Is Rishi Sunak English?

“He’s a brown Hindu, how is he English?”

"Because he was born and bred here.”

The national belonging question exploded among the very online Right of the Angloworld last month.

The universal citizenship, agnostic to ethnic and religious belonging, has been picked at and undermined by the progressives in the last decade. We need to emphasize race and culture of certain groups, the argument goes, so the job of redressing historical or current injustice can begin. Certain groups require more recognition (state celebration of cultural practices, apologies) and redistribution (funds paid through court system or by direct funding and grants). Canada, for instance, scrapped the very idea of national belonging and replaced it by the nebulous concept of Reconciliation, adopted as state religion, ill-defined (it’s a wide range of practices), loosely situated (it permeates every sphere of life and it concerns everybody, including immigrants), with no end goal in sight (when are we fully reconciled? No one can tell).

But the vibe, as the cool kids of the alternative media will put it, has recently shifted in America and is shifting around the western world and now it’s the Right’s turn to question the universal, ethnically-agnostic citizenship from its own standpoint. The pro-immigration consensus (though it’s perhaps more accurate to say the pro-immigration majority opinion) is crumbling just about everywhere in the G20. While each state is chasing the holy grail of Growth, fewer and fewer believe that large immigration is the way to achieve it - and this was Canada’s approach for the longest, which got out of hand in the last few years with hundreds of thousands admitted each year while the amount of housing, jobs, infrastructure and services remained the same. For newcomers to start creating ‘growth’, they need a place to live first, and a family doctor, and job opportunities in their areas of expertise.

English and Scottish and Irish, argues the increasingly articulate Right, are specific ethno-geographical designation which should not be up for grabs and don’t and can’t include everybody. Minority ethnic citizens can certainly be British, but neither they nor their children, whether born in England or not, are English.

Anti-immigration, ethno-essentialist camp is the most eloquent camp in the British-inflected and broadly cross-European political discourse right now; pro-immigration camp is thinner, doesn’t have many prominent columnists (Matthew Sayed, Janan Ganesh… but who else?), and if there are any politicians in any major parties that see benefits of mass immigration, they are being awfully quiet these days.

In the US, still home of the melting pot and pride about it, this manifests itself differently, primarily as legal vs sans-papiers preference, but there are American voices opposed to immigration of any kind. A big fight erupted early in the Trump administration between those in favour of H-1B visas which bring a lot of foreign, largely Indian talent to the tech industry, and those arguing that those jobs should go to Americans. It was amusing to observe the blowhards on both sides tearing into each other, Bannon calling Musk a man-child, but this rift points to something serious. The anti-immigration argument in the US has grown and matured and it crosses the partisan lines (Bernie Sanders, you’ll remember, also talked about on-shoring, and the Corbynite left in the UK was quietly - by actions, if not by words - anti-EU). It is not a temper tantrum; it’s an argument to contend with.

In my last book, Lost in Canada: An Immigrant’s Second Thoughts, I tried to address where Canada is in this conversation. I write how unusual, what a radical idea, the ethno-, creed- and race-agnostic citizenship is, and its relative rarity in the world cultures. But Canada has effectively abandoned it. This is what the more substantial US and French citizenship concepts teach us: to abandon the ethno-story doesn’t mean abandoning all stories, or the very idea of a national story.

Never particularly eager to culturally integrate its new citizens, leaving it to the large ethnic groups to integrate their own though a sub-Canadian version of standard ethno-nationalist citizenship (and calling it ‘multiculturalism’), Canada has completely lost interest in this project during the Trudeau Junior years. PM himself couldn’t see the point of it; his ‘post-national state’ and ‘no Canadian mainstream’ statements were uttered once and never repeated but they rang through the years and were confirmed by his government’s actions. (That the big nepo baby PM comes from a deeply rooted family that is profoundly, meaningfully culturally Canadian is no accident. Historian Christopher Dummitt was onto something: it’s the elite, well-settled and comfortable people who can play with the concepts and values, toss them in the air, see where they land.)

It’s not all Trudeau Jr’s fault: as a state, we’ve been conceptually disintegrating for decades and there’s no unifying cultural glue (let alone pride) to counterbalance the regional, linguistic and immigration-related divisions. To this state of affairs, the last decade added some deadly new developments that I’m not sure this country can ever recover from:

• There is a widespread belief that there are hundreds of bodies of massacred children behind residential schools. We just know they are there, and we don’t need to excavate, study the DNA, recover and rebury the remains. The bodies are there and they are the truth about this country. Those questioning, asking for excavation are akin to Holocaust deniers. (This Canadian turn to mass psychosis is probably just one aspect of what Elizabeth Weiss describes as the war on anthropology and archeology in North America: deference to creationist ideas, rejection of the study of human sexual dimorphism, a ban on scientific study of human remains in favour of indigenous repatriation). It’s the Amfortas wound that refuses to heal. We refuse.

• Men can become women; humans can change sex; to say otherwise can get you unemployed, unlicensed (by the way, Amy Hamm’s nursing association just voted against her right to express these proscribed opinions outside her work hours). Trudeau Jr’s era having embedded “gender identity and expression” (ie opposite-sex identification) in human rights laws, it will be hard to walk the country back to the legal framework where women exist as a material reality, and not as a male fixation, feeling, fantasy, feminization surgery project - an expression of this inner magic dust called gender that men too can possess.

• A seriously ill life, extremely aged, incapacitated life is not worth living. This belief is a by-product of a very efficient system of state-supervised suicide. Why does palliative care exist, and how do you defend any increase in its funding and research? When do you become ‘a burden’ to your family and to your society? Should you feel bad for wanting to live to the last possible breath? It’s not clear any more in this country.

Those are just my top three; you could add here 4) cities are cultural and economic engines but no one can afford to live there any more, 5) the bar for locking someone up and denying them bail should be extremely high, and multiple counts of violent crime isn’t where this bar is, it’s much higher, 6) no addict should be forced into treatment, under any circumstance. And crucially,

• There isn’t much to Canada outside this diet of expiation.

  ---

The Libera Party, I’ve come to realize, is a machine for acquiring and keeping power, rather than a political party in the traditional sense, with a cherished set of beliefs. TLP needn’t be liberal at all, and can be, as we’ve seen during the Junior era, quite illiberal. It’s a thing to keep that in mind when considering some of the 180s undertaken by the new Liberal leader, Mark Carney, in his first few days in office. I’m not talking about the carbon tax. After the usual throat clearing, the PM Carney said this in his swearing-in speech:

“…the wonder of a country built on the bedrock of three peoples, Indigenous, French and British. […] The office of the Governor General links us through the Crown and across time to Canada’s proud British heritage.”

Canada’s proud British heritage hasn’t appeared in Liberal party speeches for, oh how about eons.

It appears so? Even le Dauphin released a parting video in which he claims he will always be a ‘proud Canadian’. (I will note though that in the Dauphin era the Conservatives have mainly been asleep at the switch, until a couple of years ago.)

Will there be a detour on national belonging and national culture and what could it look like? I am skeptical, as the malaise is deeply embedded in institutions now, and I think the Liberals will just claim they were never really caught in the purity- and cluelessness spiral. Just like with the carbon tax, that wasn’t us, really. The new us is us.

But one question remains unanswered for me, and you’ve probably have noticed it by now. What of the argument from the Right that says that the agnostic citizenship concepts tent to empty themselves out of any content - inevitably? And get, unofficially, in practice, filled up by the strongest available ethno-nationalism and religion lying around? When the best seem to lack all conviction, the worst will rush to offer their passionate intensity.

I have no adequate answer. Or rather I do: I think we should go some way towards the religious, linguistic and cultural foundations of a country, and yes, even ethnicity should come into play to a degree. And it did occur to me: maybe I’m not a Canadian after all except in legal terms (passport, voting, taxes), maybe that will explain a lot? Maybe you can’t will yourself into a cultural belonging? You need to have grown up into it? Or marry into it?

I worked a precarious contract job in a publicly funded settlement agency in which Cantonese was spoken among my bosses and supervisors. It wasn’t an experience I would recommend. I tried joining an amateur cricket league some years ago in Toronto, but it’s so entirely South Asian that you will just know you don’t belong within days.

And I’m not innocent of this myself in my old age. I want to know less now about all the possible cultures and visit all the possible attractions of the world. My friendship and dating history isn’t exactly the United Colors of Benetton, and as a young person I consciously went out of my way to accomplish that. (Most people date and marry within their ethnicity, unless they’ve grown up alongside some other ethnicities within a social infrastructure encouraging inter-ethnic relating. I wanted to prove this sociological finding wrong! I haven’t looked at the studies but upward mobility I suspect is the strongest, the only? incentive for people to friend and marry out of their ethnic group.) My travelling has narrowed down to a few countries where I can read the papers, go to the theatre, talk to the locals, know the first thing about history, have read some of the literature. It could be too that one’s own migration and self-recreation depletes some of the interest in other cultures? Been there, done that, have enough T-shirts already?

If a culture, a country, a (let’s not be shy) nation is to continue into the future, it needs more than what Canada is giving to its citizens right now. We need more, and something different, and we need to have the capacity to imagine more.