PHILIPPE AUCLAIR ON THE 3 MILLION: BRITAIN’S INVISIBLE MINORITY

It was Tom Holland who first told me about These Islands, and invited me to join the Forum, an invitation which I was very proud to accept. It may be that my support for the England cricket team and a propensity to quote Larkin whenever I could had convinced him that I was a Brit in French clothing. But this is not why Tom approached me, however. It was to add a voice to the conversation, a voice he thought mattered. That, in itself, gave me reason to hope. We’d all seen the public debate descend into a shouting match and worse after the referendum on membership of the European Union. These Islands was a good place to get the conversation started again. And I thought that, just as the 3 million EU nationals in this country, of which I am one, contribute far more to British life than their taxes, I could contribute more than being the Frenchman de rigueur in such company. I am thankful for this opportunity, and intend to make the most of it. As is stated in our mission statement, it would be a crime to let such a crisis go to waste.

We speak of ‘the 3 million’ wrongly; we are far more than that, as so many of us have British partners, and children who were born here and have the British passport which we never thought we’d need. My daughter is one of them. More often than not, exact statistics are unavailable; in fact, one of the defining traits of data on the so-called ‘3 million’ EU is their piecemeal nature and scarcity. That we, as a group, contribute £2.5bn more in direct taxes than we claim in benefits is one of the few facts which is accepted by everyone. Other than that, even the ‘3 million’ is an estimate. In the borough where I live, Hammersmith & Fulham, a quite staggering 21.5% of residents are EU nationals – the third-largest such community in the UK – but this is only taking into account those individuals who are formally registered with the council authorities, and taking bi-nationals such as my daughter out of the equation.

Why? I believe that the reason for this is that it would be difficult to imagine as heterogeneous a minority as this group, even if this minority is, by far, the most numerous in the UK – twice the size of the ethnic Indian community, for example.

What distinguishes us is that we are indistinguishable, to the point of invisibility, because we are the most diverse minority of them all. Film-makers and TV scriptwriters these days take great care in portraying a diverse Britain. It is now unthinkable to have a BBC TV drama, set today, in which you’d only see white faces. British Asians, British West Indians, thank goodness, now have a presence on our screens which is no longer tokenistic.

But name me one British TV drama in which the 3 million and their partners are depicted beyond the stereotypical Polish builder, French au pair and suchlike, and you’ll probably be stumped. I can think of only one, The River. I’m told Holby City has got a couple. That, and the invisible Bulgarian fruit-pickers in The Archers.

We are white, brown, black. We may have Asian, African, South American ancestry – yet we are, most definitely, European citizens. We speak a bewildering number of languages. We worship God as Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, Buddhists, or we don’t worship any god at all. We pick fruit in Kent, work in the NHS as nurses and doctors, even though there has been an alarming fall in the number of new applicants; we are bricklayers and construction workers – entrepreneurs and investment bankers. We tend to be younger on average, but that is hardly something which makes us stand out in a crowd.

When I check in at our local NHS surgery, I tick the box: White/Other. I wonder what a French friend of mine who happens to be from the Guadeloupe does. Most of the time, there’s no Black/Other box to tick on official documents. I look at the results of the 2011 census, at a chart devised by the Office of National Statistics. ‘Percentage of people born in or outside the UK, by ethnic groupe, England and Wales’. We’re not there. We don’t exist as an entity. We’re subsumed in categories which, in terms of identity, are hollow, meaningless. We’re ‘Other’, like a US citizen would be.

There’s more to this. The lack of an outwardly recognizable identity must be considered in parallel with the rapid rise of ‘identity’ as a – perhaps the – pivotal component of social representation. I’ll give just one example. A large, well-known company recently circulated an advertisement on social networks, the aim of which was to attract young people to join its training programme. Five models had been chosen by this company to illustrate the ‘inclusiveness’ of its recruitment drive. What struck me was how all five were immediately identifiable – that’s the correct word – as specific gender, ethnic and religious ‘types’. Put bluntly, all five were not ‘types’, but updated stereotypes. Two male, two female, one transgender (as in: identifiable as such because he/she couldn’t be identified in binary fashion, through the juxtaposition of unmistakably ‘male’ and ‘female’ characteristics). Three white, one brown, one black. One Muslim – a young woman wearing a hijab. All five could also immediately be associated with urban, cosmopolitan lifestyles, through clothes, hairstyles, jewellery, and ‘cool’ demeanour. My object here is not to discuss how this attempt at representing ‘inclusiveness’ and ‘diversity’ can lead to normative stereotyping, albeit of a ‘positive’ kind; or why some other British ‘communities’ (people of Western African or Eastern Asian appearance, Jews wearing yarmulkes or Roman Catholics wearing crucifixes) are generally absent from such representations. It is that, reflecting on this image, I couldn’t see how we, the so-called 3 million, could be stereotyped beyond our national – not European – characteristics, not a few of them lifted from TV series, from ‘Allo ‘Allo! to Scandi thrillers and Spiral. And that is a significant problem.

In a social sense, and increasingly in a political sense, it is becoming ever more difficult to exist outside of a mediated representation of ‘identity’, however crude it can be. Now, what to do when this identity is non-objectifiable? As we European nationals cannot be stereotyped as such, despite possessing a deeply-ingrained European identity, this has serious, negative consequences on our capacity to ‘belong’ to a country which we nevertheless feel part of, which we love, but which struggles to grasp our difference, as we’re this very unusual group in millenial terms: an aggregate of disparities, yet a whole; whereas former ‘wholes’ – in terms of sexual identity, for example – are now divided in numerous categories and sub-categories, each of them with its own, minutely-defined specifics.

What this European identity is, what its cultural and historical foundations are, is not what concerns me now. I’ll just postulate that it is to me, as it is for so many of my fellow EU Nationals, and many Britons too, as deeply-rooted and powerful as any other ‘identity’. Because it is a supra- or meta-national identity (yet is compatible with regional and national patriotism), it can be seen as a flimsy construct from the outside, when it is nothing of the kind. The mistake would be to believe that this European identity is an artificial by-product of the process of integration started with the Treaty of Rome, when in fact, the process of integration couldn’t have started without a pre-existent sense of a shared identity.

To me, being a European is as real as being a Frenchman and a Londoner, something which resists questioning, as what makes it a genuine identity is that it is, in my own mind, heart and marrow, beyond questioning; but not interrogating, which is a completely different thing. To be discussed, I suppose – but elsewhere. The question is: what of us now?

We’re often been described as being  ‘in limbo’ since the Brexit referendum; which I find apt, as the Fathers of the Church could never come to an agreement as to what ‘in limbo’ meant, how long infants and Moses would spend in it, and where they’d eventually find themselves. It will soon be two years since the 23 June vote, but we do not yet know what exactly is going to happen to us and to our families. There is just a vague, uneasy – sometimes very uneasy – sense that we’ll carry on as before, but (and that is a big ‘but’) without any of the safeguards and guarantees which we took for granted, as they were and are our rights as EU citizens, rights which have been in force in all EU nations since 1993, UK included, just as they were and are the rights of British citizens who live in any of the other twenty-seven member states. Until such a time when Britain bids adieu to the Union for good, all of us – all of us – are EU citizens. Again, my purpose is not to discuss what is right and what is wrong here. It is to consider how this informs the debate on how it is possible – or not – to forge a new kind of citizenship for the single largest minority in the United Kingdom, when ‘citizenship’ had been an irrelevance before for us. Many of us felt, in our own, strange and thrilling way, that we ‘belonged’ after a fashion, with or without the required passport – of whichever colour it may be – to proclaim it to the rest of the world. We felt safe in this sense of belonging. Tragically, this is no longer the case. We ask ourselves: is it possible to belong, as we desperately want to – this is our home, not a foreign posting, and most of us have nowhere else to ‘go back to’ – without being British? And what kind of Brits would we be if becoming British were a matter of convenience, when the link we enjoyed before was so much stronger than the binding of a passport?

Britishness is an extraordinary fluid concept: it is one of its greatest strengths. But it has the fluidity of a liquid in a bubble. We, EU nationals, can skirt its surface, but not more than that. The British should not fool themselves by thinking Britishness is so loose a notion that it can fit anyone who wishes to embrace it. I may shock you by saying this, but that is my role in this forum: this inclusivity has something remarkably insular about it, in that it only extends to peoples who, at some point in their history, were conquered and governed by envoys of the British Empire, and that is that.

Can this change? Most of my fellow members of the 3 million don’t think so any longer. Something intangible has been altered, something which can’t be mended has been broken. There have been too many insults hurled at us, both individually (I was the target of those on several occasions, for the first time since I arrived in London, thirty years ago) and as a group, too many accusatory fingers pointed at the EU ‘migrants’, too much indifference, false sympathy, political posturing or hostility. And there are moments when I despair myself – but I have also found that yes, I still was convinced that this could change, even if how this is to be achieved is not yet clear to me.

First, there is the question of what will become of us.

Our fate is discussed daily. But what strikes me the most is how apathetic the general public – including many so-called Remainers – tend to be when it comes to us. People extend their sympathies, express their concern, say, oh, it’s so unfair. Then do nothing. A British friend recently told me over dinner at our home that he ‘hoped’ my British wife and I would be ‘able to stay’, without being aware of how shocking his words were to us. Now, imagine the uproar if, from one day to the next, a more homogenous, more easily recognizable minority of 3 million plus people had been threatened with, at best, disenfranchisement, loss of rights and compulsory registration and, at worst, expulsion. Just imagine that.

But These Islands remain our home. We did not come here because of a upheaval ‘at home’ like the Jews who fled the pogroms or the Poles who fought in the RAF and took root in England, as we have taken root. But citizenship in the accepted sense will elude us in post-Brexit Britain, even if the nightmare of forced repatriation seems to have been avoided. ‘Seems’, only, by the way: we should not fool ourselves. A substantial part of the British electorate, egged on by the nastiest press in Europe and populist politicians, are at least willing to consider this, forced repatriation, as an option. It’s not just sterling which has taken a knock, it is also, more worryingly, the reputation of Britain for tolerance abroad.

On the other hand, something else, something much more promising has happened. Again, never let a crisis go to waste. Can there be such a thing as a European identity in Britain? My conviction is: there can be, without a doubt, and one of the reasons why I remain optimistic is that I believe that millions of Britons have now realised that, yes, this European identity was also theirs. That was not necessarily the case before, by which I mean that this European alter ego was a real but silent companion with whom to live a Brit’s life in Britain. To these British citizens, Brexit has revealed how much they cared about the extra layer that being a European citizen too added to their lives; a layer which had become fused to the others: modern Britishness could also be about a newly acquired sense of European-ness. That it was not just about the economy, the trade of ideas, people and goods – but also about an emotional link which went far deeper than thought, and was now threatened.

To me, that’s one of the main tasks ahead: how this sense of shared identity can be a foundation stone for a form of citizenship in Britain that would welcome us, the invisible, the 3 million. I thank These Islands for providing an opportunity to explore the ways to get there. Enough shouting – let’s get the conversation going.

Podcast

If you enjoyed Philippe’s piece, listen to his podcast for These Islands. From philosophy to football, Philippe reflects on his personal story, why he became involved with These Islands, and ‘The 3 Million: Britain’s Invisible Minority’. The recording opens and closes with excerpts from Philippe’s song: ‘My England’.