Multicultural Britain is a new history of personal and community relationships across post-imperial Britain, from 1940s Cardiff to the millennial Midlands.

An extract from Multicultural Britain: A People’s History

My first kiss was with a girl called Bushra. It must have been in the mid-1990s, because I was no more than ten or eleven years old and still at junior school in Balsall Heath, a diverse neighbourhood barely two miles south of Birmingham city centre. I am not sure exactly how the kiss came about. I was playing football with my friend Ben, who was in the year above me at school and whose mother was friends with mine. Word must have got out that Bushra and I wanted to kiss; I remember us standing in front of a crowd of kids cheering us on, in the yard outside her house – one of those new-build council houses with identikit front walls.

Bushra was beautiful. Her big, sparkling eyes were the colour of hazelnuts. Her hair was hidden beneath a hijab. We were both nervous. I had never kissed a girl before, and I remember her saying that her dad would kill her. In the end, we agreed that I would just give her a kiss on the cheek. Nevertheless, the crowd around us cheered and whooped as I leaned in. I can still recall the softness of her skin on my lips.

It’s difficult to say how unusual it was at this point for a white boy like me to have had his first kiss with a girl like Bushra, whose parents were from Yemen. Bushra’s anxiety, and the excitement of our friends, might have been exacerbated by the fact she was Muslim and I was a gora (‘white person’); then again, this could just as easily have been driven by the first stirrings of puberty in our soon-to-be teenage bodies. Balsall Heath and Sparkhill, the neighbouring district where I lived, were poor, dilapidated, and sometimes rough. If these were simply features of everyday life, so, too, was the ethnic diversity around me. From the vantage point of my childhood self – when my mother dropped me off with my Pakistani childminder each day, or later when I went to school past the Asian shops that lined Ladypool Road and Stoney Lane – our neighbourhood seemed no more remarkable than the cars that passed by in the streets or the lollipop ladies who guided us across them.

The memories of that time that are closest to the surface often revolve around Sufyaan, my classmate, near-neighbour and best friend. Even now I can readily picture myself eating fish and chips at his house and watching him roll a handful of chips into a gigantic ball of mashed potato; playing cricket in his back gar- den with a tennis ball, and smashing a six straight through his parents’ living-room window; and holding his hand as we tried to teach ourselves to roller-skate from the top end of our road (mine) to the bottom end (Sufyaan’s). Like Bushra and most of my classmates, Sufyaan’s family had migrated from Britain’s former colonies. In the case of Sufyaan’s family, this was from the Indian sub-continent. For others in my class it was Yemen, Jamaica, Kenya and beyond.

I was among a minority of children at school who spoke English as a first language, and an even smaller minority of white pupils. From the late 1950s onwards in Britain, it became apparent that accelerating inner-city ethnic diversity was not going to be a temporary situation. This was a nightmare scenario for a growing number of politicians and other commentators, who positioned themselves as quasi-prophets warning of the malaise that, in their view, inevitably awaited the country because of its “open-door” immigration policy. The most influential among these was undoubtedly Enoch Powell, who, in 1968, as the Conservative Shadow Defence Minister and MP for Wolverhampton South West, delivered what became known as his “Rivers of Blood” speech in a Birmingham hotel (barely two miles from Balsall Heath), in which he talked of his white constituents having been rendered “strangers in their own country”, their “wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition”. The inflammatory nature of this speech led to Powell’s immediate sacking from the Shadow Cabinet. But in the same year, one opinion poll suggested that 80 per cent of white parents in Britain would have concerns about there being a single black or Asian pupil in their own child’s classroom. And Powell’s narrative of white victimhood at the hands of an external and supposedly alien ‘invasion’ would be repeated, with different inflections and particular targets in mind, at regular intervals over the subsequent fifty years. [1]

[1] Enoch Powell, speech to the Conservative Association, Midland Hotel, Birmingham, 20 April 1968 (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/3643823/Enoch-Powells-Rivers-of-Blood-speech.html). Opinion poll data from Jed Fazakarley, Muslim Communities in England, 1962–90: multiculturalism and political identity (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave, 2017), p. 48. See also Bill Schwarz, “‘The Only White Man in There’: the re-racialization of England, 1956–1968”, Race and Class 38: 1 (1996), pp. 65–78 & Camilla Schofield, Enoch Powell and the Making of Post-Colonial Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).