‘They think they’re English because they’re born here. That means if a dog’s born in a stable it’s a horse.” That was a staple of the comedian Bernard Manning’s routine back in the 1970s. Enoch Powell had, a decade earlier, expressed the same sentiment in more refined language: “The West Indian or Asian does not, by being born in England, become an Englishman. In law he becomes a United Kingdom citizen by birth; in fact he is a West Indian or an Asian still.”
Few today would laugh along with Manning or take seriously the claim that only white people can be English. Britain has transformed over the past half-century and most English people now embrace Ian Wright and Idris Elba as being as English as David Beckham or Joanna Lumley.
Which is why the argument that surfaced last week about English identity might seem odd. In a discussion about immigration with the podcaster Konstantin Kisin, the former Spectator editor Fraser Nelson insisted that Rishi Sunak “is absolutely English, he was born and bred here”. To which Kisin responded: “He’s a brown Hindu; how is he English?” A clip of the exchange went viral, provoking a furious wider debate, with critics condemning the claim that a “brown Hindu” could not be English, and myriad racists emerging from the online woodwork to protect the whiteness of English identity.
Kisin is no racist, and certainly no Manning or Powell. He describes himself as “classically liberal” (though John Stuart Mill may wish to have a word about that). The exchange exposes, though, a contemporary paradox. Britain is more liberal and inclusive in its understanding of national identity than ever before. Yet, old racist tropes keep being rehashed by those on the right who would describe themselves as hostile to racism. Kisin despises the racial politics of Manning and Powell. But it is difficult to see how his view of “brown Hindus” being debarred from Englishness differs from Powell’s assertion that a “West Indian or Asian does not, by being born in England, become an Englishman”.
Kisin insists he was simply drawing a distinction between British nationality and English ethnic identity. Many strands of nationalism, though, view nationhood as inextricably linked to ethnicity. At the same time, ethnicity is a concept highly malleable in meaning.
“There is no consensus on what constitutes an ‘ethnic group’,” the Office for National Statistics observed when describing ethnic categories used in the 2001 census.Ethnic groups are defined by a bundle of attributes such as a shared language, culture, religion, history and ancestry; which of these are significant varies from identity to identity. Kisin seems to assume that to be English one must possess certain immutable traits denied to Sunak as a “brown Hindu”. That returns us to questions about the relationship between ethnicity and race.
The concept of ethnicity has a long history, and its meaning has shifted over time. In the 1930s and 40s, against the background of nazism and the Holocaust, ethnicity was reworked into its contemporary form.
In the early 1920s, the biologist Julian Huxley, a key figure in this reworking, described black Americans, in the Spectator, as “childlike in their intellects”, and warned against miscegenation because “by putting some of the white man’s mind into the mulatto you not only make him more capable… but you increase his discontent”, driving him to make “trouble because of the American white blood that is in him”.
Barely a decade later, in his book We Europeans, co-written with the anthropologist AC Haddon, Huxley condemned the exploitation of “race” to “rationalise emotion”, proposing instead the alternative term “ethnic group”. He had not changed his views about race as a biological category, nor his contempt for the intellectual capacities of black people. He had, however, become horrified at the Nazis’ use of the concept. After the war, Huxley helped Unesco formulate its first “statement on race” in 1950, which argued that “it would be better when speaking of human races to drop the term ‘race’ altogether and speak of ethnic groups”. “Ethnicity” became a means of talking about race without mentioning race.
The new notion of ethnicity was wrapped around the importance of culture as helping to define a people. Culture, too, though, became a stand-in for race. There was a widespread understanding of cultures as fixed, self-contained units; of every individual as belonging to a distinct culture; of every culture as defined by its unique history. These were all attributes of “race” now transposed to “culture”. It was a vision of culture as functionally equivalent to race except that the “essence” of a people was rooted in history, not biology.
These ideas became important for liberal concepts of multiculturalism and for what we now call “identity politics”. They became even more important for far-right notions of “ethnopluralism”. “The true wealth of the world,” the French political philosopher Alain de Benoist insisted, “is first and foremost the diversity of its cultures and peoples.”
The founder of the Nouvelle Droite in France, and a philosophical mentor to contemporary reactionary movements, Benoist recognised that the far right could sustain itself in the postwar world only by exchanging old beliefs about race for new ideas of cultural difference and ethnic identity. “Authenticity of culture” became the new “purity of blood”.
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Immigrants, Benoist insisted, were carriers of alien cultures and histories and so could never be absorbed into the host nation. Democracy worked only when “demos and ethnos coincide”.
As the firewall between the far right and the moderate right has eroded in recent years, many of these ideas have seeped into the mainstream. Racialised ideas of belonging and identity have become accepted even by many of those formally opposed to racism.
In 1905, Britain introduced its first immigration controls, aimed primarily at excluding Jews fleeing pogroms in eastern Europe. Without this law, the prime minister, Arthur Balfour, told parliament, “though the Briton of the future may have the same laws, the same institutions and constitution… nationality would not be the same and would not be the nationality we should desire to be our heirs through the ages yet to come”. As so often in such discussions, Balfour conflates ideas of nationality, ethnicity and race. His point, though, is clear: too many Jews would undermine Britishness.
Few today would deny that Jews can be properly British or dispute their sense of being English. It should be no different when it comes to Rishi Sunak or Ian Wright.