ABSTRACT
This book explores how British society has dealt – and continues to deal – with an insight into the values underlying the national identity and its relationship with the English language. The state intervention aims at promoting the integration of migrants into British society while fostering social cohesion through a strengthened sense of national identity and citizenship. Following the Cantle Report into the disturbances, the government produced a White Paper titled Secure Borders, Safe Haven: Integration with Diversity in Modern Britain, specifically aims at ensuring 'social integration and cohesion in the UK'. The precursor of the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act, 2002, the White paper dealt with a wide range of social policy issues relating to nationality and citizenship, migration and asylum seeking. The public discourse has been fluctuating from a rather hostile attitude to migrants, to one of rapprochement with the nation's multiethnic roots, to the current somewhat nationalistic reaffirmation of the Anglo-Saxon, English-speaking British identity.
