Immigration and Xenophobia. The Unfinished Portrait: On the Phantom of British Culture

From 2020: 750 people died in the Mediterranean that year. This was Libya that NATO bombed

The Unfinished Portrait: On the Phantom of British Culture

From Truth Against Hate on FB

 

The demand to assimilate into British culture carries a peculiar weight, for it begs a question that is rarely answered satisfactorily: what, precisely, is this culture you must join? To claim there is none is not a denial of history or tradition, but an observation of its fundamental character. British culture is not a finished portrait to be admired and replicated; it is a living 

palimpsest, constantly being written over, with old lines faintly visible beneath the new.

 

For centuries, the very idea of Britishness was forged through incomers and influences. The Romans, Saxons, Vikings, and Normans did not arrive to find a pristine, static culture. They each brought their language, laws, and customs, which tangled with what was there before to create something new. The British culinary staple of fish and chips was born from Jewish immigrant traditions. The language itself is a magnificent ragbag of stolen words and adapted grammar. To speak of an unchanging British culture is to ignore the tumultuous, creative process that built it.

 

Today, the paradox becomes stark. When communities are challenged for their supposed incompatibility, which Britain is the benchmark? The pastoral nostalgia of the village green? The post industrial grit of the mill towns? The bustling, globalised reality of its major cities? The culture of the pub, but not the curry house that now stands beside it? The culture of queueing, but not the vibrant street festivals that transform those same orderly streets? This selective nostalgia often elevates a narrow, romanticised version of the past, one that never truly existed for the majority, and weaponises it against the present.

 

Perhaps the only consistent threads in the British tapestry are not specific practices, but meta qualities: a capacity for absorption, a pragmatism forged on an island, and a famously complex relationship with change itself, characterised by both resistance and gradual acceptance. Even the celebrated British ‘sense of humour’ revolves around the subversion of expectation and the puncturing of pomp. Is it not, then, profoundly un-British to demand rigid cultural conformity?

 

The true provocation lies in flipping the question. Instead of asking what British culture is, we might ask what it does. Its function, throughout history, has been to adapt. The screaming about compatibility, then, often reveals less about the culture being defended and more about anxiety in the face of that inevitable evolution. It is a fear of losing a comforting, if fictional, monoculture in a world of plural identities.

 

To be British in spirit, then, may be to participate in that ongoing argument, to add your verse to the poem without needing to erase the lines above. It is to understand that the culture is found not in a checklist of traits, but in the shared, often messy, and contested space of creating a society together. The demand to assimilate into a phantom is a dead end. The invitation to help shape what comes next, however, is the most British tradition of all.