What is it to be English?

... or Scots, Irish or Welsh?  Manx?

Steve in a comment at Unherdables:

Reform can’t be trusted with our identity. Tice completely swerved an ethnicity question put to him on GB News this morning. Long story but it’s to do with a reply made by Reform’s Suella Braverman MP on the BBC’s Question Time last Thursday. Was she British or English?

Though she was born in Harrow, London, she (dis)averred that she was a British national because her origins were elsewhere. In her case India. In other words she is not ethnically English. Her answer prompted the white Labour MP on the panel to accuse her of racism.

Decades of mass uncontrolled immigration we didn’t vote for and now, for good measure, they want to cancel our origins. You were right about Reform UK, James.

Tyler on X:

The argument is reinforced by the fact that James Goddard lives in Thailand, but describing him as ethnically Thai would be absurd.

James Goddard:

Amir Khan is NOT English Sadiq Khan is NOT English John Barnes is NOT English Bukayo Saka is NOT English Frank Bruno is NOT English Priti Patel is NOT English Rishi Sunak is NOT English

Carl Wilkinson:

The English are the historic people formed in England through a particular ethnogenesis: the interaction and consolidation of Anglo-Saxon, Brittonic, Norse, Norman and other elements into a distinct population, with its own inherited language, institutions, customs, historical memory and continuity across generations. No other people on earth have that exact history of formation. The French do not. The Japanese do not. The Nigerians do not. The Scots do not. Each has its own ethnogenesis. That particular history is what makes English ethnicity English. So saying “everyone is mixed” proves nothing. Mixture is universal in the abstract; ethnogenesis is particular in reality. What matters is which peoples mixed, where, when, through what historical processes, and what continuing people emerged from them. Only the English descend from the specifically English ethnogenesis. That is precisely why “mixed” cannot be used as a magic word to dissolve the English into humanity in general.