What does it mean to be English?

One of the most deeply held taboos in contemporary Britain is that one should never question the national status of minorities. Most white British people are instinctively wary even of bringing the subject of people’s heritage up — for risk of causing offence or seeming racist.  

This taboo was shattered in spectacular fashion last week, in the unlikely setting of an interview with the former Spectator editor, Fraser Nelson. The presenter Konstantin Kisin — himself a first generation immigrant to Britain of Russian Jewish origin — questioned whether Rishi Sunak was truly English, given his Indian ancestry. It seemed that Kisin had assumed implicitly that being English was an ancestral thing, and that it was the “British” element of national identity that was open to immigrants and their descendants. 

The subsequent discussion, and the broader debate that followed, demonstrated the degree of alarm on the soft right at the idea that there might be an ethnic dimension to Englishness, which is in stark contrast to their civic conception of national identity. 

This gives rise to the question; if there is no such thing as an English ethnicity, then what ethnicity are white English people who hold no plausible claim to any alternative heritage?  The official answer is that we are “White British”, which is the box that we are supposed to tick on the census, or when we register at a GP’s surgery, or apply for a job, or any of the many other occasions when the state mandates we disclose our heritage, along with our sexual preferences and chosen gender. However, this seems to be closer to a racial rather than an ethnic descriptor, and while the concepts are related, conflating the two is a category error. As ever, our confusion here is partially the result of our cultural proximity to America, and our tendency to think about our Old World society through a New World framework. 

Ethnicity is a broader and more ambiguous concept than race, and there are debates within academia between different approaches and interpretations of what it actually means.  These essentially boil down to the extent to which ethnicities are perennial, ontological realties as opposed to constructions of political convenience. In any case, ethnicity typically ties in shared attributes such as language and common culture, to ancestry. It is necessarily an exclusive concept, the question being the parameters by which a group of people chose to define themselves against others. This is not always based on common ancestry, or even language.  

In the Balkans, for example, Serbs, Croats and Bosniak Muslims share common descent from the same Slavic invader-settlers in the early Medieval period. Despite retaining an almost identical language and very similar traditional customs, bitterly contested ethnic divisions have emerged as a result of mutually antagonistic religious traditions. If anything, these seem to have been made all the more vehement by their shared ancestral heritage.  Particularly, the forced conversion of Slavic Orthodox Christians to Islam under the Ottoman Empire led to an enduring and implacable loathing toward the descendants of those who converted, on the part of the descendants of those who didn’t.  

These terms of definition come down to the circumstances that led to ethnogenesis; the historical moment at which a group of people begin to identify as a single cohesive body.  Often this is a response to traumatic and violent processes such as invasion, religious schism or even captivity as slaves. For the English people, it happened in the 8th and 9th centuries as the weakened leaders of the Heptarchy kingdoms were forced to unite, in order to prevent their complete domination by the encroaching Danes. 

The peoples of what would become England were united by their language, which was based on those of the Germanic settlers who had arrived in the preceding centuries and who made up the ruling families of the proto-English Kingdoms, and by their Christianity. It was not yet based on a shared ancestry, being made up of a mixture of Anglo-Saxons (who were not a majority, especially in the Wessex and Mercian heartlands of the new English nation), and the Romano-British populations who had inhabited those lands prior to the Germanic invasions and settlement. Furthermore, they were bound together by what they were not, which was Danish and pagan. 

Critically, it was the land that would be named after the people, taking its root from the name of the Angels; a tribe who made up one component of the Germanic settlement. This would be applied to lands that had previously been ruled by at least seven distinct polities, but which did not cover the entirety of the island of Great Britain. Over the centuries, Danish, Norman and Scottish dynasties would assume the throne, but would henceforth always govern as kings or queens of England. The character of the ruling elite would be altered, but in each case they would in time be assimilated into the culture and language of the people, rather than the other way round. 

English society in the late medieval period was unique in two critical ways. Firstly, inter-generational households became rarer, and extended family structures became much weaker, far earlier in England than anywhere else in Europe. Secondly, people moved around the country and resettled, often on an individual basis, to a vastly greater degree than almost anywhere else in Europe.   

These two factors gave English people, and particularly English women, substantially more choice over whom they married; both in terms of the variety of the potential partners available, and in terms of individual agency over which of them they picked. More so than in any comparable society at the time. People could make this choice based on individual qualities and attributes that were suited to the lives they would lead and the world around them, and this freedom endured over many generations.  By the dawning of the modern era, this meant that the English became a people far more of their own conscious making than probably any other human society that has ever existed.  

These conditions were not replicated in other parts of the British Isles, or in the Low Countries, until significantly later. The Scottish, Welsh and Irish peoples remained distinct, and retained a far less individualistic social structure until much later. The reformation of the church, and the gradual unification of the British Isles into a single political entity, steadily fractured the singular nature of the common English identity. At all levels of society, there was a movement of people into England from the peripheries, and English people settled in Wales and in depopulated areas of the Scottish borders. The elite classes of each of the home nations merged into what was effectively a single ruling caste, and in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there emerged what could reasonably be described as a British nation. 

Over the centuries, new arrivals from the continent had trickled into England, particularly following the turbulence of the reformation. French protestants and incomers from the Low Countries arrived and joined the English church. While their economic legacy was significant, they were generally assimilated through marriage into the English mainstream over the space of a few generations. From the mid 17th century, Jews were readmitted into England; though their numbers were relatively few, their homogamic tradition meant that they remained a distinct population, despite their economic and cultural assimilation. 

By the time that significant numbers of visible minorities began arriving in England after the Second World War, English people already had a deep cultural familiarity with the United States, and from it the concept of a substantial non-white minority in a white majority society.  There was a degree of pride, certainly among the middle classes, at the supposedly more enlightened British approach to race relations which had been exposed by the presence of racially segregated American GIs in Britain during the war.  The Civil Rights movement was followed closely in Britain, and various movements in the UK, most notably that of the Ulster nationalists, self-consciously adopted its language and symbolism. 

The result of this was that the British approach to race; both those of the public and of the authorities, tended to mirror that of the United States. This is partially why the concept of ethnicity has always tended to be forgotten, as there has never been a moment of ethnogenesis for white Americans, or indeed for any white settler population in the New World. As a consequence, American statistics and discourse focus on race, not ethnicity, and we have followed suit. The Northern Ireland conflict, for example, was never discussed in ethnic terms, despite being a clear example of an ethnic dispute over territory. The two communities were always discussed by reference to their religion, or to their being “nationalist” or “unionist”. 

During the 1960s and 1970s as non-white populations first settled across England in significant numbers, most people in England still identified primarily as “British”. This was an era in which the Union Jack still predominated over the St George’s Cross among England football supporters on the terraces. Furthermore, most immigrant communities, particularly those from the Caribbean, felt at least some claim to British identity from growing up in what had been British colonies. During the imperial period, Britain had necessarily become a nation that opened itself up as something to which people around the world, regardless of ethnicity, could feel some loyalty to. And so it was “British” that the new arrivals would aspire to become, and which would form the core identity of the self-consciously multicultural United Kingdom. 

On the centre and the left, there was an attempt to cast the English identity as being less inclusive than British identity, which they said was based on values, and to which anyone could sign up. This began in the 1990s, as a new conception of Britishness emerged around a fusion of pop culture and twee traditionalism, and the Union Jack was “reclaimed” from the National Front. After the emergence of the Islamist terror threat in the 2000s, it became part of a stripped-down, state-mandated British identity shorn of any cultural or ethnic component. “British Values”, so the Home Office hoped, would keep the UK’s varied communities on the straight and narrow; teenagers who failed to live up to them, regardless of their race, could be hauled in under the Prevent programme, and taught the importance of tolerance and decency.

By the time of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, progressive Unionists were more or less explicitly stating that dismantling the UK would rob non-white immigrants and their descendants of their chosen form of identity; such people could not meaningfully identify as English. However, the framing here was always that those people themselves felt uncomfortable with the English label, and not that they were formally locked out of it by ethnicity. The idea that people who think of themselves as English might imagine that it does include an ethnic dimension is no less alarming to progressives than it is to the Fraser Nelsons of this world. When pressed, such people say that being English is a cultural identity and a nationality, in the same way as being British is.  

For Nelson therefore, and others who agree with him, that Rishi Sunak is English in all possible senses of the word is so self-evident that the question itself is preposterous. But they struggle to anchor this to any particular fact about him. Certainly, he was born in England, but as we know this fact alone does not convey British nationality, let alone the far more ambiguous concept of “being English”. He is an MP for an English constituency, but so are the Independent Alliance MPs Ayoub Khan and Shockat Adam — though these gentlemen may be British citizens, I challenge anybody to claim with a straight face that they are English. Sunak speaks with a perfect English accent, yet so does Kemi Badenoch who has described herself as a Yoruba, and Muslims from northern Nigeria as “ethnic enemies”.  

Yet for all that, Sunak does just seem genuinely English. But it’s very difficult for Nelson or others to define why. Clearly, there has been a more profound degree of cultural assimilation in Sunak’s case than in some of those mentioned above; but assimilation into what, exactly?

… a renewed awareness of ethnic identity among the English people will mark an exciting new milestone on the road to true multiculturalism

What we seem to be struggling with here is not a political or racial question, but one of language, in which the definition of a word has been broadened in the name of good taste, to the point that it has lost its descriptive power. Historically, we didn’t need a term to describe people who were ethnically English, because there wasn’t a substantial number of people who were culturally English in the way that Rishi Sunak is, but of a different ethnicity. The term “English” did the job on its own.  But now we are becoming a genuinely mutli-ethnic society, people are going to reach for a term that conveys that. 

It is likely to be contemporary immigrants themselves, and their children, who are likely to be the first to break ranks on this. It’s no surprise at all that somebody of Konstantin Kisin’s background felt more comfortable raising this question than a native-born journalist. And what they are most likely to do is simply to continue to use the word “English” in an ethnic sense. This is what people from outside the UK generally mean when they talk about English people.  

The term “White British” isn’t going to cover it, as that is going to include the British-born children of white immigrants. And the term won’t serve the linguistic function required of it if it doesn’t exclude those people. The term “Anglo-Saxon” is also inadequate, as it only describes one part of the ancestry of the English people. 

The reluctance to concede that there is such a thing as an English ethnicity is only natural; the concept of ethnicity is not something that we’ve traditionally applied to ourselves. It feels rather grubby and, frankly, a little foreign. But it turns out that multiculturalism does not only mean becoming better acquainted with the exotic cuisines and music and clothing of others, but also with more exotic ways of thinking about ourselves. Particularly, I can see why it’s an unwelcome discussion for English Jews, as the concept of ethnicity would appear to divide them from the rest of the English people. Alas, it is not the first and it will not be the last aspect of England becoming more like the rest of the world that is going to make England’s Jews feel less comfortable. 

Yet that is very much what is happening. From Singapore to the Soviet Union, people in multi-ethnic societies are aware of and talk about ethnicity, and they need the terminology to do so. And that is what will happen in England, if that is the path we are truly committed to.  Far from being a sign of the end of the road, a renewed awareness of ethnic identity among the English people will mark an exciting new milestone on the road to true multiculturalism.  Once they get used to it, I am sure progressives will be thrilled.