Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in the year 2000, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a writer and teacher, a fervent advocate of multiculturalism, he spent a lifetime challenging racial prejudice.

He arrived in England just about 50 years ago from Jamaica to take up a road scholarship in Oxford.

He never went back.

His family were traditional in their attitudes and aspired to British values, but he

found himself in a country where attitudes to race were changing.

As editor of the New Left Review, a teacher of cultural studies, a professor of the Open University,

and as the author of many essays on race, politics and cultural identity, his life encompasses

the history of modern black settlement in Britain.

If I have one hope, he says, it is that it could be possible to be black and British the same way as it is now to be

Scottish and British. He is Stuart Hall. The Scottish example is the perfect model

really of what you aspire to, isn't it't it Stuart to be part of the whole British but but recognized as different.

Yes this is a funny combination to aspire to I suppose people either want to be something or sort of universally open to everything.

And I don't think either of those things work.

I think we have very strong but different attachments and we need our differences

recognize but of course at the same time we need to feel that we can belong and

are recognized in a much wider context.

But you could argue that technically anyway that obtains today.

We have British Asians, we have British Muslims, you know, but you look forward to much more

than that, don't you?

To the day when British denotes as well as Westminster Abbey denotes

...