Of course you can be English if you’re not white. So why can’t the right leave the question alone? | Jason Okundaye
Former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has argued that national identity should not be defined by ethnicity, rejecting claims that his background disqualifies him from being English. The article highlights a growing concern within the British right regarding the rise of ethnonationalist views that threaten to alienate the broader conservative coalition. Despite these fringe movements, data indicates that the majority of the public rejects the idea that Englishness is determined by skin color or ancestry.
- ▪Rishi Sunak described attacks on his Englishness as a 'reverse Tebbit test' and warned against defining national identity through DNA.
- ▪An IPPR analysis found that belief in 'Britishness' as an innate trait nearly doubled in two years, rising from 19% to 36%.
- ▪Only 3% of people believe that being a good British citizen requires having white skin, while 74% of English people reject ethnic definitions of Englishness.
- ▪The rise of hard-right groups like Restore Britain is seen as a threat to the conservative movement's multi-ethnic coalition.
- ▪Jacob Rees-Mogg has also pushed back against defining Englishness in exclusively ethnic terms.
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| Original publisher | The Guardian — Politics |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/26/sunak-definition-britishness-englishness-ethnonationalism |
| Publication time | Sat, 26 Sep 2026 05:00:27 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-26T05:20:59.590Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-26T05:20:59.590Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | yZrdj0C3cAx2 · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
A mini-roundabout painted to represent the St George’s flag in Margate, September 2025. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty ImagesView image in fullscreenA mini-roundabout painted to represent the St George’s flag in Margate, September 2025. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty ImagesOpinionBritish identity and societyOf course you can be English if you’re not white. So why can’t the right leave the question alone?Jason OkundayeEven Jacob Rees-Mogg pushes back on defining Englishness in exclusively ethnic terms.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Guardian — Politics.
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