The Quickest Way to Fuel an English Ethnonationalist Movement is to Deny that English Ethnicity Exists

His performance as a senior politician aside, I’ve no personal dislike of Rishi Sunak, a decent, bright man. In 2025 he told Nick Robinson: “I mean, of course I’m English. Born here, brought up here, yeah, of course I’m English”. I think he and I could reasonably discuss that.

His claim is imprecise. He can say he’s English by birth and address, a relatively novel civic concept. He can say he’s acquired English culture, but the “tea and cricket” version he cites is simply a veneer, and one that is not universally adopted anyway. He can’t say he’s ethnically English and equivalent to those that are.

I believe that to insist that civic/cultural layers of “English” are the whole of it, and to suppress discussion of an ethnic layer, is not only wrong, but self-defeating. It swipes aside the English culture it lays claim to, and creates the resentment it seeks to avoid. I conclude with a better, and recognisably English, proposal.

First, the argument itself

The axiom of an “inclusive” telling is that “English” – civic, cultural – can’t exclude. Englishness is a wet dog on the sofa, a cup of tea, where you live or were born. It’s just a “club” or “status”, according to a “woman of colour” writing in the Independent who wants a “grown-up conversation about race”. Not her race, of course, only mine.

She criticises the “exclusive” definition she ascribes to Konstantin Kisin and Suella Braverman: “For Englishness to mean something substantial, it must be rooted in ancestry, heritage, and, yes, ethnicity – not just residence or fluency.” Kisin and Braverman insist they are not, and cannot be, English. John McTernan calls them fascists (Braverman, a White Supremacist?):

In 2021, 77% of white English people agreed that: “Being English is open to people of different ethnic backgrounds who identify as English.” So there is clearly a modern usage of “English” – inclusive, acquired rather than inherited. But ‘open to’ is not the same proposition as ‘identical’. It does not follow that every relationship to Englishness is equally deep, nor does it obviously apply to one generation of Indians that married each other.

Here, the word English or Englisc has ethnic origin “of the Angles”; and here’s Wikipedia’s version:

Ethnicity is not an opinion, but a fact of history, intermarriage and statistics of known populations: Romano-British, Anglo-Saxon, a few Scandinavian and, later, Normans. If you care to look up ethnogenesis, pedigree collapse and “identical ancestry” you can learn that, over several hundred years and assuming intermarriage, these groups have by now mixed almost entirely.

The population statistics of England are particularly favourable to this analysis because there wasn’t much immigration, from anywhere, from the 11th up to the mid-20th century. If your family were all here in 1900, it’s reasonably probable, with the exception of a relatively small influx of Huguenots and Irish, that they were all here in 1100 and that most of them were here much earlier than that.

English ethnicity, at the end of those several centuries, is more clearly defined than most. To deny an English ethnicity is to say ethnicity does not exist, which would pose quite the shock to parts of our current political establishment.

This ethnic, and original, usage of “English” has stood for around 1,500 years during which, and particularly with the unification of England under Alfred, it also acquired civic and cultural meaning. Until very recently those layers of meaning overlapped closely – that is to say, the people who were ethnically, culturally, geographically, civically and historically “English” were nearasdammit the same people, with the conspicuous exception of the Norman Conquest. Again, English history is particularly favourable to this interpretation, compared to most countries, because of unusually stable borders and polity.

Because of that stability, we do not need to boil our heads about “what fraction qualifies as English, then?” Something more than one generation of Indians that married each other. Something between a few generations of intermarriage, and several dozen.

Sunak uses the Normans as a case study. Jacob Rees-Mogg’s objection is similar, reciting a ditty from William of Orange, which concluded with the Normans – the English are all mongrels anyway! But the Normans did not become English at Pevensey. Assimilation happened over generations, via integration and intermarriage rather than by semantic decree, and the centuries since then prove my point, not theirs.

Language can evolve and perhaps there is, now, a purely civic/cultural layer of “Englishness”, the Sunak layer. But it’s a young usage, and doesn’t mean the ancient ethnic usage can be cancelled.

Ethnicity matters – both to others, and to the English

There are aspects of identity that you can don like clothes. Your flesh and blood, your forebears – or rather, mine – are not among them. I am descended from the people that gave their name to this land. To Sunak, the Bayeux Tapestry is a historical artefact of an adopted country. To me, it is a family photo album. English families fought Agincourt, Waterloo, the abolition of slavery. They manned the factories, and worked the Agrarian Revolution.

I’m not expressing disdain, calling for discrimination or apartheid. This ethnic identity is important to me, because I say so.

Family heritage and ethnic identity are, of course, important to others. Sunak is proudly Indian. Black Lives Matter, and don’t we know they’re all descended from slaves? David Lammy, Diane Abbott and Sadiq Khan are proud of their origins. I’m pretty sure it would be “cultural appropriation” if I claimed their ethnic identity.

They can’t appropriate mine.

Why “culturally English” is self-defeating

Did you notice that I drew on classical Liberalism, which Locke, Hume, Smith and Mill gave the world, and on the English Common Law? These, too, are my heritage, the “English culture and values” that our elites ignore when they pretend it’s all about tolerance and tea.

When John McTernan cancels my ethnicity by calling me “fascist”, he seeks to close down inquiry. Where I’ve (quite generously, really) allowed that language can evolve, bottom-up, he demands to abolish traditional usage of an ancient word, top down. Striking the very heart of Liberalism, he says the political community can prescribe my identity, that I may not choose what I value and how I express it.

To dismiss the discussion of ethnic Englishness in the name of cultural Englishness is entirely self-defeating, because it ruthlessly and selectively tramples on Liberal identity, language, the individual, heritage, inquiry, ideas and their expression, and the Common Law. It swipes away English culture itself, leaving only an address.

Why it’s dangerous, and how to do it better

What is also English, is to strain against an unjust yoke. Telling the English, uniquely, that our ethnicity doesn’t exist, we’re not allowed to argue it exists, it’s not allowed to matter if it exists, and we can’t demand any – let alone equal – treatment, in the Common Law country built by our forebears, is not a recipe for harmony.

I never thought my ethnicity and culture were threatened…but now, I do. I never thought they needed protection or any deliberate – let alone special – treatment…but now, I do. I have always distanced myself from the “far-Right” or whatever…but if you label me as such, well, labels make imprints as all good progressives know. If McTernan wants to rile up the English, he’s going about it brilliantly.

A multi-ethnic culturally English/British society might yet work, squarely built on Liberalism and Common Law. Why can’t the inclusionists say, all of them: “Let’s really embrace your culture. Tell us more about Common Law, the Glorious Revolution and JS Mill and how they’ll shape our lives here. In a few generations, like the Normans, our descendants will study how we integrated and intermarried.” Where do I co-sign?

That’s the outlook Rees-Mogg calls for, but he thinks the English should passively assume it will happen. What he ignores is not only the vacuity of the prevalent “tea and cricket” veneer, but how some recent arrivals prefer their own culture to ours, while intra-marrying rather than intermarrying. Erasing English ethnicity while pandering to theirs seems unlikely to help.

While Andy Burnham shares riveting cultural insights about buses and pork scratchings, Shabana Mahmood has spoken with great passion about Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights and the Common Law tradition she encountered as the child of immigrants. Credit where due. Here is an immigrant family engaging deeply with the inheritance of the country they joined.

If the English (under any definition) want a civilised society, we need to get back to reading it, understanding it, discussing it and loving it, in order that we may consider it worth protecting. That means being honest about both ethnicity and culture. We need to embrace our individual and family responsibility for what stimulates us, and choose “the best that has been written and said”, so that our history, satire, philosophy and literature makes its mark.

That is how we build English identity, and how we protect ourselves entirely from vibes-merchants like McTernan, promote the better sentiments of Mahmood, and set higher intellectual demands of decent men like Rees-Mogg and Sunak.