and many anticipated that social unrest would become inevitable. Much of this frustration and feeling of victimisation was targeted at Muslim people, who were collectively seen to represent the antithesis of the values and attitudes associated with Britishness. Not surprisingly, British Muslim respondents also felt victimised and frustrated. They resented being asked to display their “loyalty” to Britishness and to choose between their Muslim and British identities.
Research participants also differed significantly in their understanding of “integration”. Many white British people equated integration with assimilation. As they witnessed that complete assimilation had not taken place, they argued that multiculturalism had failed. For ethnic minority communities and for some white British people, integration was about participating fully in British society while keeping certain dimensions of ethnic minority cultures alive. Those who shared this understanding of integration were satisfied with multiculturalism, although some remained uneasy about Muslims.
The study shows that the main barrier to integration is not so much self-segregation
on the part of ethnic minority communities, but the subtle and everyday “policing”
of the boundaries of Britishness by many white British people and their demand
for complete assimilation.
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