Labour must create an affirmative sense of citizenship for young BMEs

By Aaron Peters

Tonight in London and once more on Saturday in Leicester the five candidates bidding for the leadership of the Labour Party will engage in hustings with party members of BME (black and ethnic minority) backgrounds. As with the other recent leadership events they will no doubt be asked questions regarding the major issues – the economy, public services, benefits, jobs and immigration – allbeit within the context of a ethnic-minority specific audience. It is also perhaps likely that there will be a greater focus on Labour’s history of military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan than at other husting events and that our record on foreign policy issues, such as our positioning regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict and the nature of our relations with many powers in the Muslim world, both bellicose and benign in nature, will come under closer scrutiny than at other events so far.

In spite of these specific issues among BME members, it is tenable that the single biggest issue that affects the sentiments of Labour Party members of BME background, and indeed ethnic minority Britons at large, is not the legitimacy or legality of the Iraq war, concerns of foreign policy or even the powder-keg debate over immigration, but in fact an area where Labour underwhelmed between 1997 and 2010, in spite of much rhetoric: citizenship.

Notwithstanding the deluge of ‘liberal communitarian’ literature stemming from the likes of Anthony Giddens, John Gray and Amitai Etzioni that lionized the values of a positive notion of citizenship during the mid 1990s, New Labour proved historically incapable of creating a compelling narrative of citizenship. Instead of articulating an affirmative notion of citizenship founded upon the principles of our movement – a belief in social justice, fraternity, solidarity and interdependence – New Labour’s ‘Cool Britannia’ geist too often viewed any narrative of the good life for socially and economically excluded BME Britons consisting entirely in appeals to the hope that they too could one day fully participate in our nation’s (then) flourishing economy, get credit cards and a mortgage and satiate their desire for goods and services. Except we did and do not wish to participate merely in the market. We wish to participate in society and be stakeholders in it. We wish to participate in politics. And we should wish to participate in Britain.

As a young person from an ethnic minority background raised at the tail-end of the 20th and the advent of the 21st century, Labour’s position regarding second and third-generation immigrants was too often reduced to the vacant truism that ‘multiculturalism is good’, with any notion of positive citizenship displaced to foreign-born nationals seeking to settle in the UK (this being most visceral in the fact that as of 2005 such individuals, as my father recently did, are obliged to pass a ‘Britishness’ test as a part of the naturalisation process).

While multiculturalism is almost certainly a positive phenomenon, this New Labour public relations trope often disturbed me. What, after all, is the ‘culture’ of the anxious young man from the Borough of Hackney who is of mixed-race origin or the secular-minded young Bangladeshi girl who disagrees with some of the rudiments of her parents’ faith? What is the culture of those of us who are dual-heritage or alienated from the culture of our parents, all of which is doubly intensified by the often confusing cultural compression of globalisation?

The sense of alienation that many young people of BME backgrounds have towards a collective idea of a Britain as an ethical ideal, whether it be articulated by negation via indifference and apathy to the collective good or more explicitly through professed sympathy for the causes of religious fundamentalists and those that seek to bring harm to these shores is in many ways the consequence of many years of failing on the behalf of the British political establishment both left and right.

My father and many like him came to this country believing in an ‘idea’ of Britain which stood for fair play, social justice, integrity and a chance at creating the kind of life one personally wishes to lead. Thatcherism instead offered social disconnect and atomisation, discount council housing and a political economy that facilitated consumer fetishism, easy credit and the reduction of the good life to the singular ability to buy bigger and better goods and services with one’s social relations and concern for one’s community cast aside as an irrelevance.

New Labour’s ‘Cool Britannia’ reified footballers and the creative industries as the face of an inclusive Britain where young ethnic minorities had their chance to shine. Labour now needs to create an authentic narrative of the good life for those same individuals which instead celebrates and extols the best values of our tradition – reciprocity, solidarity and fairness.

Labour needs to illustrate to young BMEs, much as Barack Obama has done so successfully in the United States, that a life of service is the most profitable of all and that to be a public servant, lawyer, nurse, social entrepreneur or community leader is as genuinely gratifying and of equal if not greater social utility than being a sport star or pop sensation.

Our message to such individuals should be that our historic mission and story, of building a more socially just and equal Britain is one in which they too can be a part.