Britain’s Very Online right is getting nastier

A video of GB News journalist Steven Edginton interviewing a young British black man in south London has been doing the rounds on social media. It is safe to say that it hasn’t gone down as the producers likely intended.

Made as part of a GB News documentary entitled Yookay: How Immigration Changed a Nation, the clip features Edginton ambushing a young, autistic black man on the street, before questioning him about his relationship to Britain. Edginton asks him whether he considers it to be his home, what he thinks about several historic British figures, such as Alfred the Great and the Duke of Wellington, and what he thinks about ‘British values’.

It seems the interview’s purpose was to humiliate the interviewee, and to prove that demographic change has done great harm to any coherent sense of Britishness. But if those were the aims, it fails miserably. The interviewee comes across as decent, good-natured and likeable.

He might not know much about Alfred the Great or the Duke of Wellington – which, to be fair, is probably true for many Brits. And he acknowledges that defining British values is a ‘difficult one’, which is true given the phrase has been kicked around as a political football for several decades. But he’s clearly proud to call Britain his home and loves living here.

In short, the young lad came across well, while Edginton came across as supercilious and arch. The interview has since come in for a lot of criticism. GB News presenter Martin Daubney publicly took issue with it and praised the interviewee. Such was the interview’s cynicism and bad faith that even former leader of the English Defence League (EDL) Tommy Robinson defended the interviewee as someone who had ‘no hate for Britain’.

Some among the Very Online right, however, seized on the clip as evidence that non-white Britons, including those who are born here, are not truly British. This doesn’t just reveal a certain nastiness on their part, but also how far removed they are from decent mainstream opinion.

Take Harrison Pitt, senior policy fellow at the Restore Britain movement. He described this lifelong south Londoner as ‘unassimilated’, presumably due to his failure to answer questions on British history. Pitt even claimed that the interviewee ‘associates “Britain” with its most conquered, colonised, YooKay areas’, which is reading a lot into the fact that he lists his favourite parts of the UK as Stockwell, Brixton and Clapham, places that are local to him. If Pitt thinks a knowledge of Anglo-Saxon history and residence in the presumably non-colonised English countryside are markers of assimilation, then that’s likely to make the majority of Brits ‘unassimilated’.

I criticised the GB News clip when it first emerged. And because I opposed ambushing this young autistic man on the street, firing questions at him about Alfred the Great, and then posting the results online as a form of attempted ridicule, Pitt accused me of not caring about the ‘host people’ of the UK. He even appeared to suggest that I have a track record of this.

The idea that I don’t care about Britain will be news to some, including readers of this very publication. Moreover, I have been unafraid to challenge identity politics and the negative impact it has had on the UK. I have written about how the victims of mainly Pakistani-heritage grooming gangs were sacrificed on the altar of political correctness, how white working-class boys are being let down by the education system, and how the idea of ‘white privilege’ trivialises social deprivation within white British communities.

There is certainly a need to have a robust debate on the impact of state-supported multiculturalism and demographic change on modern Britain. But this can be done without referring to south London as ‘conquered’ territory and accusing a young black Briton who considers the UK to be his home of being ‘unassimilated’.

This attempt at gotcha-style journalism was a terrible misjudgement. It attempted to ridicule a friendly and humorous young man who clearly harbours no ideologically hostile feelings towards Britain – all in order to run Britain down. That it failed to do so is down to this young Brit himself. Amid so much pessimism, polarisation and racial grievance, he is to be treasured, not scorned.

Rakib Ehsan is the author of Beyond Grievance: What the Left Gets Wrong about Ethnic Minorities, which is available to order on Amazon.