| 12 mins read
Anya Pearson interviews Sunder Katwala, the director of British Future. Founded in 2011, the think tank works to create a more inclusive and welcoming Britain, addressing issues around immigration, identity, and race. “We listen to people's views, finding common ground and offering constructive solutions” comments Katwala, “building consensus for reforms to immigration and integration policy that can work for all of us.” He previously worked as a journalist and was general secretary of the Fabian Society think tank from 2003 to 2011.
Let’s get down to your origin story. How did you come to be interested in the themes of integration and immigration, identity and race?
I think my origin story is being born in this country and growing up British, Asian, mixed race, but mainly Irish Catholic, and supporting Everton football club. But by the time you get to primary and secondary school, you start to understand that there's a set of arguments and debates about identity: who I am, and who the country is. I don't think if you're Indian, Irish and British, there's a chance you won’t be interested in history!
I was a very big football fan. As a 15 year old, I experienced public racism that was very different from the playground. And I found out about anti-racism too. Everton didn’t have any black players, and Liverpool had signed John Barnes, the best black player in England. Suddenly, the fans around me were chanting, “Everton are white, Everton are white.” It felt like a movie. I thought: ‘Are we the baddies?’
But a lot changed around the time I graduated – what you could and couldn’t shout at football grounds; how diverse workplaces felt. I saw social change going my way, as well as there being identity challenges to grapple with.
How far do you have faith in the Labour Party to build social cohesion after the summer riots of 2024?
They've got good intentions. It’s challenging for any government. Talking about social cohesion could get squeezed out, if they think: ‘it's the economy, it's the NHS, it's climate and energy’. There's a risk that it becomes a thing you get round to if it kicks off, rather than something you put the centre.
Labour won in all the places that it doesn't normally win. So it's now got a coalition of everywhere, and it's got to hold on, which it wasn't that bothered about last time and which will be harder. You’ve got the cities and the towns; the young and the old; England and Scotland or Wales – Labour could get blown away in a very polarized politics, because everybody in the minority and the majority groups think you’re trying to be on someone else's side. I want them to have an ethical commitment to doing the bridging, being able to make a similar argument in different places and make a diverse democracy work.
And how should Labour position itself regarding its messaging on immigration?
They’re relatively confident on some tough bits of immigration. I wouldn't say there was confidence in their messaging about identity, diversity, integration of faith and so on. They've got to be good on bridging the divides in our society, particularly on immigration. Progressives aren’t going to win and protect refugee rights unless you can say, ‘we can combine control and compassion in a managed and humane system, we don't have to choose between them’. If you choose one, you’ll have a third of this society with you, and a third totally against you. Now that won't be enough, politically. So they've got that as a message, they now need to show they can do it as a policy. Instead of performing toughness, actually show the balance of it: “We scrapped Rwanda because it didn’t work. We processed asylum cases. We're giving refugee statuses and are proud to do it. We will turn people away who don’t have a good claim. We know that people are worried about the scale of change in housing. We'll talk to them about what we need for the NHS and the economy.”
Having trust in the median citizen, some of them very liberal, some of them a bit skeptical, is a much better thing to do than just hoping this goes away.
I can't help but think about the discord that might be sown in the UK from abroad by the new Trump regime. What are your predictions or concerns? How might we as a country cope with that challenge?
The Trump administration is a real challenge to my sense of confidence about this. Britain isn't America. America is divided on every front, while we’ve got consensus on some things like universal healthcare. I thought over Christmas that Elon must have shrunk the Atlantic a lot. But I don't think it will play that well for him in Germany if he’s supporting the AfD in Germany, and supporting Tommy Robinson instead of Nigel Farage in Britain. Elon just heats the whole thing up and makes it more difficult.
If you're the Liberal Democrats, the Green Party or the Scottish National Party, you can talk about why you don't like Donald Trump. If you're the leader, you've got to have a relationship with the Trump administration. There's a real political challenge; limiting the damage of tariffs, Ukraine and foreign policy as well as climate change, by playing by the rules and hoping Trump will sometimes as well.
Do you think Kemi Badenoch has managed to lead an honest reckoning about what caused the Conservative Party’s defeat? Are they getting their house in order?
I think Badenoch has a sensible idea that you can’t fix this three months after you got hammered. It will take time. Starmer can be a bit of a tortoise for these five years, but Badenoch doesn't know if she's got one or two years – she’s under pressure.
A lot of people have been giving her advice about what to do without understanding they lost the South of England to the Liberal Democrats.They need to be able to talk to the people they lost to both Farage and to Davey. Badenoch has lots of confidence in herself and the party like her. But getting them to have the patience to hear where she wants to take them in four or five years will be a big challenge.
You said in The Migration Museum’s Annual Lecture 2024, ‘Does the story of migration shape its future?’, that “if we use the history well, it could help us to live well together and embrace a changing idea of “us”, in which everybody’s voice can be heard.” Can you say more about this?
A Migration Museum can’t ever disarm all these arguments about, you know, asylum boats, migration numbers and things like that. And there's a risk, if you put too much weight on it, it sounds as though, when they're saying “we’re flooded by migrants” you're saying, “it's fine, we've always had waves of migration, get over yourself”. You sound disengaged. But what I think it can do is help you tell true stories about the places we live. The best question to ask is “can people become us?” And one thing we just know is that when we get it right, people can become us.
It’s harder to make work, and you don't get to sort of knock-out blow, but it’s foundational to having the conversation about how to make it work. A Migration Museum can take away the existential threat of “in a changing Britain, will migration stop Britain being Britain?”
How should civic society and the broader public think and talk about the role of both legitimate concerns and illegitimate prejudices when it comes to immigration to Britain?
Legitimate concerns have been used by the right to say migration skepticism is good, and if you want good race relations you better have controlled immigration. It's been used by the centre left for quite a while now in quite an anxious way. It’s not the best language, it sounds a bit othering and a bit distancing, but foundationally it’s very important.
If you want to keep racism and prejudice out of a debate, then you've got to say first what debate are you allowed to have. You can have a debate about numbers; history; resources – all debates are on unless you break the rules about prejudice and are outright stereotyping the people who come. The good faith people with legitimate concerns are surprised to be made the offer, and it brings out quite a pragmatic view.
You wrote that this has been the sugar-rush decade in British politics. What do you mean?
I mean, it has been ridiculous. We launched British Future in 2012, the year of the Olympic Games, saying there were fragments in our society and we're going have to work harder at diversity to make it work. Then we had the polarised Scottish Referendum and Brexit, however many Prime Minsters, and the Pandemic. This intense pace is the new normal.
What people would like is a culture of mutual respect. If we don’t take on something, it gets harder and you feel the cultural norm these days is a lot shoutier. The ‘sugar rush’ is the volatility of it. It would be good to get a little bit perspective and time, but these are debates that are very fast moving and people get frustrated if you don’t talk about them, so I don't think it's going to slow down.
Sunder Katwala has recently joined the Political Quarterly Editorial Board.
