This late-flowering, politicized ethnogenesis among the English people is obviously the direct product of mass immigration, which has had the effect of rapidly diminishing the English population share within their own titular country. It was also obvious, and long-predicted, that the parallel growth and confidence of Scottish, Irish and Welsh nationalism would, in turn, midwife an English equivalent. When we add to this volatile mix the obsession, in recent decades, of Britain’s political and cultural class with aping essentialist American rhetoric on racial and ethnic difference, valorizing minority identities while actively seeking to suppress and undermine (or “dismantle” and “de-center”, if you prefer) majority ones, then we see the perfect Molotov cocktail our elites have managed to assemble for us in the coming decades.

Is Rishi Sunak English? The question is so poisonous because it elides multiple distinct but partly overlapping concepts — ethnicity, culture, political identity — and is further obscured by late 20th-century British taboos and anxieties over race. One can be culturally English (as, for good or ill, I am) without belonging to the English ethnic group (to which I do not, being of mixed Greek and Irish origin). Like my suburban Northwest London contemporary Suella Braverman, I have my own ethnic identities, which I have inherited and been socialized in, and do not wish to give up, instead passing them on to my children. This is not a question of race — both Greek and Irish are European ethnic groups — but of ethnicity. I do not feel aggrieved or despondent that I am not a member of the English ethnic group, just as I do not pine to be Japanese or Basque or Hutu. But framing the question, as parochial commentators seem compelled to, as “can non-white people be English?” has, whether through well-meaning ignorance or willful obtuseness, led to the absurd situation where the very existence of the English as an ethnic group, as well as a cultural identity, is either denied or actively suppressed as a barrier to racial harmony. Indeed, for New Labour apparatchik John McTernan — proud possessor of Irish identity and citizenship through descent — “the concept of ethnic English is truly evil”.

At the same time, elements of the online Right are indeed objectively racist, denying English ethnicity to people of part-English origin by virtue of their mixed race. One of their victims, the MP Ben Obese-Jecty, who is half-English and half-Ghanaian, is clearly more English than me, ethnically, because I am not at all English. Given that a significant proportion of the new ethnonationalist Right often do not have to look back far to find non-English ancestors, then a preference for people of European but non-English heritage over non-white people with some English descent clearly shows a focus on racial identity over ethnicity or ancestry — another conceptual matter entirely. If some level of physical descent from ancestors from England were the central factor, then the vast majority of the Caribbean, or even African-Americans, would have a greater claim on Englishness or Britishness than the non-ethnically English descendants of European immigrants, though I have never seen today’s genetic purists make this claim. The racial aspect, on both sides of this debate, then, overwhelmingly obscures the matter supposedly at hand, that of Englishness as an ethnic identity, which is to say the existence of the English as a people, distinct from the Welsh, or the Tibetans, or the Iroquois, or any other of the world’s ethnic groups which are universally agreed to exist.

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Piddington’s very English revolution

By Aris Roussinos

Perhaps the online debate revolves around whether prominent non-white personalities can be definitively called English precisely because the question feels more loaded, and thus more dangerous to comfortably discuss. The existence, or otherwise, of the English as an ethnic group has become, politically, a sub-problem of the continued viability of a tolerant multiracial society within the context of vastly expanded mass Third World immigration. Without the policy choices creating this situation, this entire conversation would not be happening, and these neurotic, increasingly casuistical debates would simply not be taking place. The progressive claim that the English, alone among human societies, do not exist as an ethnic group is so absurd as to be unworthy of discussion: it is simply a means of evading the question of what political importance should be attached to being of English ancestry in the very land named after their ethnic group. If the reasoning is that the path to racial harmony lies in removing the English, alone, from the long list of the world’s ethnic groups, against the will of those who both are and believe themselves to be such, then permit me the adopted English understatement of saying that the outcome will not be positive.

To disentangle, as our purposefully obtuse commentators choose not to, the distinct issues of race and ethnicity, it is more useful here not to ask whether Rishi Sunak is English, but whether Andy Burnham is. Proud of his Irish descent (on his father’s side Irish Protestant from Drogheda, so we must assume of English settler origin), Burnham has made it explicitly clear that of the various regional and national — even pan-continental — identities he holds, Englishness comes last. As Tom McTague observed in his profile interview with the Prime Minister, “it is Burnham’s Irish roots that help explain his British identity”, fueling “his insistence that he is British first rather than English”, an identity which “allows him to keep all the ‘layers’ of his identity intact: British first, north-west second, Liverpool third, and English fourth”. With his Derbyshire surname, vanishingly rare in Ireland, no one can reasonably doubt that should he have wished, Andy Burnham could have chosen to assimilate into an English political, cultural, or even ethnic identity. For the most part, it seems he has chosen not to. Politically, he is British (and incidentally is strikingly more Unionist in dealing with Sinn Féin than his recent predecessors). Culturally, his Englishness is regional, urban and Northwestern rather than national: it is perhaps more difficult to imagine him bedecking No. 10 North with England flags in support of the national team than Starmer chose for the British state’s previous London regional office. Ethnically, should he even think in these terms, we must assume it is his “Irish roots” that dominate.

Indeed, when hosting Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin at Makerfield’s Brian Boru club last week, Burnham observed that “I certainly am proud of the Irish heritage that I have in my family. And I was with the Prime Minister of Canada at the new Everton stadium this week… Another Irishman, it wasn’t unnoticed, a Mayo man, I think.” Carney certainly is, or was — he relinquished the Irish citizenship he held from the 1980s on becoming Canada’s Prime Minister — “another Irishman” and “a Mayo man”. On the official Irish Department of Foreign Affairs website, one can find the lovingly-produced document “Aughagower to Canada: A commemorative history of the Carney and Moran families”, a masterpiece of sentimental old country soft power, tracing Carney’s forebears back to their peasant smallholdings, published “on the auspicious occasion of your visit to your ancestral home”. Carney acquired his third, British citizenship through necessity, as is mandatory on becoming Governor of the Bank of England (there is of course no English citizenship to acquire for what is, despite its name, a British role). What makes Carney “another” Irishman to Burnham? Is it citizenship? He is no longer an Irish citizen. Culture? Perhaps, though it is difficult to see exactly how this manifests.

More obviously, the answer is in descent, and the very idea of having “an ancestral home” in the first place. Such descent is a category recognized by the Irish state, like the majority of European states, for citizenship purposes, in a way the British state does not recognize its own British, or even English diaspora, in America, Canada, Australia, or other distant outcrops of the great historic wave of British transcontinental migration. But there is, still, an element of personal choice here: though less Irish, by ancestry, than either Burnham or Carney, that descendant of stout Hampshire yeomen, Joe Biden, chose to identify as Irish, in a distinctively bombastic Irish-American way.

Comparing Irishness to Englishness, then, we see that ancestry is a factor in the Irish case; citizenship another factor (though neither Biden nor Burnham are or ever were Irish citizens); and choice — the subjective matter of personal identity construction, itself a product of socialization from within and without the cultural in-group — the third. It is not any one of these things in isolation, but an interplay of all of them. If British progressives, trying to suppress a politically toxic, and, it is not difficult to foresee, potentially tragic outcome that they have themselves created, now find themselves denying the very existence of the English as an ethnic group, it must be said that much of the newly ethnonationalist Right exists in a similar state of confusion about the subjective element of choice in ethnic affiliation. If ancestry alone were the operative factor, that son of a Birmingham stonemason, Patrick Pearse (who incidentally blamed his “cold nature” and social awkwardness on his “English blood”), would be only partly acceptable as Irish, yet you cannot find even the most extreme neo-Gaelic nationalist online claiming so. When the London-born Englishman John Stephens changed his name to Seán Mac Stíofáin and led the Provisional IRA at the start of the Troubles, it was surely a triumph of will over ancestry, and yet he was nevertheless accepted as Irish by the most zealous Irish nationalists then available. Admittedly, spearheading armed rebellions may be a stiff benchmark for successful assimilation, but the Irish case — so geographically close and culturally similar to England, compared with the vastness of the surrounding world, yet so utterly dissimilar nevertheless — remains, as always, a useful foil to English certainties.

No one, at least until Irish progressives belatedly acquired once-fashionable Anglo-American opinions, doubted the existence of the Irish as a people distinct from others in the world, or that the Irish people, as such, are distinct from the English. Even the latter claim is, at least, still vestigially held by the Irish progressive class as the last remnant of Irish nationalism. Indeed, hapless Ed Sheeran has recently, by virtue of his disinclination to publicly condemn Israel, been stripped of his inherited Irishness by prominent Irish progressives, and presumably condemned to mere Englishness for his sins. This element of politicized cultural negotiation, from within and without the in-group, is neither an English nor a Right-wing peculiarity but an inherent feature of ambiguous cases in what is, by its nature, a socially constructed category. Ancestry, ethnicity, political identity: these are partially overlapping but distinct concepts, for Englishness as well as Irishness.

Yet the fact that many Irish people can claim English ancestry, like Gerry Adams, or Scottish, like Mary Lou McDonald or Conor McGregor, does not negate the existence of an Irish ethnic group, which both partially overlaps with British populations in terms of descent, but is also held in jealous contradistinction as a matter of identity formation. Indeed it is in Northern Ireland, where Irish and British ancestry is most closely intertwined in most families, that the cultural boundaries between them are most rigidly enforced. As the anthropologist Fredrik Barth observed in his influential book Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, it is the very existence of cultural boundaries themselves rather than the “cultural stuff” they are commonly held to contain, that makes the distinction between ethnic groups. The ability of individuals, in very particular and mutually negotiated ways, to slip between them, rather than deconstructing ethnic groups, reifies them as culturally meaningful categories. Ancestry, real or fictive, is an element, even a large element, in the existence of ethnic groups, but the two terms do not overlap entirely. Both sides in this interminable debate are conflating related but distinct concepts, and poisoning a debate that will result in serious real-world consequences for millions of people.

So when Jacob Rees-Mogg can claim, to online outrage, that the English are a “mongrel people”, then this is something that can be said of every ethnic group on earth outside uncontacted Amazon tribes or Andaman Islanders, it is not particularly meaningful. Even Winston Churchill, in his popular work A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, took great pleasure in ascribing different temperamental characteristics of the English “race”, the common late-Victorian usage for what we would today term “ethnicity”, to the various ancestral strains in its makeup. Churchill, who was half-American of English descent, certainly did not intend to deny the existence of an English ethnic group: indeed, his work was intended to explain what he predicted as its domination of the earth, or at least justify the handover of power he oversaw from its mother country to its New World successor empire. It is sadly ironic that the man who sacrificed the British empire to defeat Hitler spent a large part of his life writing a multi-volume epic glorifying his own ethnic group, from its island birthplace to its vast new lands across the globe, that would now itself be considered tantamount to Nazi race science by the standards of British politicians in 2026. What a muddle these people have found themselves in, and what a sad and needless predicament for the English themselves. These are nuanced and complex terms, hedged with ambiguities at the edges, but at the same time, you should not need a DPhil in Anthropology to know whether you exist.

Where does all of this leave us? The observable fact that membership of one ethnic group or another, is in certain circumstances, and within certain cultural contact zones, mutable or negotiable, is less politically relevant than the fact that for the majority population of England, such circumstances have not existed since the early Middle Ages. The English were, until relatively recently, disinclined to center themselves as an ethnic group at home precisely because they were one of the very first in the world to form a nation-state, in which this identity was unchallenged. Later, when other European societies were undergoing the wave of explicit identity-formation that led to modern nation-states, the English had happily subsumed themselves into an imperial British identity, which no longer exists — except perhaps vestigially in Whitehall. But, just as the modern experience of mass immigration leads to complex and ambiguous identities in the descendants of immigrants, whether inherited or consciously maintained like Burnham or Carney’s layers of Irishness, at its current scale, it has now caused the English to adopt the same introspective anxieties and acts of conscious identity formation.

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Nothing can stop the break-up of Britain

By Aris Roussinos

We may say that the creation of hyphenated English identities have suddenly transmuted unhyphenated Englishness from an assumed cultural norm into a politicized identity. English demographic decline in England itself, with all the rapidly eroding taboos around its open discussion, is the central fact driving all of this discourse, around which everything else is displacement activity. It is the direct result of mass immigration since the Nineties that these questions of identity and ancestry and meaning, the stereotypical immigrant neuroses, have now come to overshadow the English themselves, who in their homeland have no other identities to play with, or assume, or explore.

Like any child of immigrants, I have made choices, rational or romantic or some combination of the above, and for good or ill others have been made for me, or inherited. Like Mark Carney, I have “an ancestral home” in Ireland, and have chosen to “return” to it. If Jacob Rees-Mogg thrusts Englishness upon me, I must therefore politely decline. Yet for those whose ancestral home is England, there is no escaping the problem. Some have chosen self-assertion; others have chosen self-negation: but there can be no real imminent resolution when what was once unspoken and merely assumed has, for the first time in many centuries, become a matter of political dispute and negotiation. Yet it is doubtful that either current position, maximalist or minimalist, on who gets to call themselves English has yet reached its final form, but should instead be seen like the first haggling at a bazaar. There is, presumably, a middle-ground between claiming that the entire world is composed of temporarily embarrassed Englishmen, and determining belonging solely by 23andme results.

In Greece, which went through this process in the 19th century, despite the strong ideology of shared ethnic identity and physical descent from the ancient Greeks driving the modern state, some groups, like Romanian-speaking Vlachs or Albanian-speaking Orthodox Arvanites, were adopted as fictive Hellenes, while others found less happy outcomes. In Ireland, the descendants of English settlers were twice absorbed into the Irish ethnic group, as Catholics in the 17th century, and as Southern Protestants only definitively after independence (the assimilation of Ulster Protestants into Irishness is, we may say, a distinctly unfinished project). But modern English political ethnogenesis is only beginning, and it is impossible to predict its final form, should there ever be one. It is very plausible that an accepted compromise will retain more of imperial Britishness than the current discourse would imply. The relationship between Englishness and Britishness is also politically unstable, and one possible route out, or deferral, of English angst over identity could be a revivified unionism, which indeed appears to be Burnham’s response. But the stakes, for those of ambiguous Englishness, are increasingly high, as the once uncomplicated English begin to argue among themselves. We may as well get used to these endless and increasingly sterile online debates, and the shadow they threaten to cast over our offline lives. All of us, English or not, are now stuck with the English Question.

No, in fact, it’s complicated. In conflating race and nation, white nationalists on the Right like Carlson make the same mistake as Left-wing multiculturalists who use “culture” as a synonym for “race.” But race, however defined, is a biological concept, while nationality is a matter of culture. Everyone is born with a particular combination of DNA, but nobody is born speaking Japanese or Slovenian and preprogrammed with a particular nation’s culture and customs and tastes in cuisine.

As more countries become melting pots, thanks to the combination of immigration with assimilation, more nations like the United States will be made up of people who share a common culture, but not common ancestors or a common resemblance.

“Nation” and “state” are sometimes used interchangeably. But they must be different things, otherwise the term “nation-state” would be redundant, like nation-nation or state-state. “State” refers to an organized, independent territorial political community. “Nation” refers to a social community, defined by nonpolitical markers of some kind.

In nation-states, the national community and the political citizenry overlap, though not completely. But in addition to nation-states, there are multinational states with two or more nationalities — Anglophones and Francophones in Canada, Flemings and Walloons in Belgium. And there are stateless nations, like the Kurds and the Palestinians.

Whether you belong to a particular state’s citizenry or a particular national community is an objective question. It is sometimes said that to be an American is to believe in liberal democracy. No “American-ness” (extra-political cultural identity) exists, we are told, only “Americanism” (devotion to a particular political creed). But this gets both the American state and the American nation wrong.

There are three ways to become a citizen of the American state: to be born to one or more parents who are citizens; to become a naturalized citizen after a lengthy process of legal immigration; or to be born on US territory (according to a contested Supreme Court decision). A foreign national who tells a US custom agent, “I believe in the principles of the Declaration of Independence” isn’t immediately granted citizenship.

Nor is there any ideological or credal test in the oath that immigrants must swear to become US citizens; it is a loyalty oath to the government, the state half of the nation-state compound, not a confession of a secular creed: “I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic…”

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Can Trump make McKinley great again?

By Michael Lind

Is there an American “nationality”, a cultural majority, distinct from the US citizenry? For all of the talk about “American exceptionalism”, the relationship between state and nation in the United States isn’t different in kind from that in other modern countries.

Contemporary countries are shaped by what might be called the Three D’s: decolonization, disestablishment, and desegregation. Most of the countries represented in the United Nations today, including the United States, were created from the partition of a few multinational empires — overseas colonial empires, like the British and French empires, and overland dynastic empires, like those ruled by the Hohenzollerns, the Hapsburgs, and the Romanovs, whose domains were held together under new communist management until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The newly independent fragments usually have been more ethnically homogeneous than the multinational empire from which they were carved. In most post-imperial states, the numerically largest community — European settlers in the Americas and Australia and New Zealand, the largest tribe in the former dynastic empire — has lent its language to the successor state, and sometimes its name. Poland is the land of the ethnic Poles.

All contemporary nation-states have ethnic minorities as well as ethnic majorities. Not all citizens of Poland are ethnic Poles. The disestablishment and privatization of religion and the abolition of formal racial or ethnic segregation guarantee national minorities civil and political rights equal to those of members of the national cultural majority — in theory, if not always in practice.

The result in modern nation-states is the replacement of a “thick” conception of national identity — uniting language, culture, religion, and biological race — with a thinner but genuine national identity defined chiefly by a shared language and a few customs and cultural references that are shared by most citizens, notwithstanding their religious beliefs and ancestry.

This emphasis on language and customs in defining national identity is a return to the historic norm. For most of human history, settled populations were similar in appearance and ancestry to their nearest neighbors, who were sometimes their greatest enemies. You couldn’t tell which tribe people belonged to merely by looking at them. But whether they spoke your language, and whether they spoke it with an accent or not, could tell you whether they belonged to your community or were outsiders.

In the biblical Book of Judges, the Gileadites identified their enemies, the Ephraimites, by forcing suspects to pronounce the word “shibboleth” (an ear of wheat or rye), which the Ephraimites mispronounced as “siboleth”. Hence, the term “shibboleth” for a marker of group identity.

Membership in the cultural nation is defined not only by the language you speak, but also by the language in which you think, the Muttersprache (mother tongue), acquired in most cases in childhood.  Most citizens in a nation-state are members of the linguistic and cultural majority, but belonging to it isn’t and shouldn’t be a condition of citizenship. It is no insult to say that the immigrants Francis Lieber, Carl Schurz, and Albert Einstein became great US citizens while remaining cultural Germans.

Of course, outsiders who look no different from insiders can learn to talk like insiders as well. For this reason, in the past, ethnic boundaries among tribes of similar appearance were sometimes reinforced by physical alterations like circumcision, in the case of Jewish men and boys, or by distinctive clothing, ornaments, or hairstyles.

In many premodern Muslim and Christian societies, Jews were forced to wear yellow stars or other badges, turbans or conical hats, or other distinguishing apparel. The Manchu conquerors of Qing China forced men who belonged to the subjugated Han Chinese majority to identify themselves by wearing “queues” or pigtails, on penalty of being beheaded if they refused. Among other things, the end of invidious religious and ethnic discrimination in modern nation-states means that all citizens are free to dress alike and wear the same hairstyles, if they choose.

The lands of European settlement, from the time of Columbus onward, have been exceptions to the historic rule that the cultural nations in a particular region tend to be similar in appearance and ancestry. The Americas from the beginning have been radically diverse, with European colonists living alongside Native Americans, African slaves and their descendants, and, in some places, Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and other non-European contract laborers.

The independence of former European colonies in the Western Hemisphere — beginning with the secession of the United States from the British empire in 1776, and followed by the independence of Latin-American countries from Spain and Portugal — initially produced Herrenvolk (master-race) regimes, majoritarian or authoritarian. The descendants of European settlers lorded it over Native Americans, people of African and Asian descent, and mixed-race populations.

In the New World, racial classifications have reflected ruling-class strategies, not anthropological realities. For example, where European settler populations were outnumbered, as in some Caribbean islands, settler elites sometimes pursued a divide-and-rule strategy in which non-European populations were split up into multiple categories, like “mulatto,” “octaroon,” and “quadroon,” which distinguished varying degrees of mixed European and African ancestry.

In the Old South, however, all states, save for South Carolina and Mississippi, had white majorities. For strategic reasons, the Southern planter class adopted a strict binary black-white binary based on the “one-drop” rule: anyone with any African ancestry, no matter how minor, was defined as “negro” or “black.”

This definition benefited the planter elite in two ways. First, the one-drop rule maximized the number of unfree workers defined as slaves and, later, as blacks under segregation, by including many people who wouldn’t otherwise have been considered black, and might even have been considered white, in other Western Hemisphere countries like Brazil. At the same time, the fear on the part of poor Southern whites of being defined as black, losing their status and even their freedom, gave them a vested interest in the maintenance of white supremacy, which the Southern ruling class invoked to avert populist uprisings and democratic agitation by non-elite whites.

To be consistent, the US government should have stopped classifying Americans using the arbitrary categories of 19th-century racists at the same time in the 1960s that racial discrimination was outlawed. Tragically, most though not all black American leaders since the 1960s have rejected the idea of colorblind law in favor of a system of “affirmative action” or racial preferences, which can’t work unless all Americans were assigned to one of a few arbitrary “races”: black, non-Hispanic white, Hispanic or Latino, Asian and Pacific Islander, Native American (the precise list has varied with each census since the 1970s).

Since the 1970s, the proponents of “race-conscious remedies” to the legacies of historic American racism have found allies among American corporations, which can use racial tokenism to divert attention from their mistreatment of all workers, and American universities, which similarly have used racial quotas to divert attention from favoritism in admission for “legacies” (children of alumni, particularly big donors).

The premise of the existing system of racial classifications in the United States is that the races, or pseudo-races, are permanent. But in reality, the white-only “melting pot” that blended Anglo-American Protestant settlers with later waves of European “white ethnics” into a single generic white population has become a transracial melting pot, creating a mixed-race American majority with a common language and culture.

Today, 94% of Americans approve of interracial marriage, up from 4% in 1958, and attitudes are now the same in the South as in the rest of the nation. Interracial marriage rose to 11% in 2020, from 3% five decades earlier, when the US Supreme Court struck down laws against it; among cohabiting (as opposed to married) couples, the figure is 1 in 5.

Among younger Americans, the ratio is greater. Nearly 1 in 3 “Asian” and “Hispanic” newlyweds, and 1 in 5 “black” newlyweds, has married someone of another “race.” The number is lowest among so-called non-Hispanic whites, around 15%, simply because this group remains the largest. One in 10 children born in the United States has parents of different officially defined “races.” Old-fashioned “race” thinkers like Ibram Kendi may insist that the “colorblind” ideal is itself a form of white supremacy. But for growing numbers of Americans, both native and immigrant, love is colorblind.

Progress, right? The problem is that the United States, like all other contemporary democratic nation-states, has below-replacement fertility, meaning its population will shrink without immigration. The combination of large-scale immigration with low native fertility means that in the United States, as in Europe, the share of the population made up of recent immigrants and their first- and second-generation descendants balloons rapidly.

This wouldn’t necessarily seem to threaten the cultural majority, if immigrants assimilated quickly and painlessly to the language and culture of their new country. But it is a problem if large numbers of immigrants choose not to assimilate, or if they are discouraged from doing so. Assimilation does take time. And as the 1990s US Commission on Immigration Reform led by civil-rights pioneer Barbara Jordan noted, America’s engine of assimilation begins to break down when newcomers are piled on too rapidly.

At the same time, too many on the American Right underestimate the power of assimilation. From the 18^th century to the 21^st, anxieties that immigrant groups would never assimilate to the mainstream in America have been overblown. Irish-Catholic immigrants didn’t overthrow American democracy on behalf of the Bishop of Rome and his Jesuits. Today’s Mexican-American immigrants are assimilating to the mainstream at the same rate over several generations as did the European immigrants of the past, making a mockery of fears that they will turn the American Southwest into a Spanish-speaking Quebec.

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By Sohrab Ahmari

The only ethnic diasporas that have maintained their identities over time in the United States have been self-segregating sectarian communities, like the Amish and the Hasidim. Their numbers are so small that their self-segregation hasn’t caused significant problems, of the kind that would arise if a large share of the US citizenry formed a separatist religious enclave.

Then there are legal obstacles to assimilation. For most of American history, immigrants were assigned a race on coming to the United States. Scandinavian immigrants were assigned to white America; Haitian immigrants were assigned to black America. The combination of racial classifications with state laws against interracial marriage meant that “white” Italian Americans could marry “white” Polish Americans, but not black Americans.

The pan-racial categories of the US Census continue to be used to classify immigrants as well as natives. The results are frequently absurd. On arrival in the United States, immigrants from Denmark and Greece are assigned to the “non-Hispanic white” category, while immigrants from India, China, and the Philippines find themselves assigned to a fictitious “Asian and Pacific Islander” pseudo-race. Arab-Americans are treated as “non-Hispanic whites”, but some support the creation of a new, equally nonsensical category: Middle Eastern and North African, a fake official nationality that would include Arabs, Persians, and (to be consistent) Jews.

Proponents of affirmative action or “equity” or “DEI” want it to be legal to discriminate in college admissions and hiring against non-Hispanic whites, no matter how poor, in favor of “blacks” and “Hispanics”, no matter how rich. The beneficiaries of racial quotas, in addition to elite black and Hispanic Americans, include wealthy and well-educated immigrants — affluent professionals from West Africa, for example, or upper-class South Americans.

Unfortunately, the toxic interaction of America’s legacy racial categories with mass immigration promotes the idea that the important divide is not between Americans (of all races) and foreign nationals (of all races), but between so-called whites, blacks, so-called Hispanics, and so-called Asians. Like pan-Aryanism and pan-Africanism, these spurious racial categories never corresponded to any actual communities in the United States or anywhere else. Now that the American melting pot is creating a post-racial, post-ethnic cultural majority in the United States, it is time to abolish official racial classifications altogether.

The equation of race and nation by Right-wing racists and Left-wing multiculturalists is increasingly at odds with social reality. National identity in the future for the most part will be like national identity in the past — but with a post-racial twist. In the past, the members of a tribe usually sounded the same and looked alike. In today’s melting-pot nations, modified by waves of immigration, the members of the majority tribe will sound the same, even if they look different.

Admittedly, tensions had been rising for over a month as politicians and fascists politicised a murder at a wedding to sow hatred and division. But nobody expected it to come to this. How could a European city so rich in culture and on the road to development be torn apart by such brutal violence? Overnight, Sarajevo had become a byword for the dangers of ethnic division, ultra-nationalistic fervour, tribalism and wanton extremism.

The events of the past few days in the United Kingdom reveal a number of familiar traces. Southport has become synonymous with Sarajevo, in the sense that, once again, under the watchful sun a small extremist minority is seeking to politicise a brutal tragedy and turn it into something whose consequences reach across the country. This is not protest; it’s about violence, terror and a naked appeal to intimidation.

The idea of a civil war has traditionally referred to an internal conflict where one armed group seeks to wrestle power from the state. While some may brush this aside by suggesting a civil war is not something that the British do, we should not be so complacent. Remember, after all, that alongside the American version, the English civil war between 1642-51 remains one of the most instructive. As a result of this very British version of civic slaughter, the modern theory of sovereignty appeared in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. Not only did it put forward the now-familiar mantra that there is no politics without security and no security without the state, it also set in place the fundamental understanding — later picked up by Max Weber — that only the state can engage in legitimate violence.

What marks a civil war from this perspective is a contesting of that very monopoly and the state’s right to use force for the preservation of order. That the police forces who appear on the front lines often become the first targets is not then incidental. But where is the line that needs to be crossed so that civil tensions become a war? Since the Seventies, critical thinkers such as Michel Foucault sought to invert the logic of civil war to explain how states are always waging a kind of silent battle upon minority groups. Through this, notions such as structural violence emerged. Presenting a civil war as a process — one that is not always about widespread slaughter but can also be measured in terms of a broader account of violence and social tensions — does have some merit. The danger with such reasoning, however, is that if everything is a civil war, nothing is.

If Sarajevo made explicit how the new emerging contours of civil war would be written in ethnic terms, it had already been shown in Somalia, Mexico and later Rwanda how the very idea of a civil war was no longer bound to single movements whose sole aim was the capture of the state. Such unbounded violence went global with 9/11, which revealed the utter nihilism of certain ethnic doctrines. It also showed how the lines between race, religion and political beliefs are far from homogenised.

Political violence has since been very much driven by ethnic division, which speaks to a problem that is far more expansive than reductive explanations that focus on race. Of course, there are some overlaps between race and ethnicity, but they are not mutually exclusive. A failure to recognise this means we fail to properly understand the causes and the solutions.

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How Britain ignored its ethnic conflict

By Aris Roussinos

Three decades on from the violence in Yugoslavia, the world is undeniably a different place. The UK political landscape is notably a world away from how it looked in the early Nineties, divided as we have become by all the social media tensions that, as recent days have shown, actually makes violence easier to provoke by non-uniformed and misinforming online generals. This has been matched by the Americanisation of our political system, where performativity — including the performativity of violence and outrage — has replaced substance and where the complex lines of identity and ethnicity have been reduced to crass caricatures based on neat categories of race, sex, gender and whatever other category we care to impose.

The category of race, for example, in itself tells us little about a person’s privileges or political and religious beliefs. That is why counter-narratives around “whiteness” are also unhelpful here; just as they are useless in explaining why many black and Asian people in the US support Donald Trump, or why Enrique Tarrio ,who is of Afro-Cuban descent, became the chairman of the neo-fascist organisation Proud Boys. We should not forget their cos-play riot on Capitol Hill, for what that pantomime showed was such movements today really don’t expect to be able to take on the state. Instead, their enemy are other Americans who have a different vision of what being American actually looks like.

Unlike in Britain, the idea of a possible civil war there has been part of mainstream discussion in America for some time now. Indeed, what marked out Alex Garland’s compelling film Civil War was precisely its plausibility. Garland revealed one of the truisms of a civil war, where its experience is never universally shared. A civil war has never meant that every street is a battlefield. The violence is always concentrated. Witnessing the streets ablaze in Belfast at the weekend should remind us of this. That city, which for many impartial observers looked on the precipice of a civil war for a number of decades, was also liveable even as the ethnic divisions required the physical construction of walls. Belfast also shows how the lines of ethnic divisions are never static but take on new forms.

How should we respond to it? Many have dismissed those engaging in the weekend’s violence by emphasising its thuggery and blaming the likes of Tommy Robinson or Nigel Farage. While I sympathise with this instinct — the criminality was parasitic and abhorrent — it shouldn’t come at the expense of understanding that it was also carried out in the name of a certain ethno-nationalistic vision. So, just as we asked “why do they hate us?” in the aftermath of 9/11, so we must now ask “why is there so much hatred in Britain?”.

A staple explanation in studies of global conflicts since the mid-Nineties has been the idea that poverty is the greatest single cause for violence. Indeed, the edict that underdevelopment was dangerous has been advanced by every single international organisation and humanitarian group tasked with mitigating conflict and violence. Certainly, areas of Britain are desperately poor at the moment. And they have been suffering from the fallouts of years of austerity, the impact of Brexit and the costs of the Covid lockdown. That the anger is spilling out from those areas is cause enough for deeper reflection. But we should not fall into the trap of reducing everything to a question of economy.

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One of the best books written on the rise of extremism and how a small minority can change the course of history is Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism, which was published as Hitler was coming to power in 1933. Reich encouraged us to move beyond simplistic explanations for fascism’s rise. Instead, he asked us to question the fascist that exists within each of us. We can all learn to desire power and violence, and seek to belittle, shame and intimidate others. Fascism as such doesn’t solely reside on the Right or the Left of the political spectrum. Any identity or ethnicity can become fascistic, just as any identity or ethnicity can become peaceful and welcoming.

Despite the protestations of radical moral puritans, then, there is nothing inherently fascistic about Englishness, the flag of St George, or any other symbolic accoutrements. It is instead about how they are mobilised and whether they are appropriated in the service of violent means.

History needs heeding. As Reich showed, once fascistic desires are liberated, that is when politics tends to get reduced to questions of survival. We saw this repeatedly played out over the weekend as narratives of survival, from the protection of our children to the preservation of a way of life, resulted in the open assault upon police officers and burning of libraries and advice centres. Such calls to violence thrive in febrile moments when questions of sovereignty are translated into everyday concerns. And more dangerous still, the freeing of that violence creates the very conditions in which rigid positions have to be chosen.

Thankfully, Britain is not an armed society, and its violence is mostly contained. But that shouldn’t mean that can’t change. Across the world, civil wars have been raging in the name of revitalised ethnic divisions, which have only required a single spark to set entire societies and nations ablaze. Britain is contending with these forces, and they could become much worse. It would be foolish to believe that we are too civilised to ever let that happen. The potential for civil war is written into the DNA of all ethnic conflicts — and, like a sleeping demon, once its fires are lit there’s no knowing where it will spread.

It’s a humiliating state of affairs because Russian power has always been built on the foundation of demography. Back in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw that Russia would become a world power, because “Russia is of all the nations of the Old World the one whose population is increasing most rapidly”. The only other country with its population potential was the United States. De Tocqueville prophesised that, “Each one of them seems called by a secret design of Providence to hold in its hands one day the destinies of half the world.” A century later, they were the world’s two uncontested superpowers.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Russia’s population was 136 million, and was still booming, just as those of other European powers started to slow. Germany’s population was 56 million, excluding its colonies, and the threat of ever-larger cohorts of Russian recruits into the Tsar’s ranks haunted Germany’s leadership; historian and public intellectual Friedrich Meinecke fretted over the “almost inexhaustible fertility” of the Slavs while Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg complained that “Russia grows and grows and lies on us like an ever-heavier nightmare”. This pressure was probably the decisive factor in Germany’s 1914 leap in the dark. German Secretary of State Gottlieb von Jagow wrote to the German ambassador in London as the storm was gathering that “in a few years, Russia will be ready … Then she will crush us on land by weight of numbers.”

In the First World War, it turned out, numbers were not enough to compensate for Russian industrial and organisational inferiority. But by the Second World War, Russia’s numeric superiority had exploded. Despite the horrors of Civil War and Bolshevism, the nation’s population grew at about three times the speed of Germany’s in the opening decades of the century. The army had an endless supply of soldiers, the military infrastructure an endless supply of workers, giving the country a decisive edge in the Forties. Vast spaces and appalling weather helped, but ultimately it was the endlessness of Russian manpower which ground down the Wehrmacht in what was perhaps the most epic military struggle of all time. Field Marshall Erich von Manstein complained as he faced Russia’s armies: “We confronted a hydra: for every head cut off, two new ones appeared to grow.”

But if demographic prowess buttressed Russian power then, population decline has undermined it in the years since. Most nations have developed out of the high birth and death rates seen throughout most of human history: as mortality and then fertility falls, first the population expands, then it flattens; eventually, it may contract. But in Russia this process has taken place with a vengeance.

At the time of its dissolution, the Soviet Union was the home of 290 million people, 50 million more than the USA. Today, the Russian Federation has less than half that number — and less than half of the USA’s current total. In large part, this is the result of the loss of non-Russian republics, including Ukraine (which at the outbreak of the current conflict had a population of 43 million). But in the late Soviet and early post-Soviet period, the country also collapsed into an orgy of suicide and alcoholism, particularly affecting the country’s men.

One journalist in Russia at the time wrote about how “the deaths kept piling up. People … were falling or perhaps jumping, off trains and out of windows; asphyxiating in country houses with faulty wood stoves or in apartment with jammed front door locks … drowning as a result of driving drunk into a lake … poisoning themselves with too much alcohol … dropping dead at absurdly early ages from heart attacks and strokes”. By the early years of this century, life expectancy for Russian men was on par with countries such as Madagascar and Sudan.

Meanwhile, Russian women were having fewer and fewer children. In the later decades of the Soviet Union, the average woman in the Slavic heartland had an estimated six or seven abortions in the course of her life. The populations in the Caucasus and Central Asia were booming, though, undermining Russians as the USSR’s majority ethnicity.

This proved especially corrosive in the military. Year after year, the share of recruits from the peripheral republics went up, while the share from Russia went down; in the late Eighties, three-quarters of recruits from Central Asia could not speak Russian. (The problems of having a polyglot military had been rehearsed earlier in the century by the Austro-Hungarian Empire — which had, of course, fallen apart.)

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It’s also worth recognising that the Russian men who fell fighting the Germans in the Forties were from families of six or seven siblings; those who fell fighting the Afghans in the Eighties were from families of two or three. Those falling now, fighting in Ukraine, are likely to be only-children or one of two siblings. The preparedness of a society to sustain military losses falls as family size falls; the only conflicts in today’s world that go on and on for years — from Libya to Syria to Yemen to Congo — are in places where the men who die have many brothers.

Once the Soviet Union was abolished, Russia maintained its population size only by inward migration. Ethnic Russians returned from the now-independent periphery to the Soviet heartland. Increasingly, people of other ethnicities followed them to the North-West, where prospects were better. At least a million and a half Muscovites are ethnically non-Russian, some from places such as Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan, others from Muslim regions of Russia like Tatarstan. In 2013, the mayor of Moscow swore that there would be no more mosques built in the city, hoping to discourage more Islamic migration.

Putin has never publicly expressed concern about the ethnic mix of contemporary Russia, but this demographic nightmare haunts him, and informs his worldview. In 2006, he launched policies to encourage larger families. And last year he lamented: “We have a little more than 81 million people of able-bodied age. We are obliged to increase the number by 2024 and 2030. This is one of the factors for economic growth. Not to mention the geopolitical component of this major issue.” At around 1.5 children per woman, Russia is still dwindling. In the next decade, Russia’s population is forecast to decline by around 300,000 a year, though some suggest the decline will be much faster — perhaps 12 million in the next 15 years.

This steady depopulation is more than a nuisance; it is a strategic headache. Russia’s immense size was supported by the preparedness of its people to settle in some of the most inhospitable habitats in the world. As it reduces, it retreats back towards the big cities of the west and centre, and will leave vast regions uninhabited. “In Siberia it becomes harder and harder to find people to maintain big infrastructure. Things are starting to collapse. And that is making the place less and less liveable which reinforces the problem,” one expert told me. Thousands of villages have been abandoned, particularly in remote areas.

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What is Putin to do? “Ensuring sustainable natural population growth” was at the top of the executive order of National Goals and Strategic Objectives of the Russian Federation signed by the President in 2018. Payments were given to those with two or more children, who are eligible for increasingly generous welfare benefits. Now, payments are given to those with one child. But the best evidence so far suggests that, after a modest bounce-back, fertility is in decline again. At this stage it is not clear that these policies have had any material impact at all.

Of course, one way of growing the population is to annex neighbouring countries and try to persuade its people and the world that they are really Russians. After all, definitions of ethnicity and national identity can be easily manipulated. Turkey, for instance, has tried to redefine Kurds as “mountain Turks”. There were even suggestions in the 18th century that Scots be considered “North Britons”.

But if an incorporation of Ukrainian identity into a wider Russian one was Putin’s plan, it has backfired. The invasion has undoubtedly solidified a sense among Ukrainians that their identity is distinct and that they are in no way Russian. Vitaly Chernetsky, an expert in Slavic languages, commented that, “this crisis galvanized, consolidated, accelerated the development of this new civic identity, where folks who never in their lives spoke Ukrainian all of a sudden made a conscious choice to make an effort to start speaking Ukrainian in public”.

Meanwhile, the war could undermine Putin’s plans to boost the birth rate in Russia’s heartlands. With sanctions starting to bite, the funds for generous payments to parents will simply not be available. On the contrary, the economic hardship which the Russian population must now endure is likely to further depress childbearing.

And to compound the problem, many Russians will look to emigrate. It was said in Soviet days that dissidents were trying to change the unleavable, refuseniks to leave the unchangeable. Putin’s Russia seems unchangeable but, for now, it remains leavable. It is estimated that 200,000 people left the country in the first ten days of the conflict alone; millions more are likely to follow, whatever the outcome — partly to reject the regime, partly to escape the impending, sanctions-driven economic crisis which the country faces.

Meanwhile Russia is losing thousands of young men in the war in Ukraine. Many in their early twenties, they are unlikely to have had any children, which doesn’t bode well for Russia. Already ageing and shrinking, the nation simply cannot sustain the kind of campaign it has fought in the past. Its days of vastly superior manpower are over. A long, grinding war followed by a bloody occupation would cripple it.

Due to the gradual nature of transformation, the pagan lore of Ireland was recorded by monks who saw their work as a way to preserve and continue the legacy of their own native culture. J. R. R. Tolkien famously created the world of the Lord of the Rings so that the Anglo-Saxons could have their own mythos. The Irish have no need of such creative endeavours, since the tales of Cú Chulainn and Fionn mac Cumhaill have wrapped within them the pathos of Túrin Turambar and Achilles. The Lebor Gabála Érenn, “Book of Invasions,” more than matches The Silmarillion.

These are enduring myths that have been preserved in Irish culture — but what if I told you that the legend and myth are rooted in reality? That the Irish oral tales preserved by monks in the 8th century AD are echoes of events from thousands of years in the past? Far afield from folklore and oral history, the new science of ancient DNA is putting concrete flesh and bones upon the veiled prehistory in which Irish myth is rooted.

The story goes back to the last Ice Age when Ireland was mostly covered in ice and, like Britain, uninhabited. As the ice sheets retreated 10,000 years ago, the island began to be recolonised by Mesolithic hunter-gatherers arriving from the continent, venturing into an empty landscape. These people had migrated out of southern Europe, following the fauna and flora north as the continent warmed up, and were related to people then found in Britain, France and Spain.

They looked strikingly different from today’s Europeans. Genetic analysis indicates that their skin was dark, as was their hair — but their eyes were likely blue. The genetic difference between these people and later Europeans is similar to that between modern Europeans and Chinese. This world of hunter-gatherers persisted for thousands of years, as small bands clung to the western edge of Europe, practising a lifestyle with roots in the deepest Palaeolithic, eating a protein-rich diet of horses, bison, aurochs and red deer.

All this ended with the arrival of farming. A generation ago there were roiling debates among archaeologists as to whether agriculture came to northern Europe through cultural diffusion or migration, a debate similar to that which had raged about whether the Anglo-Saxons had conquered Britain in large numbers. Ancient DNA has now definitively answered this question, and we know that the first farmers in Europe descended from Anatolian migrants who swept in from the Near East. They spread across the continent rapidly around five millennia before Christ, mixing only minimally with the native hunter-gatherers, who were thin on the ground and could offer little resistance; although hunter-gatherer peoples had healthier diets and probably lived longer, farming societies could feed vastly more people and so overwhelmed their neighbours.

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These newcomers arrived in Ireland around 4500 BC, many thousands of years after they had established themselves in southern Europe. They brought with them their grains, sheep and cattle, but many of the elements of Irish agricultural life were already in place and had been for over 1,500 years, conditioned by the local ecology and climatic regime. Though the new people mixed with the native hunter-gatherers, their own language and culture came to dominate, while ancient DNA indicates that the hunter-gatherers were very small in number. There were simply many more of the newcomers.

What few Mesolithic hunter-gatherers there were retreated and were absorbed in the advancing human wave of farmers. For many generations the two groups would probably have been easy to distinguish: the newcomers were light-skinned and dark-eyed, while the hunter-gatherers were dark-skinned and light-eyed. Ancient DNA suggests dark-skinned people persisted long after the arrival of farmers in pockets and corners of the island, in more remote and mountainous regions of the country. Who knows if some of the Irish legends of different people and races did not emerge from these contacts?

Curiously, the closest modern people genetically to the Neolithic farmers of Ireland are the Sardinians. But this is not surprising considering that most of the ancestry of the first Irish farmers seems to have derived from the Cardial Culture of Spain (itself the product of a rapid expansion of farmers from the eastern Mediterranean). While the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers were dark-skinned but light-eyed, the farmers likely resembled many modern southern Europeans, with dark hair and eyes, and lighter skin. The contact between two such distinct groups, almost certainly speaking unintelligible languages, physically so different and practising contrasting lifestyles, almost certainly fed into later legends and myths.

The arrival of farmers in Ireland led to a transformation of the material culture. These Neolithic people were responsible for the construction of great stone megaliths, a practice that arose and spread along Europe’s Atlantic shores, seen with Stonehenge in Britain and the Carnac Stones of Brittany. They also built monuments such as the Newgrange passage tomb, one of the most ornate and beautiful pieces of prehistoric stonework in the world. These various stoneworks and tombs that litter the landscape of Ireland have shaped the Irish sense of their past, and loom large in legends of faeries and ancient peoples long lost and faded into the mists of time.

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But the time of the Stone Age farmers ended in due course, and in 2500 BC the first of many waves of migrants swept west onto the island. Called the “Beaker Culture“, they were descendants of people who had left modern Germany, and earlier still had their origins on the Eurasian steppe. Genetically, the Beaker People resemble the modern-day inhabitants of the island and physically, too, these newcomers appeared rather like the fair-skinned and often fair-haired modern Irish. Though many of the traits now associated with the Irish, such as lactose tolerance, were not present in full, the roots of the genetic character of the modern people date to this period.

One hypothesis holds that it was the Beaker People who brought the Celtic languages, establishing the cultural patterns that persisted down to the Iron Age and contact with the Romans. If this is true, then the myths that were recorded by the Irish monks in the 7th and 8th centuries AD may date to the period of contact and conflict between the Neolithic tribes and the Beaker Culture. Could it be that the Tuatha De Danann, a mythologic race of supernatural beings mentioned in Irish legend, and vanquished by the ancestors of the Gaels, were actually the builders of the megaliths?

Recently, a group of Irish scientists has cataloged genetic remains from a host of locations across Neolithic Ireland. They discovered that a high-status man buried at Newgrange 5,000 years ago appeared to have been part of an important prehistoric dynasty, and was also the product of incest. The researchers point out that it is often a feature of highly-stratified Neolithic societies that royal families will practise incest, yet it is intriguing that the early historical Irish had legends of incest at the site of Newgrange, a story that must have survived thousands of years until Christianisation and literacy.

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The local people in fact called the mound the “Hill of Sin”, and there were legends of incestuous activities between a ruler who built monuments and his sister in order to maintain the cycle of the sun. And so the existence of an individual who is quite inbred, and clearly of elite status, buried 3,000 years before these stories were written down is quite extraordinary.

Is it possible that Irish folklore was able to record an essentially truthful story over so many generations? The mythic legends of Ireland date to the time of Christ, over 2,000 years after the arrival of the Beaker Culture, and their likely conflict with the last of the Stone Age farmers who built the monuments they inherited. Preservation of such ancient motifs seems implausible. But note that Indian mythology preserves elements that are resonant with Greek myth, such as the divine twins — this, despite the two cultures being separated by thousands of years since their last common ancestor, suggesting a story that had been maintained for generation upon generation.

Davies, among other historians, highlights the Irish preservation of their mythic cycle as a matter of curiosity, and perhaps an edifying fact. But the detail and fidelity of the Irish in setting down their oral history may actually benefit future generations, as ancient DNA is telling us in exquisite detail the demographic processes by which the Irish people came to be the way they are. The true book of invasions is being written by unraveling DNA, and the existence of an oral record of the deep past may be essential for future scholars in understanding life in the islands before the Romans brought it into the light of history.

Then, abruptly, last weekend Dijon had the great misfortune to become newsworthy. War broke out, we were told, between “Chechen gangs” and “Arab gangs”. The dispute was, some French media reported, about the right to traffic drugs. The Daily Mail announced that the French army had been sent in to restore order. Marine Le Pen compared Dijon to Beirut. Similar “wars between migrant communities” now threatened, she said, all over France.

All these reports were, I believe, wrong or deeply misleading. What did happen in Dijon over four days the other weekend was surreal and disturbing. But the incidents defy simple explanation or political point-scoring. They say, perhaps, more about Chechnya, and the values — good and bad — of exiled Chechens, than they do about the wider racial issues of France. The severity of the violence probably owed something to the frustrations of France’s recent nine weeks of Covid lockdown. The political and media reaction was skewed by the fact that the events occurred while France was in the midst of a debate about race and policing – in the wake of the George Floyd killing in the United States.

On Sunday evening, on the third night of violence in Dijon, President Emmanuel Macron happened to be addressing the nation on TV. He said, among many other things, that he would resist all pressure to splinter France into ethnic communities.

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So what had happened over four days in Dijon? There are several conflicting accounts. Here, briefly, are the facts that I have been able to establish.

On 9th June a 15-year-old (some say 16-year-old) boy of Chechen origin was badly beaten up outside a chicha (hookah) bar in central Dijon. His attackers were local men in their 30s of African and North African origin. According to the Chechen version of events, the men were drug-dealers. The injured boy apparently had no connection with drugs. The dealers attacked him because local Chechens were known to be hostile to drug-trafficking. They put a gun in the boy’s mouth and said: “We hate Chechens. We’re going to let you live so you can tell the other Chechens what’s going to happen to them.”

Three days later a convoy of cars arrived in Dijon packed with Chechen men from several other parts of France, as well as Belgium and Germany. Local media and police say that there were 100 of them; the Chechens say that there were only 15. They smashed up the chicha bar, assaulted its owner and then rampaged through the multi-racial Les Grésilles area of council estates just north-east of central Dijon.

The next day — last Saturday, 13 June —  members of local drug gangs threatened and attacked local Chechens. A new convoy of cars and 50 to 100 Chechen men returned that evening, apparently hoping to agree, or force, a deal with the people in Les Grésilles and learn the names of the drug dealers.

A quarrel broke out. Shots were fired — by members of a local drug dealing gang, according to the Chechens. A pizzeria owner was wounded but not seriously. The next day about 100 Chechen men gathered once again in Les Grésilles. Local media, backed by video footage, reported that the invaders smashed windows and assaulted passers-by. A local man tried to ram them in a car. He crashed and overturned the car and was beaten up by the Chechens.

Local people complained that the police stood back and made no attempt to intervene. No arrests were made.

Finally, last Monday night, the Chechens stayed away. But 200 or so young men from Les Grésilles — of various ethnic origins, African and North African and European, judging by the footage — rampaged through their own streets and invaded other council estates nearby. They waved guns and knives, overturned and burned cars, and smashed windows and bus-shelters. Four arrests were made.

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This orgy of revenge violence is explained by local people and police in various ways. Anger with police for failing to prevent the Chechen attacks; a statement of strength by the local drugs gangs; frustration because the Chechens had failed to turn up for a fourth night of mayhem.

Police and gendarmerie reinforcements were deployed, belatedly, on Sunday and Monday; the French army was not. Gendarmes are part of the French military, but they are policemen not soldiers. The Daily Mail may or may not be aware of that fact.

Whatever Ms Le Pen may say, these events were not a war between different ethnic communities — still less a ‘war between Chechens and Arabs’ as the British tabloids reported. There is practically no Chechen community in Dijon — 100 people at most. In the whole of France, there are perhaps 30,000 Chechens, concentrated in Paris, Alsace and the Nice areas. All are refugees from their homeland’s conflict with Moscow. Most are legally resident in France. Some are not.

Nor does this story have anything to do with turf battles over drug trafficking rights. All Chechens that I spoke to insist that they have a common hatred of drugs and therefore often come into conflict with drugs gangs in France.

They insist that the battle of Dijon was about Chechen concepts of honour, pride and self-defence — a reflex forged in the civil wars fought by the majority muslim country against Vladimir Putin’s Russian Federation from the 1990s. Whenever Chechens are attacked, a section of the Chechen diaspora in western Europe feels the need to take the law into its own hands. There have been similar, but smaller, events in recent months in Troyes, Rouen and Nice.

“Chechens defied Russia. They’re not going to let themselves be humiliated by a few thugs,” said Chamil Albakov, spokesman for the European Chechen Assembly. He rejected suggestions that there was systematic racial tension in France between Chechens and other migrant or refugee communities and especially fellow muslims of North African origin. The Chechen quarrel was with drug-traffickers and other criminals, he said. “Otherwise, we live together and in the mosques we pray together.”

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A police intelligence report leaked to Le Parisien paints a more complex and darker picture. A section of the Chechen community in France — by no means all — is involved in organised crime, though not drug dealing. Others have taken over many of the jobs in the overnight security and club bouncer business, some legitimate and some more dubious and violent.The Chechen convoy which descended on Dijon was, French police believe, composed of a mixture of night security guards, club bouncers and criminals.

Heda Inderbaeva, 29, who came to France as a refugee from Chechenya at the age of 11, is an unofficial spokeswoman for the 30,000 or so Chechens in France. “Direct action like this is wrong,” she told UnHerd. “We live now in a country of laws. There are other ways to react. But this was born of frustration that many Chechens feel about the low level of police action against drug-trafficking in the poorer districts of French cities and suburbs — a sense that the police are not protecting us so we have to do it ourselves. The frustration perhaps built up during the Covid lockdown when many people felt abandoned by the police.”

Some politicians, including Christian Estrosi, the mayor of Nice, suggest that the real motive behind the violence was a conflict over drug territory. Ms Inderbaeva rejects that argument out of hand. “Yes there are some Chechen criminals but they traffic in cars or maybe arms,” she said. “Never drugs, never women, never children. Chechens have a horror of that kind of thing.”

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The picture of France that emerges from the Dijon story is not flattering or positive. But it is not — whatever Ms Le Pen may glibly say — a picture of a country that is about to erupt into generalised, Lebanese-type intra-community warfare. Still less is it the Chechen vs. Arab war that British tabloids suggested.

Anyone who has spent some time in the troubled estates of the French banlieues (inner suburbs) knows that they are social ghettoes but not, in any strict sense, racial ghettoes. Any cité (tower block estate) might house a score of ethnicities from Algerian to Albanian. Fighting between gangs of kids, or the composition of football teams, is based on territory, not racial background. The footage from Dijon showed black, brown and some white youths rampaging together in anti-Chechen fury.

The Chechens, with a different history and different reason for being in France, are an exception. They are bound by their own codes of honour and self-defence. For a variety of reasons, partly their own cultural attitudes, maybe sometimes their racist attitudes, they have had more difficulty in integrating. Some have plunged enthusiastically into crime. Other law-abiding Chechens, and sometimes the criminals themselves, find it hard to accept the unacceptable state of endemic insecurity and crime in French inner suburbs.

That may be the real story of the battle of Dijon. A series of vigilante raids, disturbing in themselves, was transmuted by some media and political commentary into a war over drug empires or a harbinger of ethnic conflict. The everyday, drug-related violence in the inner suburbs of many French towns and cities — even peaceful Dijon — goes virtually unreported.

Small-c conservative working-class voters have migrated to the Conservative Party because of immigration and Brexit. On the other side, successful educated cosmopolitans opt for Labour or the Lib Dems.

As a number of academics, including me, have pointed out, apart from attitudes to the EU, nothing predicts whether someone voted Leave better than their views on immigration. This shows up clearly in UnHerd’s data.

For instance, as figure 1 reveals, 55% of the variation in immigration attitudes across constituencies can be explained by Brexit vote share, a powerful association. The relationship is especially strong toward the top left, with the strongest Remain seats far more pro-immigration than elsewhere.

Figure 1

Sources: UnHerd Britain / Brexit data from: “Areal interpolation and the UK’s referendum on EU membership”, Chris Hanretty, Journal Of Elections, Public Opinion And Parties, Online Early Access, https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17457289.2017.1287081

This rising cultural cleavage made a powerful impact in the 2017 election despite the fact Corbyn’s far-Left image gave prosperous voters a strong incentive to vote against him. But what makes Hackney different from Boston on immigration attitudes? At the constituency level, this is about demographics, of which the key ones are, in order of importance: the proportion with degrees, the level of ethnic diversity and average age. The share with a degree varies from under 5% in Clacton to over 50% in Battersea. Immigration attitudes largely track this measure, as figure 1 shows. The reason higher education is so important is not because it boosts earnings, but because it is a measure of psychological openness and a liberal worldview, both of which incline curious minds toward the pursuit of higher education.

Figure 2

Sources: UnHerd Britain / Norris, ‘British General Election Constituency Results’

When it comes to explaining Brexit, Trump or any other western national populist vote, it’s breathtaking how resilient the narrative of the ‘left behind’ is. This suggests that those who feel they have lost out during the economic modernisation of the British economy are striking back at the elites. Yet, as I mentioned after the Brexit vote, economic factors do not tell us much about who voted Leave or Remain. As figure 3 clearly shows, unemployment level — as with other purely material factors — can’t explain immigration attitudes. The flat regression line and wide spread of constituencies around it tells us there just isn’t a story here.

Figure 3

Sources: UnHerd Britain / Norris, ‘British General Election Constituency Results’

Beyond education, what social indicators underpin immigration attitudes? An important — but not dominant — factor is ethnicity. Many are fond of pointing out that places with few immigrants seem to be the ones most concerned about immigration. Yet this statement completely sidesteps the fact that a high-immigrant area will have lots of immigrants in it! Since immigrants and those who are from minority communities tend, all else being equal, to be more pro-immigration than White Britons, highly diverse constituencies are also more open to immigration, something evident in figure 4.

Even so, there is considerable variation around the trend line. Constituencies with a more educated population tend to lie above the line, and those with fewer degrees below it. In addition, there is an important current of immigration restrictionism among ethnic minorities, especially those who are UK-born. This is more pronounced in constituencies with a higher Sikh and Hindu component to their minority population since these groups are more restrictionist than other minorities, and less so in places with a higher Afro-Caribbean share, as they are relatively liberal on immigration compared to other non-White British groups.

Figure 4

Sources: UnHerd Britain / Norris, ‘British General Election Constituency Results’. NB: excludes constituencies with less than 20% non-White British share (a majority of seats)

The share of the population aged 20-24 is also an important correlate of immigration attitudes, with younger constituencies more ‘open’ and older ones more ‘closed’ in immigration outlook. Yet this matters considerably less than education or ethnicity. The share of passport holders, however, is an indicator, even when we account for its relationship with education, age and ethnicity. Figure 5 shows the importance of this association.

Figure 5

Sources: UnHerd Britain / Norris, ‘British General Election Constituency Results’

Education, ethnicity, share without a passport and age account for nearly 80% of the variation in immigration opinion across constituencies. This means almost all of the differences in immigration attitudes over place have to do with these demographics. But is there any role here for the properties of place — whether local tradition, regional economy or cultural atmosphere?

The answer is a qualified yes. Even with controls for education, ethnicity, age and share without a passport, London emerges as somewhat more open, and the East of England and South East somewhat less so. We should bear in mind, however, that regional differences are small. Apart from London (at 46% agreement), the share agreeing with open immigration fluctuates in a tight band from 32% in Wales to 36% in Scotland. When you account for education, ethnicity and age composition, London remains only 3 points more pro-immigration than the supposedly restrictionist East of England. Moreover, some of this may be due to social indicators we haven’t included in the model, so the geographic effect may be weaker still.

Geography is important, but it’s also vital to appreciate its limits, which too many pundits fail to do after perusing an election map. A map of SNP vote by British region would suggest that living in Scotland explains 100% of the variation in SNP voting among people. It doesn’t. Mapping state income and the Democratic vote in America would show that richer states back the Democrats. Yet richer individuals aren’t more likely to vote Democratic than poorer people. In other words, you can’t simply read individual-level relationships off aggregate correlations. More than that, most of the variation (90% or more) in attitudes lies within constituencies, not between them.

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Consider university education, the most important cross-constituency predictor of immigration attitudes in Britain. When we drill into the survey data on individuals (as distinct from constituencies) — using the British Election Study — we find that education is much less important. That is, once we take psychological factors such as the death penalty into account, having a degree makes only a modest difference to immigration attitudes.

Figure 6, based on a sample of around 20,000 individuals, shows that a person’s views on the death penalty matters vastly more than whether they have a degree in predicting whether they want less immigration. Almost 9 in 10 strong death penalty supporters back restriction against barely 3 in 10 strong opponents of capital punishment.

Next to this 60-point chasm, the roughly 5-point gap between those with and without degrees pales into insignificance. While graduates are less likely (41%) than non-grads (62%) to back the death penalty, this is beside the point. The massive difference between pro- and anti-death penalty supporters holds as strongly within the population of university graduates as it does among non-graduates.

Figure 6

Source: British Election Study Internet Panel Study wave 9, 2016

As I argue in my book Whiteshift, immigration attitudes are the fulcrum around which the politics of western societies are realigning. This is because those whose psychological make-up inclines them to see difference as disorder and change as loss are voting for parties that promise to slow immigration. This isn’t generally about competition for jobs or services, which is a safer narrative to voice, but instead mainly about majority-ethnic and what I term ‘ethno-traditional’ national identities. Conservative voters feel that these are being unsettled by the rapid ethnic shifts sweeping across western countries.

The Brexit vote was primarily driven by the immigration question, though the focus on the economic risks of Brexit is presently overshadowing the subterranean force of this issue. Should Johnson ink a deal while failing to reduce migration levels, we should expect this debate to return — intruding as sharply into British politics as it did in the runup to 23 June, 2016.

Some years ago I opined that London was not really an English city any more

Since then, virtually all my friends from abroad have confirmed my observation

So there must be some truth in it…

I note also that London was the UK city that voted most strongly to remain in the EU

— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) May 29, 2019

Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London, amid the furore, tweeted his own view: “Londoners know that our diversity is our greatest strength. We are proudly the English capital, a European city and a global hub.”

So how English is London? Well that depends very much on what is meant by  ‘English’. A significant problem with the word is that its ethnic and national meanings are often confused or blurred.

Ethnic groups, for instance, are large-scale communities which consider themselves to be descended from common ancestors, are attached to a particular ‘homeland’ and are distinguished from other ethnic groups by cultural markers such as religion, language or appearance. Nations, on the other hand, are territorial-historical communities with a degree of political aspiration. They are different things, though the same word is used to describe them.

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‘English’ is both an ethnic and national designation. The English, for example, are the largest ethnic group in most of the more populated parts of English-speaking Canada, in the American state of Utah and in northern New England (see light purple shades on the linked map). They are also an overwhelming majority – around 70% – of the population of England. In London, however, they make up no more than 45% of the total.

Cleese, then, was right – if he was talking about ethnicity.

Equally, those of English national identity are also a majority in England, but not in London. Of England’s residents, 60% said they were ‘English Only’ in the 2011 census. In London, this was only 37%. This is because more than any other groups, ethnically English people also claim their national identity to be ‘English’.

And while ethnically English people tend to claim Englishness as a nationality, minorities lean towards a British identity.

Even though, according to the ONS Longitudinal Study (ONS LS), minorities under 30 are increasingly identifying as ‘English’, it is still accurate to claim that London is not an English-majority city in either ethnic or national terms.

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But was it ever thus?

No. In fact, over the course of Cleese’s lifetime, there has been considerable change in London’s ethnic and national composition. While it’s true that London has always received immigration, this has typically been on a small scale. Jewish immigration, for example, was only about 5,000-10,000 per year at its height in the late 19th century.

And while no ethnicity question on White Britishness was asked until 2001, we can use the ONS LS to track 2001 and 2011 London residents back to the 1971 census. This method finds that London was around 86% White British in 1971: an ethnically-English city with a modest minority. By 2011, the ethnic English were in the minority. These dates track the period from Monty Python’s debut to Cleese’s retirement. Living through that transformation no doubt influences his perspective.

Source: ONS LS 1971-2011

So, in these strict terms, it seems Cleese is on pretty solid ground in making his claim that London “isn’t an English city any more”. It is only English in the sense that it is located in England. But if we were to follow that to its conclusion, then all accents heard in London must be English ones, which would be an absurd thing to say.

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Can we, therefore, dismiss Cleese’s critics as overreacting? Well, not necessarily.

There is nuance to this story. There is a sense in which London is still English: the majority of its population is native-born. The UK-born (nearly all English-born) formed nearly 80% of the city into the 1980s, and while this had dipped to 60% by 2011, natives remain a majority.

Source: Hechter, M. (1976). UK County Data 1851-1966 (UKDA ref#430); Census of England and Wales 1971-2011.

Is being born in England enough to qualify as being English? Yes, say 85% of those asked in the BBC-YouGov 2018 Englishness survey. On this logic, London is still an English city, but if it passes the 50% foreign-born mark – like Miami, Dubai or (almost) Toronto – then it would cease to be so.

But even though London may still be (marginally) English by birth, if its inhabitants think of their ethnicity and nationhood in non-English terms, then Cleese’s point stands.

But what if there are people – notably ethnic minorities or white liberals who claim to be British rather than English – who have an English national identity but who don’t explicitly acknowledge it? As Daniel Kahneman writes, people “aren’t rational, they rationalise”. Their subconscious impulses drive them, but the deliberative part of their brain constructs a story about why they behave as they do – which often bears little relationship to the underlying motivations.

If this is the case, then a good test of what nationality ‘British not English’ Londoners hold deep down would be to see if they back the English football team, or feel defensive about the anti-English barbs levelled by relatives in Wales or Scotland, or care when they hear that Scotland gets more out of the Treasury than England. If they do, they quite possibly do have an English national identity. Though because they imagine a white, traditional Englishness, rather than the more modern version, they consciously reject it. On this measure there are only a few Londoners who aren’t English – unconsciously or otherwise.

It’s possible these Londoners also have English symbolic attachments. When people, regardless of whether they identify as English or not, were asked in the same Englishness survey how strongly England’s ‘diverse cultural life’ contributes to ‘your English identity’, for instance, 75% of non-white Londoners replied ‘very’ or ‘fairly’ strongly. This is also true for 73% of White British Remain-voting Londoners, though only 45% of Leave-voting White British Londoners concur.

When it comes to the English landscape, things veer the other way: this is important for 85% of White British Leavers in London, 73% of White British Remainers but just 54% of non-white Londoners. There is nearly as great a divide on the importance of English ‘history and heritage,’ with almost 90% of White British Leavers in London saying this is important for their English identity against 77% of White British Remainers and 63% for minority Londoners.

But while minorities are not quite as keen on landscape and history, a majority still consider these to be an important part of English identity. And on English sport, Christian traditions, poetry and dance, there are only small differences between white Londoners and non-white Londoners. If these people really didn’t identify as English, would they still reply that these symbols were important to ‘their English identity’? It seems that when you probe a little, many who claim not to be English are significantly attached to its key symbols.

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So where does this leave Cleese? For conservative whites, such as Cleese, English ethnicity blurs into their concept of nationhood. Being ethnically English makes it more likely that they will identify their nationhood as English which, in turn, shapes the symbols (landscape, history) that make up the image of England in their head. Ethnicity is the lens through which they view the nation; it seems inseparable from their national attachment.

When confronted by an ethnic minority person, therefore, who possesses English characteristics (attitudes to sport and Scotland, say) Cleese’s reflex may be to consider such a person not ‘truly’ English. Not because he wishes to exclude minorities from the nation, but because he has no vocabulary for distinguishing his ethnic identity from his national one.

I’m not convinced Cleese has a sinister desire to exclude minorities from national membership. I can’t know for sure, but, as an expat living in the Caribbean, he may simply wish to express his diaspora English ethnicity, as well as his attachment to an England in which his group forms a majority, but not the entirety of a nation in which minorities are equal members.

In my book Whiteshift, I call this ‘ethno-traditional’ nationalism, as distinct from exclusivist ethnic nationalism, which seeks to limit national membership to members of the ethnic majority while repatriating, or discriminating against, minorities.

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Meanwhile, as John Denham argues, Englishness is becoming more inclusive. Ideally, English national identity would be what I call multivocalist, a kind of Englishness-as-menu which would permit some to attach to England through the nation’s landscape, ancestry and history, while others can relate to its ‘diverse cultural life’, sports, vibrant economy or popular music.

So Cleese should allow that the ethnic English no longer have a monopoly on English nationhood; native-born minorities are just as English, but imagine their nation differently. Equally, Sadiq should allow that Cleese has a right to identify with his English ethnicity, and to cherish his own conception of London – and England – as opposed to the cosmopolitan one promoted by the mayor’s office.

London has become less English since Monty Python premiered, and is no longer ethnically English. But a majority of its residents are English-born and most identify with some version of English national identity. So is London still an English city? Well that, of course, depends what you mean by English.

The other day he was abused from the stands by a Chelsea fan during Man City’s defeat at Stamford Bridge. It appears to have been racial abuse, although one of the fans in question denies that.

It was a sordid affair. Sterling, though, rose above it with aplomb, and later, on Instagram, issued a thoughtful critique of how the media treats black and white footballers. Understandably, it’s led to some soul-searching in the media (though not enough, in some quarters). And it’s raised the question, once again, of whether Britain is getting more racist.

I wanted to look at that question in a bit more depth and ask how we measure a society’s levels of racial prejudice, and what you find when you do measure it. Are we getting more racist? Since the 2016 referendum, a lot of people have wondered whether racists have become more emboldened: is that true?

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The question is, it turns out, not easy to answer. It’s really hard to measure racism, or any form of socially unacceptable prejudice, because people don’t tend to admit to it. For a while people thought that the Implicit Associations Test, which (in one version) measures how quickly you associate ‘good’ and ‘bad’ words with black and white faces, was a sort of window into our souls; it led to all sorts of claims (including by Hillary Clinton) about how unconscious bias is everywhere. But it turned out not to really work. People who score highly on the IAT do not seem to behave in more racist ways than people who don’t. It’s not much use as a predictor of behaviour.

There are other ways, though. The most obvious is, simply, to ask them. But where it gets really interesting is what you ask them.

If you ask people: “Are you prejudiced against people of other races?”, or something along those lines, you get a response of about 25 to 30% saying: yes, yes I am, thanks for asking. That makes headlines most years because the National Centre for Social Research, NatCen, asks a similar question in its annual survey. And every year, the response is about the same. It has never dropped below a quarter in the 30 years they’ve been doing it. So, certainly it looks like Britain isn’t getting any less racist, right?

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But, it’s a bit more complicated than that. “Are you prejudiced” is a very abstract question; there’s no objective standard to compare yourself to. If you ask something more concrete, like “would you mind if your child married someone of a different ethnic background?”, you get a picture of dramatic decline. In 1983, according to NatCen’s British Social Attitudes survey, around 50 to 60% of Britons said that they would mind; by 2013, that had dropped to a little above 20%.

That’s not to say that things are perfect – one in five people is still quite a lot – but it’s definitely an improvement. There hasn’t, as far as I can tell, been a significant survey since 2013 asking that question, but Rob Ford, a political scientist at Manchester who studies these things, told me that (for reasons we’ll come back to) it’s reasonable to assume that the trend has continued.

Also, if you break that data down by age, you find that people born before 1940 are far more likely to be against interracial marriage than people born in the 80s and 90s. You can find similar stories when you ask people if they’re comfortable with a black or Asian boss, or (in the US) if they’d be happy voting for a black president.

The problem with all of this is that there is a thing called the “social desirability bias”. That is, people tend to answer surveys – even anonymous ones – in ways that would make them look good. Being racist doesn’t make you look good, on the whole, so people are likely to understate the extent to which they’re uncomfortable with, say, interracial marriage. The downward trend may be real, but it may underestimate the true level.

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There are other ways to look at prejudice. One is experimental: you treat the issue like any scientific question, and set up a randomised control trial. You test some hypothesis and change a single variable.

For instance, you could send out loads of job application forms, but change only whether the names on the forms are stereotypically black or white; or you get black and white flat-hunters to go and visit potential landlords, and see whether white ones are more likely to be accepted.

When you do that, you tend to find that there is prejudice: black people are less likely to get callbacks for jobs, for instance. But these experiments are time-consuming and expensive – especially until recently; online applications and things have made them somewhat easier now – so there haven’t been all that many of them, and it’s hard to use them to establish a trend. According to Ford, the evidence “cautiously” points to a decline, but that it’s hard to be sure.

Another way is to examine how we actually behave. For instance, regardless of whether you or not you say that you’re OK with mixed-ethnicity marriage, if you actually marry someone of another race, that’s a pretty robust indicator that you’re broadly OK with people of that race. If you beat someone up in a racially motivated attack, that’s pretty good evidence that you’re not.

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If you look at mixed-ethnicity marriages, they’ve been going up for years. Nearly one couple in 10 was of mixed ethnicity in the 2011 census, up from about one in 14 in 2001. And you can see it in the ethnic makeup of the population. About 1.2% of the population self-identified as mixed heritage in 2001; that had almost doubled, to 2.2%, by 2011. Research for the BBC suggests that that is a massive undercount and that the figure might be double that again.

With things like racially motivated assault, or racial abuse, it’s not so clear whether it’s gone up or down. There has been a clear increase in the statistics – a near doubling of reported assaults in England and Wales since 2012/13 – but it’s very hard to be sure whether that’s real or not. As racial issues become more salient, the police get better at recording them and people become more likely to ascribe racial motives to an attack; and as members of ethnic minority communities come to trust the police more, they may become more willing to report. The police themselves say that they think there was a real rise, not simply a statistical artefact, around the 2016 referendum, though.

Where does this leave us? In a complex situation. There obviously are a lot of racist people out there. And a lot of the statistics are hard to make sense of, because they’re messy. But where the stats are able to show a trend, they show a declining one: Britain is less racist now than it was 10 years ago, and that was less racist than 10 years before that.

What’s more, there is a good theoretical basis to believe that we’re less racist. One of the more robust findings in social psychology is that exposure to outgroups promotes more positive views of those outgroups. Each generation of white Britons since the Second World War has had more exposure to ethnic minorities than the one before, at the shops, at school, in work.

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And there’s more indirect contact, as well. Our football teams and newsreaders and actors and lawyers and doctors are more diverse. Given all this, you would expect to find that Britain is getting less racist, and in fact when you ask people whether race is important to nationality, you get “a really steep generational gradient”, according to Ford. Young people are much less likely to think that “there ain’t no black in the Union Jack”.

An important caveat: this is all about the average person. It doesn’t rule out the possibility that, while Britain as a whole is getting more inclusive, a minority has become more vocal and aggressive, emboldened by internet subcultures, Brexit, Trump, Breitbart or whatever. And that could mean that the experience of people of colour is not getting better: it only takes a small number of loud people to make a lot of noise.

And if people are yelling abuse at you in the street, or following you home at night, then it’s probably not a lot of comfort to you to learn that on average, people are more in favour of mixed-ethnicity relationships than they were 10 years ago.
Still, it’s probably fair to say that our society has improved on this issue. And to return to football for a moment, you can see this, even though the Sterling case has brought it back to our minds.

In Nick Hornby’s memoir of football fandom, Fever Pitch, published in 1992 and leading up to Arsenal’s dramatic league win in the 1988/89 season, he writes about how racism was common on the stands then. Less so, for Arsenal, as a London team with a large multiethnic following, but lots from away fans, and still sometimes from his fellow Gooners. An opposing black player misses a chance or something, he wrote, and “some neanderthal rises to his feet, points at Ince, or Wallace, or Barnes, or Walker, and you hold your breath … and he calls him a cunt, or a wanker, or something else obscene, and you are filled with an absurd sense of metropolitan sophisticate pride, because the adjectival epithet is missing … It’s not much to be grateful for, really, the fact that a man calls another man a cunt but not a black cunt.”

That wasn’t all that long ago. Compare that to now: the men who allegedly racially abused Sterling will never see the inside of a Premier League stadium again. It’s far from perfect. But it’s definitely an improvement.