folio

My grandmother — an immigrant — adopted the persona of being more British than the British.

She became a true blue, Telegraph-reading Tory. A proud patriot, loyal to Queen and Country.

After moving down to the Home Counties upon retirement, she chose to attend the same church as Margaret Thatcher.

She had an impeccable telephone manner, infused with received pronunciation, her Irish accent all but obscured.

The car in the garage had to be a Rover, made in England. Yes, even when it was well-known that Rovers weren’t very good.

In many ways, she was the archetypal aspirational immigrant, determined to take her place as a loyal citizen of her new homeland.

Certainly, like many an immigrant since, she took this role seriously, working hard to serve her fellow countrymen as a nurse, then GP practice manager.

That ethos of service lasted a lifetime. Even into her 90s, she was still visiting the old folk at the care home, despite many of them being decades younger than her.

Little of this is unusual. It’s the stance taken by many a newcomer determined to make a success of life in their new country.

Through the years, we have known many like this, who arrived with little — be it wealth, means or language proficiency — whose children nevertheless attained higher degrees and professional jobs, excelling in their fields.

Perhaps that is simply the immigrant way, determined to invest everything in their new life in a new home. Civic duty runs through their veins.

For some of us, though, that intense loyalty is sometimes hard to comprehend. Loyalty in the face of policies which would discriminate against people like them sometimes smacks of cognitive dissonance.

And yet, this is all too common: anti-immigrant sentiment amongst immigrants or their children. Pull up the drawbridge after you and bolt it shut.

Some of them even take it to extremes, railing against multiculturalism, despite their own families being the very epitome of multicultural success.

Fortunately, my grandparents were not of that mold. Their youngest daughter married an Indian fellow, his international family embraced absolutely.

And then came my wife, whom my grandmother took under her wing when we married, and with whom she would frequently compare notes on immigrant experiences married to an Englishman.

Despite her own aspirationational one-nation conservatism, I am certain even my grandmother would consider today’s second-generation radicals extreme.

Indeed, she would probably have made a joke about them having being dropped on their heads as a child to account for their performant politics.

My grandmother was more British than the British. As for this new generation of radicals. She would have said: they don’t sound very British at all.