Britons should be able to define themselves as both Black and English, according to senior MPs who are calling to broaden the range of ethnicity options in the census.
The cross-party push is a riposte to Reform UK politicians who have claimed that people from minority ethnic backgrounds cannot have English ethnic identity.
The Liberal Democrat president, Josh Babarinde, is launching the drive, with backing from the former deputy prime minister David Lammy, the former foreign secretary James Cleverly and other prominent MPs including the Conservative Mark Pritchard and the Lib Dem chair of the health select committee, Layla Moran.
The MPs say the current definition of Englishness on the census means 60% of England’s World Cup squad would not technically be classified as English on the census.
“I’m a proud Englishman and Englishness is about more than the colour of your skin,” Babarinde said. “Most people in this country already agree that you don’t have to be White to be English. Just look at the England football team. But our census hasn’t properly caught up.”
MPs backing a bill proposing the change have been highly critical of comments from the Reform UK MP Suella Braverman – a former Conservative home secretary – in which she said she did not consider herself ethnically English because of her south Asian heritage.
Braverman said she did not take “a ‘laissez-faire, anything-goes’ attitude to ethnicity, citizenship and identity … I take the conservative approach. Englishness is an ethnicity. There have been English people for centuries and we need to recognise this more if we are to start taking a more muscular approach to citizenship and nationality. And no, it’s not racist to say this.”
Those remarks are part of the motivation for some MPs to seek a change to the next census to ensure that Englishness is not categorised separately to ethnicity. In England, the ethnic group question offers “English” only within the “White” category, although about 11% of UK-born population in England and Wales (about 5 million people) are from a minority ethnic background.
But Asian, Black, mixed and other respondents can describe themselves as British, for example “Asian or Asian British”, but have no option to describe themselves as English.
This stands in contrast to the census in Scotland and Wales, which offers options such as “Scottish Asian”, and “Black Welsh”.
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MPs will give their backing to a 10-minute rule bill on Tuesday tabled by Babarinde. The short bills rarely become law but are used by MPs as devices to raise particular matters of policy. The bill would require the ethnic group question in future censuses in England to give respondents in every category the option to identify as English.
The bill also has backing from Conservative MP Ben Obese-Jecty, Labour’s Adam Jogee and and the Lib Dems’ Munira Wilson.
“This bill is about standing up to those want to gatekeep Englishness exclusively for White people and standing up to those who seek to divide us over who counts as English. This is about bringing people together around our shared Englishness,” Babarinde said.
Braverman’s comments have drawn criticism even within Reform UK. The party’s chair, Zia Yusuf, distanced himself from her view, saying: “I’m a Chelsea fan and in my view Ashley Cole is the best English fullback in history, and I won’t take any other position. So in my view, Ashley Cole is English. The argument that he’s not English doesn’t hold water with me.”
