February 28, 2025 - 10:50am
Ever since Fraser Nelson and Konstantin Kisin quarrelled over whether Rishi Sunak is English or not, the debate over national identity has persisted. Now former home secretary Suella Braverman has intervened, arguing that while she is British, she can’t be English because she has a distinct Asian heritage which disqualifies her. “I don’t feel English because I have no generational ties to English soil, no ancestral stories tied to the towns or villages,” she wrote in the Telegraph this week.
The funny thing is that many ethnic minorities, including those who detest Braverman’s politics, would actually agree with her basic point. In a 2018 BBC survey, 61% of people who describe themselves as white are proud to declare their English identity, whereas among ethnic minorities it is just 32%. British identity, by contrast, is held by three-quarters of ethnic minorities. So much was confirmed by the writer Samantha Asumadu last week, who argued: “The truth is that lots of black and Asian Britons don’t see ourselves as English […] only British.” She also stated that perhaps Kisin, and by extension Braverman, “stumbled on an uncomfortable and distressing truth, and [that’s] why I’m forced to agree with him. English as an ethnicity is seen as white and maybe there’s nothing wrong with that.”
Part of this discrepancy is certainly because of the legacy of racism that excluded black and Asian people from the fraternity of the nation because of their skin colour. There is a feeling among some that if they won’t claim me, why should I claim them? What’s more, it is commonly understood that Britishness has a civic quality that can be inclusive of different ethnic identities, while Englishness denotes one’s ancestry, and so is far more exclusive.
This is a reasonable perspective. Most black Britons and British Asians have a history of migration, so there is an experience of living between two cultures which white English people don’t have. When one comes across the term “English rose”, the subliminal images are more likely to be of Keira Knightley or Lily James, not of Gugu Mbatha-Raw — who despite being born and raised in England, and having English ancestry on her mother’s side, simply doesn’t “fit” because she’s mixed-race.
Additionally, contemporary Britain advertises itself as a multicultural and multi-ethnic society in which minorities can integrate into mainstream society without having to shed particular cultural practices and traditions that they wish to retain. So long as people are treated equally and not disadvantaged because of their background, is it really a problem that black and Asian Britons are not “truly” English? As Braverman notes: “it’s what living in a multi-ethnic society entails.”
The flaw in this view is that it subtly assimilates race into nationhood, thus believing Englishness really lies in the blood. Braverman writes that for “Englishness to mean something substantial, it must be rooted in ancestry, heritage, and, yes, ethnicity – not just residence or fluency”. But notice that she doesn’t mention culture, or customs, habits and manners. She erects a straw man that in “Fraser’s world, all it takes to join the tribe is a plane ticket and a birth certificate”. The point is that if you are born and raised in that “tribe” — marinated in its culture, idiosyncrasies and way of life — then your skin colour shouldn’t disqualify you from membership.
Like any nationality, Englishness isn’t a fixed substance, interwoven with the forces of nature and grounded in race. It is a great culture and civilisation that has evolved historically and has already assimilated many initial “outsiders”. And like all nations it will continue to evolve, or else it will become redundant.
Ralph Leonard is a British-Nigerian writer on international politics, religion, culture and humanism.
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Subscribeam i reading unherd or the guardian?
I think the points the article promotes are largely fair.
I’m English but with Celtic blood from more than one of those other nations that comprise (or used to comprise) Britain, and whilst multi-culturalism is failing, there’s just no denying the multi-ethnicity which goes back a very long way in our island history.
The problem we’re faced with is trying to absorb too many too quickly, and whilst there’s a reluctance on the part of some immigrant groups to even try to integrate, if the numbers were fewer (and reducing) they’d be isolated and not seeking ascendancy.
“Ralph Leonard is a British-Nigerian writer …”.
Not English then?
My thought too!
An odd piece insofar as the writer intelligently and diligently disentangles English ethnicity from British nationality for five good paragraphs – before confusing them again in the last two.
It’s called sitting on the fence
The truth is too painful. So we get articles like these.
Look away. There’s nothing going on here. Countries evolve. England a race of English people? Of course not.
You can’t hide from reality. It will catch up with you in the end. Meanwhile you can read Unherd.
The same sleight of hand was practised on the Irish by the Ascendancy for many centuries and allowed people like Grattan to claim a spurious mantle of Irishness all while despising and praying for the disappearance of the actual Irish people.
Exactly. But UnHerd doesn’t get it. To keep on asking this question is the problem defined. End of story. Any clever words, literary references, philosophical teasers… become irrelevant if you have to keep asking the question.
If you are a black kid born in England, and learn to love Shakespeare, the English countryside, warm beer, and the warped English sense of humour, please imbibe as much of it as you want, because it is yours as much as it is mine. However…… Somebody walking past 10 or more generations of their forebears in the local graveyard is owed a bit more “street cred”, I’m afraid. On the other hand, having relatives and the experiences that can bring from another country or ethnicity can be seen as a different kind of “privilege”. I think all we need is a bit more understanding and consideration from all concerned instead of only throwing sympathy at
'minorities‘.The point missed here is choice.
Being English means not being Jamaican or Nigerian or Indian.
I’ve had the ‘English’ conversation with African Caribbean friends and whilst they consider themselves British having been born here and act British, they found it difficult to get their heads around being ‘English’ because in some cases their primary allegiance was to their ancestral country of origin.
Now arguably this might be because of the racism their forefathers had faced when they first arrived but at the same time I know Sikhs that arrived in the 50s who still can’t speak ‘English’ which says a lot about their “chosen” ethnicity.
Similarly, “choosing” not to be English but another ethnicity has certain privileges in its own right since if everyone was ‘English’ then there would be no ethnic minorities, would there!
‘Like any nationality, Englishness isn’t a fixed substance, interwoven with the forces of nature and grounded in race.’
But it IS. The English are these days largely Anglo-Celtic as a result of 500 years of intermingling, and yet remain an identifiable ethnic group with an ancient history on this island, one with very deep Christian roots. Just visit any country church. Its customs, language, place names, social structure, art, literature etc are the product of this particular group.
Why treat the English differently to the Igbo or the Han? I’m tired of this b*llsh*t!
Not many of the English do Christianity today, but that’s just part of the English evolving.
Thought experiment:
Nuclear war leads to the death of millions on the British Isles and the evacuation of all survivors.
50 years from now, these islands are resettled by Chinese.
Are any of the new residents English?
Variation:
A pocket of native English survive in a corner of the country – Cornwall, perhaps – but the situation plays out otherwise as above? Does the fact some English never left mean that England didn’t become less English?
Clearly what matters to the survival of English *culture* is the scale and pace of change.
But English is an ethnicity too, and I’m not sure why people more relaxed about the prospect of its extinction than they are about the extinction of other groups.
Ironically Christianity is much more pronounced amongst the immigrant communities. I don’t know a single young white God botherer
I think you’re misunderstanding the OP’s point – England is still a culturally Christian nation, it’s inter woven in our laws, art, our sense of how we should interact with each other. Christianity is so embedded in our history that it’s even taken on some of the pagan festivals that we’re here before it, blending into a deep cultural memory. I’m an atheist but I know my attitudes are culturally Christian and shaped by its traditions.
England is still a Christian nation whether any of us attend church or not. At least, I think we will be until we legalise state administered suicide.
Yes. We are now largely post Christian.
170 years or so ago England absorbed waves of Irish resulting from the famine. They ended up building half of Britain. Deemed a concern they were culturally and religiously different and we didn’t even let them build their own Churches for some decades.
And yet now? Who notices any difference (other than perhaps in NI)
It’s just ‘Time’ my friend. British values get into the pores and have much greater impact on those coming here than the values they might bring with them. Our problem is often we lack self confidence and can’t see it.
Yes, time matters and after a certain number of generations, Bravaman’s descendants will become English. That’s probably not her or her children’s generation.
I think I’ve come to the conclusion that being English can be about a certain ethnic background, ancestry, “ties to the soil” – but it doesn’t have to be.
I am probably your bog standard English person. I can trace my family line back through generations, the most exotic outside ethnic influences as far as I can tell are the odd Welsh or Scottish person. As for non-ethnic identity considerations, I was born and brought up in England speaking English only, share my name with one of English literature’s best-known heroines and was born on the Queen’s birthday (after having been due to arrive on St. George’s Day, but failed to keep the appointment).
If all that doesn’t make me English, I don’t know what would.
But, at the same time, I think the English identity can also be available to others who don’t have my ethnic/cultural background but who feel like they are English and it’s not completely ridiculous (an Argentinian with no English parents who has never been to England and doesn’t speak English wouldn’t be English, for example).
So, if Rishi Sunak or Suella Braverman WANT to think of themselves as English, then of course they can.
But no worries if they don’t, because the British identity is flexible enough to sweep everyone up into a sense of belonging in some way.
Isn’t it something to be celebrated that Britain offers you multiple paths to belonging? Other countries don’t have that. A bit less outrage, please.
Gibbon defined a nation as a group with a shared lineage, language, religion and customs. Any admixture of those has traditionally afforded a person membership to a greater or lesser extent in the English Nation.
Traditionally Englishness has found a quiet and sustaining bower in the long endurance of institutions such as the Monarchy the Church and the English Countryside, and in our shared language, music and literature. In contrast to many European Nationalisms, the least part of our inheritance – it was long felt – was made up from an unexamined but assumed ethnic blood-stock.
As those institutions and repositories of shared-life have come under attack from without and within we should not be surprised to see the ethnic component reassert itself – it is all that remains to many people after all. It is of a piece with the general coarsening and adulteration of the national culture.
It is part of the poppy-fetishism which subsists in the place religion used to occupy and football where culture ought to be. The gentle sense of Englishness which used to subsist, unexamined by most, now has to bear an unsupportable burden of meaning in the English context.
The question everyone SHOULD ask is; is England becoming LESS English ?
English can’t become ‘less’ English, it has evolved over the centuries and will continue to do so.
That is being English.
Perhaps, but the difference here is that a combination of mass migration and absolute surrender of any idea of a central culture beyond generic technocrat signifiers true of anywhere in the west or beyond (‘the English respect the rule of law, human rights, we love our kids’) has meant evolution has become nigh on a big bang shift for some communities who feel completely alienated.
And people are shocked when surveys show if WW3 kicked off we’d have to surrender due to lack of participation
The usual confusion over what English means. Surely, if people really knew the answer to the question, there would no longer be a question. 33% of people in the SE of England were not born there – 40% of the population of Greater London and this will soon approach 50%
I was born in Wales and have lived for two years in Scotland, 18 years in England, a year in Italy and now back to a village north of Cardiff. There is no question of who is Scottish, who is Welsh or who is Italian so…..but English???
Maybe the last cultural signifier of Englishness is just that everyone hates us, especially our closet neighbour brother and sisters in the UK and GB, and yet increasingly no one can actually say what that Englishness that they’re hating is.
Unfortunately, if you go outside the UK Britain and England are synonymous. My American friends believe that my home in Wales is in Western England. This whole idea of Englishness is stupid because it doesn’t exist. For that matter, Britain doesn’t exist either except in the eyes of people from other countries.
There is no connection between someone living in Lancaster with someone in London, except that is part of the UK.
Once more for those who need to hear it: you can have a multi-ethnic society but you cannot have a multi-cultural society.
No you can’t, multi ethnic societies can rub along for a short while until the free money runs out, then conflict is inevitable.
It’s not too easy, to be fair to Suella who can’t herself be English. I have shared Irish and Jewish roots born in Northern English. My mother has a stronger Irish-Anglo identity than my father, say. But I identify as English because I’m right-wing and fully for Anglo-Celtic ethno-nationalism rather than post-colonial multiculturalism for Britain.
Sound commonsense, customs, culture, manners and habits are all part of being English or any other culture, hence all Americans are viewed as American.
Englishness has always evolved and it will continue to do so, but if you are born here and are part of our English Nation then of course you are English
My Irish friend lives in Japan, is married to a Japanese woman and together they have two young children. The children’s names work in both Irish and Japanese, making things easy for friends and relatives. If asked what the children are I suspect my friend would say ‘Japanese-Irish’ or ‘Irish-Japanese’. Fraser Nelson though would say they were 100% Japanese, “as Japanese and sumo and sushi”, since Japan is where they were born. This seems silly to me.
The reason why this arises is that you have to be proud of something. Pride is the killer. I was born in Wales and went to live in England at the age of 6. Two of my grandparents were Irish. So am I English or Welsh or Irish? To Welsh people I am English because of my accent. To English people I am Welsh because I was born in Wales. Therefore, British works well. The whole question is stupid.
Konstantin Kisin also used the Japanese example, which made me laugh because long ago my London-born-and-raised Dad described how his Irish father used the Japanese example when challenging my Dad’s consideration of his own nationality: Irish or English (back then, “British” was less distinctive in this context, Ireland having been British within living memory). To me, this illustrates the fallacy of using other countries as comparisons, because sometimes (as with mono-ethnic Japan) race and nationality can be conflated and elided, whereas in other countries (USA being the primary example) this is very much not the case and must be specified. Hence the boring conclusion that this conversation is a matter of definition: England’s status as a nation has been superseded by the use of the term “British”, but if the UK were to split then it would be revived, so “English” can mean either nationality or race (or both). I prefer to think that this is an interesting discussion that needs to be had, as news coverage has proven.
One thing that seems always to be omitted in comments section on the topic of ethnicity and related topics is an historical perspective (excepting Fred Bloggs in an earlier comment). And it is a perspective that supports Ralph Leonard’s argument which is stated in his conclusion (i.e. it should have been his Introduction): “ Englishness isn’t a fixed substance, interwoven with the forces of nature and grounded in race. It is a great culture and civilisation that has evolved historically and has already assimilated many initial “outsiders”. And like all nations it will continue to evolve, or else it will become redundant.”
The point I want to make was illustrated, in a book published in the late 1980s and, if I remember correctly, based on interviews largely with girls living in London who had Indian and Bangladeshi ancestry, who were asked to describe their identity, and who were second or third generation British citizens. The message was that these girls defined themselves first as Londoners, second as British, and third as, Indian/Bangladeshi (largely on the basis of appreciating family histories, cooking, rituals, etc.).
So it seems to me that while second generation citizens (those born of immigrants) may be circumspect about whether they are ‘English’ or, depending on where they grow up, as Scottish, Welsh or Irish, their children (third generation) and certainly their grandchildren (fourth generation) would have no qualms about defining their ethnic identity in British terms. And, I suspect, they would express their Englishness in terms of local ethnic identities, such as those girls who defined themselves first and foremost as ‘Londoners’.
“… those who detest Braverman’s politics …”
What is there to detest about Braverman’s politics except that hers do not coincide with the like of Mr Leonard’s political orientation? She’s got more vision and courage than most politicians swimming in the cesspit of UK legacy politics.
“… Englishness denotes one’s ancestry, and so is far more exclusive.”
Just as Kurdish, or Somali, or Japanese, or Nigerian, etc. is exclusive to those racial groupings, to which English people would not aspire as an identity anyway.
Mr Leonard’s musings would be of more interest and benefit to readers of The Guardian. Not impressed!
Are there still cockneys? The English didn’t consider that underclass as their equal unless there had been an Eliza Dolittle transformation behind the scenes. Ask Colonel Pickering.
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Cultures evolve. The prudish Victorians and hedonistic lad/laddette culture of the 90’s would be poles apart, but both were distinctly English.
English is a race in the same way as Celtic Irish is a race. I am Celtic Irish so can never be English. That doesn’t mean you can’t have bits from other places but realistically if you are brought up in an Indian household in the UK you are a British Hindu/Muslim. You can never be English.
There is an English ethnicity, there is also an English nation, and anyone who resides in England, who practices English customs and culture is a part of that nation whether they identify with it or not.
Orwell saw that by the late 1930s The English Left Middle Class , especially the intellectuals hate being English . The first step was Lytton Strachey’s book The Eminent Victorians mocked people. Strachey was a weak man who was inadequate compared to those who made England great; the robust yeoman archers of the Middle Ages, Elizabeth’s sea dogs such as Drake, the craftsmen who created the Industrial Revolution( Newcomen, James Brindley, A Darby, Wedgewood, G Stephenson, Watt and Boulton, etc ) , naval captains such as Earl St Vincent, Nelson, writes from Chaucer onwards , scientists from I Newton onwards, the evolution of Parliament onwards from the Charter of Liberties of 1100.
Battle of Cape St. Vincent (1797) – Wikipedia
Lytton Strachey – Wikipedia
What England offered was greater freedom to improve one’s lot in life than other countries. B Wallis said the genius of the English was their individuality. Keir Hardie said Sam Smiles “ Self Help “ was manual of socialism.
The fact that England was suitable for supporting wheat, barley and pasture for animals meant people had more protein and even serfs could sell wool for money and buy their freedom. The arming of households from 1182 meant that England created an property owning middle class , whether farmer or merchant and from the mid 1250s could vote. No other European had such a large middle class. By 1300 MPs decided on the taxation of wool which was the main income the state. Even serfs could make their voices heard through moot courts. The result was a more emotional mature populace who accepted that liberties required an acceptance of responsibility.
Proof that the English system was producing a more competent homogenous nation comprising robust people endowed with common sense and fair play was the victory of the Battle of Sluys, followed by Crecy and then Poitiers. The English were outnumbered at to five to one but mastery of the war bow with draw weight of up to 200lbs meant a smaller technically superior more disciplined meritocracy defeated a larger technical inferior less disciplined aristocracy.
Mao said political power came from the end of barrel. For hundreds of years it was the arm of an archer.
As Orwell said the Left wing Intellectual hated British Culture, patriotism and physical courage. What better example is the robust yeoman archer at Poitiers and the sensible wife running the farm. The Black Prince addressed the army before Poitiers
You have it plain that you are the worthy sons and kinsmen …..I and my commanders will drink the same cup with you.
Elizabeth 1 at Tilbury
But being resolved , in the midst and heat of battle, to live and die amongst you all, to lay down for God, and for my kingdom, and my people and my honour and my blood, even in the dust.
Elizabeth, The Queen Mother
Elizabeth publicly refused to leave London or send the children to Canada, even during the Blitz, when the British Cabinet advised her to do so. She declared, “The children won’t go without me. I won’t leave the King. And the King will never leave.”
Name any leaders who were prepared to die amongst their people ?
The English people at their best are tough, robust, emotionally mature individuals who have common sense and sense of fair play, that in order to be free one must accept responsibility of defending the nation, take part in the running, obey laws drafted by Parliament and the monarch.
The problems we have today are because of the large part of the middle class centred on London lack the toughness, robustness, emotionally mature common sense, individuality, the sense fair play and ignore the concept of rule through consultation and consent. People wish to undermine free speech because they lack the mettle to win the debate so they wish to win by the deceitful means of silencing those who oppose them.
I’m sure there are many ways to be English, but I’d expect an “English rose”, specifically, to be kind of pink.
What is the purpose in trying to deny someone’s ethnic roots? By identifying as a British Pakistani, or whatever it may be, it enables the legitimacy of continuing to celebrate elements of your cultural heritage whilst at the same time declaring that primarily you are British, with all that implies and entails. By trying to dissipate the ethnic implication of someone’s English-ness into a catch-all grouping of multiple ethnicities called English for inclusivity’s sake, we undermine not only the historical context of being English but of the myriad other nationalities too. Sunak is proud of his roots and quite rightly so, but primarily he is an exemplar of what a modern British man is.
The writer needs to remember that England is not a ‘nation’ in the way that, say, France or Nigeria are nations: there’s no England at the UN, no English army, no English passport. But, it is, for better or worse, grounded in the land, the ‘race’, the language.
Rishi, made a pretty good fist of Englishness, however. That button upped manner and the very English air of superiority and the obliviousness of the rest of the British Isles . . .