SPECTAT THE OR
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NO CHEERS FOR MR TEBBIT
Mr Norman Tebbit's cricket test of national loyalty is not original. Hindu extremists in India apply the same test to their Muslim fellow citizens: at cricket matches do they cheer for India or Pakis- tan? If the latter is true, they must be drummed out of India, or at least roughed up. And so, many innocent, law-abiding citizens become victims of mobs, whipped into a frenzy of chauvinism by politicians who seek advantage in bloodletting.
It is of course quite possible that some British citizens of Indian or Chinese origin — assuming for a minute that they were interested — are happy to see teams from India, or Hong Kong beat England on the sports-field. Nostalgia for the old country, no matter how miserable the life one left behind, is a powerful emotion in most immigrants. But what of it? Nostalgia does not negate loyalty to the new home. Besides, it is not the job of politicians in democracies to make sure that citizens sit in stadia waving flags and bellowing the name of their country in unison. For that is not the mark of good citizenship. A re- sponsible citizen is loyal to the laws and institutions of the land, and those rather than the playing-fields are properly within the domain of our politicians.
Mr Tebbit is in danger of confusing Yobbo chauvinism with citizenship. He appears to believe that loyalty to laws and institutions is largely a matter of culture and race, a point that his demagogic example of Salman Rushdie's Muslim 'judges' is designed to support. He is worried that Britain and America will become violent and lawless because they have become less Anglo-Saxon.
He is quite right to say that Muslim extremists issuing death threats are a dan- ger to British society, because they hold the laws of the land in contempt. But so are members of such organisations as Class War a danger to British society. All those who seek to further their political aims by violent means undermine everything par- liamentarians — such as Mr Tebbit stand for. 'A nation is a nation for what it shares in common,' he said last week. One hopes he meant shared ideals of an open, democratic, civilised society, rather than shared bloodlines. For he must know that
most people who threaten this society are of impeccable Anglo-Saxon stock, and, to use his own words, 'share our culture'. At its lowest level that means the England football fans who 'cheer for the right side' by beating the heads of those who don't.
Let us assume that all the Hong Kong Chinese who are able will come to live in Britain. It is indeed unlikely that they will go straight to Lord's or Wembley or Twickenham to cheer the no longer very Anglo-Saxon England teams. (Mr Tebbit will have recently been cheering an Eng- land cricket team including four fast bow- lers of West Indian origin and two batsmen from South Africa.) Many of the Hong Kong Chinese may indeed not share our culture. Some may keep a certain racial and cultural arrogance, not uncommon among the Chinese. Most will prefer eating fried noodles to steak and kidney pie, and be more interested in Hong Kong beauty contests and pop idols than in concerts for Nelson Mandela or Les Dawson television shows.
But will they be in any way a threat to British civil society? Is there any reason to believe that they will hold the laws in contempt or subvert the political process? Common sense points to the contrary. Religious fanaticism and political radical- ism are the last things one associates with the Hong Kong Chinese. Thrift, indus- triousness, family life, social order, the very stuff of Mrs Thatcher's dreams, are much nearer their mark. Immigrants from Hong Kong, whether professionals, businessmen, doctors or nurses, would not only abide by the laws, they would prob- ably be solid Tory voters — a thought which might lie behind the objections of the Labour front bench. They are the shining examples of people who — to quote Mr Tebbit — got on their bikes, in the first instance to escape from a political and economic disaster wrought by people who shared their culture.
In Britain, again assuming they come here, they will be perfect citizens, not because they share our culture, but be- cause it is in their interest to be so. They will support British institutions, not be- cause they play cricket or lived through the Blitz, but because it is in their interest to do so. To suggest otherwise, namely that loyalty should be inspired not by enlight- ened self-interest, but by emotional appeals to yobbo nationalism, is to be an enemy of the open society, and of liberal- ism in the true, conservative sense of the word.
Liberalism and enlightened self-interest are not qualities that inspire the yobbo chauvinists, the down-and-out Anglo- Saxons, who might mean immigrants harm and break the law to do so. But if it is Mr Tibbit's intention to keep immigrants out to protect them from the yobs, then one might ask why he is, wittingly or not, stirring up precisely the emotions that inflame yobbish aggression?
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