Englishness Debate, Migrant Protest Leader Arrested & Burnham's Ministry of Truth - Off the Fence

Konstantin Kisin (0:00)

Hello, everybody, and welcome to this week's Off the Fence with me, Konstantin Kisin, Francis Foster, of course, and Winston Marshall of The Winston Marshall Show and Tom Slater from SPIKED. Gentlemen, welcome back. What a show we have for you today. We're going to argue about Rishi Sunak, who's been having a pop at me, over the Englishness comments I made last year, or earlier this year, I don't remember. It feels like it was a long time ago. We will talk about the latest polling, which claims that reform would win fewer seats than labor and the Tories, but prediction markets interestingly disagree. We'll talk about that. We will talk about the anti-migrant protests happening on the south coast of the UK. And we will touch on the government's plans to effectively introduce a ministry of truth. With that aside, gentlemen, welcome back. Let's talk first and foremost about the Englishness debate. So let me set the scene.

In February, I believe, we had journalist Fraser Nelson on TRIGGERnometry, and we actually talked about the welfare system in this country, which isn't working and bankrupting the country. But as part of that, we had a robust back and forth about the importance of ethnicity and cultural identity, during which I said the eternal phrase, Rishi Sunak is not English. I wasn't the one that brought him up. It was Fraser Nelson.

And I did say that it was because he is a brown Hindu, which is not remotely what I meant, but in the context of that back and forth, it's what came out. And this week, Rishi Sunak wrote an article in which he referenced this incident again and sort of said that we, you know, we live in the most successful multi-ethnic, multi-religious, not multi-cultural importantly, but multi-religious society and creating this kind of test of who can be English is wrong and alienating and create a two-tier society for ethnic minorities.

I've written the response in order to lay out what I'm arguing. And I've had lots of invitations from various, you know, BBC and other mainstream media to talk about it. I know that having experienced that they don't want to have the actual conversation, what they want is just to call people names. For example, in this instance, they want to call me racist for saying it, even though in that very same interview, I said both of my children who, this is a joke, I pinched the Francis, by the way, but I think it's a very good joke. Both of my children are whiter than a Michael Buble Christmas album. I also said that they can't be English because they are born in this country to two parents who were born in a, who are of a different ethnicity and born abroad, even though they're born in England to two British citizens. So it's not about race.

So Ella Braverman, the former home secretary, Rishi's former home secretary actually, wrote several articles saying, she's not English. Lots of people say that they are English. Rishi Sunak claims he says he's English. It's a live debate. I want to explain why I actually think it's important because a lot of these things become cul-de-sacs where people say what they think, and there's no actual point to the argument. So people are arguing about these finer points that offend everybody for no actual gain. But in my opinion, this is actually a very important debate because my argument is this, after two decades of open door mass immigration, with tens of thousands of people streaming in illegally every year on top of that, and after two decades at least of this multicultural experiment, DEI, identity politics for minorities, have created a society that I was desperate to avoid, and which is why I opposed the woke insanity in the first place, which it was obvious to me that if you racialize everything, then eventually everyone will think of themselves through the racial prism.

And in my view, you're clearly seeing that on the ethno-nationalist right at the moment, the sense that white people need to think of themselves as a collective and act accordingly. And to me, that's not the way a multi-ethnic society can function in the long term, but it's an understandable reaction to what we've seen up to this point. And so my argument is we have to have an identity that is greater than the different ethnic groups that make up our country. And to me, the English identity is not sufficient because there is a sufficient minority, it's a minority, but nonetheless a sufficient minority of both white English people who won't see it as anything other than an ethnic identity, and they will say Rishi Sunak can never be English. And there's also, by the way, a higher percentage of ethnic minorities who also agree with me that this isn't a workable definition. And so my view is what we should be doing is picking an identity to unite around that will work for everybody, and that to me is Britishness, which is why that is the identity I'm proposing for all of us to unite around. And by the way, we kind of already do, we already say the British Jewish community, the British Muslim community, the British Asian community if there's such a thing, British Indians, British Jews, etc. Because I think instinctively we understand this.