Only a small portion of the public believe you have to be white to be English, but ethnic minority adults are significantly more likely to think so than white adults.
This is according to a new poll from YouGov that examines how attitudes to British and English identity differ amongst white and ethnic minority adults in England.
According to the study, the general public is more likely to see English identity as something tied to family heritage than British identity.
50% of white adults born in the UK said they saw themselves as equally British and English, with 24% regarding themselves as more English than British or solely English.
Ethnic minority adults born in the UK were more likely to identify as British than English, with 24% describing themselves as ‘British not English’ and 19% as ‘more British than English’.
Based on YouGov’s polling data, the biggest difference between the two identities appears to be that of heritage, with English being a slightly more strictly defined identity related to the identity of a person’s parents.
The most popular view was that if a person is born or raised in England, they can be considered either English or British. However, 32% of respondents said that in order to be considered English, a person must have family heritage, while only 21% said the same for British identity.
Ethnic minority adults are more likely to agree with the statement that a person can only be English if they are white, with 24% of ethnic minority adults agreeing with this statement compared with 10% of white adults.
9% adults in England believe that you can only be considered English if you are white with English heritage, which rises to 17% of ethnic minority adults from outside the UK and 21% of ethnic minority adults born in the UK.
The same is not true for British identity, for which the vast majority of both white and ethnic minority adults believe ethnicity is unrelated.
“The broader point here is that while a third of white adults in England may have a conception of Englishness that is based on heritage grounds, the majority of them (64%) do not mean this in a racial sense – only a third (28%) do so,” YouGov notes.
“By contrast, the majority of ethnic minority adults who hold the heritage conception of English identity do have racial connotations in mind when they say this (54-63%).”
The image below shows how white and ethnic minority adults define British and English identity in relation to race, religion, and heritage.
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