At the start of the summer, various articles appeared in the press bemoaning the ethnic composition of the population living in public housing in the UK, or even of London itself. I pushed back in a short Substack piece, asking whether these writers and politicians really meant to imply that British citizens whose ethnicity was not what was increasingly being described as “white British” should somehow count for less.
The UK’s social norms about race and immigration were much more fragile than I had realised. Just a year after the country’s first ethnic minority prime minister since Benjamin Disraeli had left office, thinkers and politicians on the right seemed to be toying with the idea that Rishi Sunak was not properly “English”, or that racial diversity was undesirable.
My intervention had me labelled a “left-liberal”. This felt odd to me. Until quite recently, parties across the political spectrum agreed that increased racial diversity among, say, politicians, had been a good thing. According to a 2020 Ipsos poll, 93 per cent of Brits disagreed that “to be truly British you have to be white”. We used to view this support for inclusive norms about Britishness as a positive.
The new trend towards ethnonationalist commentary likely reflects the decline in the proportion of “white British” people in the population. The most obvious reason for this is migration, including plenty of “white other” people from eastern Europe. But there is also the increasing frequency of marriage across ethnic divides—according to the 2021 census, more than 1.7m people in England and Wales now identify as of “mixed” ethnicity, compared to 1.2m in 2011. That same 2020 poll found 89 per cent of people would be happy for their children to marry someone of a different ethnicity. But the children of those who have the temerity to do so will exit the category of “white British”, increasingly held up by a certain right-wing punditry as the most deserving category for public housing or residency in London.
As the summer wore on, what began as ethno-curious wonkery seems to have become something rather darker. There is a sense that, even beyond online right-wing circles, the country is turning inwards and against certain ethnic minorities. Take some recent events. In York, a Chinese restaurant was defaced with racist abuse. When a local Asian Brit in Nuneaton was speaking to Sky News, the interview was interrupted by two women, with kids in tow, shouting racial abuse.
Let’s call this turn what it is: racist. This is racism of a type that mainstream politicians have not encouraged since the early 1980s. Politicians seem to be fuelling the debate rather than calling it out.
What was purportedly a national crisis about asylum seekers illegally arriving on boats seems to have metastasised—into criticism of legal migrants, including those with indefinite leave to remain, and ultimately into a suspicion that “white British” people are losing out to non-white British citizens, and that the former should come first instead.
Even usually sensible politicians have found themselves drawn to talking about racial categories. The Tory MP Neil O’Brien recently argued that because the number of people who are “white British” has become a minority in parts of London, “in many places people cannot really integrate into the traditional majority culture because it doesn’t exist anymore”.
The right seems to have abdicated all responsibility for this slide into darkness
I find this curious. I am almost 50 and grew up in a Britain where Floella Benjamin and Andi Peters presented the kids’ TV I watched; where my childhood football heroes were Ian Wright, Mark Bright and John Salako. Was I supposed to be limiting my “traditional majority culture” to Bernard Manning and Jim Davidson?
Who exactly wants to reverse the last 50 years? Robert Jenrick is talking about returning to before this time, to an era of net emigration. Why is his party’s leader Kemi Badenoch not asking why he is so keen on the term “white British”? Why are Susan Hall and Gavin Williamson toying with Rupert Lowe’s political movement that advocates “remigration”, another term for deporting migrants. The right seems to have abdicated all responsibility for this slide into darkness.
And what of Keir Starmer? It took a 150,000-strong Tommy Robinson march that included fights with the police and racial slurs against Londoners for the PM to raise his head above the parapet. During the Labour conference, he finally brought up the “r” word. But Labour remains oddly cautious about celebrating the anti-racist British values that its party members and most of the public were happy to laud.
This is social norm reinforcement 101. The British people in 2025 are emphatically not racist. But that is in part because of decades of politicians, the media and, yes, all of the rest of us enforcing that norm.
We are not alone in experiencing a politicised rise in white ethnonationalism—witness the concerning term “heritage Americans” being used stateside. Alex Garland’s film Civil War, released last year, put its finger on this trend with Jesse Plemons’s cameo as a yellow shades-wearing, trigger-happy militia man. When he finds his captives are American, he asks “What kind of American are you?”
Do we really want to be asking, “What kind of British are you?”
