WHAT kind of leadership does a changing Britain need? Rishi Sunak could not persuade the public to keep him beyond the half-term of power he inherited as the third prime minister of the previous parliament.
His successor, Keir Starmer, lasted no longer despite a landslide election victory, so Andy Burnham is the latest mid-term successor seeking to make Britain believe in itself again.
Sunak this week showed how former prime ministers can exercise leadership by making a significant intervention on race and identity. He had observed that it seemed rather British to accept the first prime minister of Indian ethnicity and Hindu faith with little fuss or Obama-style fanfare.
He is worried about a changing climate in which his own identity has somehow become a state-of-the-nation debate.
So Sunak took the opportunity of his Cowdrey Memorial Lecture at Lord’s cricket ground not only to reminisce about his love of cricket, but to warn about the re-racialisation of national identity.
However much the Tebbit test had been criticised, it had at least been possible to pass it. A decade ago, David Cameron was distancing himself from the Tebbit test as excessively assimilationist. Sunak is bringing it back, at least as a baseline.
Sunak will win his foundational argument for the equal status of British minorities. His intervention was praised by Labour chair and equalities minister Bridget Phillipson.
The core staff team of Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain advocate a British identity depending on ancestry and faith – but Restore’s refusal to exclude overt racists and antisemites has sparked criticism in the rightwing press.
Whatever else they clash on, Nigel Farage’s Reform do not reject Sunak’s British identity. The twist is that British Asians Zia Yusuf and Suella Braverman lead on their most contentious policies of mass deportations and replacing antidiscrimination laws.
Sunak does acknowledge that British and English identity can be separable questions.
Podcaster Konstantin Kisin now regrets the clumsy interjection – “he is brown and Hindu? How is he English?” – on tone, more than substance. Having arrived from Russia in the mid-1990s, Kisin is proud to be British, but not English. That has invariably been how naturalised British citizens see things.
Kisin appeared unable to comprehend why Sunak believed that being born and bred in England could make him English, too.
The broad public consensus in England is with Sunak: that birthplace trumps ethnicity or faith, so those born here who sincerely identify as English are accepted as such.
That the English nation is broader than the ethnic group has an 8:1 majority among the white English – not only because people such as Marcus Rashford or Nasser Hussain score goals and runs for their country, though sporting symbolism entrenched that common-sense consensus. Up to a quarter of ethnic minorities agree with Kisin that English identity seems more ethnic than civic.
In an interview about Sunak’s article, Today programme presenter Justin Webb asked me if the argument was really about how “too many people who have come to this country who do not have British values and lead separate lives”.
That confuses two quite distinct integration debates. It takes a feat of mental gymnastics to see objections to Sunak, London mayor Sadiq Khan or Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch holding leadership roles as reflecting concerns about too little ethnic minority integration, rather than a backlash against too much.
The ethno-nationalist case against trusting ethnic minorities to represent everyone is that the ethnic majority’s distinct identity and interests are diluted, even eradicated, when minorities integrate so fully.
The core ethno-nationalist agenda rejects cohesion – promoting mass remigration as racial protection – within a catch-all grievance politics that shifts seamlessly from complaints about the absence of integration to fears of a minority takeover.
Yet Sunak stresses that his belief that the UK remains, at its best, the world’s most successful multi-ethnic democracy does not mean diversity at the top of public life should distract us from other integration challenges.
These include addressing the perception or reality of “parallel lives” by ensuring that everyone settling in this country has the English fluency to participate fully, and that we share a social contract and common life.
Cohesion is rising up the agenda. Deputy speaker Nus Ghani hosted a Westminster reception for the Independent Commission on Community and Cohesion.
Co-chairs Sajid Javid and Jon Cruddas spoke about their ambition of tackling challenges of disconnection and division in ways that could reach across our polarised politics.
Equalities minister Satvinder Kaur spoke about her sense of a battle for the country’s soul, responding to British Future’s research on race attitudes.
In Edinburgh with the Equality and Human Rights Commission, I heard Scotland’s equality minister Simita Kumar MSP speak about the re-elected SNP government’s increasing commitment to these challenges, including a new cohesion taskforce.
Sunak should be praised for reasserting the foundational boundaries. The next leadership challenge is how to act for cohesion too.
