Apart together

Publication of the 2021 UK census reveals some fascinating demographic and social shifts in a decade but are we a more integrated society - and do we want to be?

My answer to both questions is probably not, especially since Brexit threw an almighty spanner in the works - though we were hardly living in a multicultural nirvana before 2016. Grayson Perry's Full English, the artist's new exploration of Englishness now airing on Channel 4 TV, touched on some uncomfortable truths in its first episode, although, being Perry, the tone is generally upbeat and positive. His ask of 'minority' communities (in some areas now actually in the majority) to define their own identity threw up some interesting responses to the question of Englishness versus Britishness, one which has exercised me personally. As a white man born in England to English parents does that mean I automatically define as 'English'? Not necessarily.

If someone were to pose the 'Lady Susan Hussey question' to me I could answer quite clearly where I was born and who 'my people' were but I'd be hard put to give a definitive answer about my own status. Perhaps being white I have the luxury of choice, or ambivalence, but if quizzed more closely, would probably describe myself as a Londoner. Although not born in the capital (the delicious irony being that a majority of people who were are non-white) I've lived here for more than half my life and, as a gay man, feel most comfortable here. (The distressing experience of prejudice told to Perry by Rukiya, an English Muslim woman running the only halal café in the Peak District, might equally be shared by an out gay white man in the English countryside.)

My self-definition has changed over time. I was brought up to feel proudly British, unsurprisingly I suppose when my primary school atlas still showed large parts of the world coloured pink. In the immediate post-Imperial era of the 1950s we white British-born children, and those black and brown immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean and Indian subcontinent coming to live and work in the UK in increasing numbers, were actively encouraged to feel themselves part of a common heritage. The great Imperial (or Commonwealth) Family, however mythic, held a powerful attraction. The reality for Britannia's far-flung children on arrival in the 'Mother Country', however, was a harsh one. Exploitation, prejudice and, on occasion, overt hatred exposed a nasty truth - one laid bare for all the world to see by the Notting Hill race riots in London in the summer of 1958.

Memorably, I met my first person of colour in 1961 aged eight and, extraordinarily, wasn't to meet another until my mid-twenties. The first encounter was with a visiting Nigerian civil engineer as we sat together in the back of my parents' car while they drove him to a construction site to see how the Brits ran their infrastructure projects. I remember little more about the day but my utter fascination at actually having met a black man from Africa has stayed with me to this day. Incredible as it seems now, my entire school and college career thereafter was spent in an all-white environment. England outside of its cities was a very different place then and it was only in the mid-to-late 1970s that I met one or two black people socially and later, in the early-1980s, a mixed-race/dual heritage young man (although he was then referred to politely as 'half-caste' - when he wasn't being racially slurred, that is) who became my partner.

Of course, moving to London with him in the late-'eighties, being gay and working in the arts, changed all that. I found myself living in a vibrant multi-cultural environment and had many black and Asian friends and sexual partners, colleagues, staff and bosses. Nevertheless, I was struck by how relatively little mixing there appeared to be in general outside the work environment. It was apparent that different communities (cultural, religious, linguistic and socio-economic), whilst living in close proximity, by-and-large 'kept themselves to themselves'. 

Now, Brexit, with its covert and increasingly overt xenophobia and openly anti-migrant sentiment, is making the always fragile hope of closer integration ever-less achievable. And, I have to acknowledge, the concept of integration itself is no longer seen as necessarily desirable. I remember with a touch of nostalgia the hippy aspiration of my teenage years to "a great big melting pot" producing "coffee-coloured people by the score" but do appreciate that the zeitgeist, if it was ever more than California dreaming, has moved away from that. Concepts such as miscegenation, assimilation and homogenisation, de rigueur in lefty-liberal circles fifty-five years ago, now seem simplistic and patronising. I remember them being inspirational at the time but they have not worn well and I must admit they now seem at best naive and at worst culturally insensitive. We have learned that proximity is not an inevitable precursor to familiarity, much less intimacy.

It seems we are destined to live our lives increasingly along parallel lines.