A conundrum called "Britishness"

The Life and Times of a Very British Man

Kamal Ahmed 

Bloomsbury 

Pages 337, Rs 599

The idea of “Britishness” has been endlessly debated for as long as one can remember but remains tantalisingly elusive. Everyone  has at least a vague sense of what it means to be English, Welsh, Irish or Scottish. But ask anyone what it means to be British, they will struggle to explain. 

That’s because there’s no such thing as Britishness. It’s an artificial construct, a catch-all term invented to create a collective sense of identity to rein in competing English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish nationalisms. Historian David Starkey has called Britishness a fiction because “a British nation doesn’t exist”. 

Only immigrants desperate to be identified with their adopted country call themselves “British” and wallow in their “Britishness”, comforted by a sense of inclusiveness the term suggests.

Step forward Kamal Ahmed. Son of a Muslim Sudanese father and a white Christian woman who brought him up after his father mysteriously left them when he was still very young, he is indeed A Very British Man, deeply conflicted about his hybrid racial and cultural identity.  Despite a highly successful professional career as a journalist, he has struggled most of his life  to “fit in”. He is particularly conscious of his mixed race — neither white, nor black but a touch brownish. Which, he says, makes him a bit of an outsider even among immigrants. Being British makes him feel he belongs somewhere.

“Being British is a brown thing as well as a white thing. It’s the ultimate mixed-race descriptor. British is the umbrella I feel most comfortable sitting under.” 

As a schoolboy, Mr Ahmed was so desperate to be accepted by his white peers that he  called himself Neil, and even joined them in bullying Asian boys — telling “Pakis” to  “Go Home”. One day someone called his mother and asked for Neil. “Who’s Neil?” she snapped and probably hung up. 

Mr Ahmed puts it down to the racist climate in Britain at the time when  “children with funny, foreign names” were mocked.  “Lots of us did it...used short English names in our effort to fit in. We were the generation of black and Asian people that wanted to be like everyone else, it was a confidence thing.” 

He’s more contrite about targeting Asian kids: “Keep Britain Tidy. Kick Out Pakis,” he wrote on the cover of his exercise book. It was the action of a boy “grappling in a world where half-white-half-black didn’t have an anchor,” he writes, referring to his mixed race. 

Mr Ahmed has held senior positions in The Guardian, The Observer and The Sunday Telegraph. He also had a stint as the communications chief at the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Until recently, he was the BBC’s Economics Editor but last month he took over as its Director of News. 

“His ambition is to rise even higher. The exodus of high-profile black executives from the BBC in recent years demonstrates how tricky that path is,” a reviewer in The Guardian wrote, noting that, “while this careful book will no doubt deepen the conversation on race and identity in Britain, it sometimes reads like an audition”. 

Clearly, he’s an ambitious man (nothing wrong with that) and some believe he has benefited from the so-called “ethnicity dividend” — the push to give more representation to ethnic minorities across all public and private institutions, particularly media and politics, if necessary through positive discrimination, a euphemism for tweaking rules.

There’s a telling passage in which he tries to dismiss the idea of the “ethnicity dividend”. A passage that, in retrospect, might come to haunt him, and be seized by critics to claim, “We told you so.”

He writes that last year applied to be the Director of News at the BBC  and after he was shortlisted along with two white men, and one white woman there was “some social media comment” suggesting that he would get it because of his ethnic background. 

“I bet the Muslim will get it,” someone apparently wrote.

 “The BBC — they’ll want a brown. Stitch up,” wrote another.

Ahmed, trying to prove them wrong, writes with a touch of sarcasm: 

“I didn’t get it. I am brown. I am not a Muslim.”

Well, he got it in the end. 

This book is part of a new “ethnic noir” genre in publishing and follows a spate of memoirs by prominent Asians and Afro-Caribbeans who grew up in the era of “No Blacks, No Irish, and No Dogs” and themselves suffered racism. 

It is part-memoir and part somewhat rambling reflections on immigration, race, identity, and the idea of Britishness drawing on his own experiences as a mixed-race child growing up in the racially charged 1970s Britain. He rightly argues that every critic of uncontrolled immigration is not necessarily racist, and backs it with persuasive reasons.  A liberal refusal to accept this was what led to Brexit, and is among the factors fuelling right-wing populism today.