Rishi Sunak has written a piece in the Sunday Times about identity, integration, and me. He doesn’t say so explicitly, but he doesn’t need to. Instead, he quotes me without attribution.
“Less anger-inducing, but stranger still,” he writes, “was a debate that kicked off after I left office about whether I was English or not. The claim was that I couldn’t be because I was a ‘brown Hindu’.”
That was me. In February last year, on Triggernometry, Fraser Nelson raised Sunak unprompted in a debate about identity and told me he was “as English as Tizer and y-fronts.” I made a nuanced counter-argument, but in the ensuing cross-talk I said: “He’s a brown Hindu. How is he English?”
This was not the best articulation of an argument which Nelson himself described as “perfectly fair point” in the aftermath. What I meant to use was the phrase nobody objects to when the BBC uses it — British Asian — and I reached for a shortcut that obscured the argument rather than sharpening it. That one’s on me, and I’ve said so before.
I typically don’t go around issuing verdicts on whether people are English. I was answering a claim that had been put to me, about a man I have never met and bear no ill will towards, on a podcast where my job is to respond to what my guest says. I’d have preferred the argument stayed general rather than focusing on Sunak. It didn’t, and he’s had a year of being the case study, which I regret. I texted him privately to say so. No reply - I don’t know if the number I was given for him is no longer in use or he simply doesn’t want to accept my apology. If it’s the latter, that is, of course, his right.
That’s the concession. Here’s the part I won’t concede.
The charge that followed was not that I phrased it badly. It was that my position was racist.
I have two children. Both were born in England to British parents who each came here from somewhere else. They are not English either. They’re British. I said this in the very same podcast Sunak pulls quotes from in his article.
My kids also happen to be whiter than a Michael Buble Christmas album. So either I’m a racist against my own white children, or this isn’t an argument about race.
Suella Braverman, Sunak’s own former Home Secretary, responded to the row about my comments by penning an article in which she argued that as a proud British Asian she herself is not English. Is she racist against herself or is there perhaps more of a substantive discussion being had than people would like to pretend?
It’s 2026, of course, so to many people everything is about race but instead of having the stupid version of this debate, let’s take Sunak’s argument and address it on its merits. Let’s accept that anyone can be English. All that is required is to be born in England and to say you’re English. Feels good, doesn’t it? If you’re an ethnic minority like Sunak or an immigrant like me, just saying this coats you in the comforting protection of fitting in, being safe and living in a land of beautiful diversity.
And if you’re a white Brit who says this, what a relief it is to know that you’re definitely not a nasty racist.
To his credit, despite repeatedly and deliberately conflating Englishness with Britishness at his convenience, Sunak is an intelligent man who can’t pretend he doesn’t actually understand the argument:
“Some people will argue that English is an ethnic identity and British a civic identity. Though if you think those nuances are heard by most people, I fear you are being rather — perhaps even wilfully — naive,” he says. “If you are born and brought up in England and view it as home, what are you other than English? Attempting to deny people their Englishness or Britishness because of the colour of their skin is a recipe for alienation, for a two-tier society. How are children who hear this meant to feel?”
If I was at any point naive about people’s ability to hear the nuance of this debate, I have certainly been disabused of my delusions by the backlash to my comments. The problem for Sunak, however, and, more importantly, for our country, is that just because a lot of people are too busy, too scared or too uninterested to understand the problem does not mean the problem will magically disappear.
Would Sunak argue that the majority of the British public are currently willing to hear the nuances of the national debt (which is greater than our GDP), or that raising taxes will not deliver prosperity for the very people that measure is alleged to help? I doubt it.
That many are unable to parse the complexities of a particular issue does not render that issue irrelevant. What Sunak actually wants is for us to accept that this debate is pointless, not because it doesn’t matter, but because he is right. As he says in the opening of his article, “In Britain, we’ve created the world’s most successful multi-faith, multi-ethnic democracy.” Job done, case closed.
Unfortunately for all of us, the reason we are having this debate is that to a large and growing number of people in Britain this multicultural experiment doesn’t feel all that successful. Indeed, the failure of multiculturalism has become so undeniable that we’ve given up cancelling people who make this point.
In her brilliant, upcoming book “Diversity is Not Our Strength”, Katharine Birbalsingh, an inner-city teacher and founder of the Michaela school, whose life’s work has been to inculcate a largely ethnic minority intake of students into uniting around their British identity, chronicles the rising self-segregation among children across schools which fail to do this.
“The inner city scene I have described is, in the long run, more divisive than is understood. I have seen it all before. The Bengali kids sit together. The Pakistani kids sit on the other side of the hall. The Hindu Indian kids sit together. The Black African kids sit together, sometimes divided on the basis of whether they are Christian or Muslim. The Eastern European kids have their area outside by a set group of benches. At other moments, friendships across divides will be formed but there’s a catch: they will be bound together by the idea that they all experience marginalisation or are all from somewhere else.”
Last year, a 12-year-old girl turned up for Culture Celebration Day prepared to give a short speech about her culture, just like all the other pupils. The event was dedicated to “recognising and celebrating the rich cultural diversity within our school community”.
“We encourage students to consider wearing attire that reflects their nationality or family heritage,” the school said.
Unfortunately for the girl in question, the culture she wanted to talk about was British and the flag on her dress was the Union Jack. As will surprise no one who has been paying attention, far from being included in her school’s delightful celebrations, she was prevented from speaking and sent home. Diversity, it turns out, is not for everyone - some groups are more equal than others.
This phenomenon in Britain’s schools is replicating across society at large, where the endless celebrations of “diversity”, combined with outright hostility towards English and increasingly British identity, history and culture, are creating an equal and opposite reaction.
For many years now, a small number of sensible people have warned that identity politics for minorities would inevitably lead to identity politics for the majority. If you spend 20 years telling people that what matters about them is not what unites them (allegiance and affinity to the country in which they all live) but what makes them different (their ethnicity), then, inevitably, everyone will want a piece of the action. That’s just human nature.
Add to this the unprecedented demographic change that has occurred in this country in recent decades, whereby Britain went from being a white British country with a small number of well-integrated ethnic minority residents, to white British people now being a minority in several of its major cities including its capital.
Why would we be surprised that there is now a debate about identity?
Words are, by their very nature, exclusive rather than inclusive. To describe something as a table is to necessarily claim that it is not a chair. That does not mean that all tables are identical, that a random member of the public can reliably explain what makes a table a table, or even that you cannot eat off a chair the way you might eat off a table or sit on a table the way you might sit on a chair. But we all accept there’s difference between tables and chairs. To say that something is A is to simultaneously make the claim that it is not B.
Sunak’s argument is that we should reject the idea that there is anything exclusive about the English identity. Anyone can be English if they feel they are and were born here. Erling Haaland, born in Leeds, would become English tomorrow simply by saying that he feels English. Given England’s performance against Argentina, many would be forgiven for hoping he does.
But those who adopt this instrumental view of identity like Sunak do not seem to realise that they are playing directly into the hands of the ethnonationalist right. When he says that “attempting to deny people their Englishness … is a recipe for alienation, for a two-tier society”, does he imagine that denying people belonging to a unique and special group only has a negative effect on ethnic minorities? Does he really think that saying to ethnically English people that they are the only people in human history who are not allowed to have an ethnic identity of their own will not make them feel like they live in a two-tier society?
Like Sunak, I do not have any great desire to engage in these debates. I would very much like to return to the Britain to which I came in 1995 - one in which foreigners like me were welcomed as guests in manageable numbers, encouraged to integrate and become British and these debates were not had because they were not necessary. But 30 years of uncontrolled mass immigration, the frankly outrageous opening of our borders to hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants with no legitimate claim to be here and the pernicious ideology of diversity and inclusion being rammed down British people’s throats have put an end to that.
I am aware that carefully crafted polling will show that a significant proportion of people in Britain disagree with me. If asked whether a well-known and well-liked British citizen of minority ethnic origin is “English”, many will say that he is. But I wonder how many people would agree that an England populated exclusively by people whose parents were born abroad, no matter how integrated, is England as they think of it.
This entire thing is a trap that is destined to lead Britain down the path to segregation, tribalism and civil strife. There is only one way out because there is only one type of “successful multi-faith, multi-ethnic societies” in history.
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