It’s a question that keeps stubbornly resurfacing in our political discourse. Last weekend, the former prime minister Rishi Sunak gave his view in a column in the Times, arguing that national identity should not be turned into a DNA test. After leaving office, Sunak, the UK’s first prime minister of colour, was subject to claims by a prominent podcaster that he was not English because he was a “brown-skinned Hindu”.
Reflecting on this, Sunak described it as a “reverse Tebbit test”: the sociological concept measuring the loyalty of immigrants – and their children – in the UK depending on which cricket team they supported in international matches. Some people will argue that English is an ethnic identity and British a civic identity. Though if you think those nuances are heard by most people, I fear you are being rather – perhaps even wilfully – naive.” Sunak is right that this conversation isn’t really about nuanced distinctions between ethnic and civic identities.
The questioning of one’s Englishness is deeply insidious, as it is not solely articulated through supposed “legitimate concerns” about the pace of immigration, crimes committed by migrants or ethnic minorities, or anxieties around jobs and access to public services. Instead, it is presented as a question of first principles: whether you are a “good” or “bad” minority, a citizen or non-citizen, your ancestry or skin colour means you will never truly belong. Your claim to belong in this country, and that of your descendants, will always be implicitly lesser than those who could, at least theoretically, trace their ancestry back to Oswald of Northumbria.
That idea is deeply uncomfortable for many, rejected both by those who hold progressive views on immigration and community integration, and those who otherwise hold conservative views of national belonging and hardened borders. There is growing concern among sections of the British right about increasingly “ethnonationalist” impulses emerging on its fringes and entering mainstream political debate. That has particularly gathered steam with the rise of Rupert Lowe’s hard-right Restore Britain.
These beliefs belong to what the Financial Times’s Robert Shrimsley described as the right’s own “woke wing”, which fusses over “the great replacement theory and the betrayal of the west”. More moderate conservatives will want to distance themselves from these views as much as they will from the black-clad far-right mobs that descended on Portsmouth and Dover this summer. There are indications that some of these views are gaining greater public legitimacy.
An analysis by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) last year found that the percentage of those who believed “Britishness” was something you were born with had almost doubled in two years (from 19% to 36%). But there are reasons for those on the right to worry that the popularisation of these once-fringe views could alienate them from the majority, who still reject them. According to the IPPR analysis, only 3% of people believe that being a “good” British citizen requires having white skin, while at least 74% of English people believe that Englishness is not defined by ethnicity.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
