Can you be English and not white? Why the debate keeps returning on the right

The useful part

Dan Kitwood/Getty Images View image in fullscreen A mini-roundabout painted to represent the St George's flag in Margate, September 2025. Jason Okundaye Even Jacob Rees-Mogg pushes back on defining Englishness in exclusively ethnic terms. The endurance of this discourse is still deeply troubling Can you be English and non-white?

How it works

• For those who believe that it is an ethnic identity based on ancestry, how many generations back must you be able to trace your lineage?
• It's a question that keeps stubbornly resurfacing in our political discourse.
• Last weekend, the former prime minister Rishi Sunak gave his view in a column in the Times, arguing that national identity should not be turned into a DNA test.
• After leaving office, Sunak, the UK's first prime minister of colour, was subject to claims by a prominent podcaster that he was not English because he was a "brown-skinned Hindu".
• "Once we say that this or that person isn't really English or British because they are not white," he wrote, "then we are on a very slippery slope.

What to take from it

Its traction may, for now, be limited, but it still risks contributing to a "common sense" assumption that there is something like a pure English ethnicity determined by race. Some people will argue that English is an ethnic identity and British a civic identity. Instead, it is presented as a question of first principles: whether you are a "good" or "bad" minority, a citizen or non-citizen, your ancestry or skin colour means you will never truly belong.

Example or evidence

• The hard right's attachment to a politics of ethnicity also threatens to upend a project that the broader conservative movement has been at pains to build over the years: a multi-ethnic coalition that can...
• That idea is deeply uncomfortable for many, rejected both by those who hold progressive views on immigration and community integration, and those who otherwise hold conservative views of national belonging...
• There is growing concern among sections of the British right about increasingly "ethnonationalist" impulses emerging on its fringes and entering mainstream political debate.
• That has particularly gathered steam with the rise of Rupert Lowe's hard-right Restore Britain.

Details worth keeping

Of course you can be English if you're not white. So why can't the right leave the question alone? Dan Kitwood/Getty Images Of course you can be English if you're not white.

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