My Response to Rishi Sunak - Konstantin Kisin

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1:19You know what to do. Order on the Sweetgreen app. My response to Rishi Sunak.

1:30Former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has written a piece in the Sunday Times about identity, integration, and me. He doesn't say so explicitly, but he doesn't need to. Instead, he quotes me without attribution. Less anger-inducing, but stranger still, he writes, was a debate that kicked off after I left office about whether I was English or not. The claim was that I couldn't be because I was, quote, a brown Hindu. That was me. In February last year on Trigonometry, Fraser Nelson raised Sunak unprompted in a debate about identity and told me that Sunak was as English as Tiza and Yfront. I made a nuanced counter-argument, but in the ensuing crosstalk I said, he's a brown Hindu, how is he English?

2:11That was not the best articulation of an argument which Nelson himself described as a perfectly fair point in the aftermath. What I meant to use was the phrase that nobody objects to when the BBC uses it, British Asian, and I reached for a shortcut that obscured the argument rather than sharpening it. That's on me, and I've said so before. I typically don't go around issuing verdicts on whether people are English. I was answering a claim that had been put to me about a man I've never met and bear no ill will towards on a podcast where my job is to respond to what my guest says. I'd have preferred the argument stay general rather than focusing on Sunak.

2:48He didn't and he's had a year of being the case study, which I regret. I texted him privately to say so. No reply. I don't know if the number I was given for him is no longer in use, or he simply doesn't want to accept my apology. If it's the latter, that is of course his right. That's the concession. Here's what I won't concede. The charge that followed was not that I phrased it badly. It was that my position was racist. I have two children. Both were born in England to British parents who each came here from somewhere else. My children are not English either. They're British. I said this in the very same podcast Sunak pulls quotes from in his article.

3:27My kids also happen to be whiter than a Michael Buble Christmas album. So either I'm racist against my own white children, or maybe this isn't an argument about race. So Ella Braverman, Sunak's own former Home Secretary, responded to the row about my comments by penning an article in which she argued that as a proud British Asian, she herself is not English. Is she racist against herself? Or is there perhaps a more substantive discussion being had than people would like to pretend? It's 2026, of course, so to many people everything is about race. But instead of having the stupid version of this debate, let's take Sunak's argument and address it on its merits.

4:05Let's accept that anyone can be English. All there is required is to be born in England and to say you're English. Feels good, doesn't it? If you're an ethnic minority like Sunak or an immigrant like me, just saying this coats you in a comforting protection of fitting in, being safe, living in the land of beautiful diversity. And if you're a white bread who says this, what a relief to know that you're definitely not a nasty racist. To his credit, despite repeatedly and deliberately conflating Englishness with Britishness at his convenience, Sunak is an intelligent man who can't pretend he doesn't actually understand the argument I'm making some people he says will argue that English is an ethnic identity and British is a civic identity though if you think those nuances are heard by most people I fear you are being rather and perhaps even willfully naive he says if you were born and brought up in England and view it as home what are you other than English attempting to deny people the English or Britishness because of the color of their skin is a recipe for alienation and for a two-tier society.

5:12How are children who hear this meant to feel? If I was at any point naive about people's ability to hear the nuance of this debate, I've certainly been disabused of my delusions by the backlash to my comments. The problem for SUNAC, however, and more importantly for our country, is that just because a lot of people are too busy, too scared, or too uninterested to understand the problem does not mean the problem will magically disappear. Would Sunak argue that the majority of the British public are currently willing to hear the nuances of the national debt, which is greater than our GDP, or that raising taxes will not deliver prosperity for the very people that measure is alleged to help?

5:49I doubt it. That many are unable to pass the complexities of a particular issue does not render that issue irrelevant. What Sunak actually wants is for us to accept that this debate is pointless not because it doesn't matter but because he's right as he says in the opening of his article in Britain we've created the most successful multi-faith multi-ethnic democracy job done case closed unfortunately for all of us the reason we're having this debate is that to a large and growing number of people in Britain this multicultural experiment doesn't feel all that successful indeed the failure of this approach has become so undeniable that we've given up cancelling people who make this observation.

6:32In her brilliant upcoming book, Diversity is Not Our Strength, Catherine Burblesingh, an inner-city teacher and founder of the Michaela School, whose life's work has been to inculcate a largely ethnic minority intake of students into uniting around their British identity, chronicles the rising self-segregation among children across schools which fail to do this. The inner-city scene I've described, she says, in the long run is more divisive than is understood. I've seen it all before. The Bengali kids sit together. The Pakistani kids sit on the other side of the hall. The Hindu-Indian kids sit together.

7:07The Black-African kids sit together, sometimes divided on the basis of whether they're Christian or Muslim. The Eastern European kids have their area outside by a set group of benches. At other moments, friendships across divides will be formed. But there's a catch. They will be bound together by the idea that they all experience marginalization or are all from somewhere else. Last year, a 12-year-old girl turned up for Culture Celebration Day prepared to give a short speech about her culture, just like all the other pupils. The event was dedicated to, quote, recognizing and celebrating the rich cultural diversity within our school community.

7:44We encourage students to consider wearing attire that reflects their nationality or family heritage, the school said. Unfortunately for the girl in question, the culture she wanted to talk about was British, and the flag on her dress was the Union Jack. As will surprise no one who's been paying attention, far from being included in her school's delightful celebrations, she was prevented from speaking and sent home. Diversity, it turns out, is not for everyone. Some groups are more equal than others. This phenomenon in Britain's schools is replicating across society at large, where the endless celebrations of diversity combined with outright hostility towards English and increasingly British identity, history and culture are creating an equal and opposite reaction.

8:29For many years now, a small number of sensible people have warned that identity politics for minorities would inevitably lead to identity politics for the majority. If you spend 20 years telling people that what matters about them is not what unites them, allegiance and affinity to the country in which they all live, but what makes them different, their ethnicity, then inevitably everyone will want a piece of the action. That's just human nature. Add to this the unprecedented demographic change that has occurred in this country in recent decades, whereby Britain went from being a white British country with a small number of well-integrated ethnic minority residents to white British people now being a minority in several of its major cities, including its capital.

9:14Why would we be surprised that there is now a debate about identity? Words are by their very nature exclusive rather than inclusive. To describe something as a table is to necessarily claim that it is not a chair. That does not mean that all tables are identical, that a random member of the public can reliably explain what makes a table a table, or even that you cannot eat off a chair the way you might eat off a table, or sit on a table the way you might sit on a chair. But we all accept that there's a difference between tables and chairs. To say that something is A is to simultaneously make the claim that it is not B.

9:51Sunak's argument is that we should reject the idea that there's anything exclusive about the English identity. Anyone can be English if they feel that they are and were born here. Erling Haaland, born in Leeds, would become English tomorrow, simply by saying that he feels English. Given England's performance against Argentina, many would be forgiven for hoping that he does. But those who adapt this instrumental view of identity like Sunak do not seem to realize that they are playing directly into the hands of the ethno-nationalist right. And when he says that attempting to deny people their Englishness is a recipe for alienation, for a two-tier society, does he imagine that denying people belonging to a unique and special group only has a negative effect on ethnic minorities?

10:35Does he really think that saying to ethnically English people that they are the only people in human history who are not allowed to have their own ethnic identity, will not make them feel like they live in a two-tier society? Like Sunak, I do not have any great desire to engage in these debates. I would very much like to return to the Britain to which I came in 1995, one in which foreigners like me were welcomed as guests in manageable numbers, encouraged to integrate and become British, and these debates were not had because they were not necessary. But 30 years of uncontrolled mass immigration, the frankly outrageous opening of our borders to hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants with no legitimate claim to be here, and the pernicious ideology of diversity and inclusion being rammed down the British people's throats have put an end to that.

11:25I'm aware that carefully crafted polling will show that a significant proportion of people in Britain disagree with me. If asked whether a well-known and well-liked British citizen of minority ethnic origin is English, many will say that he is. But I wonder how many people would agree that in England populated exclusively by people whose parents were born abroad, no matter how integrated, is England as they think of it. This entire thing is a trap that is destined to lead Britain down the path to segregation, tribalism and civil strife. There's only one way out because there's only one type of a successful multi-ethnic society.

12:04Those societies are called empires. How do empires work? A single ethnic group expands the borders of its country so that it encompasses other ethnic groups. The original ethnic group, Romans in the Roman Empire, Russians in the Russian Empire, Ottomans in the Ottoman Empire, remains a distinct ethnic group, but a civic identity is created to incorporate the other ethnicities who make up the society. As such, you could be a Roman citizen who was not a Roman, a Russian citizen who is not ethnically Russian. We actually have two different words for this in Russian. Ruski, which means an ethnic Russian, and Rossiyanin, a Russian national.

12:42For example, no one in Russia would describe Russian UFC champion Khabib Nurmagomedov as an ethnic Russian, East Dagestani. But everyone would agree he is a Russian citizen and celebrate his achievements on behalf of his country, with the ethnically Russian president calling him to congratulate him on his victories. The solution to Britain's conundrum is no different. First, the English, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish identity must be allowed to exist as ethnic identities. Second, they must be allowed to take their rightful place and be celebrated as the founding ethnic groups of Britain, to which others have been added.

13:16Far from being denigrated, denied and diluted as they are today, they must be acknowledged and recognized. They must, in other words, be included and considered part of the beautiful diversity of Britain. Then we must do everything in our power to focus on what unites us as citizens who love their country and want it to thrive and succeed. We must focus, in other words, on our Britishness. What is that exactly? What is it that we can all get behind? Hating the French, of course. But alas, that's not going to be enough. The erudite and well-traveled American journalist Richard Miniter once told me a story about traveling in Africa.

13:56I remember spending the night in a mud hut in northern Uganda with some local tribesmen in the late 1990s, he told me. One of the older guys surprised me as we were falling asleep and talking in front of a smoky fire. He asked if the British would ever return to Uganda. I was astonished by the question, Richard said. Why would you want them, he asked. The answer was long and discursive, but basically boiled down to this. They have no tribes. They're fair. They invented the modern world. You can win fights in their courts against them, and they will patiently and calmly teach you anything that you want to know about their society.

14:33The fact that a tribesman in Uganda can articulate these elusive British values better than most people in Britain, including its leaders, is a large part of the reason we are where we are. The way out will not be easy, but it begins with acknowledging the problems we face and acting accordingly. If you enjoy these videos, remember that they're available on my sub stack as articles at www.constantinkission.com days, weeks, and sometimes months ahead of time. So head on over to www.constantinkission.com right now and subscribe. As you know, I've been concerned about both the economic and political direction of travel of Western countries in recent years.

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