Searching for an identity

This week’s Newsweek has a piece on what it calls “Britain’s post-Blair identity crisis.” Most of the article is about Gordon Brown’s current obsession with Britishness but this fact in it stood out: “every second child in London is now born to an immigrant mother.”

This isn’t a problem if these children are being brought up in a way that leaves them feeling part of society rather than in opposition to it. (On that front, it is not encouraging that “only 26 percent of the 1.3 million British residents of Pakistani and Bangladeshi descent are fluent” in English). But it does show how imperative it is that we articulate a sense of identity that the population as a whole can appreciate.