British values aren't colour-coded

Kenan Malik

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"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 and in wider society. Yet, the question of whether there is, or should be, any black in the Union Jack - and how much - has returned, not as racist chants but in academic reports and newspaper columns.

Last week, the academic Matt Goodwin published a report that suggested that “the White British will become a minority in the UK by the year 2063”, a claim splashed across the pages of newspapers and discussed on social media.

The report’s methodology has been ridiculed by critics, for instance for defining as “white British” people “who do not have an immigrant parent” (which would exclude King Charles and Nigel Farage's children). Nevertheless, alarm about white Britons becoming a minority has a long history. “UK whites will be minority by 2100,” ran an Observer headline a quarter of a century ago. Over the past decade, there have accumulated many dire warnings about white decline.

The irony is that this debate about whiteness and Britishness has resurfaced at a time when Britain has become far more liberal in its attitudes to race and identity. As racism has diminished, discussions of identity have become more fraught. Such debates have also served to allow racism to rebrand itself in the language of identity and to reshape perceptions of nationhood and of whiteness.