To object to multiculturalism would be to wish away my whole world

I grew up in a version of Britain that seemed to recognise that we should all be treated as equally valuable human beings – what happened to this idea?

Naomi Ishiguro: ‘My existence in this country has undeniably felt more precarious in the past decade’ (Rosie Powell)

I was born in 1992 in London. Growing up, I felt as if majority opinion in the UK held multiculturalism to be a wonderful thing, something to be proud of, one of Britain’s great strengths.

What I didn’t realise was how new this celebration of multiculturalism really was. How could I? I was a primary school child. And besides, as a half-Japanese, half-Scottish girl growing up in a predominantly culturally Jewish area of London, with families of American people, Kenyan Indian people, Japanese people and Sicilian people as my immediate neighbours, it seemed obviously the morally and intellectually correct view of how our society should be.

Looking around my London classroom, too, the majority of us, alongside our identities as 21st century British kids, were also part of cultures distinct from dominant “English” culture, whatever that might be. My world was one in which I’d go to a friend’s house for Shabbat dinner, and then to another friend’s for a Diwali party the next night, stopping on the way for tempura at the local Japanese restaurant.

To wish away or to object to multiculturalism would be to wish away myself, my family, my friends, my whole world – everything I thought was home and everything I loved. I couldn’t envisage anyone ever wanting to do such a thing.

My existence in this country as an essentially multicultural person from a multicultural generation has undeniably felt more precarious in the past decade or so, and this is not just as a consequence of my growing up, and being able to see Britain with clearer eyes.

In 2011, David Cameron declared multiculturalism a failure. In 2012, the coalition government began the hostile environment policy and sent the now notorious “Go Home” vans trundling around London as part of the sinister Operation Vaken. Then of course there was the 2016 referendum. Though it felt to me like the latest step on a sad, cruel road we’d already been following, the campaigns, the result itself, and the aftermath still shocked me to the core.

I’d never fall into the trap of saying that everyone who voted Leave is racist – that’s clearly not true, a vast oversimplification of the actual situation. What did shake me, though, was what I’m sure frightened many others like me: how so many false and toxic narratives around race, nationality and belonging appeared to be legitimised by what the powerful people fronting and promoting the Leave campaigns were saying.

Running throughout all of this we’ve had the Windrush scandal, the continued systematic discrimination against the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities, and many more attacks besides on the rights, freedoms and wellbeing of minorities.

I am of course well aware that the 90s and early 00s were far from being a racism-free utopia. The question, though, is this: what kind of society we were aiming to become, even if we hadn’t managed it yet?

I grew up in a version of Britain that for all its failures, did seem to recognise that we should be striving to make this a country where everyone is treated as equally valuable human beings. A place where our differences are regarded as sources of strength and insight, as opposed to being used against us to sow societal division. A place where it is recognised that we are all capable of making equally brilliant and crucial contributions to the wider culture. What happened to the aspiration to make Britain somewhere like that? Isn’t it a tragedy that we abandoned it?

It was this shock, fear and grief that got me started on the project that eventually became my novel, Common Ground. It’s not directly an EU referendum book, as the story begins in 2003 and finishes in 2012. It is, though, my attempt at writing something that champions the principles of friendship and solidarity across cultural boundaries.

It tells the story of a friendship between two boys from very different backgrounds, growing up in a small Surrey town in the early noughties. Stan is a child from suburbia struggling with bullying at school; Charlie is a Romany boy with a love of indie music and a nose for local history, who lives on the Traveller site on the town’s outskirts.

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They meet by chance while riding their bikes on the common, and form a friendship that we follow into adulthood, when they’re both 20-somethings trying to survive in the increasingly hostile, neoliberal world of London in the 2010s, their friendship coming under strain as a result of the very different sets of opportunities they are granted in a country rife with structural inequality and systematic discrimination.

In recent years, it’s saddened me to see multiculturalism coming in for such criticism, not even just from right-wing nationalists. I’ll agree that, like anything, on a policy level it has to be implemented well – with sophistication, and by a government that actually listens to its people. Surely, though, we should expect any government to be capable of such basic things as listening and sophistication?

And then the fact remains that you can’t just tidy away the children of multiculturalism and declare us a failed political experiment. I’m not a failed political experiment, and neither are my family, friends or wider community. It feels absurd and heart-breaking to have to assert this, to have to write a whole book to defend a worldview I once took for granted.

Still though, in spite of everything, Common Ground is still a hopeful book, because I still believe that despite this troubled phase we’re going through, Britain can and will be better. I wanted my writing to celebrate what I know to be true – that on a personal, human level, friendship across cultural boundaries still strongly exists in our country, and in fact forms the foundation of everything good and hopeful in our society, even if an awareness of its existence is sadly lacking on the level of national policy.

Common Ground by Naomi Ishiguro is published by Tinder Press (16.99)