This column isn’t about the diversification of Britain’s governing class. It is about the lack of domestic interest in that trend. The arrival of a non-white prime minister detained British commentators for, what, the first week, at most? I, who field lots of interview requests from broadcast producers, some of whom are sweet enough to think that I am awake and ambulant at 8am, have never been invited to discuss this subject. You don’t hear much in the way of conservative misgivings about the change in who runs Britain, or much liberal self-congratulation either. After four years in America, the relative absence of an identity discourse is startling. (And, to me, freeing).
I have written before about the difference between diversity and cosmopolitanism. One is a material fact. A place that contains several ethnic groups might be called diverse. The second is an attitude. It is an indifference to that diversity. Lots of places are good at the first. Why is the UK so good at the second? I have entertained all sorts of theories, from commercial necessity (a trading nation has to get used to unfamiliar faces) to the English respect for privacy. But the answer, I think, is more prosaic than that.
We aren’t very reflective people generally. “Anti-intellectual”, the old line of attack against England in particular, often from those within it, is fair enough. Now, to be clear, anti-intellectual doesn’t mean stupid. The nation doesn’t have less cognitive processing power than the next. What it does have is a certain impatience with, and perhaps even a suspicion of, abstract thought. Immigration? That we can discuss to the nth degree. It is a practical matter, to do with numbers, public resources and geographic space. But “identity”? The “meaning” of having a Diwali-celebrating prime minister? The metaphysics of Britishness? Even our intelligentsia isn’t at home with this stuff.
Non-paywall link: https://archive.is/Snnot
Janan Ganesh is always so good on this stuff.