It is both amusing and revealing to watch Suella Braverman talk about race, identity, belonging and citizenship. Her comments can be dumbfounding, not least because they confuse the issues, subvert reality and reflect a completely disjointed understanding of what is indeed a complex matter, yet also a relatively straightforward one.
The old adage that you cannot be English unless you are white is beginning to fade. Post-war migration, settlement, integration, multiculturalism, interculturalism, diversity and globalisation have changed Englishness. It is no longer confined to the idea of someone who is ostensibly white and of Anglo-Saxon heritage. This may have been relatively true for around 1,500 years, although the Romans included people of colour within their systems of administration, governance and incorporation, particularly during the roughly 400 years in which they ruled these lands.
When the British – drawing upon the English, Welsh, Scottish, and later Irish – colonised the world, they came into contact with people of colour from the Caribbean, the Middle East and South Asia. This brought greater familiarity and understanding, as well as exploitation and expropriation on a significant scale, with the enduring consequences of colonisation still felt today. It also brought people of colour to Britain, including England, where they came to work, trade, live, settle and mix with the existing population. Some of this history also predates mass colonialism. One only has to read a little Shakespeare and consider what Othello experienced as a person of colour.
Fast-forward to 2026, nearly 60 years after Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in Birmingham, and we face the reality of Britain First and variations of Reclaim, Replace and Reform, all highlighting the supposed problems of immigration. These claims are often misconceived and deliberately divert ordinary Britons from challenging the consequences of failed government policy. This is what populists – essentially troublemakers – often do to advance their own interests. It is a familiar historical playbook repeating itself in the UK today, as well as more widely across Europe and North America.
The key point is that, over the past few decades, being English has become less directly associated with an ethnic category and more closely understood as a cultural one. This distinction is especially important in the British context. If you are a citizen of the United Kingdom, you are legally defined as British rather than English, Welsh, Scottish or Northern Irish. Historically, because Englishness was wrapped within Britishness, it remained poorly defined and was often assumed to carry an ethnic meaning. Yet it has evolved precisely because it was never entirely an ethnic category; it is now increasingly a cultural identity that distinguishes England from the other nations.
The argument that generational lineage is a prerequisite for Englishness does not work either. Britain now has three or four generations of ethnic minority communities whose members are comfortably British and, culturally, increasingly comfortable identifying as English. Nor was the association between being white and English ever fully settled, given successive waves of migration from northern and western Europe – not only from 1066 onwards with the Normans, but earlier, with the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Danes. These movements are all part of the history of any nation.
Much of the present confusion arises because Englishness is not, and never has been, a legal category. This ambiguity has allowed the far right to weaponise the term and claim that only people who are white and English can be British, which has never been the case. They need only look at their passports, which identify them as British, not English: they are British citizens, not English citizens.
With perhaps one in six Britons claiming an ethnic, racial or mixed heritage, England – the most populous nation in the United Kingdom – is more diverse than ever. It is therefore a natural evolutionary step to regard Englishness primarily as a cultural category. It was never a legal classification, and as an ethnic identity it has always been complicated by patterns of migration. If cultural identity is based solely on indigenous claims to birthright, then Britain, and England in particular, presents a far more diverse reality.
I believe it is an excellent development that Englishness is now more firmly understood as a cultural category. This is arguably the direction it needs to take, freeing it from the grip of the far right and radical right, which would rather turn it into a narrow ethnic and racial classification – something it was never fully able to sustain in the first place.