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The Cricket Test
In 1990, the Conservative MP and former cabinet minister Norman Tebbit questioned whether those black people coming to live and work in Britain should be compelled to "take the cricket test." This loosely translated as a trial of allegiance at Test matches, in which their loudest cheers should be reserved for England, rather than for teams representing their country of origin, such as the West Indies and Pakistan. Fundamentally, Tebbit's inquiry (and professed skepticism as to a lack of will on black people's part) is more than a simple challenge of sporting allegiance. In truth, it should be properly understood as part of a wider public discourse on belonging, on contesting the parameters and contours of British identity, that has shaped the black experience in Britain over the last fifty years. In 1979, the Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher delivered her now notorious "swamping" speech. In it, she suggested that the British people's tolerance and goodwill would be unreasonably stretched by the arrival en masse of immigrants with a "different culture." The subtext of Thatcher's speech is a warning of perceived social and economic problems created by different "races," despite not mentioning this concept. As such, it has precipitated numerous calls for "oaths of allegiance" to the Queen and to the "British way of life," as preconditions of citizenship. A populist discourse that conflates "race" with national well-being and identity is not a new phenomenon, and has been well documented in its various forms.' Therefore, for all black people, irrespective of their country of birth, Tebbit's seemingly innocuous metaphor of allegiance became yet another proxy for a more significant argument: just who does or does not have the right to be a British citizen? It follows that any calls to exclude people from national sporting sides on the basis of "race" carry enormous and far-reaching significance. For this reason the views expressed in an article by Robert Henderson in the July (1995) edition of Wisden Cricket Monthly were the subject of widespread media commentary, coverage, and a libel action. Henderson suggested that representative sportsmen who are not "unequivocally English"-by which he meant not white and raised in Britain-were likely to have divided loyalties, even when Britain was the country of their birth....