It’s up to Suella Braverman how she wants to identify

Can you be both Asian and English? Not according to Suella Braverman, Reform’s “education and equalities spokesperson”, who on Question Time last night, implied they are two mutually exclusive categories. “I’m not an English person; I am of Asian origin.... Why are the English the only group of people on the earth who cannot have a distinct identity?” It’s up to Braverman how she wants to identify. If she sees herself as British and of Asian origin, but not English, that’s her business. What is not legitimately up to her though is to define the category of English for everyone else, in a way that excludes people like me — of Asian origin but born and raised in England — who very clearly are English

Braverman is not totally clear on what she thinks it means to be English. Accused on last night’s show of reducing Englishness to whiteness, she repeatedly refused to answer the presenter’s direct question: can you only be English if you are white? Instead, she made vague references to lineage, as if that answered the question: “I think it becomes pretty obvious when people have got a lineage, an ancestry, a connection to the heritage of this country which dates back a few generations.” So, according to Braverman, as a second-generation immigrant, I’m not really English. Neither is England football player Bukayo Saka, also a second-generation immigrant of Nigerian descent. By the same measure, my Scottish friends born to Asian immigrant parents aren’t really Scottish. It’s insulting and — yes — effectively racist.

This long-running debate about what it really means to be English is a darling topic in the harder-right fringes of British politics. On one side are those who would define Englishness as a purely ethnic identity. Part of Braverman’s definition — lineage and ancestry — falls squarely within this understanding: Englishness as ethnicity. On the other is the vast majority of the public — 81 per cent — who in a 2017 poll said they think what makes someone English is whether or not they were born in England. Hence, in the last couple of years we have seen the question raised of whether or not Rishi Sunak is English. He has been very clear that he does indeed see himself as English as well as British, just as I do.

It is possible to argue that there are two different conceptions of Englishness — one a nationality-based conception, the other ethnicity-based. But that begs the question: why would a politician like Braverman take this beyond the theoretical to push an ethnicity-based conception on everyone else in a way that seeks to deny people like me, Sunak and Saka our English identity? Why is it so important to Braverman that we do not define ourselves as English? The answer to that question isn’t pretty. It is, of course, because Reform is a populist, hard-right party that seeks electoral success through sowing division. As I’ve argued before, there are indeed questions to be asked about the failures as well as successes of multiculturalism in Britain; too often the British left has sought only to celebrate its successes, while sweeping legitimate concerns, for example about the heinous grooming gang offences committed disproportionately by men of Pakistani origin, under the carpet.

But there are those on the right of British politics who seek to weaponise some of these concerns in order to tar whole communities on the basis of their ethnicity. The only reason to give primacy to ethnic conceptions of Englishness over nationality-based conceptions is to imply that some English people aren’t actually English: that they don’t belong in the same way. And that is, indeed, racist. Braverman last night reacted with outrage at the contention that she, an MP of British Asian descent, could be racist. But of course British Asians can be racist, just in the same way that women can be sexist (in fact, all women have a degree of internalised misogyny they need to confront head-on, by dint of the fact that we are brought up in a patriarchal society infused with sexist stereotypes).

And just in the same way that non-white Britons can have political views from right across the spectrum: it is racist to contend that a woman like Braverman isn’t really Asian — that she is a “coconut” or some sort of race traitor, as some on the left do — because her political views aren’t those that should be expected from someone who is from a migrant background. But the flip side of that is that Braverman can’t use her brownness as some sort of shield to defend herself from any allegations of racism, as she ludicrously seems to think.

Ultimately, this is why Braverman’s views are so unsavoury. She isn’t looking to play out a good-faith academic debate about whether there is such a thing as an English ethnicity as well as English nationality. Nor is she making this purely a question about her own identity. I think the reason that she wants to talk about this is to signal to voters who think people with brown and black skin can’t be English – who are very much in a small minority — that she agrees with them. That is toxic and dangerous — and Braverman’s own skin colour certainly does not give her a free pass.