The handsome features and sober patrician voice of George Alagiah are as familiar as wallpaper. He is the presenter of BBC1’s Six O’Clock News, and he would be the first to admit that he epitomises a certain quintessential Britishness — smartly suited, exuding quiet authority, reassuringly in charge.
Like millions of other Brits, however, he was not always British. As an immigrant who has had to manufacture his own Britishness, Alagiah is in an ideal position to join the raging debate about multiculturalism. Is it a good thing to allow immigrants to cling to their own national identities and customs, or “has institutionalised tolerance for diversity led to institutionalised indifference to separation?” Is it, in fact, only a recipe for creating alienation and resentment? The starting-point for A Home from Home was the horror of the first London suicide bombings. “People wanted to know,” writes Alagiah, “how British-born lads could do this in their own land.” Something had gone horribly wrong. Alagiah uncovers another Britain, in which Asian and African immigrants live and work inside tight national groups, sometimes never crossing paths with a native Brit, let alone speaking to them. His hilarious encounter with a Bradford taxi driver who had lived there for 15 years but spoke no English (and didn’t know his way round the city) is only too familiar. Modern Britain is not a melting pot because nothing melts any more — these days it is full of apparently indissoluble lumps.
“This book is emphatically not an attack on multiculturalism,” Alagiah assures us. In fact, the most interesting part of his argument is his honest examination of his own identity. He was born in Sri Lanka, but his earliest memories are of Ghana, where the family lived until 1967. At the age of 11, young George found himself at a Catholic boarding school in Portsmouth. For the first time in his life he was alone, and he was different. And he already had an awareness of what was expected of him as an outsider from “bongo- bongo land”. He felt he had to do better than everyone else, and push himself harder, because he was carrying the hopes of all other outsiders on his skinny shoulders.
Alagiah worked to fit in — his descriptions of learning the language and customs of this barmy little island are ruthlessly honest and often extremely funny. The BBC accent was forged when he was still a schoolboy. When he flew back to Britain after the holidays, he learnt to get through immigration quickly by chirping “Hello!” in a posh home counties voice. “In Britain,” he notes, “class almost always trumps race.”
Assimilation, however, can also mean stifling part of the self. Alagiah returned to Sri Lanka as an adult and was confused by the conflict between his two selves — this felt like home at a very deep, forgotten level. Yet he felt British to the marrow.
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Such duality should, Alagiah believes, be encouraged and celebrated. “My education, my adopted accent, my religion, even my looks,” he says, “all combined to make me the right kind of foreigner.” He acknowledges that his experience is far from typical. He worries that other immigrants might dismiss him as a “coconut” — ie, brown on the outside, white on the inside. It cannot be denied that he is something of a toff.
Yet Alagiah’s experiences give him a unique overview of the entire argument. He urges wider tolerance, on both sides of the cultural divide. His argument is solidly supported by facts and interviews, and is very persuasive.
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