The process of applying had made her think about her attitudes to Britishness. “I find it difficult to know after all this time whether I feel at home here. I certainly don’t feel British, like a British person, but I have English friends … I feel in-between; I feel both. There’s a saying: the British are too polite to be honest, the Germans are too honest to be polite. I think there is something in it.”

A typically baffling illustration of the difficulty is the fact that Britain now has more Jews than Germany ever had. If a further accretion of, say, 100,000 of them come into the country, how could the danger be averted of an anti-Jewish feeling here?”

The "before" at the end would magnify that sense of prior to that moment, but I think that the "had" is sufficient. There is an English grammar "rule" not to end sentences with a preposition, so some would prefer not to end the sentence with "before" to comply. However, non-compliance is common, particularly in spoken English. Adding the "before" to the sentence with "have" makes it descriptively correct if not perfect grammar. The words been and being are forms of the irregular verb be. Been is the past participle and being is the present participle and gerund form.

When he was older, he asked his mother to help him wear traditional male dress and went travelling as a Viking. He later returned to taking on the role of a woman, but this is why it is so important for us to understand people within their cultural contexts: our view of what ‘trans’ means now is not universal, but Hervard certainly acted in a way that challenged conventional gender in his culture. It’s chastening when one of the loudest, clearest voices urging positive reporting of asylum seekers comes from the police. ACPO, in its Policing Guide To Asylum Seekers And Refugees, published last year, reminds its media spokespeople that the numbers of asylum seekers in Britain are marginal, that they’re “real people who need our urgent support and in time could make a valuable contribution”, that “we have a history of absorbing other cultures...and being an asylum seeker is no fun”, and that they should “encourage direct media involvement in the integration of asylum seekers, offering positive stories at every possible opportunity”. But although her condition has improved, she is still far from well, which only underlines calls for proper recognition and management of serious post-viral conditions. Since the beginning of the year, Labour has been warning of looming problems with the system, even talking of “ Windrush on steroids”. But such warnings are often firmly slapped down as just being part of “project fear”. (“I find your comparisons to Windrush inappropriate,” Priti Patel, the home secretary, told the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, this month.)

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Been is always used with the auxiliary verbs has, have, had, and will have. As a present participle, being is not used with these auxiliary verbs, but it may possibly appear next to them when used as a noun. Examples of been and being used in a sentence People need a different approach to activity and energy management along the lines of what we’ve been promoting for years, which is basically pacing and just trying to live within your energy envelope.’

However, "being" can act as an adjective before a noun (or a pronoun) when it is joined by other words to form a participle phrase. Have been and has been are verb constructions that are used in the present perfect tense and the present perfect progressive tense. There were questions about eligibility to healthcare in a no-deal scenario, questions about how to apply for dual nationality and questions about how UK pensions would be uprated if they were paid in Germany. “I have no information whatsoever on how it will pan out. You don’t know what the British government will do,” the diplomat said sadly. In later years, as Samra comes out to her family, the act is nothing short of a paradigmatic shift, as her family is forced to imagine a world they never thought had existed- or simply like many others had chosen to un-see, to overlook, to invisibilise. Yet the title asserts “we have always been here”.Looking at Google NGram, both are well-attested. The line on the chart for "never been here" should include every entry for "never been here before". It looks like about 60% of instances from this corpus are "never been here before", so this phrasing may be slightly privileged, but either one should be unremarkable. There was a brief period in the 1810s when "before" seems to have been required, but that looks like an unusual outlier from 200 years ago. This idea then helps Samra Habib build her career to the next level, wherein she conceives this project called “Just me and Allah”. The project basically is about capturing similar struggles and narratives of Queer Muslims from all over the world. Samra has traveled to diverse nations to meet people with similar struggles, to listen to their stories and to bring the stories in front of the world through her lens to assert and testify that “we have always been here”. The project further hits on the idea of homogeneity found within religion and instead brings to the table a more nuanced and layered understanding of Muslims.