The arguments have been endless and they are fatuous. Wales and Scotland stopped conflating national identity with race: why can’t England?
In 2021, the then shadow justice secretary, David Lammy, asserted his Englishness on the Saturday LBC programme he hosted, only for a caller named Jean to insist that his African-Caribbean heritage disqualified him. He could be British, she maintained, but “never be English”. Jean defended Englishness as though it were a possession she would never surrender to the country’s Black populace. Lammy’s entreaties to recognise it as a civic identity were ignored, as Jean attempted to demarcate its racial boundary live, on air.
After cross-party condemnation of Jean’s nativist screed, Lammy would go on to appeal for census options that would allow him, his children and other Black people building lives in England to identify as English, but the Office for National Statistics (ONS) stood firm. A spokesperson responded: “The evidence did not support a change to include Black English in England.” This was despite the ONS having recommended Black Welsh and Asian Welsh categories, with equivalent options available in Scotland. In Wales, the change followed criticism that census categories recognised Welsh identity among white respondents but not ethnic minorities; Scotland’s approach was informed by research and consultation showing that Scottishness was integral to the identities of many people from ethnic minority backgrounds.