Who gets to be English? On BBC Radio 4’s Moral Maze, Ash Sarkar of Novara Media questioned Matthew Goodwin as to why he would accept her as English despite her being a child of immigrants but keeps labelling the Southport stabber the child of Rwandan immigrants (the killer was born in Wales and raised in this country). And his stumbling response revealed a slippage between a civic and ethnic conceptions of nationhood, which has lurked beneath much of the violence seen recently. On the one hand, there’s a jus soli conception of nationhood: if you’re born and raised on English soil, you’re English irrespective of where your parents’ origins. But on the other, there’s a darker and deeper ancestral understanding, one that rears its head whenever the question of “Englishness” is raised.
There has clearly been an attempt to fashion this exclusivist ethnic nationalism in the service of a tendentious and reactionary politics in recent years. And when notions of ethnicity are used in some of these discussions, it is a way to avoid explicit reference to race but retain its meaning. Obviously, most people don’t think this way. Even though Englishness is sometimes racialised, polling on this subject suggests that most people don’t link being English with skin colour or phenotype. But the very fact the argument has been revived shows an awkwardness and anxiety around our national identity that we still haven’t resolved.
In a discussion with Salman Rushdie in 2010, Christopher Hitchens remarked on the striking absence of an “English-American” identity in the United States, in marked contrast to its abundance of hyphenated identities (Irish-American, etc.). The thought, he added, of an English Saint George’s day parade on Fifth Avenue – shepherded by impatient Irish cops – is indeed “shuddering”. But the subtext is clear: the English don’t have the most attractive nationality identity, or one that we feel comfortable trumpeting.
Unlike the nationalisms of our Celtic cousins, modelled on the classical small-nation European romantic nationalisms of the 19th century, we don’t have a flamboyant national dress based around bagpipes and kilts. We don’t have any need or desire to save an “indigenous” language from extinction, since English is the global lingua franca. Nor do we have a romantic underdog story of overcoming and emancipating ourselves from an imperial occupier to fuel our sense of nationhood. Instead, England, historically, is an overdog nation that for many nations across the world was an invader, conqueror and occupier.
This is partially a product of treating England as byword for Britain. Our histories and ancestries naturally overlap (in both directions). But following devolution inside Britain and the transformation of Britishness into a post-imperial civic nationalism, the task of adapting Englishness to the 21st century lingers on. The racist rioting that has engulfed England in the wake of the dreadful stabbings in Southport has made this issue more salient because it was powered by an ultra-nationalist narrative. The subconscious claim of the violence was that the (white) English are a beleaguered and declining ethnic majority whose unique way of life is threatened by unrelenting mass immigration. Beyond this was the sense that England has been overtaken by an asymmetrical multiculturalism that privileges the right of ethnic minorities to celebrate their unique identities, while excluding the majority.
The best argument against this narrative is the booming “mixed race” population, many of whom are being integrated into the “white” part of the English population. Whether you can somehow trace your lineage to Alfred the Great or are of second- or third-generation immigrant parentage, if you are born on English soil, raised in English civil society and have English as your native tongue, then you are English. We must resist the “great replacement” impulse that the changing skin colour gradient of the English people in the present and future is somehow a problem that must be solved.
Go to any city or town in this country and you can easily see how deep England’s history is. But this history has not ended and is still ever developing in front of us, with new chapters being added to the long history of these islands. To use an imperfect analogy, Arabs throughout centuries have intermingled with Persians, Berbers, Mongols and sub-Saharan Africans through migration, conquest, and so on. This means that, much like the modern English, Arabs can’t be squashed into shoddy categories of race based on skin colour or phenotype, or a narrow concept of ethnicity based on a “pure” ancestry.
Yet, there is such a thing as an “Arabic people” and an “Arabic culture” based on a broad cultural-linguistic unity that has evolved historically. Likewise, the English people is a nation even though its heritage is mixed, one whose character is not based on ethnic purity, but to borrow a phrase of Rudyard Kipling is “like a built-up gun barrel, all one temper though welded of many different materials”. Nations are syntheses of peoples whose complicated overlapping histories make something new, distinct, and yet continuous. England is no different. Once we understand this, perhaps we will be more at ease with being English.
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