Defining 'Britishness'

Or, 'How do we respond to Otto?'

Steve (left) and Sarah (right) are both ethnically English, one of the ethnic groups native to the British Isles, and are both British citizens. But they have drastically different lifestyles. Could we say that, in some sense, Steve is 'more British' than Sarah, something that would be denied by both modern sensibilities and ethnonationalists?

The British Right like to talk a lot about what ‘Britishness’ (or ‘Englishness’) is not. It isn’t just about ‘values’; it isn’t just about having a British passport; and it certainly isn’t just about eating fish and chips, or queuing, or reading the King James Bible. However, aside from highly rigid ethnonationalists (who, quite apart from anything else, lock the Right into an unhelpfully extreme position on nationality), for the most part no real positive vision for ‘Britishness’ is given. This is a discourse that destroys, but fails to rebuild. In this article, I will attempt to give a more satisfactory, positive, answer to to this question.

In a previous article (‘How Wittgenstein destroyed the Woke’, August 2024), Pimlico Journal contributor Alfred Ryle introduces a fictional debate between ‘Bazza’ and ‘Otto’ on the nature of ‘Englishness’:

Bazza: ‘Bits of London aren’t really English anymore, since there are barely any English people still living there.’

Otto: ‘Hmmm, but what exactly does it mean to be English? Are the Celts English? What about the Anglo-Saxons, the Normans, the Vikings? You ever heard of the Huguenots? Nigel Farage is one of them!’

Bazza: ‘You know exactly what I mean, Otto, there’s clearly something different between Cockneys — no matter which of those peoples you mentioned they’re originally descended from — and all the Bangladeshis now in Whitechapel where the Cockneys used to live.’

Otto: ‘You still haven’t told me who’s really English. You see, Britain is a nation of immigrants; nothing out of the ordinary is happening by some Bangladeshis moving here.’

Ryle goes on to argue that the solution to Otto’s subversive (and clearly disingenuous) argument is to avoid claiming that there is any ‘essence’ to being English; instead, we should treat it as a family resemblance concept. For while there may be no single thing (or set of things) that all Englishmen have in common, but that all non-English people do not, thus defining the ‘essence’ of ‘Englishness’ (i.e., the essentialist viewpoint), that does not necessarily mean that the concept is meaningless. For we can still ‘…observe that there are sets of resemblances that all people we view as intuitively English share.’

I will have more to say about family resemblance concepts and our intuitions later. But for now, I mention this debate for the same reason as Ryle: because it is an important debate for the Right to win. We all, of course, recognise that, in some sense, Otto’s final statement is trivially true: Britain is indeed a ‘nation of immigrants’ — just like every other nation. If we define ‘immigrant’ as merely meaning someone who moves permanently to a place where they were not born, then only the most ignorant man, who believes that the English sprouted fully formed from the soils of Kent and Essex in times of old, would deny that the people living in England today — including those who all people would firmly describe as ‘English’ — would be unable to trace their entire lineage for tens of thousands of years back to England, and only England.

This deceitful tactic of deconstruction is hardly unique to the debate on national identity. In fact, it is used in many other debates on matters of identity — but needless to say, this tactic is selectively applied to groups that are disfavoured. The left-wing deconstructionist will never also deconstruct such favoured groups as ‘black’ or ‘Palestinian’ (although, amusingly, supporters of Israel will indeed attempt to deconstruct the ‘Palestinian’ group, as it is actually a reasonably effective tactic in debates). This is why we need to give a positive definition of ‘English’ and ‘British’. If we can give these positive definitions, then ‘Bazza’ can respond to ‘Otto’ by saying, ‘Yes, Britain is a nation of immigrants, but so is every other nation. The reason that the Bangladeshis in Whitechapel aren’t truly “British”, or “English”, is because of x.’ In this article, x is what we are trying to define.

It is my perspective that, contrary to what some people claim, we can easily define what it means to be English: ‘English’ is an ethnicity — or, more precisely, the ethnic group formed by the mixing of the various peoples who came to this island over thousands of years. These groups, as any schoolboy knows, include: Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, and Normans.

Why can’t this set of ethnicities be modified to ‘fit with the times’, and so also include Bangladeshis (or more precisely in this context, Bengalis)? Most fundamentally, because they have not been here for a long enough time and intermixed sufficiently for there to be a new ethnogenesis. We cannot say that they have began to melt into the ‘English’ ethnic group, in a two-way process of genetic exchange (indeed, intermarriage between the two groups remains extraordinarily low). Nor do the Bengalis identify as being ethnically the same, or at least very closely connected to, the English: there is clearly no mutual recognition. But what does a ‘long enough time’ and ‘ethnogenesis’ mean? We will know it when we see it. It is certainly far more than twenty, or even fifty, years away (although it’s worth noting here that with more culturally and phenotypically similar groups, this process will occur more quickly for fairly obvious reasons). Maybe in a millennia, things will look very different and we can relitigate this debate. But not now, and not even in our lifetimes.

There is only one serious anomaly if we follow such a perspective: the English national football, rugby, cricket, and hockey teams (among others). In a more intellectually serious world this paragraph would not be necessary, but in the last decade or so, the existence of non-white British citizens playing for the England national football team has become bizarrely central to the undermining of the claim that ‘English’ is still fundamentally an ethnic, rather than a purely civic, identity.

This view should not be taken seriously. The existence of people who are not ethnically English on a team labelled as ‘English’ is purely an accident of history, owing to our own central involvement in the development of international sports: the England, Welsh, and Scottish teams exist as separate entities, rather than being subsumed into a broader ‘British’ team to directly mirror the ‘German’ or ‘Canadian’ one, purely because they were invented before ‘true’ international competition became common. Instead, at first, it was primarily the ‘Home Nations’ that would compete with one another. When ‘true’ international sports competitions became more common, these sub-national national teams were in effect grandfathered in to the new system. Arguing that the fundamentally unimportant anomalies created by this accident of history means that ‘English’ can no longer be understood as an ethnicity, just because it is not always understood as such in the context of sports competitions, should be understood as a bad-faith argument and ignored.

However, what it is to be English is an easier question to answer than what it means to be British. This is not a new problem. Historically, while anyone of any ethnicity who owed their allegiance to the crown could be a ‘British subject’ — a concept related, but not quite equivalent to, ‘British’ — this certainly did not make them ‘English’. Moreover, ‘British’ has always, at a minimum, been a set of ethnicities (albeit very closely related ones), with the position of the Irish being particularly complex. As such, the concept of ‘Britishness’ has, to a much greater extent than ‘Englishness’, been contested and in flux, and still remains somewhat unclear to this day.

We can therefore be confident in saying that the ethnically Bengali child whose ethnically Bengali parents both moved here from Bangladesh is not ‘English’ — you can’t claim to be both fully ethnically Bengali and fully ethnically English — but it is somewhat more difficult to say if he is, or at least can theoretically be, or become, ‘British’. Some readers might take the view that no Bengalis can ever be, or become, ‘British’. I do not agree. I, like most British people, believe that ‘British Bengalis’ can at least theoretically exist — though certainly, as we will demonstrate, most nominally ‘British’ Bengalis are not in fact ‘British’ under my own definition, and it is unlikely that they ever will be.

An Exploration of Intuitions

As Ryle points out in a separate article (‘Civic nationalism — practically impossible and theoretically absurd?’, September 2024), it is impossible to reduce ‘Britishness’ to any set of ‘values’. This is because our definition will simultaneously become far too restrictive and far too inclusive. If we are using the five ‘British values’ enumerated in classrooms across the country, we can easily see that most people born before 1900, including those who are considered by everyone to be ‘British’, would no longer be considered to be ‘British’. At the same time, someone who believes in the five ‘British values’ with fervent zeal — even if he doesn’t identify these ‘values’ as being specifically ‘British’, and even if he doesn’t know that Britain exists — must automatically be considered ‘British’. Attempts to add riders to avoid these absurdities are also generally unconvincing.

However, it is my belief that there are some cases where values, or culture, does matter. I will show that this is intuitively true even if we take the ethnonationalist line, and do not admit any possibility for someone who has more than trace non-European ancestry to become ‘British’ (something which I do not agree with, but let us hear them out for now). For if we said ‘values’ did not matter at all, we would say that Sarah, who is firmly ethnically English, but who has moved into a Pakistani community and adopted fully the ‘values’ — she has ‘reverted’, now wears a niqab, is an Islamist, and refuses to snitch on known ‘grooming gang’ members who sexually abuse the ‘outgroup’ — is equally as ‘British’ as Steve, who works as a plumber, goes down the pub most evenings after work, watches the game on the weekend, loves Lee Anderson, and votes Reform UK.

But this doesn’t seem right: to most people, intuitively, Steve actually seems more British than Sarah, despite Steve and Sarah being of the same ethnicity. This is true even for the vast majority of those who take the view that Steve and Sarah are actually both ‘British’. So, even if we think that ethnicity matters to ‘Britishness’, we can see that it seems prima facie unlikely that we can fully reduce ‘Britishness’ to ethnicity, nothing more and nothing less. While there are some people who would still claim that Sarah is no less ‘British’ than Steve, this would be out of line with an intuitive understanding, and also out of line with the popular understanding. ‘Britishness’ seems to be linked to ethnicity — hence why Sarah causes us such a logical problem — but is also more than just a matter of ethnicity.

Furthermore, it is also likely that many uncontroversially British people, including those who do admit some role (or even a major role) for ethnicity in defining ‘Britishness’, would, rightly or wrongly, actually recognise not only Steve to be more ‘British’ than Sarah, but certain highly integrated immigrants to be more ‘British’ than Sarah too.

But why? What are ordinary people’s intuitions trying to tell us here? So far, I think we can say the following things:

1. ‘Britishness’ cannot be reduced to ‘values’ (or ‘culture’) alone.

2. ‘Britishness’ cannot be reduced to ethnicity alone (unlike ‘Englishness’).

Returning to family resemblance concepts, is this how we can solve this puzzle? By saying, as our fellow contributor does, that we can identify who is and is not ‘British’ by merely observing how much they resemble cases of people we firmly understand to be ‘British’? This seems to tell us why most incontrovertibly ‘British’ people, even those with a certain degree of ethnic consciousness, think that certain highly assimilated immigrants are, in fact, ‘British’. It also tells us why many (most?) British people, if they are speaking honestly, don’t actually think that the Bangladeshis in Whitechapel are ‘British’. This is because they in no way resemble, ethnically or otherwise, the ordinary British person. They only resemble British people in one way: holding a British passport. If this is sufficient, then ‘Britishness’ is no longer a family resemblance concept, as it has only one, sufficient, condition (namely, citizenship). While this is not a logically incoherent approach, readers need not be reminded of the absurdities that this view has caused in the past.

This, however, does not seem to solve the case of Sarah. Most (though not all) people would still say that she is ‘British’ despite the fact that she seems to resemble, in most ways, a Pakistani more than the average British person. It is, after all, only in ethnicity that she does not resemble a Pakistani.

‘But Sarah does resemble a Britisher more than a Pakistani’, a Wittgensteinian might say in response. ‘After all, she is ethnically English, she was presumably born into a typical English family, she grew up in a British household, and only when she became an adult did she adopt her new way of life. This is why we must call her not only “British”, but no less “British” than Steve.’ Fair enough. But what if we go further, and say that Sarah had instead been adopted at birth? What then? It seems that eventually, Sarah’s supporters would seriously struggle to justify why they consider Sarah to be ‘British’ on the basis of ‘Britishness’ being a family resemblance concept. This is because Sarah now resembles the average British person in one way, and one way only: she is ethnically English. At this point — once again — ‘Britishness’ is no longer a family resemblance concept, as it has only one, sufficient, condition (namely, ethnicity). Again, while this is not a logically incoherent approach, it risks creating absurdities and clearly conflicts with the intuitions of most people.

And yet, I think that we must still consider Sarah to be ‘British’, even though she is still less British than Steve. This shows that we cannot simply resort to, ‘It’s a family resemblance concept, mate’, when debating who is and isn’t ‘British’. The intuitive answers to the puzzles we have posed require us to go beyond this.

A Positive Account

So what about Sarah, who was adopted into a Pakistani family at birth, and who has become culturally more Pakistani than British? Why is it that most people still consider her to be British? I believe it is for this reason:

• Someone who is born in Britain, to firmly British parents, can be considered ‘British’ no matter what they do with themselves.

This principle explains our intuitions far better than a family resemblance concept. For — as mentioned earlier — while we do consider Sarah to be ‘British’, we can still consider Steve to be more ‘British’. I think this can bring us to a few further claims:

• ‘British’ is not merely something that you either are or are not. It is something that you can be more of, or less of. Somewhere out there, there is indeed a Platonic form of ‘Britishness’. What exactly this looks like is up for debate. It probably involves a combination of being born in Britain and identifying only as ‘British’ and solely growing up in Britain and being a British citizen and being of solely Anglo-Celtic ethnicity and the staunch, even vehement, adoption of certain cultural behaviours and values that are strongly associated with ‘Britishness’.

• However, that is not to say that as a result, there cannot be a line one can draw to determine whether someone is considered ‘British’.

I think that most of the confusion about how we define ‘Britishness’ stems from this second claim. I believe the solution to this apparent conundrum (i.e., where to draw the line) comes in seeing ‘Britishness’ as something that has different sets of sufficient conditions, but no necessary conditions. (It is in this way that I agree with Ryle that we must come out against the ‘essentialist’, who seeks to find a common property that all ‘British’ people share.) This means that there are multiple ways in which someone can become British.

The first way is the one that we have already mentioned: if you are of one of the ethnicities included under the umbrella of ‘British ethnicities’ — i.e., the Anglo-Celtic peoples — mentioned above, were born in Britain and possess citizenship, and you additionally identify yourself as British, then you are automatically considered ‘British’ regardless of what you do, say, or believe. If you were born ‘British’ in this way, then you will always remain ‘British’.

But there is another way one can be considered ‘British’ — a much harder way. One can become British by coming here and fully adopting a British way of life, as principally defined by living in ways that are exemplified by people from the aforementioned ‘ethnically British’ groups. It of course follows that this is in flux, both historically and today: if Muslims had conquered Britain in the early medieval period but left no real genetic trace, Sarah’s lifestyle would not be out of the ordinary for someone who is English, while Steve’s would be strange. I think this is probably where, if we wished, we could introduce a family resemblance concept. In this way, a ‘British way of life’ would be one which resembles the way of life of those we would firmly call British (especially those of one of the ‘British ethnicities’).

What does this account tell us? Firstly, it highlights the role of ethnicity in ‘Britishness’. After all, an important indicator (though it is neither necessary, nor even sufficient) as to whether someone is ‘British’ is clearly whether they a member of one of the ‘British ethnicities’. It is in this sense at least that Ryle is right in saying that values do not matter. But secondly, it also actually highlights the relevance of ‘values’, which I think mirrors the intuitions of many (most?) uncontroversially ‘British’ people. Yes, there is such a thing as a ‘British culture’, and yes, there is such a thing as ‘British values’ (though they aren’t the five that we are given, and indeed it is probably impossible to enumerate them in this way, let alone, even more absurdly, to teach them). What these two things are is a question for another day, but they do both exist.

However, the barriers to ‘becoming British’ as an ethnic and/or political outsider should be high. This should help us guard against the following two claims:

1. Anyone who completes the citizenship test and becomes a British citizen is therefore ‘British’, no ifs, no buts.

According to our account, this claim is false, because passing the British citizenship test is simultaneously too easy, yet also too hard. It is too easy, because knowing Britain’s history and how our government works does not make you ‘British’ any more than a Koreanist knowing all about the history and government of Korea is ‘Korean’. You don’t ‘become British’ through remembering facts: you ‘become British’ by adopting a way of life; something that, as a previous contributor has argued, is almost certainly only possible if the dominant element is organic imitation. But it is also too hard, because most people who are ‘ethnically British’ — the people we have established are clearly British — do not actually know the answers to all the questions to the citizenship test (e.g., very few ‘ethnically British’ people born and living in England will know how many people sit on a Scottish jury — the answer, by the way, is fifteen, against England’s twelve).

2. Anyone, anywhere across the globe who fully adopts the ‘British way of life’ is now ‘British’.

To prevent this claim, I noted that you must come to Britain to have the chance of being considered British (and there is no ‘gotcha moment’ where you take a flight to Britain and then leave). You must move here and settle here and then fully adopt the way of life. Furthermore, the British way of life isn’t just some Anglophile obsession with the Royal Family and the Empire, but is instead organic: living in Britain in a British community and living as they do, in all ways, privately and publicly.

We still have one case to figure out, though. I pointed out earlier that despite Sarah and Steve both being firmly ‘British’, on account of their ethnicity, we still consider Steve to be, at least in some sense, more British than Sarah. I think I have illustrated why: Steve adopts the British way of life far better than Sarah — hence why he is more British.

So, to conclude, one is British if they are either born ‘ethnically British’, or if they move here and fully adopt the British way of life, which means a full cultural adoption of Britain, not just coherence to some values or knowledge of some history and institutions. Furthermore, one who is firmly ‘ethnically British’, but adopts the British way of life more than another, can be considered ‘more British’.

Is this just ‘civic nationalism’ all over again?

To some readers of this article, I can already see you thinking this account stinks of Woke. Am I just another ‘civic nationalist’ who believes that it doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from as long as you believe in the five ‘British values’?

This is not my account. It is not in any sense a true ‘civic nationalist’ account (as conventionally understood) because it understands that ethnicity is usually of substantial importance in determining ‘Britishness’, even though there is also another route a person can take to ‘become British’. My account is not that the Bangladeshi can come here, move into a Bangladeshi-dominated area, and so long as they can occasionally make a performance of waving the flag and singing God Save the King, they are just as British as Steve.

I see the ethnonationalist, who sees ‘British’ as purely an ethnic term, putting forward the following argument as a response: ‘So, you would have no problem if, hypothetically, the hundreds of thousands who are coming to this country today were all British Patriots. After all, you would then consider them British.’

I don’t think that this argument succeeds.

Firstly, in my account, someone who is from one of the British ethnic groups listed above is still ‘more British’, at least in some sense, than someone who becomes British through assimilation. Therefore, it would appear that millions of easily-assimilated, would-be patriots from around the world coming here would still make Britain less British overall.

However, the second (and bigger) point is this: although this hypothetical situation is theoretically possible, it will never occur. People are seeking to create a logically invincible — but practically flawed — argument merely to guard against something that is not even worth thinking about. With high levels of net migration, there is no need for immigrants to assimilate; indeed, I would go as far as to say that it is impossible for them to assimilate, even under far more generous definitions of ‘assimilation’ than the one I would give. My account of ‘Britishness’ is quite clearly only compatible with both relatively small migration flows and relatively small immigrant stocks, as both seem to be required for the average immigrant to assimilate. The reason that we find the idea that there would be millions upon millions of Indians who sincerely love Britain and want to be as British as Steve flooding the country amusing is precisely because it will never occur.

I can see one more response to my argument that must be dealt with: ‘Surely, then, the Normans, or the Anglo-Saxons, or the Vikings, during the time they were coming to Britain en masse, wouldn’t have been considered British?’ I think the answer to this question is obviously ‘yes’. I don’t think the Vikings who raided the shorelines of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire before settling here should have been considered British at the time (or, more accurately, English). It is only after hundreds of years of cultural change and intermixing with the natives that they became ‘English’. History supports such an interpretation: Bede writes of the ‘British’ (meaning the native population) and ‘Anglo-Saxons’ as distinct, rather than viewing both as bona fide ‘British ethnicities’ as we do today. None of this means we need to see immigrant groups as constituting ‘ethnically British’ groups today on the basis that future mixing might occur, or that we cannot consider whether this is a good course for our country to take.

I think, then, we have found a somewhat satisfactory way for Bazza to respond to Otto, even if there are still some loose ends to tie up. When Otto says, ‘You haven’t told me what it is to be British. What do you mean that the Bangladeshis in Whitechapel aren’t British?’, Bazza responds, ‘To be British is either to be born ethnically British which consists of…’ — Bazza lists off the ethnicities — ‘…or to fully assimilate and adopt a British way of life, something that can be exemplified by the way in which most people of British ethnicity live.’ The people who Bazza objects to in Whitechapel fulfil neither condition, hence they are not really ‘British’. With this, I think that Bazza can best sneaky Otto in their debate.

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This article was written an anonymous Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to pimlicojournal@substack.com.

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