Who Counts?

The increasing extremism in British commentary about race

I was supposed to write a data-rich analysis of UK immigration attitudes and policy for my next Substack and I’ll get there. But there’s something I wanted to say first, so that it’s not disguised by graphs, figures and dry analysis. There is something disturbing going on in British commentary about race and ethnicity. And those of us with an audience - however small - I think have the responsibility to call this out. I don’t think I am going to say anything hugely profound here but I think it’s still worth saying. And the basic gist is this - all British citizens are equal. Or to use the meme…

Why would I say something so incredibly obvious? Well apparently, this is now a controversial claim among segments of the commentariat. I don’t want to call these commentators names - I believe my readers can make their own judgment about the character and morals of these individuals. I will simply note that for a large number of writers - from Matt Goodwin to David Goodhart, Lord Frost to the MP Neil O’Brien - the distinctions among British citizens are apparently important and worthy of what can at best be described as suspicion and at worst denigration.

As Gavin Jackson from the Economist noted on Bluesky the other day, these individuals appear to have been ‘inspired’ by a series of definitions used by the UK Census and the Office for National Statistics, apparently innocuously. The two key measures are “Non-UK Born” and “White British”.

Let’s start with the former because, while misleading in a number of ways, I think its use has been less abhorrent. It is also a binary - you were either born within the United Kingdom or not. This feels like it should be a measure of whether someone is a first generation immigrant or not too. But that’s not quite right. Do you know why I know? Because I was not born in the UK.

I was born in Stanford University Hospital while my (British) parents were working in California in the late 1970s. Accordingly, I am British by descent and was registered in that way. A similar story holds for Boris Johnson (New York City) and Rory Stewart (Hong Kong) and Emma Watson (Paris). Note that in ethnic terms we are all ‘white British’.

So we have our first wrinkle in using ‘non-UK born’ as a shorthand for immigration. In one sense, I am a first generation immigrant, moving to the UK at six months old and going to school here. In another sense, I suspect almost no-one in Britain would refer to me, or Boris, Rory and Emma, as an immigrant. Why not? Because they will be tricked, if you will, by our ethnicity.

There is another way in which ‘non-UK born’ can be, though doesn’t have to be, misleading. You can of course become a British citizen through the process of naturalisation. Britain’s rules on this are currently fairly clear and middle of the pack in terms of stringency, though the financial cost of becoming a citizen is far higher than in most countries (for reasons that I don’t really follow but potentially relate to the Home Office viewing immigrants as a plump target for squeezing out all kinds of arbitrary fees). Around 200,000 people a year at the moment naturalise.

This can really add up. According to the Migration Observatory, in 2021, 43% of non-UK born residents were British citizens. Some will be like me - essentially British citizens from birth. But others, I suspect the vast bulk, will be immigrants who naturalised.

And this is a massive success. Surely anyone who cares about integration should welcome long-term immigrants deciding to become politically incorporated into their country of residence. Rob Ford has often noted that the British public tend to have quite welcoming views in terms of how long it should take to become a citizen and in reducing the costs to doing so.

I am aware, all too aware, that on X - the everything (including the worst things) app - there are a number of accounts who deny that naturalised citizens can ever become ‘British’. For such people, your ethnicity or your birthplace conquers all. I have my own views on the morality of these people, which you can probably guess. But in any case, what they think has no bearing on the status of someone’s citizenship. You either are, or you aren’t, and it doesn’t matter what @pAtRiOtIcBrIt1488 thinks.

And yet still journalists and commentators are prone to use non-UK born as a short-hand for non-citizen. I hope the quick discussion above might dissuade people of making that false assumption.

The non-UK born debate has been floating around for a while. Rob Ford and Jonathan Portes spend fruitless hours trying to explain the difference between non-UK born and non-citizen to people. For which their reward will be in heaven.

But I can at least understand why many people make this mistake innocently. Immigration really has been very high in the UK in recent years. And the British public pretty consistently call for lower immigration in public opinion surveys. This slowed down, perhaps reversed, just after Brexit, but the last couple of years have seen concerns about immigration rise, along with the surge in immigration numbers in 2023-24.

I’ll write about public opinion and immigration in my next post but I want to be clear that I don’t think debating the level of immigration should be viewed as inherently illegitimate. There are ultimately some physical limits on the number of migrants that the United Kingdom could absorb and the social and political limits are substantially lower than that. I might be personally comfortable with high levels of immigration but other people are not and I don’t think it makes sense to shut them out of the debate. Nation states have the ability and right to set some boundaries of membership. How stringent those boundaries should be is the stuff of politics.

What is not, in my view, legitimate is to denigrate, explicitly or implicitly, the ethnic background of existing migrants or British citizens.

And this is where the term ‘white British’ comes in. The term is a product of the way the UK Census (currently) asks about ethnicity. The categories that are used are ultimately social constructions of one kind or another. There are five categories of ‘white’ - ‘white British’, ‘white Irish’, ‘white Gypsy or traveller’, ‘white Roma’ and ‘white Other’. The census distinguishes among Asians - ‘Indian, ‘Pakistani’, ‘Bangladeshi’, ‘Pakistani’, and ‘Other’ - and Blacks - ‘Caribbean’, ‘African’ and ‘Other’. And then there are various ‘Mixed’ categories and finally ‘Other’ ethnic group, which amazingly has the two categories of ‘Arab’ and ‘Other’.

In other words, it’s all rather arbitrary - a mix of national identities and regional identities, race and ethnicity, with lots of residual ‘Other’ groups and the slightly grudging ‘Mixed’ categories, which feel like the Census mildly resents complicated categories of descent.

These are also self-declarations. I suspect a lot of people who answer ‘white British’ might well have descent, possibly quite recent, from the other categories, particularly ‘white Irish’, or ‘white Other’. There are no hard and fast categories when it comes to our family trees when we extend them far enough.

Still, I don’t think it’s illegitimate for the Census to count ethnic categories. I am not sure we would be in a better situation if we followed the French model of refusing to collect data on racial categories, which just produces a self-congratulatory ‘we’re all French’ outcome while ignoring actually existing racial and ethnic differences in social and economic outcomes.

What is illegitimate though is for commentators to act as if white British is a pure and superior category, to which other forms of Britishness are unfavourably contrasted.

And it feels to me as if that is in fact the general tenor of many recent pieces published in the national press that bemoan in some ways or another declining numbers of white British.

Here is one-time academic Matt Goodwin, calling the decline in the percentage of ‘white British’ a ‘demographic crisis’ and highlighting the concerns of those who oppose ‘ethnic change’.

This is the fastest ethnic change the country has ever seen.

If this continues, then the share of the country’s population that identifies as “white British” is forecast to become a minority group around the year 2070.

Those who oppose these great inflows and do not embrace the rapid ethnic change they cause wonder why it is that politicians seem unable to stop them.

There is much focus on illegal immigration and the small boats in the Channel, which looks set to rise further under a likely incoming Labour government.

But most of the inward movement of people flows from legal, not illegal, immigration, so it’s not just about the difficulty in controlling Britain’s borders.

Which brings me to what this is really all about.

If you really want to understand the looming demographic crisis that is facing Britain and many other Western nations then you simply have to make sense of what I call the ‘demographic trilemma’.

As an academic I can tell you that everyone has a trilemma, and so apparently does Matt. So he’s still an academic on that front I guess. The reporting of Goodwin’s report in the Telegraph also has some complicated versions of white Britishness which appear to remove anyone descendant from a migrant parent, along with those born abroad, or of different ethnicity. This led to lots of people making jokes about King Charles not being a white British citizen under these criteria.

Personally I can’t figure out - and don’t care to take the time to - whether this was a misinterpretation of Goodwin by the Telegraph because I think there is a bigger issue at stake here. For all the - understandably humourous - jokes about Britain’s ruling monarch, there is a deeper problem here. Why do non-ethnically white British citizens count for less? Why is this a demographic ‘crisis’? What is the crisis? That some British citizens have different shades of skin than others? Is that it? Am I missing something?

Sadly I suspect I am not in fact missing something, because this focus on ‘white British’ as somehow distinct and the approved norm appears to be spreading.

Here is David Goodhart in the London Standard.

And what happens when London’s white British population falls below 20 per cent in 10 years time, as it appears on track to do? Is there some minimum number of natives that a capital requires before it ceases to be the capital? Perhaps Nigel Farage’s next policy surprise will be to propose stripping London of its capital status and moving the government to York.

There’s ‘just asking questions’ and then there is this… a series of questions ‘just asking’ whether London’s capital status ought to be removed because its ethnic mix has changed.

There is also this much mocked line about British social interactions: “Many parts of the capital would fail my integration “bus stop” test — can you share a joke at a bus stop with a stranger from a different ethnicity about something you have both heard on national media?”

I am slightly concerned that David Goodhart is not in fact British if he views this as a regular interaction among white British people in London. This feels like the kind of claim that would be the mistake that catches out a long-embedded Russian spy.

And here is Conservative MP Neil O’Brien, often lauded as one of the sharper minds in the party, writing in the Telegraph under a typically Telegraphian title of ‘Britain is heading for utter oblivion”. The piece is broader than just migration and writers rarely get to write their own headlines so perhaps we can forgive him that. But here is text from the section subtitled “Mass migration and breakneck social change”

Among private renters in Greater London around a third are white British. In Greater London schools just over one in five schoolchildren are white British. The old conversations about “integration” and “assimilation” don’t even really make sense any more. In many places people cannot really integrate into the traditional majority culture because it doesn’t exist any more.

“Traditional majority culture” you say? I’m about the same age as Neil and, as I flagged above I grew up in this country, imbibing our “traditional majority culture”. And what on earth does it have to do with the previous sentences about the proportion of people who are white British, I wonder. Because my “traditional majority culture” in the 1980s and 1990s included Lenny Henry, Ian Wright, Moira Stewart, Goodness Gracious Me, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Salman Rushdie. Did I miss something? Was I supposed to have turned the TV off if Jim Davidson wasn’t on?

But there’s more. Lord David Frost - a man engaged in a decades long competition to provide the perfect contrast to the urbane and thoughtful Sir David Frost - appeared in, where else, the Telegraph (sensing a theme here), with an article titled “The Great Britain I love is dying. We have one last chance to save it”. Why it dying you ask? Take a guess…

Frost also uses an intriguing expression that those of you who don’t spent a lot of time on X might not know - ‘Yookay’. This is a codeword used by many on the (far-)right who don’t believe that non white British UK citizens are quite the right type of citizens. Sunder Katwala does the job here of setting out the types of X-users who Frost himself recommends to learn about ‘Yookay’. Interested readers can click through and ask themselves how appropriate they think the good Lord’s choice of internet wisdom is.

I want to be clear, I make no judgment on any of these writers other than what they have written in public. You should judge the content of their words yourself. These are not words I would have written but they are words that newspapers have chosen to publish.

I am very far from the only person to wonder exactly what is going on on Britain’s right. Stephen Bush wrote eloquently about this today. Perhaps nothing I say here will differ much from the various appalled pieces you may already have read. Still, I think it is worth noting my personal concern about the outbreak of using ‘white British’ as some kind of ur-Britishness which naturalised citizens or ethnic minorities can never attain.

It’s also worth noting that the core of Britishness being ethnicity is not a widely shared view in Britain. Sir John Curtice and Alex Scholes in recent work for the British Social Attitudes survey show that the number of people who think ethnicity is part of being ‘truly British’ is a declining minority. And only 19% of people believe the statement “a person has to be born British to be truly British” reflects their views more than “It is possible to become truly British if a person makes an effort”, with 68% believing the opposite.

Most people in Britain are good, welcoming people who don’t distinguish among their fellow citizens by their ethnicity or where they were born. A citizen is a citizen is a citizen.

Of course some people don’t feel that way and never will. Liberals have been told for at least a decade, perhaps longer if we go back to Gordon Brown and ‘bigotgate’, that we need to shut up and listen to the opinions of people who dislike diversity, immigration, and racial differences. That we need to listen to those voices.

I’m a political scientist. I know that such people exist and matter politically, even if I fundamentally disagree with them. People hold all kinds of beliefs I don’t like. And they vote. When I analyse survey data I have to take their views seriously if I want to explain the shape of public opinion.

But what I don’t have to do is give them succour. Or encourage them to believe that white British people are an embattled group who need special protection over other citizens. I don’t have to denounce liberals for playing the ‘race card’, while simultaneously accentuating racial differences among British citizens.

Denigrating, implicitly or explicitly, British citizens because their ethnicity is not ‘white British’ is shameful. If you believe that non-white British citizens somehow ‘count for less’ then come out and say it directly. If you don’t, then please stop bemoaning how many non-white British citizens are using public services or living in certain locations. It is not clear to me how you can believe one of these statements without believing the other. It is a sleight of hand where we can all see the trick.

Many people have convinced themselves they are speaking for some poor benighted tribe of ‘white British’ people. But they are not. They are speaking for themselves and we can all it hear it loud and clear.