What does it mean to be English? Konstantin Kisin knows. He showed his working in a recent interview with the former editor of the Spectator, Fraser Nelson, on Kisin’s Triggernometry podcast. In a viral 20-second clip discussing the identity of Rishi Sunak, Nelson said: “He is absolutely English – he was born and bred here.” Kisin demurred: “He’s a brown Hindu; how is he English?”
His comments have ignited a furore from all quarters. The journalist Sangita Myska said that Kisin’s comments were “either ignorance or thinly veiled racism”. Dan Hodges of the Mail on Sunday insisted that “Rishi Sunak is English… that’s where the debate begins and ends”. The pollster James Johnson found it “deeply worrying”. David Aaronovitch challenged Kisin: “Am I English, Konstantin?” Kisin’s question was a racialised dog-whistle – and surely designed to create the stir it did. But outrage will only get us so far – who can define Englishness, and what politics is Kisin consciously or unconsciously giving voice to?
Kisin’s question to Nelson seems to assume that there are certain immutable traits essential to Englishness – implicitly, white skin and Christianity – which Sunak doesn’t possess. But clearly there are more substantial traits that make someone English than their epidermis or religion. That someone was born, raised, educated and socialised into the culture and society of their home nation ought to count for something.
So what is the ideology behind Kisin’s essentialisation? Even though they are often intertwined, on principle there is a distinction to be made between nationalism and racism. Nationalism holds that a “foreigner” can become part of the nation after going through a process of naturalisation, assimilation and acculturation. Racism posits that nationhood lies “in the blood” and assimilation isn’t possible or desirable. This is why Enoch Powell used to say that just because a West Indian or Asian is born in England, it doesn’t make them an Englishman. Legally, he may be British, but “in essence” he is still West Indian or Asian.
If Kisin said that Sunak isn’t a “white Anglo-Saxon Protestant” (Wasp), a generally American term that has never had much currency in the UK, he would be on safer ground – at least in a descriptive sense. In fact, this is really what is meant by “ethnic English” because it is undeniably true that most English people belong in that category and have an ancestral lineage on these isles that goes back centuries. But Englishness is a nationality that has for centuries been part of a multinational union that is Britain. Nations aren’t simply defined by ancestry but by culture and language, which make them very flexible. It is the reason that, in the space of a generation or two in the 19th century, identities like “Italian” or “German” were largely able to supersede their ethnic constituents. Does anyone really think that any Wasp American whose family migrated from England is really more English than Rishi Sunak and Marcus Rashford simply because of ancestry?
This kind of racial essentialisation is increasingly common in parts of the right. It has become more mainstream as figures on the right bemoan the relative decline of the white population due to mass immigration and subsequent demographic change, and more confidently defend a majoritarian “racial self-interest”. In 1991, according to the census, almost 94 per cent of the country’s population identified as white. In 2021, 74.4 per cent identified as white British. This is only a relative decline. But in England, the “Wasps”, shall we say, can no longer assume to be the universal subject of the nation. They are still the majority, but ethnic minorities are large enough for this change in position to be noticeable, noticed and exploited. What’s more, most of the UK’s “ethnic diversity” is concentrated in England, which makes this question of what and who is English more acute. It feels conscious to people, especially in English cities and towns like London, Birmingham, Leicester, Slough and Luton where “Wasps”, the national ethnic majority, are a local ethnic minority. It’s how you get to John Cleese, or any other bar-room philosophe, declaring that London is no longer an English city.
But Kisin’s comments are just a relabelling of an older racism, which itself demonstrates how flexible these national identities are. Ironically, if the Triggernometry exchange occurred in the 1970s and 1980s, it would have been said that “Sunak is not British; he’s Indian”. At that time, Britishness was still infused with racial characteristics, inherited from an imperialist national self-conception by which Britishness was exclusive to whites and didn’t apply to blacks and Asians, even if they were born and bred here. One of the chants of the National Front on their marches was: “There ain’t no black in the Union Jack.” But Britishness has been transformed since the 1990s from an imperial identity into a civic-national badge that can accommodate hyphenated identities in the American fashion. Hence the rise of “British-Indian” and “British-Nigerian” identities. Most of the right is at least comfortable with these: the current and previous leaders of the Conservative Party fall into exactly these categories. And a similar process is occurring in the home nations as they too evolve into a post-ethnic understanding of nationhood and culture, where what it means to be English isn’t understood in simple racial and ancestral terms.
This is obviously nothing to fear. Nationhoods have always changed, or else they become redundant. And all identities have some notion of exclusivity; that is the mechanism through which we can distinguish one group of people from another. But if we’re at the stage that, despite being born, raised and socialised in England all his life, speaking English as his native tongue, and speaking it with a cheerfully Wykehamist accent, Rishi Sunak isn’t English, we have left even a civic form of nationalism behind. It is an impoverishment of Englishness, and a betrayal of the mechanisms by which this country has grown up and grown old.
[See also: Who can answer the English question?]
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