qwghlm.co.uk : because all the other domain names were taken

New Labour’s approach to domestic policy-making is (for the most part) simple and two-fold: Ban things, or let the market sort them out. You can play a fun game with this – just look through the BBC News website every morning and see which category each slated proposal falls into. This morning it’s fairly easy – there are anti-terror plans (which includes making selling the wrong kind of books a crime) and Her Majesty’s Government has been talking to casino companies about relaxing money-laundering laws.

Sometimes, though, Labour can’t do either for reasons of practicality. In that case, what they turn to is an easy yet bold solution that is without doubt, utterly useless to the extreme. Yes, I’m talking about rebranding things. Usually this is applied to things the government is meant to take care of, such as hospitals and schools, but now Hazel Blears has taken a brilliant leap of logic: she’s going to rebrand ethnic minorities.

(I actually thought the use of the word “rebranding” was a nice small joke, but then it turns out that the subeditors at The Times have used it, apparently in all deadly seriousness).

Hazel Blears, minister in charge of race relations in the country, has been talking to leaders of Britain’s Muslim communities (who don’t even represent all British Muslims, let alone British Asians or other ethnic minorities, but we’ll leave that aside for the moment) and her bright idea is to get people to start call themselves “Asian-British” or some such rather than plain old “Asian” or “Muslim”, just like non-Anglo-Saxon Americans call themselves “Italian-American”, “Irish-American” etc. Of course, the ludicrosity of this starts to shine through when you start applying this to anyone other minority – will we start demanding people of Irish descent call themselves Irish-British? What about the Scots, Welsh or even the English? Furthermore, it seems strange to single out British Asians as being the only ones who need to affirm their Britishness when plenty of others aren’t adhering to the “British” values of tolerance and decency. Last week’s racist murder of Anthony Walker was every bit as intolerant and barbaric as any terrorist act, yet I didn’t see ministers meeting leaders of the white working-class Liverpudlian community and suggest they start calling themselves “Scouse-Britons” or some such other guff.

Regardless, even if the double-barreled appellation was carried out fairly across all of society (which it won’t be), it still doesn’t work. For starters, what about us mixed-race types? I will presumably have to call myself “Chinese-English-British”; other people I know will be lumbered with quadruple- or even quintuple-barreled descriptions.

Alright, that’s maybe taking the piss slightly, but there is a point, namely we’ll call ourselves whatever the fuck we want to. And our identities are by no means fixed; while racially I am half-and-half, having lived here virtually all my life, culturally I am much more English than Chinese. But this doesn’t stop me from time-to-time eating Chinese food, being disappointed at the crapness of English fireworks or taking some pride in Chinese artistic and scientific achievements. Identities are fluid, and we adapt different ones for different situations – one’s ethnicity is one of the factors, but so’s one faith, age, gender, home, childhood, schooling, income, etc. We juggle and interchange these factors as the situation demands; in my case, whether it’s Chinese New Year or England playing in the World Cup will be very different occasions.

Identities are different, not only from person to person but within a person themselves. As a result, classification is only OK as long as we realise that such systems will always be arbitrary and will only be able to capture part of, not all, the complexities of the real world. Unfortunately, Hazel Blears has missed this entirely. What’s worse, is that she thinks we can get away with not just labelling a diverse collection of people under a single term, but thinking that actively forcing it upon them will change things for the better. This will only lead to resentment from those who are affected, and makes them the target of even more asinine generalisations from the kind of person who likes asinine generalisations (I’m looking at you, Davis).

What people think of themselves is not really the problem. It’s what people think of others that is the problem, and no change in language is ever going to fix that.