Let me get this right: a man can identify as a woman but Suella Braverman can’t identify as non-English? During Pride our streets throng with oddballs in rubber-gear who identify as pups, some even woofing like loons, and you’re a homophobe if you don’t say: “Ah, how sweet.” Yet when a brown woman says she’s not English, it’s rotten tomato time.
Like Braverman I don’t identify as English. I don’t have a drop of English blood in my body
I wish someone would explain the rules of identity politics to me. It’s about choice, they say. So woe betide the believer in biology who wonders out loud if that 6ft lad called Dave really is a lesbian. “Yes she is!”, the digital mob will wail. Yet the same mob comes raging for Braverman because she chooses not to call herself English. What’s happening?
It all unfolded on Question Time, which identifies as a serious discussion show. Ms Braverman made the point she’s been making for a while now: that Britishness is an inclusive, values-based identity, but Englishness is something more ethnic, a gift of ancestry rather than migration.
Her fellow panellists looked at her with a toxic mix of pity and contempt. Oli Dugmore of the New Statesman said “Suella is entitled to identify however she likes” – aw, thanks white man! – but the horrible core of her argument is that “you can only be English if you are white”. “And that”, he said, sounding almost drunk on his own sanctimony, “is a racist point of view”. The whites are playing the racism card against non-whites now. Happy days.
What a minefield Englishness has become under the ruthless boot of identity politics. Fail to identify as English and you’ll be paraded on live TV as a racist lowlife. But over-identify as English and you’ll also be branded racist. The same smugocracy that reprimands the brown woman for not identifying as English also dry-heaves into their matcha tea when they walk through a white working-class area festooned with England flags.
I think I’ve got it now: if you’re brown you must identify as English, but if you’re white you must cool it with the Englishness. If you’re Suella you’re expected to go on the airwaves and say: “Yes sir, I’m an Englishwoman, thank you sir.” But if you’re a white bloke in Bermondsey you’re told to take down your St George’s Cross because it might make migrants – and more importantly, gentrifying ponces in Peckham – feel uncomfortable. Have I got it right?
What a mess. And what a testament to the haughty draconianism of what passes for left-wing politics these days. They have elected themselves the overlords of Englishness, decreeing with superb arrogance how much Englishness you may display. Be English too vigorously and they’ll shame you as a thick slab of gammon. Be brown and non-English and they’ll pathologise you as suffering from “internalised racism”. It’s all so stunningly condescending. Censorious, too: the shutting down of Braverman with the slur of “racism” is further proof that anyone who dissents from left orthodoxy is seen not only as wrong but as morally compromised.
Braverman could really blow their minds by rocking up to a future episode of Question Time sporting a St George’s pashmina and a Three Lions tattoo. The same brocialists who imperiously chastise her for rejecting the English identity today would be like: “Okay love, tone it down.”
For all the bamboozlement on the faces of the QT panellists, the fact is there’s an entirely legitimate debate to be had about Englishness. I come down on Braverman’s side. Like her I don’t identify as English. I don’t have a drop of English blood in my body. My family has only been in this country for a little over 50 years. I’m a Brit – and desperately proud to be so – but not English.
If people listened to Braverman, rather than seeking her expulsion from polite society, they’d understand that she thinks many white people in Britain also aren’t English. People like me. I tick the White Irish box on medical forms and census documents. For me to then turn around to the fella whose ancestors were ironmongers in Aldgate and say “I’m as English as you” would be bizarre, and insulting. If everyone is English, no one is. When an identity becomes too fluid it becomes meaningless.
It’s not about skin colour. I grew up with an Indian-heritage lad who was far more English than me. His family had been in England for longer than mine – 70 years longer, in fact – and he was steeped in the country’s traditions. He played cricket for heaven’s sake, whereas we were singing “Come Out Ye Black & Tans” and dancing (badly) at whatever feis would have us.
Isn’t it enough to love England? I really do. No offence to Scotland or Wales – or even my motherland – but England is the greatest nation to ever exist. I drink in its history. I give speeches about how it is the birthplace of modern liberty. I would take a bullet for the English working classes who voted for Brexit in spectacular defiance of their “betters”. I live and breathe England but I am not of England. And you know what? It’s fine.
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