Can a brown Hindu be English? English people say yes. Why do so many on the right say no? | Kenan Malik

Kenan Malik

Feb. 23, 2025, 8 a.m.

An argument about Rishi Sunak’s identity reveals how ideas of ethnicity and race have become conflated

‘They think they’re English because they’re born here. That means if a dog’s born in a stable it’s a horse.” That was a staple of the comedian Bernard Manning’s routine back in the 1970s. Enoch Powell had, a decade earlier, expressed the same sentiment in more refined language: “The West Indian or Asian does not, by being born in England, become an Englishman. In law he becomes a United Kingdom citizen by birth; in fact he is a West Indian or an Asian still.”

Few today would laugh along with Manning or take seriously the claim that only white people can be English. Britain has transformed over the past half-century and most English people now embrace Ian Wright and Idris Elba as being as English as David Beckham or Joanna Lumley.