WHO qualifies as English?
Strangely, this has become a contentious question: yet replace English with any other nationality and it is easily answered.
Q: Who qualifies as an Italian person?
A: Someone of Italian parentage, usually, but not necessarily, born and living in Italy.
Q: Who qualifies as a Chinese person?
A: Someone of Chinese parentage, usually, but not necessarily, born and living in China.
And so on.
This was how we defined nationality in the far-off days of my youth. Until unprecedented floods of immigration muddied the waters, the fundamental qualification of heredity aroused no prickly sensitivities. Just like your sex, it was simply a given.
The mother of my best friend at nursery, for instance, was French and was always considered unequivocally French by her friends and relations. This was nothing to be upset about. It was interesting and exotic. Her daughters, with their English father, were universally accepted as English, only a bit more exciting by virtue of their mother. When they married English men and had families of their own, the brief French vagary was no longer anything but a fascinating antecedent, fading into the distance with each generation.
Back then, when settlers from abroad were few and far between and when only a minority of them came from starkly alien cultures, nationality was not a matter of dispute. A foreigner had to accept that he or she was for ever a foreigner, with no hope of ever being called English, though capable, over time, of being accepted as ‘one of us’: particularly by intermarrying and becoming the co-progenitor of English men and women. England, already the melting-pot for a steady stream of incomers from other parts of the British Isles, could be counted on to water down any more far-flung anomalies from generation to generation, ensuring that the English nation survived as a recognisable entity, while benefitting from a little novelty now and then.
That was all well and good, when the people born and living in England were overwhelmingly of English parentage. But what happens when they are increasingly born to parents not only unrelated genetically to the native population, but determined to remain that way, even to the point of serial incest? When they speak a foreign language, practise an alien religion, live by their own laws, actively despise the ways of the host country, and condemn its history? Can these people truly be called English? Or Scottish? Or Welsh? Or Irish?
Of course not.
But what of the immigrants who do not live in colonies; who speak English, pay their taxes, have apparently assimilated into our way of life? Do they qualify as English? Or, in the case of Anas Sarwar, leader of the Scottish Labour Party, as Scottish?
Here is an excerpt from a speech that Sarwar made in September, 2022, standing in front of a giant Pakistani flag: ‘We will only truly get real power not if we just have more Pakistanis sitting in council chambers and in Parliament but actually having more Pakistanis and South Asians sitting in the corridors of power, making the decisions. And that’s where I’ll end tonight, is to say, the change is coming, and the days where our South Asian community are viewed as a vote bank or a curry bank are well and truly gone. The days where South Asian communities get to lead political parties and get to lead countries is now upon us.’
Reading his words, would you say that Sarwar thinks of himself primarily as a Scot or as a Pakistani? As British, or South Asian? Who are the ‘we’ he identifies with?
I think most people would agree that, though born in Glasgow (son of a marriage between first cousins from the subcontinent), Sarwar cleaves to his Muslim Pakistani heritage. Nor has he bought more fully into the nationality of his adopted country, as he might have done, by marrying a Scot. His wife, too, is South Asian.
Our Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, by contrast, obviously loves this country, where she was born and educated, and said in a recent interview that it has never occurred to her that she was not English. However, when she spoke last year after an arson attempt at a mosque in Peacehaven, East Sussex, she referred to those under attack as ‘my community, the Muslim community’. Photographed wearing a decorative not-quite-a-hijab among others in biblical garb, with women standing apart from the men, in long black dresses, that community appeared to be the very antithesis of all things English, and Shabana herself very much a Pakistani woman. Islam is a religion which has a long history of antagonism towards all other faiths, and most particularly to the Christianity which has been intrinsic to British history and culture. Most English people would probably identify Shabana as a British Pakistani. Her road to wider acceptance as ‘one of us’ would surely be to marry an Englishman, have some English children, and stop undermining her professions of Englishness by speaking of Pakistani people who, from the way they dress and worship, appear to be living a Pakistani lifestyle apart from the host population, as ‘her’ community. (There is no publicly available information about her domestic life.)
So who qualifies as English? I would stick to the once-inoffensive definition of my childhood: that anyone of English parentage (ie, with at least one English parent), usually, but not necessarily, born and living in England. It’s pretty clear-cut.
And who qualifies, if not as English, as ‘one of us’?
Perhaps it would be easier to say who is definitely not ‘one of us’.
Nobody living in the foreign colonies which have sprung up in our country is ‘one of us’.
Nobody of foreign extraction who actively promotes their foreign or tribal interests above their nominally British identity is ‘one of us’.
Nobody who seeks to establish an Islamic Republic in this country is ‘one of us’.
This is not ‘blood and soil’ nationalism. It is just the way that we, like the people of other countries, have always been used to thinking about foreign incomers: that is to say, not too many of them, please, and only the kind who can be comfortably at home with us, without making our home unfit for us to live in.
