The Great British Immigration Debate
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Version 0 of 1. LONDON — The final whistle blew. The home team’s shoulders sagged. England, inventor of the game of rugby in the 19th century, had been ousted from the sport’s World Cup, failing for the first time to survive the preliminary sparring in a contest it was hosting. Oddly, though, much of the nation did not mourn. Its attention was elsewhere. There were times when such national humiliation would have prompted agonized soul-searching. Almost reflexively after sporting catastrophes, which are rarely unexpected here, pundits turn their laser gaze on potential scapegoats: this time, the England coach Stuart Lancaster and the team’s skipper, Chris Robshaw, accused by critics of making a fatally flawed decision in a crucial game. But, as England’s destiny unraveled through defeats by Wales and Australia in the pitiless caldron of its home stadium at Twickenham, in southwest London, it was not the only show in town, or even the most watched. That prize went to a BBC television competition called “The Great British Bake Off,” staged in a large white tent, whose winner turned out to be a 30-year-old Muslim descendant of Bangladeshi immigrants named Nadiya Jamir Hussain. The fact that Ms. Hussain wore a black head scarf as she baked her way to a victory watched by 14.5 million people underscored the precarious balance of British society, as the xenophobic right questions the loyalties of British Muslims and seeks to conflate Islam with migrants seeking a free ride on welfare, or with the terrorists of the Islamic State. Ms. Hussain, said the columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, herself an immigrant of South Asian descent from Uganda, had taught the nation “what it is to be British in 2015.” Not so, the broadcaster Julia Hartley-Brewer snapped back on Twitter. “Nadiya Hussain’s victory doesn’t tell us anything more than that she bakes a good cake,” she said. A third writer, Amanda Platell, suggesting that the BBC was driven by political correctness, opined that a contestant who was eliminated would have been better-advised to have baked a “chocolate mosque.” The familiar debate, setting hope against prejudice, is laden with political currency. A vast exodus of Syrians fleeing an increasingly tangled civil war has set the rhetoric of inclusiveness against Britain’s reluctance to absorb more than a relative handful of refugees. For some, Ms. Hussain offered testimony to the notion, disputed by some, that immigrants enrich the nation’s cultural loam. “If anything, putting people of different cultures in the tent is the reason why they had amazing bakes this year,” Ms. Hussain told The Guardian. Compare that with the counterview expressed by Theresa May, the British home secretary. “When immigration is too high, when the pace of change is too fast,” she said, “it’s impossible to build a cohesive society.” Rugby, for its part, has made its own contribution to the debate over diversity. Among England players with foreign roots, the brothers Mako and Billy Vunipola are descended from a rugby-playing dynasty in Tonga. Racism among rugby spectators is virtually unheard of, but it is sometimes reported from soccer games, though soccer controls the moneyed heights of TV rights, merchandizing and gate receipts. But rugby has its contradictions. It inspires intense patriotism, yet its passion is narrowly defined, mirroring the separatist forces that threaten to loosen the 300-year-old United Kingdom. As in many sports, Wales and Scotland have their own teams and anthems. Both survived to the knockout stage along with Ireland and France, making England the oddity among top-tier Europeans. Sound familiar? Critics, moreover, call Rugby Union a middle-class sport compared with Rugby League, rooted in the blue-collar, flat-cap north of England — an emblem of enduring and broader social divisions. And, perhaps the cruelest cut of all, Rugby Union is a sport whose most skilled exponents are often drawn from the Southern Hemisphere — in particular Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, once parts of an empire that has long shrunk in on itself. As in history, it now seems, so too in rugby. |