This week, controversy blew up when Konstantin Kisin debated with the Spectator’s notoriously liberal Fraser Nelson whether Rishi Sunak is English. For Kisin, Sunak – like himself – was British, but his ancestry and cultural markers precluded him from being English. This debate reminds me of the film Groundhog Day: it pops up with depressing regularity, but never seems to get anywhere.
Is Sunak English? As someone who has written on, researched and taught ethnicity and national identity for 30 years, I think I can speak authoritatively on this.
As I posted on X (yes, mea culpa, I reposted myself!), the matter seems quite simple. Sunak is English by nationality, as well as a British national.
However, he is not a member of the English ethnic majority within England, nor is he part of the 80% white British pan-ethnic majority of the United Kingdom.
In these debates, it’s vital to begin with some basic terms. Type concepts, like elements in a periodic table, measure something real in the world, a clustering of statistically unlikely values of variables. Instead of valence and atomic weight for the elements, think degree of territoriality, shared ancestry and memory, and externally observable cultural markers.
Ethnic groups are communities which believe themselves to be descended from common ancestors. Jews claim descent from the 12 tribes of Israel and Abraham. Turks trace their ancestry to the central Asian Turks, Hungarians to the Hungarian tribes of the central Asian steppes.
Many groups cherish a myth of fusion: the English are a blend of Anglo-Saxons (themselves a blend) and Celtic Britons, the French a mix of Gauls and Franks, the Scots a blend of Celtic Scotii settlers from Ireland and native Picts. It’s worth saying that many contributions are airbrushed out (Huguenots? Normans? Vikings?) because our affective attachments can only really zero in on a few key strands.
Gestalt psychology means we view a blend of parts as an undifferentiated whole, and that we screen out a lot of information to focus on a few lineages. One day, most of the multicultural diversity in Western countries will be absorbed and forgotten. English is a gestalt.
Ethnic groups are principally defined in subjective terms, but also have external markers which help delineate members of the community. These are typically religion (e.g. Irish Catholics and British Protestants in Ulster), language (e.g. Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians) and physical appearance (such as black and white Protestant Americans in the US South).
In Britain, the native ethnic groups are delineated by surname, accent and, to some degree, religious sect (i.e., Anglican English, Presbyterian Scots, Methodist Welsh, Catholic Irish, or lapsed versions thereof). Physical appearance and religion are becoming more important as ways of distinguishing native from immigrant groups.
So we have the ethnic English, who form around 70% of England, ethnic Scots, who comprise 85% of Scotland, and ethnic Welsh, who are only half of Wales because of all the English and Irish who moved to work in industrial South Wales in the past. In Northern Ireland, the Irish Catholics and Ulster-British Protestants – who descend from early 1600s English and Scottish settlers – are roughly equal in size, a big change from 1965 when Protestants outnumbered Catholics 65-35.
Now for state and nation. Let’s zoom out to Britain, the highest level. This is the state – the political unit – that governs the British Isles. A state is a set of institutions that has a monopoly on the use of force – military and police – in a territory. It has exact borders and institutions of government: it’s a territorial-political unit.
England, by contrast, is a territorial, historical and cultural, but only vaguely political, unit. That is, it has no government, but has a political tradition predating the formation of Great Britain in 1707. It has given rise to a territorial community of memory and culture, with identity markers such as the George Cross and English accent (or family of accents).
A stickler for definitions would say that a nation must have political ambitions, but the domination of Britain by England (English make up 85% of Britain’s population) means that England can express its political control through Britain. This explains why British and English symbols are fused in the English mind to the point they see the two as interchangeable. Simply by changing the order of national identity choices in the census to put ‘British’ at the top instead of ‘English’ (see below), England’s statistical agency increased the share identifying as British from roughly 20% in 2011 to 55% in 2021. English identity fell by the same amount. Many were indifferent between the two so chose the first option that seemed to make sense.
States like Britain seek to create British national identity from the top down, through institutions such as the NHS, BBC, military, state schools and the monarchy.
Nations like England, by contrast, emerge more from the uncoordinated actions of individuals, market forces and the media. As people watch rugby or football, observe their green and pleasant landscape, eat fish and chips or drink real ale, wear flat caps and produce distinctively English musical styles including mod, punk and grime, they produce and consume English national identity.
Historic buildings like Anglican churches and National Trust stately homes, documents such as Magna Carta and the events of English history also inform the English identity. If Britain is a top-down state-led nation, England is a bottom-up nation whose identity inheres in everyone and no one, created by many individuals, cultural outlets and groups interpreting English history and distinctiveness whilst also reproducing that particularity. A flock of birds which produces a higher-level pattern rather than a military formation following orders.
So for people in England, there is a top-down state-led British national identity and a bottom-up ‘everyday’ English national identity.
Ethnicity informs nationhood. In ethnic terms, the ethnic majority population, like the landscape, architecture or traditions, helps to define what makes the nations of England, Scotland and Wales distinct. In Northern Ireland, the presence of Catholics and Protestants helps to define Northern Irish identity. At the level of Britain, the white British pan-ethnic majority contributes to the uniqueness of British national identity.
The next question is how individuals like Rishi Sunak relate to British and English national and ethnic identities.
First off, Sunak’s accent and mannerisms mark him out as English as well as British in terms of national identity. I have little doubt he identifies as such. Sunak is English by nationality.
However, his ethnocultural markers – surname, religion, physical appearance – place him outside both the English ethnic majority and the white British pan-ethnic majority that encompasses ethnic English, Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish Catholics and Protestants. I very much doubt he would tick the ‘White British’ box on the census. Sunak is not English by ethnicity.
There is of course the tricky question of the blurring of ethnic boundaries through intermarriage. Half of people in England and Wales have four grandparents born in England, but the other half do not, and many of these identify as white British. There is, for instance, a substantial Irish Catholic component in the white British population in North West England and in urban areas.
Having an Irish surname and Catholic religious background could place someone outside the bounds of Englishness or Scottishness as recently as the 1990s. In southern England, anti-Catholicism was weakest, and part-Irish James Callaghan served without fanfare as Prime Minister in the 1970s. Notwithstanding this, I recall being on the Tube in the early 1990s, before people were all glued to their phones. I heard a woman say to her friend that they were surprised that Americans boasted about their Irish heritage whereas “here if you’re Irish you try to hide it”. That attitude has faded because the Troubles in Northern Ireland ended in the 90s while Irish Brits have experienced upward mobility.
The country reverted to its prior assimilationist trend in the 90s. So many English people with Irish surnames and a Catholic background are the offspring of mixed marriages with those of English ethnicity that it’s impossible to know at first glance if a Catholic person with an Irish surname is in fact ethnically Irish. So they are taken for English. Regionally, the North West, around Liverpool, has the highest share of Irish surnames, and a lot of Catholics, but very few who identify their ethnicity as Irish on the census. In London, by contrast, those with Irish origins tend to proclaim themselves Irish by ethnicity.
The map below shows the relationship between the share identifying as ethnically Irish on the census and the proportion of Irish surnames in an area. Liverpool surnames are 16% Irish but just 2% of its population identify as ethnically Irish on the census. In Islington, North London, 7% have Irish surnames but fully 5% identify as ethnically Irish. The difference is accounted for by the way people in the two places select from among their ancestral options. London urban liberals tend to select away from Englishness.
Many British Jews also identify as white British on the census and so do many offspring of mixed white British-European origin. Boris Johnson, David Cameron and Peter Mandelson are examples. In other cases, such as the Jewish Nigel Lawson and Michael Howard, surnames have been anglicised over time.
What we have here are individuals who objectively possess the markers of ethnic Englishness, but may subjectively identify with different lineages in their personal genealogy. This tells us that part of whether someone is ethnically English is that they ‘pass’ by possessing the main external markers of this ethnicity – English-sounding surname and accent, white racial appearance. Those who pass as such and identify with their English descent are properly classified as ethnically English, those who do not identify with their English origins belong to a different ethnic group.
We know that when people have options in their ancestry, the exotic background is often chosen rather than majority ethnicity because in a liberal culture that values diversity that is viewed as more distinctive. Hence Mary Waters found that white Americans with Italian heritage were more likely to identify as Italian than their other parts, while those of Scottish background identified with their non-Scottish origins. This represents a change from the pre-1960s period when those of part ‘old American’ background were more likely to identify with the WASP majority.
Politics increasingly matters for ethnic choice, with Brexit supporters undoubtedly more likely to identify as English than Remain voters with the same background – as the Islington example above illustrates. In the US, those of white-Hispanic ‘Spanglo’ ancestry are more likely to identify as white if they are Republican, Hispanic if Democratic. In the 19th century, Whigs identified with the plebeian Anglo-Saxons, Tories with the Norman heritage of the imperial line.
This begs the question of how mixed-race English individuals such as Calvin Robinson, Sunder Katwala, Ben Habib or Matthew Syed identify. I haven’t asked them, but surveys tell us that 35% of people with a mixed-race background in England identify as White British on the census. I’d wager that, in their hearts, at least one of the Right-leaning Habib, Robinson and Syed see themselves as ethnically English. Partly this depends on whether others accept them as such. How others categorise you affects how you see yourself, but there is still wiggle room based on what you find appealing.
At one time in the US, a ‘one-drop‘ rule operated in which even miniscule black heritage (but not Amerindian background) disqualified a person from being considered white. Having said this, plenty of light-skinned blacks passed as socially white. Today, white-Asian offspring are more likely to identify as white than white-black offspring in part because black identity in the US has always spanned a wide racial spectrum and this seems to affect the way Americans categorise people with some visible African origin.
It is not clear that the same holds in Britain, where black-white intermarriage is very common and light-skinned individuals with black ancestors such as UKIP MEP Steven Woolfe or football player Kieran Trippier would generally be considered part of the ethnic majority regardless of how they personally identify.
The blurring of race at the edges through intermarriage will matter a lot in the future, and it interests people like me who are of mixed background. But at present it is rare: 97% of people in England are of single racial origin. For them, categorisation is pretty straightforward.
Bottom line: Sunak is English by nationality, but not by ethnicity.
Eric Kaufmann is Professor of Politics at the University of Buckingham and Director of the Centre for Heterodox Social Science. He specialises in nationalism, the cultural Left and political demography. Subscribe to his Substack page, where this article first appeared.
Stop Press: Suella Braverman, the former Conservative Home Secretary, explains in the Telegraph why she “will never be truly English“. “I don’t feel English because I have no generational ties to English soil, no ancestral stories tied to the towns or villages of this land. My heritage, with its rich cultural and racial identity, is something distinct. I am British Asian, and I feel a deep love, gratitude and loyalty to this country. But I cannot claim to be English, nor should I. This is not exclusionary – it is honest. And it’s what living in a multi-ethnic society entails.”
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This debate reminds me of the film Groundhog Day: it pops up with depressing regularity, but never seems to get anywhere
A bit like “They are fleeing a War Zone” No, they are fleeing France”.
I’m a white person born and brought up in England but I am only half English as one of my parents was from another European country. I do feel very English though, and my non-English parent was so English-like that a lot of people didn’t realise she was an alien. My Mrs is White European, not English, so our kids are technically only a quarter English. I guess it depends how far you want to go back. When my mum came to this country, there were very few foreigners here and very few people cared about any of this crap. Bottom line – we should not be having this debate and/or it should not be important.
As far as I know this (I have never even seen a photograph of any of my paternal grandparents¹), I’m ½ East-Prussian, ¼ Mecklenburgian and ¼ Hessian, this wild mixture being a consequence of war and explusion, and I grew up in a small country town of the former Prussian Rhenish Province which – together with parts of Hessia and Bavaria which were located in the area, is nowadays called a German state (Rheinland-Pfalz) because it happened to be occupied by France and they also wanted some German state when all the others had them. This is intensely annoying to me, because it means I don’t really belong anywhere, not even in Germany, and half of me has been formally abolished, anyway.
I know people whose ancestors have been living in Hessia for centuries and the question doesn’t even occur to them — they know who they are and where they belong and nobody else will ever question that.
¹ One of them worked something for the Prussian Administration in Königsberg and vanished without the trace during the German flight from there – it’s conjectured that his ship was torpedoed by the Russian – and the other was a professional soldier in the German army but died when he was about 50.
Well, it sounds like you are German to me.
Yes a bit like a county in England.
Well, yes. I’m so German that my mother tongue is actually standard German which – to the typical German – is the first foreign language he’ll have to learn in school. Other pupils in elementary school used to give me shit for this as they believed I was intentionally showing off. That my parents didn’t speak the dialect (what’s called accent in English) of the area was a possibility which never occurred to them¹.
German is a nationality and not an identity. Identity is what used to be called the German tribe (eg Bavarians, Hessians or Westfalians) someone belongs to before this notion fell out of favour as – hahaha – “Nazi stuff”, despite it was much older, post-1945. But only for educated society, people knowing words like tribe. In my case, I’m a mixture of people from three different tribes, one of them all but violently obliterated and grew up in the territory of fourth. This marks me as freak.
I think stuff like this matters very much and that it’s also right and proper that it does.
¹ I sort-of do speak it, but I only learnt this later due to contact with the natives of the area. Some day [in Reading], a guy on a bike passed me and made a driving trick (on the hindwheel) he apparently couldn’t do very well. I then intuitively shouted at him
Ey, paß uff daß de nitt uff die Fress fliehst, de Bode is hatt!
Standard German (free translation): Gibt acht, daß Du nicht auf die Nase fällst, der Boden ist hart!
English (first version): Beware, lest you fall on your face! The pavement is hard!
I do like the first one best because it’s what I wanted to say (all three are subtly different).
Interesting – I didn’t realise Germans were so “tribal” within the wider German context.
Wheelies – a key thug skill. I never learned.
I don’t think wheelies can be dismissed as a “key thug skill”.
It’s just an adventurous thing that some people like to do for fun, in the same way that young men in previous centuries liked to drive their carriages in a reckless manner, or real chases over rooftops, sometimes resulting in terrible accidents.
Certainly not everyone who can do wheelies is a thug
You never had a BMX then
No, too much of a wimp
Dialect and accent are completely different.
Dialect is about form and how the language is pronounced.
Accent is more about the way the language is pronounced. Scousers typically have an irritating nasal whine whereas Geordies have a lovely listing almost romantic singalong style. And so on.
Linguistically, that’s true. But while Germans speak of their dialects, Brits speak about their accents while additionally acknowledging that these accents are actually dialects with words and phrases which don’t exist in standard English like “innit” or “half ten”.
NB: As someone who’s not a native speaker, I have absolutely no idea if the two I mentioned are informal standard English or local variations of the area I’m living in. Both would have been marked as wrong by any German English teacher I’ve ever known, including my mum.
Indeed. It is the large numbers and non-integration that has caused the problems we have. The elites are responsible.
m They recruited millions of immigrants from conflicting cultures and told them they can keep their different ways of life. Indeed they said it was preferable.
No one asked those already legally here at any point but our disagreement with mass immigration was well known; that is why they shut us out.
YES, WE SHOULD BE HAVING THIS DEBATE !!!
Well yes of course we have to now – but it should never have been an issue because we should not have had this happen to our country
” There is, for instance, a substantial Irish Catholic component in the white British population in North West England and in urban areas”
My personal anecdote can relate to that. My Great Grandfather on my father’s side came from West Ireland and moved to Leeds.
Every other nationality on earth has a recognised history, ethnicity and culture. Every one except the English. The English are being wiped off the face of the earth – a bloodless genocide.
Practically all German establishment parties are doing exactly the same with Germans. For the first half my life, German-ness was defined based on the ius sanguinis from the original German citizenship law which means you’re German if your parent were German. This is increasingly (and with increasing speed) being replaced by German-ness by executive fiat: The state bureaucracy grants it to people as it sees fit. People who remember the ius sanguinis situation and preferred it are decried as (as always) “Nazis” and left-wing the German politicians come up with neat language contortion like “those who have been living here for longer already” just to avoid admitting that German or not was ethnically defined until about the turn of the millenium.
What are they doing here!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fxb-DxLjSXA
Does Sunak say he’s English then?
It’s hardly for him to say.
I understood he was planning to relocate to california who is welcome to him.
He’s basically an Anywhere, unworthy of wasting any more time discussing.
I think it’s for him to see what he sees himself as, and for the rest of us to agree or not. Probably something of an Anywhere, yes. I know little about the man, other than he didn’t seem to achieve very much while PM or in government generally, didn’t seem very conservative and was a part of the Covid Cabinet, and the cat apparently got his tongue while he was, and he only afterwards said he had been sceptical about lockdowns.
No, isn’t for him to say! Haven’t we all had enough of Leftist Propaganda saying you are whatever you claim to be, whether it is male, or female, or a horse, or a tree, or an Englishman, when you are obviously NOT?
He’s entitled to his view –
does not mean we have to agree with him
Sushi is a globalist product of Davos. A sensible suggestion is that no first born immigrant shall hold public office which takes care of the last 2 tory leaders. A real clue of where Sushi is comes from the way his children are being brought up – Indian.
As an MP up north, he liked to call himself “The Maharajah of the Dales”.
Lol. I guess he’s a bit English as he grew up here, but not properly English.
No, he is NOT ENGLISH, in any way, shape or form.
Cliff Richard, like many children of British people abroad, happened to be born in India, but he is NOT INDIAN, in any way, shape or form.
Nor would you yourself be Chinese, if your mother happened to live in China when you were born.
Fishy is not English and never will be. End of.
Badenough is even less English than Fishy and frankly to be leader of a once grand English political party shows how low that party has fallen.
Hear, hear!
We did export Cricket to India, so they do share some culture with the UK.
Sunak was born and brought up in England, to ethnically Indian parents who I think were living somewhere in Africa before they came to the UK. Where you live rubs off on you, to a greater or lesser extent. I don’t think national/cultural identity is binary.
To quote Ludwig Thoma, a Bavarian from Munich,
“This guy is an alien! His grandfather came to Munich via the Dachau Moss!”
or someone whose name I don’t who was from the Palatinate (properly a part of Bavaria and not of the French ‘overseas departmnent’ of Rheinland-Pfalz):
Du meenst de Sohn von dem Nau?
You’re referring to the son of the new guy? The new guy having moved to this particular village about 40 years earlier and found and married his wife there. Which means de Sohn von dem Nau was actually born in this place and had spent all of his life there. People eventually assimilate into their surroundings but this takes a couple of generations and an effort to do so. None of the Hindus or Muslims living in their self-erected ghettos all over England will ever become English by assimilation.
Some people descended from immigrants might eventually assimilate – depends on temperament, religion, culture. Whether they could be classed as fully English I don’t know – but I’d be happy if they behaved in an “English” way (whatever that is…). Certainly the more different the culture that you come from, the longer it will take, in general.
Is the former DDR part similarly “tribal”? I don’t remember my relatives from there talking about this kind of thing, but perhaps it just never cam up in conversation.
Try calling a Saxon or Thuringian a Prussian. But make sure that he’s not a football fan before you do.
Understood.
I was told everyone hates Red Bull Leipzig because they are upstarts – I suppose something like Man City on steroids.
No, he apparently identifies himself as British-Indian.
Yes, that makes sense. I don’t think “English” is exactly a nationality – it’s a cultural and ethnic identity.
We wouldn’t be having this conversation if our politicians hadn’t embraced multiculturalism and its obvious social problems.
Absolutely.
The English are notoriously tolerant and easy going… until they’re not.
We’ve had these next Tuesdays rubbing our noses in it for decades now, the charge sheet would run to a million pages, and people are understandably and rightly fed up.
Why should we put up with it any longer?
See you in the f@#n’ car park pal.
My old boss was born in England to Irish parents. He would never in a million years have claimed to be English.
Which rugby team would he have played for?
That is the real test.
Oh 100% Ireland if he’d been good enough and had the choice. He doesn’t hate the English or anything, just feels completely Irish.
There is a wonderful book called How to be an Alien by George Mikes that addresses this question in a far.more lighthearted and humourous way. It was written in the 1940s by Mikes who was a Hungarian immigrant to Britain.
It will make you nostalgic for what England once was.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Alien-Handbook-Beginners-Advanced/dp/0140025146/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=1CEGPBO7GBXHG&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.fG5KVuvW9UAY5GpYf00dvMFMOHaeUKlfcei2xlBOgByMPCRh0RE63rZwW2f1V8Jr-dCmjk5LqflP0xaE4c05_HwvirPCBpXS0sXgYQTmaogUXN1yDtIudnWOgA6QPOLs-K7S1EC2vFkkUVDy6GZ2jyUJmcCFDbjNy7kIgLQRczbBbKTsQKf2H3mhAFjRlNr81ugxsSTEtjqdrD5MwI5WpA.NilXpRqZtlzEB4T3A2vAGgaDiQH9tU0zJ0Bf42maQEU&dib_tag=se&keywords=how+to+be+an+alien+george+mikes&qid=1740679530&sprefix=how+to+be+an+alien%2Caps%2C131&sr=8-1
Nicholas Bentley drew the pictures.
Nice versus nasty.
The continentals have sex, the English have hot water bottles.
My mum had that book. Perhaps someone bought it for her as a joke, or an instruction manual (not that she needed one).
Indeed wonderful.
What grade of ‘Certifiable Idiot’ do you have to be to find the word ”Manxies” racist?
”The term “Manxies” – used by an Isle of Man radio station to describe locals – has been suggested by one disgruntled listener to contain “elements of a racial slur”.
Local broadcaster Manx Radio received a complaint that the use of the word “denies the individuality of each of us as a unique individual” and was met with a demand that the term should be scrapped.
The phrase “Manx people” is most often used to refer to an ethnic group from the Isle of Man, a site which became the home of Celts who spoke the language Manx – which was regularly spoken in the area until the mid-19th century.”
https://www.gbnews.com/news/woke-madness-isle-of-man-manxies-term-deemed-racist
I agree.
Ethnically, psychologically and spiritually Rishi Sunak is not English.
(Neither am I, for that matter, despite the fact that I have spent the majority of my life in England, married to an English woman and hold a British passport.)
Furthermore, Rishi is also part of a cosmopolitan elite – he would feel just as home in California, Abu Dhabi or Paris. I doubt he feels attached to England, I don’t think he would feel homesick if he moved to another country.
Englishness is rooted in the subconscious.
Also, the author doesn’t seem to realize that the Ethnic English are not allowed to have “English Nationality”, but only “British Nationality”, as on the passports.
You can wave a Welsh Dragon flag, or a Scottish saltire, or a Black Flag of Islam without being called “racist”, but if you wave an English flag…
“Englishness is rooted in the subconscious.”
I would go further – Englishness is in your blood.
When I go abroad am I just a foreigner?
No, I am what I have always been, English first and British second.
And proud.
Braverman says “And it’s what living in a multi-ethnic society entails.”
Nigerian Birth Tourist Olukemi Olufunto similarly talks about living in a multi-ethnic society as if it were a good thing— just a natural development welcomed by the Indigenous English, Welsh, Scots, Irish and their descendants around the world, whose ancestors have lived in these islands for more than a thousand years.
But no one ever asked the White People of the West if they wanted to live in a multi-ethnic society. No one ever asked them if they wanted the mass invasion of voracious predators, hostile, alien, parasitic people from the Third World, raping and murdering and buying up everything in sight, shoehorned into top positions in our government and society, destroying the civilization our ancestors built for centuries.
And the White People of the West do not have to accept it, or welcome it, or kneel to it, or submit to it at all.
If you want to know someone’s real Ethnic Identity, just ask them where their ancestors were 300 years ago, or 500 years ago, or 1000 years ago.
Mine were right here in different centuries: one a blacksmith and church warden in a Somerset village, another in a Gloucestershire village who made the drastic decision to be a passenger on the Mayflower, others in Hertfordshire, and Northern Ireland, and the Netherlands: all faithful Protestants since Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to that church door in Wittenberg.
That would be problematic for me, as my great grandfather was an illegitimate child, father unknown.
I’m half Polish, half French, born in London – always considered myself British but not English. Back in the early 80s, this background excluded me from certain government jobs (eg Treasury, Bank of England, Foreign Office)
Yes, I understood the same (from the early 80’s) that a foreign born grandparent excluded you from certain government jobs to ensure no conflict of loyalties if the job had security sensitivities. Now I suppose in our open borders – everything including vital infrastructure Made in China country, it’s ‘security’, what’s that?
Ethnicity is highly correlated to culture and beliefs. This reduces over time but it does not happen quickly and issuing a passport to an individual does not change the underlying reality that they are, intrinsically, different to the majority culture and beliefs. It would be wholly ridiculous for me to e.g. move to Japan (a country which I like a lot), gain citizenship, then claim to be ‘Japanese’. It would be an insult to the Japanese and their impressive culture with all of its many achievements over thousands of years. It would take more than one or two generations before this difference may fade and it certainly would not fade if I were to be told that I am fine to, essentially, remain of British culture and expect the Japanese to ‘celebrate this’ and accommodate me. Yet, in Britain, we regularly witness so many making such claims of ‘I am as British as you’, after they have gained a passport’. This is little more than pure opportunism, arbitraging the legalities for personal gain and social climbing. Done at scale it is dangerous to the stability of a society be it Britain, Japan, or anywhere else. The fact that, as a society, we tolerate this nonsense says a lot about our own naivety, sheer stupidity, and the way our protected characteristic legalities have been written and interpreted. Mix in little free speech and we have the status quo.
Oooh. English Nationality. Can I please have an English Passport?
Of course, legally there is no such thing as English Nationality. There is only English Ethnicity.
And Sunak is not English. As he himself said, he’s a British Indian.
My father, who came from India but is a Parsi of Persian origin (back in the 8th Century or thereabouts) invented the Tebbit test before Tebbit, by not teaching me his religion or languages so that I became fully British. My mother came from East Anglia. Father immigrated in 1937, and was from the state of Baroda, so was never an Indian citizen. What am I then? Culturally British/English, colour wise white, ethnically almost anything. I can tick White British, White other, White/Asian mixed and a couple of others quite truthfully. Often I tick the lot. It’s called assimilation. Who cares? Not I.
I have a couple of Polish colleagues. One of them has kept her “Polish” first name, the other (and his wife) make of point of introducing themselves with anglicized versions of their first names. I think they are all pretty well assimilated though.
To me, the question is there, in a time of turmoil, a homeland of your parents, grandparents, etc, that you can return to, in another country?
If you can’t, you are 100% English, or Welsh, etc.
Strictly speaking, I can’t because this homeland is nowadays a Russian nuclear and naval base called Kaliningrad sitting in a depopulated wilderness which was formerly the bread basket of Germany. But this certainly doesn’t make me English.
The thing with being English is that there has been more mixing over time, due to contacts, population size, cultural developments and interactions. I have a Danish, some Scottish and a variety of north and east English ancestors over the last 3 generations. I’m mostly English, and technically, following usual patriarchal inheritance of surnames, I should be a Schultz, but am not. I have a surname that is concentrated in the north and west.
What a mess. So much of this discussion endlessly stumbles over itself because everyone seems to have their own definition of what ethnicity is, or should be. We hear culture, society, language, genetics, geography, religion, history etc. This is because ethnicity itself is a woolly and porous concept. Yet because so many people place such importance in perceived ‘ethnic’ identity (muslims, black people, identity politics types etc.), the conversation is always conducted at cross-purposes.
Not genetics. That’s a red herring lefties have arbitrarily inserted into this debate because it enables them to claim that culture, society, language, geography, religion, history don’t really matter: Genetically, all white people have more in common with certain black people than these black people have in common with other black people (or at least this is claimed based on the usual “vanishingly small number of participants” ‘studies’) and hence, we’re all evil racists if we claim that people from Cologne and people from Kongo are actually different from each other¹.
¹ Only in this direction, mind you. When people from Kongo claim that they’re different from people from Cologne, that’s multicultural diversity which is to be celebrated.
Before we start waffling on in long articles about what “English” or “British” means, let’s start with a more fundamental question.
What is an “ethnicity”? In my opinion it is a polite word to get around talking about “race”. When the census asks about your ethnic origin, it really means to ask you what race you are. It wants to know whether you are white, black, Asian etc. But it can’t ask that. That would be “racist”.
So ethnicity is meaningless. Only race and nationality have meaning.
The difference between “British” and “English” is simple. “British” means English, Scottish or Welsh. So all English people are British, but not all British people are English. Not hard, is it? And no, it has nothing to do with the institutions (NHS and BBC…ffs) that according to the author are used to “create British national identity”.
But then, the author claims that “Anglican English” is a native ethnic group, which is odd considering that more of them worship in Catholic churches than Anglican ones.
Let’s cut through all this nonsense and get to the heart of it.
You have a nation, England, that is part of a larger nation, Britain. You have races within that nation. “Ethnic origin” is meaningless verbiage. What makes you English, or British? Legally, it is having a British passport. More fundamentally, it is composed of identifying as English/British, and having English or British culture.
Simples, really.