According to reports in the Telegraph and Spectator (I am not going to link to them), 40% of British people now have at least one overseas parent. The implication is that this is A Bad Thing, which I suppose it is if you have a Hitleresque world view of racial purity. And many people do indeed hold that view. Take Rupert Lowe, former Southampton Football Club chairman and now leader of Restore UK, a fascist splinter group of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party UK Ltd. He has called for the family of Vickrum Digwa, who killed Henry Nowak, to be deported, on the grounds presumably that they are not pure. Quite a few of us would be in bother if Lowe’s policy was extended to all of us who have at least one foreign parent, including me.
In the unlikely event that one of my children went on a killing spree, Restore’s leader would be calling for my deportation to the Netherlands. While I love the land of my mother’s, resettlement would be a tricky business since my Dutch family lineage is basically me now. But perhaps I am safe from deportation because despite my overwhelmingly foreign DNA – I am 17% English according to my latest DNA test – I am white. I can’t help feeling that this could be a factor.
Plenty of other people would have something to fear from a Restore government starting right at the top. King Brian would be in bother since his late father, Prince Phillip, was born in Corfu, Greece. The leader of his majesty’s opposition, Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke Badenoch, has two overseas parents and it appears was born in Britain by way of a deliberate decision of her Nigerian parents. Amusingly, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who calls himself Tommy Robinson, has an Irish mother. He too had better be concerned if Restore UK come to power in 2029.
I joke about this, but in truth it’s a very serious issue. Take my late paternal grandfather, Marinus Verburg, who died three years before I was born. According to my late mother, Neeltje Verburg out of Rotterdam, and his widow Anna, née Rijn, who watched local Jews being rounded up and taken to Westerbork Transit Camp, before being moved to Auschwitz, Marinus was repeatedly stopped and searched because Verburg was “a Jewish name” and, believe it or not he “looked Jewish”. To the best of my knowledge, we have no Jewish blood in our family and anyway, so what if we did, but this was a real concern in World War Two, particularly to my own Dutch family. But this is where racial ‘purity’ can take you.
Back in the year of our lord 1969, the pop group Blue Mink had a hit single with Melting Pot in which the narrators, in this case the Bristol songwriting pair Roger Cook and Roger Greenaway, imagined a world in which you put everyone into a “great big melting pot” in order to turn out “coffee-coloured people by the score”. The lyrics of the song have not aged particularly well and indeed it is these days banned by mainstream radio stations but the whole point of the song was a call for racial harmony and integration. As a white man with mixed heritage, who is essentially English but proud of my Dutch and Norwegian ancestry, the words racial harmony and integration are part of my formed DNA.
We have to be careful as to where this debate about who is and isn’t British ends up. Clearly, all this purity doesn’t extend to the lives of those who shout so loudly about it. Even Nigel Farage, the most charismatic and effective politician on the far right, has a live-in partner, Laure Ferrari, who is French. And Farage itself doesn’t sound the most English of names, does it? Farage’s best mate in Reform Party UK Ltd is of course Muhammad Ziauddin Yusuf, the Scottish born Muslim whose parents are Sri Lankans. I’m guessing that when the deportations begin under a Reform/Restore government, Messrs Farage and Lowe will have to be highly selective as to who they expel?
I cannot even begin to understand why it matters to some people whether someone has a foreign-born parent or not. Unless they are Hitler, that is. But take this debate to its logical conclusion and the simple fact of the matter is that we are all Africans, in the sense that all modern humans share a common ancestor that lived in Africa approximately 200,000 to 300,000 years ago. That makes me African, as well as English, Dutch, Norwegian and, apparently, way back, a bit Welsh, too. That’s a decent melting post, if you ask me, big enough to take the world and all it’s got. If you live here, pay your taxes and live by the law of the land, that’s good enough for me.
