Last week, Rishi Sunak went on Nick Robinson’s podcast Political Thinking and laughed off a question about whether he considers himself English.
“Of course I’m English,” the former prime minister said, adding that he frankly found the issue of his national identity – which has been rumbling on ever since last month, when it was first questioned by another popular podcast about politics – “slightly ridiculous”.
In that podcast, former Spectator editor Fraser Nelson said Sunak is “absolutely English – he was born and bred here”, to which host Konstantin Kisin replied: “He’s a brown Hindu. How is he English?”
I’ve been thinking about whether to chime in, the argument against being that the blowback is almost always certainly not worth it.
As a political correspondent for Sky News, one thing I’ve learned is that very few people want to have a discussion in good faith about national identity.
The racial make-up at Westminster doesn’t help. When I attend the Downing Street daily briefing for journalists, I can expect to be the only person of colour there – and almost certainly the only woman of colour. That’s not to say there aren’t Black and brown people in the lobby at Westminster; there are, and that number is growing. Some are hugely influential and are shattering all sorts of ceilings that should have disappeared years ago.
But this hasn't translated into a grown-up conversation on race. Which leads to us having a conversation about whether a man who served as our prime minister is English or not, seemingly on the grounds that he is brown and a Hindu.
This “English question” seems to hook around the fact that there are certain essential traits that grant you access to “Englishness”. Konstantin Kisin, co-host of the Triggernometry podcast, suggests that someone born and raised here, educated at one of England's oldest and poshest schools, socialised into the culture so much he grew up dreaming of and then becoming the PM, cannot make it into that club. If that is the case, then there was probably nothing Sunak could ever do to achieve that status, because the golden card is primarily whiteness, and if being a Hindu is an issue, then Christianity is probably a requirement as well.
But is nationality simply defined by ancestry, or has Britain always strived to be a multinational union that united around culture and heritage?
Many of us who were born here exist without such a clear-cut picture of our ethnic background as Rishi Sunak. Lots of us have a complex family history, or, in my case, unknown key relatives. Without this clear sense of “other” cultural ties to latch on to, I wonder what else Kisin wants us to reach for instead of Englishness? He seems to conflate race and nationhood, which means that being English can only ever be framed as a privilege that is taken as a given by some (white) and queried by others (non-white).
In the Kisin podcast, Nelson said that if you are born in England, you are English. But this view is not widely settled in the diasporas. A BBC survey from 2018 found that twice as many people who identify as white were happy to say they were English than people of colour were.
As I was walking through parliament last week, I asked a few Black and brown MPs what they made of Rishi Sunak’s answer to whether he was English, and I came away with wildly different answers. One born-and-bred Londoner said they didn't feel particularly English because they were excluded at a young age from that club, and from then on didn’t really want any part of it. For others, “British” seemed a more comfortable identity.
This is how the former home secretary Suella Braverman feels. Very publicly and proudly, in the Telegraph, she argued recently that while she is British, she can’t be English because she has a distinct Asian heritage that disqualifies her.
Braverman says that she is sure her views will “send progressive elites into a tailspin”, and insists that multiculturalism has failed. She also seems to suggest that all ethnic minorities should take note of what she is saying. It's proof that every time this issue is brought up in Westminster, while there is an opportunity for a deeper discussion on race, it almost certainly doesn’t happen. Political point-scoring seems to be the preferred option.
This is the current landscape of politics: the Conservatives are being bankrolled by a donor, Frank Hester, who doesn’t deny saying he wanted to shoot Diane Abbott in the face, and that the Hackney MP made him want to hate all Black women. For her part, Labour’s most senior female Black politician declared in the Independent that she believed her own party to be “racist”; certainly, an internal report found that anti-Black racism was thought to be rife within the party. During the election, canvassers for Britain’s fastest growing party, Reform UK, were filmed undercover by Channel 4 News making openly racist and Islamophobic comments.
In his podcast conversation, Sunak perceptively pointed out that the “Tebbit test” – coined by the Conservative’s former party chairman, by which a migrant’s loyalties to the country could be tested by asking which team they supported during an international cricket match – was now redundant. He added that, under Braverman’s thinking, supporting England wouldn’t be enough to qualify as English – and nor would playing for the England side.
In my view, Englishness has always been an evolving picture, and ethnic minorities used to help define it. But we will only have a better understanding of what Englishness currently means once politicians start taking discussions about it, in whatever form they arise, seriously.
Serena Barker-Singh is political correspondent at Sky News
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