‘It's absurd’: Do you pass Suella Braverman’s ‘Englishness test?’

Read time: 4 minutes

In brief:

• Suella Braverman has said that despite being born and raised in England, she doesn't identify as English because Englishness requires ancestral ties and ethnicity, not just birthplace or upbringing.
• Reflecting on his own Jewish family history, Jon Sopel questions Braverman's logic, asking "When do you actually qualify as English?"
• The News Agents describe Braverman’s views as “deeply damaging,” arguing her views bleed into a wider narrative on the hard right of British politics, that is about creating “an enemy within”.

What’s the story?

“What does it mean to be English?”

That’s the question Suella Braverman tries to answer in a new piece written for The Telegraph.

After some soul searching about what gives one the right to identify as English, Braverman, who previously served as Home Secretary, concludes that she does not.

“I was born here, raised speaking the Queen’s English, and educated in England. Yet I am not English,” she writes.

Braverman argues there are two schools of thought, the first: being born in England automatically makes you English.

The second: That Englishness is an “ethnic identity” that can’t be “inherited by geography”.

“My parents, members of the Indian diaspora, were born in Kenya and Mauritius,” she writes.“They acquired British citizenship, but they were not – and could never be – considered English. For Englishness to mean something substantial, it must be rooted in ancestry, heritage, and, yes, ethnicity – not just residence or fluency.”

She goes on; “I don’t feel English because I have no generational ties to English soil, no ancestral stories tied to the towns or villages of this land.”

Instead, the decade-long MP for Fareham and Waterlooville says she identifies as “British Asian.”

How, then, do you identify who is ‘English’?

Where your parents, grandparents or great grandparents came from is “largely immaterial,” Lewis Goodall says, “so long as you subscribe to the mores and culture of that society.”

Rishi Sunak, who was born in Southampton and has Punjabi East African-born Hindu parents, is a great example of this.

“Rishi Sunak, a man with vocal cords made of tweed. The guy went to Winchester for goodness sake, born and brought up here. Everything about him, from his clipped accent to his quite restrained manner - everything about him screams ‘Englishness’.”

The question of what qualifies as being English, can be put to Jon Sopel personally, whose family came to the UK from Poland in the 19th century whilst fleeing the pogroms, with his parents then born in England.

“Am I English?” Jon asks.

The “challenge” that people who hold the same view as Braverman would put to those who oppose it, is: if you moved to Japan, would you declare that you had ethnically become, or become, Japanese?

“What they do, in saying that, is positing societies which are very different from ours,” Lewis Goodall says.

“They do have, internally within them, quite nationalistic and ethnically- based views of what ethnicity or what it means to be part of that nation. We don't have that. This is where the point of contestation comes.

“I think most reasonable people in this country wouldn't think that is what we want Englishness or Britishness or Welshness or Scottishness to be about.

Thinking about it through the lens of whether he would consider himself Japanese if he went to live in Japan, Jon says he doesn’t know.

But, what he does know is that millions of Jews, like his own family, fled Eastern Europe in the 19th century and went to live in Britain, America, Latin America, Canada, France, Italy and so on.

“There are Jewish communities there that probably 150 years ago were somewhere else, and they would describe themselves as Italian or French or American or Canadian or British,” he says.

“I think I'm as English as they come, but maybe I'm not. When do you actually qualify?

“The idea that there is this kind of moment where you suddenly pass an Englishness test, I just think it’s completely fallacious. I owe my loyalty. I owe everything to this country where I have grown up.”

What’s The News Agents’ take?

The idea that those who aren’t from England need to integrate, to accept British values, speak the language and bring up children as a part of British life, is something Jon agrees with, but he notes, there is a distinction between that belief, and the one which Braverman promotes.

“I agree with her that people need to integrate into some of the values of Britain, but erecting false barriers that separate, and mean that you just look at different tribes within the UK, where some are somehow lesser or to be feared more than others, I think is deeply damaging.”

While Lewis thinks such radical views are being “detoxified” within British politics, most people in the country, Lewis says, would not agree with her.

The country’s response to England’s football team demonstrates this.

“There is no doubt when that very multi-ethnic team is assembled wearing the England white shirt, it would only be a fringe opinion for anyone to be sat there, going, ‘Well, half of those lads aren't English’.

“But that is what Suella Braverman is articulating… absurdly.”

Braverman’s views, Lewis suggests, bleed into a wider narrative on the hard-right of politics that “western civilisation is under attack.”

“It is about separating and creating an enemy within and what's sad is that Suella Braverman is doing this to herself.

“She's internalising this extreme ideology and this extreme view of what ethnicity, nationhood and nationalism is, and subjecting it and turning it on herself.

“For what reason, I am not entirely sure.”

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