Britishness was always a more welcoming identity, i think, than englishness. I welcome te multi racial diversity of the country as it is to day. But immigration has been such such a dominant theme in n over the last sort of 15 to 20 years. And that had a consequences when it enabled the kind of new populist right, nationalist right to exploit. It unsettled a lot of people and created a whal it wanted. So i think one of the challenges for the ruling alites, who obviously favoured more, more migrant workers arriving in the country, was to tell them exactly what was happening. They haven't levelled with the public,. That's what's created the sense of
Jason Cowley is Editor of British political weekly, The New Statesman. He’s also an author and his latest book, Who Are We Now? Stories of Modern England, is a timely reflection on the identity of his home nation. The book follows both individual stories of everyday life and the broad arc of national politics over the past 25 years spanning the ascent of the Tony Blair government to Tory austerity, Brexit and the pandemic. Hosting the discussion is Kavita Puri, journalist, broadcaster and author of the book and radio programme, Partition Voices, which explores issues of identity within the British Asian community.
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