{"id":106266,"date":"2026-08-18T22:59:24","date_gmt":"2026-08-18T22:59:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/106266\/"},"modified":"2026-08-18T22:59:24","modified_gmt":"2026-08-18T22:59:24","slug":"recognizing-britains-ethnic-identities-isnt-racist-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/106266\/","title":{"rendered":"Recognizing Britain\u2019s ethnic identities isn\u2019t racist"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week, Melanie Phillips wrote<\/a> in her Times column that Restore Britain is \u201cthe antithesis of Britishness\u201d. This resulted in online pushback<\/a> from Rupert Lowe\u2019s supporters about the apparent incongruity of this position with her longstanding Zionism. Why, they asked, does Phillips have no problem advocating for the ethnic interests of Jews and their claim to an ancestral homeland, while failing to acknowledge that the British have a specific ethnic identity which they wish to preserve? In response, she made a distinction in a post on X<\/a> between British identity, which she labelled \u201ccivic and not ethnic\u201d, and Jewish identity, \u201cwhich is ethnic, religious and cutural [sic]\u201d.<\/p>\n

Phillips is partially right to say that Britishness denotes a civic identity. For much of the country\u2019s history, being a \u201cBritish subject\u201d in law was defined not by the identity of an individuals\u2019 parents but by whether that person was born on territory over which the Crown was sovereign.<\/p>\n

Still, the more apt analog would be with English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish identities, which carry that ethnic, ancestral and cultural weight. One can just as easily argue that the English or Scots are a \u201cunique fusion of a people, a faith and a land\u201d, to borrow Phillips\u2019s description of Judaism. After all, England\u2019s very name derives from being the land of the Angles: the land is named after its people.<\/p>\n

Every country has an ethnic, cultural or religious shadow, even if it doesn\u2019t officially proclaim it. Historically, in these isles that shadow was Anglo-Protestantism. The Sabbath in Britain is Sunday, not Friday, as it is in Muslim countries, or Saturday as it is for Jews. The truth is that most countries are not purely civic or purely ethnic; instead, they incorporate a mix of civic, ethnic, cultural and linguistic expressions of how nationality is conceived. Only the United States, perhaps, is sui generis in how close it comes to being a purely civic nation.<\/p>\n

Clearly, then, there are longstanding ethno-national identities in Britain. The idea of \u201cethnic minorities\u201d implies an ethnic majority, and pretending otherwise out of fear of legitimizing racism doesn\u2019t help. Last year, in the wake of suggestions<\/a> that former prime minister Rishi Sunak wasn\u2019t English on account of his race, the journalist Samantha Asumadu wrote<\/a>: \u201cThe truth is that lots of black and Asian Britons don\u2019t see ourselves as English.\u201d She added that \u201cEnglish as an ethnicity is seen as white and maybe there\u2019s nothing wrong with that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Studies<\/a> frequently show that most ethnic minorities identify with being British over being English. That \u201cEnglishness\u201d denotes a particular identity and heritage of the ethnic majority, and many ethnic-minority citizens recognize they\u2019re not eligible for it. Most of these people have a history of immigration within the last two or three generations; meanwhile, most white Britons don\u2019t,\u00a0given that their lineage on these isles goes back much further. There is naturally, then, a difference in experience and history.<\/p>\n

Just because Britain \u2014 or, more specifically, its constituent nations \u2014 has an ethnic and cultural identity doesn\u2019t mean that minority groups should be legally handicapped or socially persecuted. It also doesn\u2019t mean that they should not be considered compatriots for building a common public life within a flourishing civil society. But Phillips is being short-sighted in overlooking the ethnic heritage of this country altogether.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last week, Melanie Phillips wrote in her Times column that Restore Britain is \u201cthe antithesis of Britishness\u201d. This…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":106109,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2],"tags":[13,44224,44225,30,44226,8374,1153,5524,474],"class_list":["post-106266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-britain","tag-britain","tag-britishness","tag-ethnicity","tag-israel","tag-melanie-phillips","tag-race","tag-restore-britain","tag-rupert-lowe","tag-uncategorized"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/117118996915906608","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106266"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106266\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/106109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}