Nationalism, identity & natural law | Exploring the English contribution to political philosophy | Preserving continuity. carlwilkinson1.substack.com/
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We really have reached Soviet levels of gaslighting.
A man is murdered, and somehow, the real problem is that people are angry about it.
Children are gang raped, and somehow the real problem is that people keep mentioning it and “dividing communities.”
This is moral inversion.
No. Crime divides communities. Institutional failure divides communities. Cover-ups, euphemisms, cowardice, and elite contempt divide communities.
Farage, of course, has form. He did it after the Southport murders. He’s doing it again after the murder or Henry Nowak. He looks to divide and destroy rather than unite and build.
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Quite the media pile-on today. Scroll through the people declaring this the great defining moment of Badenoch’s leadership, and a striking number of them are political journalists.
It has the same energy as when Hollywood releases some painfully self-important ideological film: the critics give it 10/10, congratulate one another on its bravery, and then seem genuinely baffled when the audience gives it 0/10.
Perhaps wait and see whether anyone outside the Westminster press gallery was actually impressed.
Most striking - and most passionate - part of Kemi Badenoch's speech is seeing her draw that dividing line on the right and say enough is enough.
"I am black. I am British. I’m proud of my country... I’m proud of our history."
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This is not really about you, or any other minority.
For once, maybe just maybe, what is happening concerns the English themselves.
Yes, I understand why the government wants everyone to feel they belong here. That has been the logic of the whole post-imperial British project.
But that does not mean the English have to surrender the right to define themselves as a historic people, or accept that their identity simply means anyone who happens to live in England.
Perhaps, for once, the English can ask what is happening to their own country, their own continuity, and their own identity without the entire discussion immediately being reframed around everybody else.
🚨 WATCH: Kemi Badenoch accuses Reform UK of debating "whether my mixed race children are English"
"I don't want to explain to my son when we're watching our brilliant English team play football that some people don't think that black players are English"
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Love of the stranger does not require abolishing the neighbour; universal human dignity does not abolish kinship; and charity does not require a nation to abandon the border that distinguishes those for whom it bears political responsibility from those it receives as guests.
A border rightly governed is therefore not the repudiation of Christian charity. It is one of the ordinary instruments through which a political community protects its peace, preserves its common good, and exercises prudence about whom it can receive and incorporate.
The basis of Christian social thinking is Genesis & Matthew: we are all made in the image of God, we must love each other as God.
Not easy, not a requirement to do stupid things, but the message is clear: Christianity rejects racism. That is my final word on the matter!
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In case anyone was wondering, this is the Conservative Party, not to be mistaken for the Green Party Conference.
'Who wants a pact with Reform?!'
Tune in to yesterday's special Daily T: On The Road from day one of the Conservative Party Conference where @CamillaTominey, @timothy_stanley and Poppy Coburn @kafkaswife speak to a room of Young Conservative delegates about what the party needs to do to attract more young voters and whether economic policies to enable home ownership and starting a family could be the key
👇 Let us know your thoughts below
🎧 Listen to the full episode now through the link in our bio
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How can Charles be King of an institution more than a thousand years old when the monarchy has changed so enormously since Alfred?
Because continuity does not require immobility. Dynasties have changed. Laws have changed. Territory, religion and constitutional powers have changed. Yet we still understand the Crown as an institution possessing historical continuity through those changes.
The same principle applies to a people. The English of 2026 do not need to be genetically, culturally, or institutionally identical to the English of Alfred’s age for the English people to be continuous.
And like Charles, I too stand at the end of a chain stretching back into that distant past. I am not an Anglo-Saxon. I do not speak Old English. I do not live by the customs of the ninth century. Almost everything about the world my ancestors inhabited has changed.
Yet here I am: another Wilkinson in a long succession of Wilkinsons, the name itself carrying the memory of earlier generations: Wilkin, a diminutive of William, and Wilkinson, the son of Wilkin. One generation following another.
That is what continuity means. It does not mean remaining unchanged. It means that change happens to something which persists through time.
Charles III is not Alfred the Great. I am not one of my medieval ancestors. The English today are not the English of the ninth century.
But none of us appeared from nowhere.
Each stands at the end of a historical chain whose form and circumstances have changed, but whose continuity is precisely what lets us say the later thing is connected to the earlier one.
You said “Only the English descend from the specifically English ethnogenesis” which seemed to imply that this occurred some time in the past - birth being a once-in-a-lifetime event. Unless the thing born is characterised by its continual and ongoing mutability of course.
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Then you accept the underlying principle: that a historic people can possess a distinctive claim to a homeland, and that preserving their collective continuity and capacity for self-determination there is a legitimate political objective?
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GB News has now made its position clear.
It is prepared to acknowledge that an English ethnicity exists right up until that recognition has consequences. Then we are immediately told that “English” must also function as an infinitely expandable civic identity for anyone attached to the territory.
That is the establishment settlement: recognise the historic English as a cultural curiosity, but deny them any meaningful boundary as a people.
Britain does not even have unconditional jus soli. England has no citizenship, no naturalisation law and no sovereign state capable of conferring an “English civic nationality”.
You cannot manufacture one by semantic sleight of hand.
The English are apparently permitted to exist provided “English” ultimately means everyone.
‘People don’t know what it means to belong to this country anymore.’
Maajid Nawaz discusses whether it’s racist to discuss English as an ethnicity, following Reform UK’s Suella Braverman’s statement that she is British Asian but not English.
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I can define the English quite clearly.
The English are the historic people formed in England through a particular ethnogenesis: the interaction and consolidation of Anglo-Saxon, Brittonic, Norse, Norman and other elements into a distinct population, with its own inherited language, institutions, customs, historical memory and continuity across generations.
No other people on earth have that exact history of formation. The French do not. The Japanese do not. The Nigerians do not. The Scots do not. Each has its own ethnogenesis.
That particular history is what makes English ethnicity English.
So saying “everyone is mixed” proves nothing. Mixture is universal in the abstract; ethnogenesis is particular in reality. What matters is which peoples mixed, where, when, through what historical processes, and what continuing people emerged from them.
Only the English descend from the specifically English ethnogenesis. That is precisely why “mixed” cannot be used as a magic word to dissolve the English into humanity in general.
Quite. English people aren't a definable ethnic group. We are mongrels. If English refers to definable ethnic group, what is it? My offspring have an Indian grandparent & Croatian/American/Scottish great grandparents. Are they English? They were born in England as was I.
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I have no idea why @peterjukes has blocked me on here; I’ve always tried to be civil.
That said, his recent article is interesting because much of what he describes is actually integration and assimilation into England.
The problem is that he never really explains what people were integrating into.
It wasn’t simply a free-floating “culture” that anyone could pick up. There was already a historic English people, with inherited institutions, customs, memory, kinship and continuity across generations.
Assimilation only makes sense if something already exists to assimilate into.
His family story may therefore argue for the openness and absorptive capacity of English society. It is not, by itself, an argument that the English were never a people.
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Don’t let people who claim to occupy the sensible centre smuggle every form of collective identity into the category of “identity politics”.
Identity politics is the demand that a subjective or sectional identity be politically recognised and organised around as such.
That is not the same claim as saying that a historic people exists and that political self-government derives its legitimacy from an identifiable political community.
A nation is not created because somebody wakes up and demands that their chosen identity be validated. The argument is that the political community precedes the state and gives the state its subject: the people who are governing themselves.
You can disagree with that account of nationhood. But calling it “identity politics” does not answer it. It simply collapses two very different ideas into the same pejorative label.
Self-justifying your identitarianism by appealing to a problem that we both agree exists, without pondering why identitarianism is not the solution, is what radicalisation does to your brain.
You are now indistinguishable from the radicalised identitarian left.
“If you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you."
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This is the proposition you still haven’t established.
England being a country does not mean that England therefore confers a civic nationality. You are simply inserting that conclusion after the word “country”.
The state confers British nationality. There is no English citizenship, no English naturalisation process and no separate English civic status acquired by residing in England.
Yes, “English” can also describe a self-declared national identity. But that establishes precisely that: an identity. It does not magically create a second civic nationality sitting alongside the English ethnicity.
So there are at least three different things being collapsed here:
English ethnicity (membership in a historic people)
English national identity (somebody’s subjective identification with England)
British citizenship/nationality (the civic and legal status conferred by the state)
You can argue that the second ought to constitute a civic English nation, but you cannot prove that merely by observing that England is a country or that “English” is polysemic. That is the conclusion under dispute, not evidence for it.
And incidentally, English ethnicity is not simply a synonym for “Anglo-Saxon” either. That reduces a people formed through a much longer historical process to one component of its ethnogenesis.
On Being English:
1) England is a *country* - which confers a nationality to those who belong to that country.
2) English is also used colloquially as a synonym to mean the ethnicity of *Anglo-Saxon.
People are talking across each other. Nationality and ethnicity are distinct. I have been using the word English to mean my country of England since my LBC days until today. We will not give up our country to the restrictive linguistic rigidity of ethno-nationalists.
Maajid Nawaz: "Perhaps where we may disagree is where I'd like to now move this to on the issue of Englishness and Britishness is: do you think that Englishness is just an ethnicity or can it also be a country? And what I mean by that is there is something called English ethnicity. I may perhaps for the purposes of avoiding confusion, and I've done so on LBC, somebody called up once and had this conversation with me, for the purposes of avoiding confusion and making sure everyone understands what's being discussed, I may refer to it as a white Anglo-Saxon ethnicity. Just to be very precise as to what we're speaking about, speaking about white people who have either a Celtic or an Anglo-Saxon or a Norman background who live in the British Isles. So there is such a thing as a lineage and ethnicity, and a culture, that emanates from that grouping. Is there a second category in your mind? And I'm posing this as a question because I'm not trying to force my view on you. I want to hear your view. So is there a second category in your mind that if you look at England as a country and Scotland as a country and Wales as a country and Ireland as a country, say, putting aside the North Ireland versus Republic of Ireland debate for a minute, if these are countries, and as countries that have a polity, and they have an administrative state that defines their boundaries, is there a civic notion of being English? And if you want, we can use a different word for that. Perhaps, I don't know, English versus Englander, or whatever word you want to use, or perhaps even The opposite, white Anglo-Saxon English people versus just English citizens. Is there room, in your view, for a civic identity that sits on top of that lineage-based identity?"
@Con_Tomlinson: "I wouldn't say it's a civic identity. The way that I've described it before is you can describe adopted family members or national friends who have other heritage as an Anglophile. We can make special dispensations for people that have a genuinely positive relationship with the majority. But if you just have self-governing communities who self-identify as English because they say, well, there is a civic identity that doesn't require me to have any of that lineage, then what you get is you have to face the proposition of it's well, you could say it's an absurd hypothetical, but demographically we're trending in that direction. If there were no English people left in England, nobody of Anglo-Saxon, Celtic or even earlier Brittonic, you know, ethnic heritage, which plenty of us have. And it was here before the ice sheets, and they would still define themselves as English, if you had England of 100% Somalians, but they call themselves English, would it be England? And most people, you would say no, I would say no. And that means that even if you have a reverence for the place, even if you fulfilled what you would say that the civic criteria of Englishness is, there's still this essential component that if it isn't present would cause the destruction of the country, the dispossession of the people from their land. And those people are the, the nation is the people, and that is the beating heart of the nation state. You can learn to love the country, you might even be accepted as an adopted family member, but just as you can't write yourself into my family's will and entitle yourself to my parents' home, you also can't say, I am English, and entitle yourself to the country.
Maajid Nawaz: "So, again, this is important, and I think where we're going to end up disagreeing is probably on terms, actually, semantic, in the sense that I see that you're, probably for understandable reasons, territorial over the word English to describe the ethnicity, and I'm saying the ethnicity is important, but perhaps the word is a synonym, and that's probably where our disagreement would be."
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As much as I enjoy watching people play these little semantic games, could you just explain how “English” being polysemic establishes that there is an English civic nationality alongside the English ethnicity?
Saying a word has multiple meanings tells us nothing about what those meanings are, let alone whether one of them constitutes a civic nationality.
That is what you need to demonstrate. You cannot simply announce that “English” has a civic-national meaning and then cite its supposed polysemy as proof.
You are using the conclusion as a premise.
Lying requires intent to deceive. There is no lie here, as you are well aware.
The argument being advanced is that “English” is polysemic, to denote both ethnicity (colloquially to mean Anglo-Saxon / Celtic) as well as the English identity as a country.
You should not pretend to respond to an argument that is not being made, because it just makes you look dishonest.
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I suspect there is a significant overlap between people who say anyone can simply become English through identification and those who say a man can become a woman through identification.
The deeper disagreement is philosophical. Some of us think categories describe a reality that exists independently of what we say about it. Others increasingly treat categories as things that can be altered by declaration, recognition or the correct vocabulary.
That is the real divide: do words describe reality, or can words remake it?
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Apparently, the English FA now has the metaphysical authority to decide who is English.
Centuries of history, ancestry, family, culture and national continuity can all be thrown in the bin. If you satisfy the eligibility rules for an international football team, Cold War Steve has solved the question of national identity.
Remarkable scholarship.
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That isn’t what happened.
He said he considers himself English. Braverman did not tell him he couldn’t. They disagreed over whether birthplace alone settles the question, and whether Englishness also has an ancestral dimension.
"What you've done is reinforced the
racist argument, the amount of times I've been told I'm not English..."
Suella Braverman tries telling this black man he can't consider himself English.
Absolutely disgusting that we have MPs in the country who talk like this openly!
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Carl Wilkinson retweeted
Ethnicity is about ancestry, not the colour of your skin. There is only a certain extent to which you can have a multiethnic society without it becoming multicultural because culture is passed down generationally. That is why preserving the ethnic make up of a country matters if it is to remain culturally recognisable.
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“Fight for your country.”
But liberalism has spent decades dissolving the very things that once made “country” concrete: inheritance, continuity, culture, peoplehood and belonging.
Then, when sacrifice is required, it reaches back for the old language of patriotism and demands the loyalty it has spent years hollowing out.
Like a serpent consuming its own body, it survives by feeding on the inherited loyalties it is simultaneously destroying.
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Here is the trick. Take an abstract description like “mixed” or “mongrel”, apply it to the English, then treat them as indistinguishable from anything else described by those words. The particular disappears into the abstraction.
But mixed with what? Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Normans and Celts? You have now identified a particular mixture of historical populations. Calling another people “mixed” does not make it the same mixture.
Restore those particulars and the English question becomes clearer: the English descend from a particular historical coming together of peoples, rooted in this part of the world. The word “mixed” does nothing to erase the specificity of that ancestry.
This is a first class debunking of the ‘ethnic English’ claim. Jacob beautifully describes the English mongrel and the importance of English culture rather than some idea of an ethnic purity. The ethno-nat path has been trodden before in Europe, it didn’t end well.
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