Oh No, I Did a Racism!

One of the things that anyone who attempts to speak their mind in public knows is that there is nothing more dangerous than making a statement of the bleeding obvious. However, since TRIGGERnometry is about having honest conversations, I frequently forget this and say exactly what I (and millions of others) think without filtering everything to avoid getting in trouble. Last week, this resulted in shock and outrage when in a discussion with Fraser Nelson about the difference between being British and being English, I dared to suggest that Rishi Sunak was British but not English.

You can watch the 7-minute discussion here:

If you actually watched the debate we had, you went much further than any of the journalists who decided to be outraged about this, attempting to start a pile-on on social media and publishing hyperventilating article after hyperventilating article about my outrageous views. They reacted instead to a carefully edited 20-second clip in which I appear to suggest that it is the fact that Rishi Sunak is a “brown Hindu” that prevents him from being English.

So deranged was the reaction that Fraser himself ended up writing an article defending my argument about ethnicity as a “perfectly fair point”. He himself also copped a lot of flak from those who feel that his view that you become English by simply being born in England is incorrect.

In case you are one of the dishonest journalists who misunderstood what I said on purpose, let me explain it for you as simply as I can:

This is a page from the British census:

Which of these boxes do you think Rishi Sunak ticks? Well, actually, you don’t have to think - helpful if you’re a legacy media journalist - because Sunak himself has answered this question in the past:

“British Indian is what I tick on the census, we have a category for it. I am thoroughly British, this is my home and my country, but my religious and cultural heritage is Indian, my wife is Indian.”

Far from being racist against himself, Sunak is saying something entirely uncontroversial. As I say in our discussion with Fraser, my son, born in England to two British parents, is not English either.

It’s true that someone could be a Hindu and be English. Someone could also have dark skin and be English, if they were ethnically English. But we know that Rishi is neither and in my exasperation I used the shortcut of "Brown Hindu" to make the point that he is what we call a "British Asian". We don't talk about the English Asian community or the English Muslim community or English Jews or English Sikhs. It is popular to pretend this isn't true among the white commentariat class but everyone else, especially ethnic minorities, regards this as a statement of the bleeding obvious. Of course, all of this is fuzzy at the edges and highly contextual. A British Asian person could play for the England football team, for example. But that isn't the context of our discussion.

The reason we are having this discussion, of course, is that the demographics of Britain have shifted very rapidly in recent decades due to mass immigration, and this creates understandable challenges when it comes to creating a cohesive society that can unite around a shared identity. The speed with which this has happened is unprecedented: at the time of the first census to record ethnicity, which was conducted in 1991, white British people made up well over 90% of the population. You need only walk around any major British city to see how much this has changed in what is a very short period of time.

No amount of lecturing about diversity being our strength can overcome the fact that it is difficult for people from different backgrounds who increasingly don’t speak the same language to have a sense of community and common purpose. We need to have a serious conversation in this country about how we develop an overarching identity that we can all buy into. Pretending we are all English isn't going to cut it.