Anyone who has visited Canada or Australia in recent years might have noticed an interesting new tradition. This is the trend for issuing a ‘land acknowledgement’ at the start of any public event. Before discussion gets under way, some bureaucrat or other will get up and note that we are all fortunate enough to be on the land of X, and then garble the name of some not-especially-ancient tribe. The moment gives everyone a feeling of deep meaning and naturally achieves nothing.
Even our King indulged in some of this in May when he opened the latest session of the Canadian parliament. Before getting down to the meat of his speech, Charles said: ‘I would like to acknowledge that we are gathered on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg people.’ You would have thought that by dint of his being King and addressing a parliament the land had been very much ceded.
In any case this is the modern routine. Everybody pays tribute to an extinct or almost extinct tribe, giving the sense that anyone other than the members of the said tribe is an interloper and that indigenous peoples are everywhere and always to be revered. Their ways are forever understood to be the ways of peace. Their customs, habits, crafts and learnings are to be discussed as having a connection to some ancient wisdom, long lost to our own wretched materialistic societies.
One interesting thing is that concern for indigenous rights has exceptionally firm borders. The delineation of those borders are clear. All indigenous peoples must be allowed to have rights, just so long as the people in question are not white and do not originate from our own continent.
The brouhaha over last weekend’s Glastonbury festival nicely clarified some of this. Pascal Robinson-Foster, singer of the rap group Bob Vylan, has been much commented upon because of his ‘death to the IDF’ chant. But another of his charming ditties got far less attention. This one consisted of him jumping around screaming: ‘Heard you want your country back. Ha. Shut the fuck up.’ As he repeated this, things like ‘This country was built on the backs of immigrants’ flashed up on a screen at the back of the stage. I’m not sure that anyone could come up with a more irksome and divisive message if they tried. The taunt is clear: ‘If you are English and think this is your country then I have news for you. Nope. It’s ours now.’
The suggestion is that the British were an essentially bad people until the noble migrants came to rescue us
Others have been ratcheting up a similar message. At last year’s general election, a man called Shakeel Afsar ran as an Independent in Birmingham Hall Green and Moseley, and was only a few thousand votes away from becoming the area’s MP. He is the sort of person who is usually described by local media as a ‘firebrand’. I’m not sure that does him justice. His public life has mainly consisted of insisting that Birmingham will not allow the inventor of Islam – Mohammed – to be in any way criticised or ridiculed. Afsar is also not a fan of Prime Minister Modi of India, for obvious sectarian reasons. In a recent interview, he was asked about the line that a few brave souls have had the temerity to utter in recent years: that if you want to bring your Third World beliefs to our country and replay the same failed playbook here, then perhaps there are other countries – including your family’s country of origin – in which it might be better for you to live.
This was how Afsar responded: ‘Our forefathers were instrumental in rebuilding this country after the second world war. It was our grandfathers who worked in the factories 20 hours. It was our grandfathers who came here and ran the infrastructure. It was our grandfathers who brought you the lovely curry which is your national dish. So how can you tell us to go? We’re not going nowhere. We’re here to stay. We’re not here to take part. We’re here to take over.’
That would seem to me to be almost the definition of a threatening statement, and one almost perfectly designed to stir up the worst sentiments of the human heart. Personally I feel these sentiments throbbing through me when I hear statements like this, or those Mr Robinson-Foster decided to project from the stage at Glastonbury.
Keir Starmer, Danny Boyle (who directed the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony) and others have long insisted that this country was effectively built by the Windrush generation. If they had pitched this ball a little shorter they might have been on to something. If they had said that our country had a rich and distinct history and that we owe ‘something’ to those who came after the last war then they might have brought more people along with them. But the suggestion that the British were an essentially uninteresting and bad people until the noble migrants came to rescue us is a story that is not only false but insulting.
So back to the retort that this new type of anti-British demagogue inevitably wishes to provoke. They want a backlash along the lines of: ‘Actually this is not your country. It’s mine. Your grandfathers may have done something, but mine did far more for a lot longer and to much greater effect. The benefits of the recipe for curry we might litigate another time. But I prefer everything that was already ours.’
And so the language of indigenous rights that has been pushed on our friends in Australia and North America finally comes back around to the people it was never meant to assist. Yes – many feel they would like their country back. Many do not wish their country to be taken over. We were here first, they’ll think. That’s how it works, right?
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