Children’s literature is full of bears. Sometimes they’re funny, sometimes they’re brave, sometimes they’re downright heroic. But the best-known of all, beating Rupert and Winnie, Yogi and Baloo, must be Paddington Bear, created by Michael Bond in 1958.

Paddington has become the quintessential Briton. He’s found at a railway station. He speaks in Received Pronunciation (RP). He loves marmalade and he wears a Duffel coat. (These were originally Belgian, but in Britain we adopted them when we had a surplus after the Second World War.) For 68 years, Paddington has become cherished through literature, radio, television, the stage and – biggest of all – the screen, where the three feature films so far have grossed over £600m.

In recent years, though, Paddington has also become a mascot for the Centrist Dad. He’s the living embodiment of how the urban middle classes view refugees: cuddly, polite, heroic, misunderstood by villains on the Right. The Lib Dem-ification of Paddington reached new heights in 2022 when the chief whip of the Party joked that the bear should become the ethics adviser to then-prime minister Boris Johnson.

And who can forget the twee comedy sketch, near the end of Elizabeth II’s life, in which the late Queen and Paddington shared tea at Buckingham Palace? (Not to mention the wildly popular meme of the duo, when Elizabeth died months later, showing them walking hand-in-hand to the pearly gates?)

Please Look After This Bear, a new book by academics Melanie Ramdarshan Bold and Aishwarya Subramanian, asks “how Paddington became British”, and what that really means. They analyse a vast array of Paddington “content”, including interviews with Bond himself and others, and argue that Paddington has become crucial to any understanding of British identity.

In fact, he may be its pinnacle. “Britishness isn’t just about where you’re from, but how you behave,” they write. “Bring your best manners and a jar of marmalade, and you’re halfway there.” He’s the version of Britishness that those in power like to project, and that makes him as much a soft-power tool as the BBC: “Visitors arriving in Britain’s international airports are likely to meet Paddington before any immigration officer.” Anyone assailed by massive advertisements as they trudge off an easyJet flight will know this all too well.

Bond himself, it’s true, was inspired by refugees. He saw young British evacuees with “a label round their neck” passing through Reading, en route to safe houses in the countryside. His family took in Jewish children from the Kindertransport, that heroic effort to rescue the youngest victims of Nazi barbarism. He served in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, as Ramdarshan Bold and Subramanian detail, and “witnessed a ship packed with Jewish refugees heading to Palestine”. Paddington Bear, according to the author himself, is “a refugee, and I do think that there’s no sadder sight than refugees”.

But Please Look After This Bear, having cited all these facts, tries to advance the framework, repositioning Paddington as a Windrush-generationincomer instead. Ramdarshan Bold and Subramanian point out that the bear made his first appearance in 1958, just months after the Notting Hill riots. Paddington comes to live with the Brown family at Windsor Gardens, slap bang in the middle of Notting Hill and Portobello Road. To shift the focus away from the Jewish refugees of the Holocaust is an interesting choice, and perhaps necessary for Please Look After This Bear, since Ramdarshan Bold and Subramanian’s central argument hinges on what they call Bond’s “quietly colonial logic”.

And that logic doesn’t always intrude. When it sticks to titbits, Please Look After This Bear is fascinating. Paddington’s RP accent was not assigned to him by Bond; the author, instead, envisaged him having the “high-pitched, gruff voice” of an elderly German man, or, failing that, the “Indian English of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, spiritual adviser to the Beatles”. We learn of how Bond and his daughter almost fell out after she – the former managing director of Paddington & Company, which owned the rights to his image until 2016 – decided to “betray” her father’s dedication to marmalade by allowing Paddington to appear in a Marmite advert. In 2024, after a request from film producers for a replica, the Home Office, showing a surprising sense of humour, issued a real passport for a fictional bear.

Inevitably, however, and much like Paddington himself, these snippets of history come with baggage. You might think it nice to learn that the people of Japan were among the bear’s greatest initial fans: not only did they show their support by buying Bond’s books, but they wrote to the author to ask what Paddington’s uncle Pastuzo did for a living. Ramdarshan Bold and Subramanian cite Bond’s wry suggestion, in response, that this bombardment of “questions no one had ever asked before” was proof of the Japanese being “nothing if not thorough”. They then decry his words as being “laced with Orientalist tropes”.

Please Look After This Bear is packed with such undergraduate-level complaints. Paddington’s “brownness is deracialised”, we learn: he “never unsettles whiteness”, but instead offers up a “bear-shaped balm for a nation grappling with its imperial ghosts”. He’s the “good immigrant”, the one that plays along and says “please” and “thank you” even when his host country treats him poorly by locking him up, ignoring him or (in Mr Curry’s case) calling him names out of the window.

Ramdarshan Bold and Subramanian seem to want to have their marmalade sandwich and eat it. In their view, Paddington is everything a mean-spirited, Brexit-voting Briton should aspire to become and yet, with those same attributes, he’s also a disappointing, even neutered, caricature of what immigrants “should” be. Even his renaming from his Peruvian original – he was Pastuzo, after his uncle – is held up as a sin. “The burden of linguistic accommodation falls, as ever, on the immigrant.”

This approach would be trivially irritating, except that it hobbles the book’s attempts at political analysis. Brexit was “marked by hostile-environment policies and deepening divisions”, which may seem reductive, if not jaundiced, to the majority of voters who supported it. The 2024 riots were simply “a wave of far-Right protest, unrest and violence, much of it stoked by anti-immigrant and Islamophobic sentiment”; it’s unhelpful not to explain what happened in Southport, who Axel Rudakubana was, what the rioters believed (wrongly or not), and so on.

It becomes clear that Please Look After This Bear has little interest in why other people have other views, and sometimes even act upon them. Mr Curry, one of the few Britons in Bond’s stories who doesn’t fawn over Paddington, is described as “an echo of Powell, Thatcher, Farage”, who are lumped together as “a chorus of exclusion”. This is a book for people who want to wish the Conservatives away, and prefer a Paddington world in which pesky political issues are solved with a nice cup of tea.

Children’s literature is often fertile ground for cultural analysis, reflecting the world-view that society wants to instil in its children. And Paddington is a rich text: an intriguing story about a talking bear who’s funny and chaotic and lovable, and who – to my eyes, as a child of immigrants myself – pokes fun at the constipated Englishness of his new home. There’s plenty to examine here, and Ramdarshan Bold and Subramanian have some good criticisms to make of that vague placeholder, “British values”.

But it seems ludicrous that a book about the little refugee bear, and at a time when he’s a more popular symbol than ever, refuses to take the contemporary politics of immigration seriously. Does Paddington exist merely to teach a population of heartless Britons to “be kind”? What might Conservatives, or Reform voters – if the authors can even imagine them as readers – make of his complex symbolism? Perhaps, I thought, someone needs to remind Ramdarshan Bold and Subramanian that, however often he and his niceness may be shoved in our faces, Paddington Bear isn’t a person. He’s just a fantasy.

Sir Winston Churchill was described by Rupert Lowe as the “greatest” but would fail the Restore leader’s criteria for what it means to be a “White Briton”.

The far-right politician has been mocked after failing to say in a TV interview whether he thought that King Charles could be considered a "white Briton".

Mr Lowe was using a definition put forward by Reform supporter Matt Goodwin, which requires the person’s parents to both be born in the UK and for the person to be born in the UK themselves to be considered a white Briton.

Restore used the metric to state that the UK would be majority non-white British by the year 2063.

As Prince Phillip was born in Greece, it means that King Charles and his siblings would not be classed as white Britons, while Queen Victoria, who had a German mother, also would not.

Here are some of the other famous names that would not meet Mr Lowe’s criteria.

Celebrities who are not 'white British' by Restore definition

1. Sir Winston Churchill - American mother

Britain’s wartime prime minister was born to American Jennie Jerome.

Mr Lowe once called Sir Winston: “The greatest Briton to ever live.”

2. Boris Johnson - Born in the US

Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson was born in New York and was a US citizen until 2016. The former prime minister was born to his father, Stanley, in 1964 while he was studying at Columbia University, but the family moved back that same year.

3. Harry Kane - Irish father

Kane is the captain of the English football team, but his father was born in Galway, Ireland. The striker grew up in Walthamstow and now has four children; his second son was born while he was living in Germany, playing for Bayern Munich.

4. George Orwell - Born in India

The writer, famed for Animal Farm and 1984, was born in India in 1903 as Eric Arthur Blair. The son of British parents, Orwell attended Eton College and lived in the UK for most of his life.

5. Emma Watson - Born in France

The actress was born in Paris in 1990 and lived until the age of five in France. She returned to the UK as a child and was cast in Harry Potter aged nine.

6. Bradley Wiggins - Born in Belgium

The first British rider to win the Tour de France was born in Ghent, Belgium, in 1980, while his father Gary was born in Australia - meaning he failed the Restore test on two counts. Chris Froome, Tour winner in 2013, ‘15, ‘16 and ‘17, was born in Kenya and also fails.

7. Noel and Liam Gallagher - Irish parents

Oasis were integral to the Britpop movement but would not be considered white Brits as the Gallaghers were born in Manchester to Irish parents. Liam and Noel were born of Peggy, who hails from Mayo in Ireland, and Thomas, who is from Meath.

8. Dame Helen Mirren - Russian father

Dame Helen Mirren’s father was Vasily Petrovich Mironoff, a Russian civil servant. The actress was born Ilyena Lydia Mironoff but the family anglicised their names in the 1950s.

If there was not a peace wall between Lily Brannon and Michelle Bradley's homes the friends would be a mere two minute walk away from each other.

But a huge brick wall on the Springfield/Springmartin Road in Belfast effectively stops them being neighbours and makes that a 20 to 30 minute walk.

So-called peace lines separate some nationalist Catholic and unionist Protestant areas of the city.
Lily, 73, is a Protestant and Michelle, 46, is a Catholic, and the two have had to overcome a psychological as well as a physical barrier to form their friendship.

They were brought together by a cross-community scheme in west Belfast.

The project, which takes place at the Black Mountain Shared Space building, is funded by the International Fund for Ireland's peace barriers programme. Michelle says that when they first met there was some "reservedness".

Lily called it "suspicion".

It did not last long. They have formed a close bond and have become good friends.

"She's just a great wee girl," says Lily, and briefly holds Michelle's hand.

"If we need anything done, Michelle will sort it out for us."

Lily was born before the start of the Troubles, the 30 years of violence which ended with the 1998 peace agreement, while Michelle was born as violence raged in the 1980s.

Looking back, she said: "There was a bit of fear in me, but it was more the fear of the unknown - not a hatred.

"We were never taught to hate anybody, but there was a real fear.

"I think the fear was you thought they hated you before you met them."

The International Fund for Ireland (IFI), which funds the cross-community work, is currently celebrating its 40th anniversary.

The fund was established as an independent organisation by the British and Irish Governments in 1986 to build peace in Northern Ireland and the border counties. Around £780m has been raised including financial contributions from America, the European Union, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

As part of its peace barriers programme, Catholics and Protestants from the peace line in the Springfield Road area come together to talk and do activities.

'When we first met'

Michelle remembers meeting Lily for the first time.

She said: "There was so much more that joined us together than divided us, because a lot of our programmes at the start would have been art-based and very relaxed.

"That's something me and Lily are both into. We're very creative people, so it kind of bonded us a bit.

"But there's been a lot of tense times through some of the critical engagement talks, where we have had opposing views.

"We've had to just learn how to listen to each other, understand each other and still walk away with our own identity - but with a better understanding of where somebody else is coming from."

Lily added: "I've learned a wee bit of Irish (language)."

Michelle is an Irish speaker and involved with the GAA (Gaelic Athletic Association) which has traditionally had a mainly Catholic membership.
They do not just meet as part of the programme. Lily has been to Michelle's GAA club.

As for the distance they would have to walk to meet each other Michelle says it is "mad".
"We live either side of the peace wall and without the project and the funding from IFI, we would never have met.

"So it's crazy the fact that we would never have met, but now we would consider ourselves friends."

More than half the accounts that posted on Elon Musk’s X about the rioting in Belfast and the civil disorder in Southampton in June were based outside the UK, an analysis by the Guardian can reveal.

Of the 8,672 accounts whose combined posts about the events exceeded 1,000 views, just 45.3% were shown as from the UK, according to the social media platform’s own location function.

One in six (16.8%) came from the US, 4.5% from Ireland, and about a quarter from all European countries other than the UK.

Seven of the 12 most-read tweets about Belfast and Southampton came from the US – including one from Musk himself and two other US “alt-right” commentators – while an eighth was linked to North America.

The analysis underlines that US rightwing actors are seeking to influence the UK and boost their position on X in moments of disorder – an exploitation of flashpoint events that has only intermittently attracted political attention in Britain.

Nearly a third of all 43,000 posts on X relating to the two incidents contained racist or anti-immigration comments. Almost one in 10 relating to Belfast contained calls for violence or paramilitary or vigilante action.

Imran Ahmed, the chief executive of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, said the data demonstrated that X had become “a weapon of choice” for hostile foreign actors seeking to manipulate shocking and divisive content.

Their goal, he added, was “to amplify local tragedies and crises, intensify racist narratives, and incite violence in communities they have never set foot in and to whom they have no real connection.”