Last week, Melanie Phillips wrote in her Times column that Restore Britain is “the antithesis of Britishness”. This resulted in online pushback from Rupert Lowe’s supporters about the apparent incongruity of this position with her longstanding Zionism. Why, they asked, does Phillips have no problem advocating for the ethnic interests of Jews and their claim to an ancestral homeland, while failing to acknowledge that the British have a specific ethnic identity which they wish to preserve? In response, she made a distinction in a post on X between British identity, which she labelled “civic and not ethnic”, and Jewish identity, “which is ethnic, religious and cutural [sic]”.

Phillips is partially right to say that Britishness denotes a civic identity. For much of the country’s history, being a “British subject” in law was defined not by the identity of an individuals’ parents but by whether that person was born on territory over which the Crown was sovereign.

Still, the more apt analogue would be with English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish identities, which carry that ethnic, ancestral and cultural weight. One can just as easily argue that the English or Scots are a “unique fusion of a people, a faith and a land”, to borrow Phillips’s description of Judaism. After all, England’s very name derives from being the land of the Angles: the land is named after its people.

Every country has an ethnic, cultural or religious shadow, even if it doesn’t officially proclaim it. Historically, in these isles that shadow was Anglo-Protestantism. The Sabbath in Britain is Sunday, not Friday, as it is in Muslim countries, or Saturday as it is for Jews. The truth is that most countries are not purely civic or purely ethnic; instead, they incorporate a mix of civic, ethnic, cultural and linguistic expressions of how nationality is conceived. Only the United States, perhaps, is sui generis in how close it comes to being a purely civic nation.

Clearly, then, there are longstanding ethno-national identities in Britain. The idea of “ethnic minorities” implies an ethnic majority, and pretending otherwise out of fear of legitimising racism doesn’t help. Last year, in the wake of suggestions that former prime minister Rishi Sunak wasn’t English on account of his race, the journalist Samantha Asumadu wrote: “The truth is that lots of black and Asian Britons don’t see ourselves as English.” She added that “English as an ethnicity is seen as white and maybe there’s nothing wrong with that.”

Studies frequently show that most ethnic minorities identify with being British over being English. That “Englishness” denotes a particular identity and heritage of the ethnic majority, and many ethnic-minority citizens recognise they’re not eligible for it. Most of these people have a history of immigration within the last two or three generations; meanwhile, most white Britons don’t, given that their lineage on these isles goes back much further. There is naturally, then, a difference in experience and history.

Just because Britain — or, more specifically, its constituent nations — has an ethnic and cultural identity doesn’t mean that minority groups should be legally handicapped or socially persecuted. It also doesn’t mean that they should not be considered compatriots for building a common public life within a flourishing civil society. But Phillips is being short-sighted in overlooking the ethnic heritage of this country altogether.

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Ralph Leonard is a British-Nigerian writer on international politics, religion, culture and humanism.

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