My Response to Rishi Sunak - Konstantin Kisin

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Konstantin Kisin (0:59)

My response to Rishi Sunak.

Former 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 with that 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 TRIGGERnometry, Fraser Nelson raised Sunak unprompted in a debate about identity and told me that Sunak was as English as Tizer and Y-Front. I made a nuanced counterargument, but in the ensuing crosstalk I said, he's a brown Hindu. How is he English? That 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 stayed general rather than focusing on Sunak. It 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. My 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. Let'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 their Englishness or Britishness because of the colour of their skin is a recipe for alienation and for a two-tier society. How 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 Sunak, 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? I doubt it. And 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.