Matt Goodwin’s ‘English ethnicity’ rhetoric: it’s important to ask why politicians want to sort people into categories

By Ros Williams, Senior Lecturer in Digital Media and Society, University of Sheffield

For Reform parliamentary candidate and former academic Matt Goodwin: “Englishness is an ethnicity that is deeply rooted in a people that can trace their roots back over generations.” By contrast, he argues, liberal progressives believe “anybody can be English as long as they sign a piece of paper and identify with Englishness.”

This is not a novel definition, and for some, it may be completely uncontroversial. It’s not surprising that some people living in England can trace their ancestors back many generations.

But attempting to define a particular “ethnicity” is also an…

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