Not welcome anymore?
I was chatting to my dad about politics, he asked whether Pakistanis were welcome in the UK anymore. I knew little about his generation, what the UK was like when they came, why they came, how and why things have changed. I’d reported on migration—infiltrating an Iranian people smuggling gang in Calais to learn about their operation, walked with a Sudanese man across mountains late at night from Italy aiming for France and met Pakistani economic migrants in Italy. To educate myself further, I started with a course in Modern British History at Oxford university learning how this country and its culture came to be. Next, I looked for books, papers and essays that would help me build an accurate account.
A six thousand word essay written in 2004 by David Goodhart called Too diverse? in Prospect magazine (which he founded) included a line—“To put it bluntly - most of us prefer our own kind” which comes at the end of a paragraph where he explored the concepts of solidarity and diversity, he also asks “who is my brother?”. I wanted to explore this. I’d chatted to David after he’d written the essay A tale of three cities after interviewing people outside my local mosque in Burnley and found it to be an honest account. I’d read David Miller’s book Strangers in our midst where he makes the cases for both open and closed borders then a middle ground and describes ‘settled societies’ as those where “most of whose members have a sense that they and their ancestors are deeply rooted in a place.” An ancestor being a person typically more remote than a grandparent, it made me think it would not take the UK’s Pakistanis long to qualify as settled in Miller’s definition.
Complicated questions arose: Who were the Pakistanis, why had they moved to the UK, what was happening in the UK at the time, in Pakistan? Why were Pakistanis a target for the far right? I needed to know more. I found Professor Alison Shaw’s book Kinship and Continuity: Pakistani families in Britain (2000). She’d spent seven months living in Pakistani villages, learned Urdu and produced accurate descriptions of British Pakistanis living in Oxford, from some drinking when they first moved here to them being forcibly married, how the English home is split to keep cultural norms. When my dad had asked whether we were welcome here anymore, I wanted to know who ‘we’ were. I thought of myself as British but I knew some disagreed, even though I’d served in the British Army, Alison’s book shows many of the first Pakistani migrants were those who served in the British Indian Army who faced landlords not allowing them to rent rooms.
So to start
References
Goodhart, D (2004) Too diverse? [Online] Prospect. Available at: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/essays/59131/too-diverse. Accessed 16 July 2025
Goodhart, D (2011) A tale of three cities [Online] Prospect. Available at: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/essays/49268/a-tale-of-three-cities Accessed 16 July 2025
Miller, D (2016) Strangers in Our Midst: The Political Philosophy of Immigration. Cambridge, Massachusetts:Harvard University Press
Shaw, A. (2000) Kinship and Continuity: Pakistani families in Britain. Oxford:Routledge