How to end our very British culture war: Sunder Katwala
In this episode
If you need some optimism about the future of Britain, a place that currently feels like it’s riven with political polarisation, prejudice and the aftermath of Brexit, Sunder Katwala is here to remind us that there is a way out of this. His proposal is that patriotism - if done well - could be the answer to many of the problems associated with the culture wars. Can emphasising identity actually overcome division?
Guests
Sunder Katwala, Director, British Future (@sundersays)
More info
How to Be a Patriot: Why love of country can end our very British culture war - Published by HarperNorth and out now.
Check out the work of British Future including their research on public attitudes to immigration, why events matter for social connection, reducing racial inequality and remembrance.
Buy a copy here
We'd love to hear from you over the summer with your ideas, feedback or experiences of forest bathing, get in touch via email (reasons@cheerfulpodcast.com) or via the website!
Episode transcript
Geoff: Let's say hello to our guest for this episode. His new book is called ‘How to Be A Patriot: Why Love of Country Can End Our Very British Culture War’. Sunder Katwala, hello.
Sunder: Great to be with you.
Geoff: It’s great to have you. You've been blurbed…Ed, he’s been blurbed by Spider-Man. Tom Holland says ‘my go-to’…hang on.
Sunder: It’s not the same Tom Holland
Geoff: Hang on, it's not Spider-Man? I thought Sunder is connected to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It's a different Tom Holland! Did you try to get Spider-Man?
Sunder: Uh, inquiries are ongoing.
Geoff: Maybe for the paperback. The book is fantastic. And I've been waiting for the Sunder Katwala book for a while. Let's start with the idea of the culture war. It is bold to say that you’re going to address this. I'm sort of interested to know: how big do you feel the idea of a culture war is in real life, as somebody who spends a lot of time online? How aware of that side of things is your average person who perhaps doesn’t spend as much time online?
Sunder: It’s quite middling the extent to which the cultural conflict, the identity conflict in Britain can be called a culture war. If you take the term really seriously I think you'd say we don't really have a culture war in Britain, but we've got increased identity conflict in our politics. I think it'd be much more reasonable to say there's a proper culture war in America.
A culture war I think is something quite similar to a civil war. It is when there isn't a belief that the political system can sort out an existential clash between people with different views of a question. It's not the kind of thing you can agree to disagree about. I think abortion in America, I think gun control in America, and I think, you know, violence and the election. These are the sorts of existential disagreements that are the kinds of things that people might say ‘maybe violence is legitimate in our politics,’ ie. culture wars actually legitimise violence in our politics.
We [Britain] haven't got very much of that and we use the term ‘culture war’ to mean Twitter storm about identity. But we have got more public awareness of culture wars, cancel culture, wokeness at pace, year on year. I think a quarter of people knew what terms like ‘cancel culture’ and ‘wokeness’ meant two years ago and it was 50% last year. So, while there's a difference in the intensity, we can't be complacent that we are not sort of going down that road.
Ed: Just before we get onto patriotism, which is the main, sort of argument of your book. Is part of the truth here that we are less divided by a culture war than many people would want us to believe. In other words, actually by and large we’re quite tolerant, quite inclusive. That’s quite important, isn’t it?
Sunder: Yes, although it might be the progressives that don’t believe that now. There might be a level of progressive jeopardy that’s very high, because we live in a world of Brexit and we live in a world of Trump. Whereas, you know, it would've been the progressives saying, ‘don't worry, we'll all get along’. You know, ‘we can make diversity work’. It might now be the progressives that have got a high sense of jeopardy.
I think the foundational reason for confidence, if you look at the kind of culture war issues of sort of 1968 to the 1990s, they got settled on largely liberal terms. The questions that used to get asked in the British Social Attitude Survey: ‘What do you think about traditional gender roles?’ ‘Should men do the work and women stay at home? ‘Is homosexuality always wrong?’ ‘How would you feel if you had a black boss or if your children married across ethnic lines?’ The reason they don't ask the questions anymore is because the things that were 40:40 divides in the eighties and nineties are now like 80:10. And so we can bank that progress if we want to and say: ‘actually a lot of culture wars got resolved.’
But I think progressives would worry about all of this. They see it potentially as all being reversed if the Right turns up the heat. And I don't think there's much social reality to that. So these are more moderate constrained skirmishes, but they're very important to people who are interested in issues of race, racism, gender.
Ed: So when your subtitle says, ‘why love of country can end our very British culture war’. What is the thing you are trying to end?
Sunder: I think it’s probably a bit of an over-claim, you can’t fix it all! The problem with culture wars is, you know, accusing someone of being a culture warrior is an aggressive move in itself. Like, dog whistling and so on. Everyone knows how to end the culture war, which is that people who don't agree with them should shut up and everyone should agree with them instead.
And that is not how you end a culture war. You end a culture war when you take responsibility for your side, your tribe's, voice in the political system when you do disagree well about the things you can disagree about while having the foundations that you need to protect.
So yeah, it's fine to call out political opponents when they cross lines, but you are only doing something useful on the culture war if you're holding your own tribe and your own side to the standards you demand of others.
Ed: I want to just sort of try and be as clear as possible. We don’t have the same culture war as the US, so what is the thing that we’re trying to end?
Sunder: We’re trying to avoid - and we looked at during 2016-2019 - we're trying to avoid escalating unconstructive social and cultural polarisation. Where, if I know your views about one thing, if I see you wearing a face mask, I know what you think about climate change.
And there are just two Britains: one of which is progressive on everything, and the other one is the opposite. France and America both have slightly more of that underlying potential. We're trying to make it possible to pick and choose your issues.
Ed: Sunder, talk a little bit about your background, your family, and maybe what makes you optimistic about Britain, as I think you see that as a cause for optimism?
Sunder: Why I’m optimistic about Britain is a story of experience as much as of instinct. I was born in a hospital in Doncaster, as it happens, in the mid 1970s. So I'm born here, in Yorkshire, to parents who've come to this country from India and Ireland. My dad has taken a flight the week after Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech - clearly it didn't get the coverage Enoch needed in Gujarat!
And his parents wanted him to go back, but he's stayed, he's met my mum who's from Cork, Southern Ireland. So I grew up, sort of Irish Catholic kid with an Indian name, mixed ethnic identity. I'm going to start to wonder about what's going on with history and identity and so on! As a teenager I realised that that's quite challenged. I'm very keen on football, but I experienced a lot of overt racism as well as seeing Everton win the league title twice, which hasn't happened since.
But I then see change in my lifetime, in my society in an absolutely profound way, because the racism I was seeing in 1989, 1990 was being sorted out by 1995 and 1996. I was graduating from university into the world of work in the late nineties. There was almost no diversity in our public life at that point. I graduate into a country where there's never been a Black or Asian government minister in this country. So whatever you think of the politics of the diverse cabinet and diverse opposition it's a change that I've experienced. Those are foundational changes that we don’t lose to the referendum, the culture of football stadiums when I take my 11-year-old.
I'm then writing a book that isn't saying: ‘has Britain got a place for people like me?’ because I sorted that out by the time I was a young adult. It's like, ‘why is everyone else at loggerheads on identity? Am I the only optimist left? Let's find out. Why do people not share my confidence?’ And you've got to get into what's going on. It's harder I think to pitch this idea of confidence to people who are the beneficiaries, people born in this century benefit from the change of eighties and nineties, but they didn't experience them. Their expectations have risen. It hasn't felt like society is going forward.
And if I start saying, ‘oh, but we used to have monkey chanting and bananas being chucked’, they'd be like, ‘well, what do you want a gold medal for? Not chucking bananas?’ ‘That's not the change I want to see, I want equal opportunity yesterday!’ So I like that radicalism and those high expectations, but I think it's worth putting the desire for change in the story of the changes we've made and worked out how we got them and how to go forward. We got them by reducing the social distance between groups in our society, in classrooms, in universities, over the generations. So we should keep that and build on that.
Ed: And just talk to us - if you don't mind, and if it's not too personal - about your own kids and how the challenges that they face, and the world that they're growing up in feels different to the world you grew up in?
Sunder: Yes, I mean, it gives me confidence when I talk to them. The kids feature in the book particularly because while Britain's becoming more ethnically diverse at pace, the Katwala household is becoming less ethnically diverse. Because I filled in the census forms in 2011 when the kids were all aged under five or six and I thought the kids were mixed white Asian like me, I tick the same box. And they've decided they're white British now because they go to very diverse schools. And my daughter said, ‘I'm a supporter of Black Lives Matter, but you know, if people give you white privilege most of the time you've got white privilege!’
And I was saying, ‘but Zarina Katwala, when you send your CV in, you know you've got skin in the game when the people aren’t giving the right number of interviews.’ I didn't say, ‘what about the narrative that mixed race people were the answer here kids? We were gonna nail this census!’
My children get very annoyed, they think it's really obvious that woke is an insult and that nobody would identify as woke, and that you'd need to be a 50-year-old progressive to think it can be a compliment as well. But they think that much more strongly now. So anyway, they’re a source of information for me. Not an entirely representative and balanced one, but it's quite interesting to see how they integrate these points.
Geoff: I'm feeling very attacked right now.
Ed: And just talk to us then about, patriotism, and why you think that is so relevant to this whole question.
Sunder: Yes, and it is a counterintuitive proposition as clearly what we’re seeing is that identity can divide. Maybe we should avoid identity and say, ‘don't we all love the NHS’? ‘And isn't everyone worried about their gas bills now’? And then just hope this stuff calms down.
And you know, there is obviously a shift towards more economics and less identity. I think you've got to go through it. You've got to have a principled case for what to do about differences of cultural identity, how to resolve them. For progressives, of course, it's about being able to make social change over time without contributing to this sort of civil war-like politics. So it's really important, I think, to have national moments, national symbols, experiences where you are doing something with the people that you don't agree with politically. That you're not living in, sort of Remain-land and Brexit-land and you don't share anything.
So things like our sporting teams can be used for that. Things like the monarchy can have that, even though not everybody agrees with it. The most important institutional inoculation in Britain is that our broadcast media, which is regulated, and has some opinion in it, but is still a kind of relatively straight place. And if something big is happening in Ukraine, in covid, in politics, lots and lots people with different views are watching the BBC. One of the big differences between Britain and America is that in America, anything that happens in America, two different groups are just watching a totally different narrative of what just happened.
And so it becomes incredibly difficult for people to say, ‘I agree the election was fair’, because one channel is saying it almost certainly wasn't. And the other channel is saying, ‘this is the start of a civil war’. So, you want to keep at all levels the possibility of meaningful contact, shared identity, and people with different views having the same experience rather than parallel, separate experiences.
Geoff: How easy is it for that to hold? Not just now that people can to some extent get the news that best suits their views online, but also with the plurality of channels. We were lucky to grow up in a time, I guess, where there were three and then four channels.
Ed: Lucky?
Geoff: I think we were in a way.
Ed: That's not what my children say.
Geoff: Yeah, but your children - I know this now takes us into a slightly fatuous way of looking at it - but Ed was a kid who grew up on Dallas. No child would ever watch, say Succession, because they've got their own media. Media was able to unite people, not just that we were getting the same news, but those cultural moments, there were just many more eyes on them because we were in an era of media scarcity. And that’s changed.
Sunder: So it’s harder for it to hold up, that’s right. You know, the BBC is a century old. And generations of us - I'm very much one born in the mid seventies - were very much children of the BBC in the way that my children won't be. So everything I care about, you know, taping the pop charts and watching Top of the Pops every Thursday night for 15 years, which was an intergenerational experience.
I think the political fragmentation, the media fragmentation is a challenge and it is a problem. And I also think progressives could make it worse, because if you now mount a kind of progressive campaign ‘to save the BBC from the ‘evil Tories’’ you've almost, before we’ve started the argument, created the problem that the BBC's now going to belong to progressives who believe in climate change and not to ‘evil Tories’. I want a sort of progressive and a conservative defence. This is the place where we do the Last Night of the Proms and the Coronation. We could still do some of this if we fragmented the channels more, but it's easier for 20 million of us to occasionally do the same thing once or twice a decade if we keep a trusted institution that does that. And at a local level that's really important that, you know, if something really terrible happens in Nottingham, BBC Nottingham is an incredibly important institution for people talking about what that means.
Ed: I don’t quite know how to ask this question. But you want to embrace patriotism. What does that mean in practice?
Sunder: I think politics can be part of the problem. I think at a social level, we want to share a country with our neighbours because in the end, however much Scotland disagrees about the future of Scotland or Northern Ireland does in England and Wales, we are living on this island. We are living in these towns and cities, and I want to find emotionally important and resonant ways to share that in memorable ways.
They don't all have to be sporting events, but sporting events have that feature. You don't have to like sport, but they're intense things: you win and lose together. You remember it and you tell stories about it. You need moments like that so that the fact that you've got different views about whether there should be an independent Scotland or not isn't an existential thing where you're going to hate each other, that's what you want to do.
Now, politics can be part of the problem because if you don't want these, ‘them and us’ identities that join everything up, politicians tell ‘them and us’ stories. If they start to say ‘we are the patriots, don't trust them, they're not patriotic,’ rather than saying, ‘we've got a different idea, different agenda’ then you'll get a kind of a thing where people might opt out of patriotism because it seems like it belongs to Brexit, or the opposite. So I think it's really important that politicians don't do a kind of ‘we are the real patriots, the other side don't really count’, but actually have their vision and their story about how they relate to the nation, what they want to keep about it, what they want to change about it.
Geoff: How do you engineer a sense of national identity without it seeming a little bit sinister and top down?
Sunder: I think it has to be quite soft. It’s a liberal democracy with younger generations. So I think a lot of this is show, not tell. It might be about quite soft use of, you know, moments that still matter. Remembrance hasn't faded away as something that still matters because it's part of an intergenerational contract of gratitude to people who are no longer alive. The 75th birthday of the National Health Service will be marked as quite a symbolic occasion about what it means to be British and what we decided. We don't treat it as just a public service, we treat it as having macro symbolic importance.
You can also do things in schools. Ofsted can send a thing around saying ‘Shared British values are respect for diversity and difference’ and then they can teach that to primary school children. But the question of whether that feels right, real or not to you when you are nine and when you are 15 and when you are 21, does depend on, maybe how politicised or how this is for you, or not for you.
Those moments feel, as I say in the book, all of this seemed simple to me when I was eight. The Eurovision Song Contest is on, the Royal Wedding’s very boring. You know, England’s going to the World Cup. And much more complicated when I'm a teenager. But I actually see efforts being made to tell a story about how these things include people like me. If you are getting a message that these things are not for you, then we won't have that kind of cultural and social capital to do that bridging and to do that bonding.
Ed: If you take a sort of pinnacle moment for national unity like the Olympics, what does that teach us about your thesis? Or in other words, what inspiration do you draw from that?
Sunder: I think there two useful about that point. So London gets the Games for Britain in 2005. It gets it in the moment, the same moment of the 7/7 bombings actually. So it has to deal with the opportunity to tell the world a story about the diversity of youth of London, and then a really shocking event happens and it has to talk about what that still means. It handles that very well, literally in that week and then has an idea about what that’s saying to the world.
And I think what’s valuable - and I think people who voted Remain might miss this - what’s valuable about 27 million people watching Danny Boyle tell a story about Britain because we're hosting the Olympics and he wants to tell the world what we're telling ourselves, the 27 million doesn't just belong to one of the tribes! All of the political tribes in Britain can see different things that connect them. The smelting of the rings is a very powerful story about the Industrial Revolution.
But what I think is really important, I would really contrast what was good about the Boyle ceremony to what happened with the Millennium Dome. It feels to me the Millennium Dome says the future, not the past. Because it's the future, not the past, it hasn’t got any roots or any story. Boyle shows the development of Britain over a thousand years: history turning into modern Britain. So that's important. That gives you a symbolic vision to think, on our better days, on a happy time: ‘I like that version of our country’, ‘I would like to be that version of our country’, but of course it'll be idealised and it won't be entirely true. So I think you need a strategy to make your society more like the idealised version you want. But a glimpse of what we might achieve together is a valuable thing to have.
Geoff: On history: that a huge part of the answer? History in education? You talk about Windrush in the book. My son is seven and learns about Windrush. It certainly wasn't ever something, I was aware of at school. Is a big part of this telling those stories?
Sunder: There’s a real paradox about history, especially if you’re in Britain. If we have a culture war in Britain, if you really want to get one going, it'll be about history, because history really matters. I mean, this is a thing Tony Blair was wrong about. Tony Blair said ‘we are a young country.’
I mean, he might have had some aspirations, but I mean, Britain's an old country and it knows it! And so that could make it sound difficult, but there's loads of resources in British history. The secret of the British in history is that we're very proud of it. We don't really know any of it, and there's an appetite to learn about it. You then have resources in Britain that that I think are harder to find in Western Europe of, are there shared symbols, shared moments, shared stories about history.
It's obviously history of empire, decolonisation, immigration. It sounds quite sharp-edged, and we might be saying, let's stay away from that. Actually the history of Britain means that the really cherished tradition of remembrance is about two world wars fought by armies that look much more like the Britain of the 2020s than the Britain of 1918 or the 1940s.
It's surprising for people who care a lot about remembrance, to see there's this enormous commonwealth contribution minority state. You go into classrooms, you'd have, you know, young people quite keen to pursue change, saying, ‘write us into our history books, tell the full story’. But it's quite a constructive, quite potentially bridging thing. The history of Britain really is a long history about how we became us. I think we've been a bit scared of that because it feels like that might be a problem in multi-ethnic classrooms. This is how to explain that the multi-ethnic classrooms exist.
Geoff: And there can be a defensiveness amongst people if they feel that their history, which they might not really understand that well or know that well, there can be a real defensiveness if people then feel that history has been reverse engineered. How do you counteract that?
Sunder: There can be defensiveness and you can do this really, in a broad way, where you write new chapters into the book and that feels good for minorities and everyone says, ‘that's good. I own the book’. Or you can do that in a way that triggers a lot of defensiveness.
The defensiveness is quite ironic: when we start talking about empire or slavery. A lot of people will then say - maybe they're white British from the majority group – ‘well, I wasn't born. Don't pin that on me. I'm not guilty.’ But they've actually abolished the idea of a nation now because they're gonna be proud of Shakespeare. I don't think they were born when Shakespeare was here!
So that defensiveness, or you know, ‘didn't everyone else do it?’ I think you've got to be careful about that. Hear all the voices, tell all the stories. That's quite inclusive language. It's good. If you start talking about ‘decolonisation’ or ‘let's remove all of the statues’, you create a much more polarised, much more defensive debate on both sides.
Ed: But Sunder, aren't you highlighting one of the big challenges here? Geoff and I did an episode on this ages ago. We didn't really teach the history of Empire in schools when Geoff and I were growing up, and we probably still don't, and that's because it's such potentially contested and divisive terrain. And isn’t that just a massive challenge?
Sunder: It's just so much less contested when you do it. Partly because the World Wars and Remembrance story is a way into empire and colonization is an example. There are definitely sharp edges of this history. I think if people who are mainstream conservatives feel that you are taking what you say is an image of an old monolithic 1950s history, and of course, history has moved a long way in schools have Horrible Histories for kids, which does the stories of Empire Britain reasonably well most the time. If you're then going to replace that with a really sort of monolithic story where there's only one answer then that's sort of swapped it over. What has been the problem is not that it divides when you do it, it actually does the opposite. Sometimes you have parallel conversations going on that you haven't been able to join up.
Ed: What's the evidence? What's the evidence that it's easier to do than people might think?
Sunder: Well, um, during the first World War centenary, 2014 to 2018, knowledge of Commonwealth troops went from 40% to 70% in this country. And people with conservative views and young people with, left wing views, all thought that was a really important thing to do, that we’d made it more common ground. Now it might be that, doing specific bits of the sharp edges of slavery might get more difficult.
But if you do it well, it's good. Take Edward Colston and Bristol, which is the epicentre of that history debate. Very few people outside Bristol knew much about that debate. Everyone in Bristol had been hearing about it for 15 years because Colston's everywhere, everything's named after him: often schools and so on. But what happened in Bristol, and I think the Mayor Marvin Rees did a very good job. There are two or three different conversations in Bristol. I could go to an event at a festival of ideas in Bristol every year and everyone will agree that we need to do more to sort out the history.
And a completely different group of people would be writing on the online comment section of the Bristol Post saying, ‘tell these woke people to leave Bristol's history at all’. And nobody had managed to create a space where those views could be heard, could work out what they wanted to do.
After the statue came down, they actually had a history commission. It did large public engagement, and they found a way to actually get the views respected. It turned out that there was quite a lot of potential late consensus: it should be in the museum, we should tell the story, we shouldn't whitewash the past or we shouldn't, you know, write it all out. But it was really difficult to work out who was going to do that. You know, an institution like the National Trust might do that and got into a lot of cultural challenge for doing that, but there was a big public appetite for what they were trying to do.
Geoff: You have a tiny, perhaps not statistically significant, but very interesting focus group in your in-laws who, they are conservative. They voted to leave. Have they read the book?
Sunder: Yes, they have. They had to read the book for GDPR reasons, the publisher said. As I was revealing their voting behaviour in the referendum. And I said, it's not, ‘it's really not a secret how the in-laws votes’.
Geoff: Have you had a conversation with them about it?
Sunder: They said it's a very fair… because they're very proud of the book, I’m the first person in the family to write a book. But they said it's a very fair account of the Brexit divide, partly I'm quite empathetic to them. I started having monthly conversations with them and I was tweeting them as ‘Brexit in Billericay’, and I learned quite a lot from these conversations, and they got a bit radicalised in that three years stalemate, my father-in-law particularly.
It's also an example I think of social distance because a lot of people say to me on Twitter, ‘Sunder, get to Billericay, give us an update. We need to know what's going on in Billericay’. People are saying that in liberal newsrooms occasionally. My in-laws aren't representative of the Brexit vote, but they represent broadly the views of a quarter of a country. The people who sort of would've been quite happy to leave without a deal and then see what happened because you know, ‘it's all got a bit political’. And if you don’t know anybody who voted differently to you and you don’t have those conversations. And they've got surprisingly moderate liberal views occasionally on some things because they changed their minds a lot on questions of sexuality, especially gay rights. My wife went to university, her parents met gay people who were her friends. You know, they changed their views. So it is quite interesting to get a rounded view of the actual person who holds these views, not your impression of what everyone who thinks like that must think.
Ed: Isn't this a very good sort of note to end on, and a very good lesson? Which is: because they are your in-laws, you engage with them – and also because you’re a decent bloke and all that. You engage with them with empathy and you listen to what they've got to say and try and understand where they're coming from without, you know, sort of being dismissive. And isn't that quite a good lesson for us all about people we disagree with? Isn’t that the fundamental lesson?
Sunder: Yes. I think that empathy of your opponents is really important. The other thing is we do need meaningful contact in the real world. Real conversations with people. I meet lots of people who voted remain. It's partly the geography of it, I hadn't really spoken to somebody about it who votes the other way.
I think structuring in that meaningful contact and not having political parties, political means, pressure groups that are sort of monocultures. If everyone's got a degree and everyone thinks the same, and ‘now we're gonna have a conversation about what people who aren't in the room want to hear from us.’ That would be much worse than broadening the room and being able to talk to different people.
Ed: Well look Sunder, it is as always fascinating to talk to you. A total pleasure. The book is ‘How to Be a Patriot: Why Love of Country Can End Our Very British Culture War’, Sunder Katwala. Thank you so much for joining us.
Sunder: Great to see both.
