What qualifies as integration?

For me I've never seen being white as the main aspect of being either British or English but nor do I believe someone can move from the other side of the world, make zero effort and still be considered one of the above.

So what essential characteristics tend to mark someone out as either British or English?

The problem we face today is twofold; firstly, we've had the usual kind of left-wingers and liberals being their typical anglophobic selves (I don't believe every left-winger who criticises Britain is anglophobic, indeed it can be an act of patriotism, "I love my country, but I want it to be better", "I love my country, but this course of action should be beneath it" and so on) only more so, they struggle to really promote Britain at all; secondly we do still have those on the right who think that a key component of Britishness or Englishness is skin colour. Between the two of them they present very little into which minorities can integrate.

I bear no ill will towards people based on skin colour, I also think it's of fundamental importance that we resolve these issues quickly as more generations grow up in Britain but to a certain degree not being sure if they're really accepted as British. We see much discussion of what isn't British or English and why certain behaviours mark someone out as something else, but you can't construct a national identity based purely on negatives. Using a process of elimination to determine what isn't British and hoping you're comfortable with whatever's left seems like a mistaken approach.

However, our lack of understanding of our own history is perhaps as much a hindrance to this process. I've been working my way through Peter Akroyd's "History of England" series and the fundamental thing that strikes me is that we have typically been seen, both by foreigners and our own rulers, as an unruly mob who therefore cannot be entirely ruled. So given how we're quite good at fighting with each other and disagreeing over everything, are disagreements over cultural markers and integration simply a sign that many minorities are often given too little credit for the extent of their Britishness or Englishness? I doubt I'd win many fans for suggesting that race riots are part of the integration process however much that is welcomed and necessary was born out of deeply unpleasant circumstances.

Keeping with the theme of history, I find myself stuck between two extremes, I have read the history of Britain sufficiently well to see that non-white people did make contributions long before the Windrush generation. The black man in the painting "Death of Nelson" and the one in the bronze relief at the base of Nelson's column attest to the presence of blacks in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic era. Also during the Elizabethan period when England was at war with Spain, much effort was made to court both the Moroccans and the Ottomans as they were the two powers in the Mediterranean who could be a problem for the Spanish, they both routinely sent ambassadors to England. However the rabid leftist progressive would see this inch and take a bloody mile, using the ones and twos who were there to justify a portrait of London during any period from the 16th century onwards as possessing the same demographics as it has today adn that can be just as divisive, overcorrecting to the point of excluding people who were there while including people who weren't and claiming it's a more accurate version of history is insulting and delusional.

I understand the anger at historic erasures such as excluding West Indian troops from the victory parade in London after WW1, if someone's fought and bled for the country, regardless of skin colour, they have every right to be considered a full part of the national fabric. This doesn't mean that every question mark placed over the Britishness or Englishness of a minority is automatically racist, certainly for me there are minority individuals where such question marks don't exist.

A further problem arises when we try to draw a distinction between the people and the leaders, the people can take the fair play attitude and the amicable-but-don't-take-the-piss approach to new neighbours, but they also elect the politicians who, on both sides, benefit to a certain degree from division and whose views are often a condensing and more blunt version of the many nuanced opinions of either their friends, colleagues, party members and constituents.

We could develop a decent picture of the national character based on the broadly positive aspects of the people and say, "It is to this that people should integrate", but those same people could easily point to our politicians and say "If you believe in that, why did you vote for them?"

The answer to that is fairly obvious if somewhat complicated and is mainly because of the pitfalls of democracy (Churchill said it best, "Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst system imaginable, apart from all those other systems which have been tried from time to time" ) and hopefully anyone who's honest about it can be forgiving, we often vote for politicians with views we find uncomfortable because the other side's views make us even more so. Do I think there are people within the modern Tory party who hold racist views? Probably, but I'd rather that than the destructive brand of socialism Corbyn would impose on us. I'm voting for people to govern the nation, not to have round for dinner.

But within this debate I personally see some of the positives of Britain shining through, we muddle through, we don't automatically have a grand plan and I think that's a positive, attempts at large scale social engineering are often destructive and foolish and when it comes to race can only exacerbate problems.

The muddle through attitude may be a starting point, but from there whence shall we go?

The desires of the far right are, before we even get to ideology, unworkable, but the regressive left, liberal elite and others would leave a society divided along cultural lines because they can't imagine promoting Britishness or Englishness.

I don't automatically see minorities as "the enemy within" as some writers have termed them, nor do I deny that there are certain problems which appear to manifest along ethnic lines - grooming gangs being the most prominent example although that appears to be associated more with a particular religion than any race - although there are red herrings, the discussion of London's crime rates as being partly a black problem is complicated by simple maths (2017-2018 there were 163 murders in London with a black person being a suspect in roughly half, given a population of around 1.4million (1.1 million according to 2011 census but I've read 1.4 million elsewhere) means that somewhere just over 0.005% of the black population was implicated in a murder in that year, not exactly a representative statistic). I get the frustration of minorities who think of themselves as British only to have people treat them as foreigners, (from a technical perspective, if someone's born here, raised here, pays their taxes here, votes in elections, speaks English as a first and often only language, where else are they supposed to go, especially if they've served or if they can point to ancestors who served in the British military, they may not be able to be anything else).

Looking inwardly at the problems with establishing a positive British national identity doesn't absolve new arrivals of an obligation to try, (although we should be forgiving and allow them time, integration doesn't happen overnight), but if we say integrate and the question comes back "into what should we integrate?" we need to have some decent answers.