So it was a relief to hear the new home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, articulate clearly that weekend what should always have been Labour’s line on both the English and British flags: that, as the English-born daughter of Pakistani-born parents, she sees herself in them and is “all for” their use as a symbol of unity, but not as a means to exclude and divide.Oh Gabby, What do you think now she's a proven liar..?
“I’m a patriot, not a nationalist,” she told the Sun on Sunday. And, yes, it would have been better had Keir Starmer said something like that from the start.Perhaps he didn't want to be caught in a lie so quickly, unlike his DEI hire Home Sec?
The outlines are fuzzy, but in Liverpool there are glimmerings of a new politics of belonging: an aspiration to be what Mahmood called an “open, tolerant, generous” country, welcoming to newcomers, while acknowledging that migrants aren’t the only ones sometimes struggling to find their feet in a multi-ethnic nation.
And how do they feel in Manchester now? Probably the same, since vacuous ‘don’t look back in anger’ acceptance of insanity seems to always reign there.
The biggest challenge Mahmood now faces, one I have not seen before in my lifetime, is the shocking rise of ethnonationalism. It’s the blood-and-soil politics of those who claim Rishi Sunak isn’t really English despite being born and raised here – a charge not levelled at his US-born, Brussels-raised, white-skinned predecessor, Boris Johnson – or that being Muslim is somehow fundamentally incompatible with living a properly “British” life.
It is, because so many of them cannot seem to.
We are not an island of strangers, in the words Starmer now regrets using: just an island that needs reminding, sometimes, of who we really are.
Actually,we’ve been reminded of who they are too much, Gabby. And we are sick of it!
