On Tebbit and Cricket Tests
- Kieran Connell
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
For Norman Tebbit, the multicultural issue was encapsulated by a question. Which side did Britain’s South Asian population support in the cricket? It was an important test, Tebbit explained to a journalist in 1990. Were people still harking back to where they came from, or were they loyal to where they lived? After all, he added, “you can’t have two homes.”
Tebbit – the former Conservative Party grandee who died last month in July – was widely seen as Margaret Thatcher’s attack dog in the 1980s, the minister most capable of selling Thatcherism to the man and woman on the street. It’s hardly surprising, then, that Tebbit struck an uncompromising stance when it came to Britain’s often-fraught politics of multiculturalism.
Tebbit and Thatcher were born six years apart in interwar Britain – Thatcher in 1925, Tebbit in 1931. When they were children, the anthropologist Kenneth Little estimated that fewer than five per cent of the British public had ever had any direct contact with someone from an ethnic minority background. By the time Tebbit became Under-Secretary of State for Trade in Thatcher’s first government, there were more than two million immigrants from Britain’s former colonies in the Caribbean, Africa and the Indian subcontinent living in Britain, the one time imperial “mother country.” Their British-born children were reaching maturity. Both Tebbit and Thatcher were alarmed by what they saw as the potential consequences of this growing immigrant and immigrant-descended population.
In the run-up to the 1979 General Election, for example, Thatcher had sympathized with communities that felt they were being “swamped” by immigrants “with a different culture,”. A few years later, Tebbit rejected the idea that the riots that had erupted in Britain’s inner-cities in the early-1980s had anything to do with unemployment. Instead, he implied, they should be attributed to the essential character of what had become Britain’s ethnically-diverse inner cities. “I grew up in the 1930s with an unemployed father,” Tebbit told his party conference in 1981. “He didn’t riot. He got on his bike and looked for work, and he kept looking until he found it.”
The riots cemented areas like Brixton in London, Handsworth in Birmingham and Toxteth in Liverpool as the primary focus for the anxieties around race, immigration and multiculturalism that remain with us today. For Tebbit, like Thatcher, it was a question of culture, what he understood as the thing that “defines our society.” Two or more cultures operating at the same time and place – living in Britain and supporting Pakistan in the cricket, say – was in his view a “recipe for trouble.”
By autumn 1990, Thatcher had resigned as Prime Minister and Tebbit had decided against running as the continuity candidate to replace her. I had just started primary school in Balsall Heath, another inner-city area of Birmingham, on the other side of town from Handsworth. There, people of South Asian heritage constituted three quarters of the local population; two in ten residents were, like me, white.
1990s Balsall Heath was a site of cultural hybridity, an example of the kind of day-to-day multiculturalism that was gradually emerging in Britain. It’s not hard to see why this milieu provoked anxiety in people who, like Tebbit, clung to an understanding of culture that was seemingly static to the point of immovability.
When I started school, there were still echoes of the global reach of Jamaican “roots” reggae. The oeuvre of Bob Marley and others helped enable a young Black British generation to embrace Rastafarianism, and to see their experiences in Britain in much broader terms – as part of a diasporic continuum that reached out across the “Black Atlantic” to the Caribbean, North America, Africa and particularly Ethiopia, the spiritual home of Rastafarians.
The Ethiopian flag became a recurring sight in inner-cities at this time, often sported by people who had never been to Africa, and in many cases would never go. And despite its pan-African messaging, reggae’s appeal was never limited to any one demographic. Down the road from where I went to school, the reggae band UB40 had been formed by friends of Scottish, Yemini and Jamaican descent. They had first encountered reggae as children, having snuck into the house parties that were often put on by their Caribbean neighbors.
In Balsall Heath, hybridity was manifest in our speech, in the way we often used snippets of Jamaican patois or Punjabi insults in our daily joshing. Having complicated family ties was par for the course. As one person I quote in my recent book put it, “frig me, I live in England, Mom’s from Ireland, my grandad’s from Ireland, my bleedin’ Dad’s from Jamaica...in my family, you’ve got everybody.”
This was a precursor to a more general shift in Britain. By 2015, more than thirty per cent of all babies born in England and Wales had at least one foreign-born parent, and twenty per cent of people identified with an ethnicity other than white British. Today, more than a third of the population of England are either migrants themselves or else – like me – had parents or grandparents born outside of the UK.
Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the idea that Tebbit helped usher in, that immigrants and their descendants are suspect people who should be required to prove their loyalty to Britain, remains a central pillar of the political culture.
In the early-2000s, and fueled in part by the post-9/11 “war on terror” that made British Muslims a particular target, New Labour introduced a Citizenship Oath for prospective immigrants that required them to pledge their commitment to Britain’s “democratic values.” In the aftermath of the 2005 London terrorist attacks, Norman Tebbit went as far as to claim they would have been prevented had a version of his “cricket test” been implemented earlier.
There was also a focus on the need for immigrants to prove their loyalty earlier this year, in the government’s contentious White Paper on immigration. Settlement and citizenship in Britain should be recognized as “a privilege not a right,” the White Paper emphasized. Applicants for citizenship are only successful if they can pass a “knowledge of life” test, one that enables officials to verify their understanding of British customs, laws, history and traditions.
It is unlikely that the test will ever include reference to UB40. Britain’s politics, by and large, continues to be stubbornly divorced from a sense of Britishness that, as the British-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie once put it, is “constantly metamorphosing.” But in homage to Tebbit, perhaps, one of the “knowledge of life” test questions does ask prospective citizens about the length of test match cricket.
Kieran Connell is the author of Multicultural Britain: A People’s History (2024). He teaches history at Queen’s University Belfast. Author photo by Alicia Field.
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