Rishi Sunak: Britishness must not be turned into a DNA test

I worry that the immigration debate is going far beyond arrival numbers

Rishi Sunak

Saturday September 19 2026, 12.00pm BST, The Sunday Times

I was a very fortunate kid. My dad’s GP surgery was lodged between the Dell, Southampton’s football ground, and the County Ground, the home of Hampshire cricket. At weekends and during school holidays I could go to a game and get a lift home afterwards. That childhood left me with a passion for both sports and a belief in their importance to our national character. Sport has the power to bring us together. But it also opens a window on to our concerns, our preoccupations.

When I was a boy, the Tebbit test was a matter of intense debate. The late Norman Tebbit famously asked in 1990 which side Commonwealth immigrants cheered for when watching the cricket: “It’s an interesting test. Are you still harking back to where you came from or where you are?”

For all the criticism it received, this was a test that anyone could pass. If you supported England because you now saw it as home, you were part of the team regardless of the colour of your skin.

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Ten-year-old me passed the test without even knowing about it. Born in Southampton, I would have found it odd not to support England, Hampshire and the Saints.

On Thursday I had the honour of giving the MCC’s Cowdrey Lecture, and this prompted me to think about cricket, its place in our national life and the current arguments about identity and integration.

In Britain we’ve created the world’s most successful multi-faith, multi-ethnic democracy. I was a beneficiary of that. Whatever issues people had with me as PM — and there was no shortage of those — neither my race nor my religion was among them. No one was outraged by my role in appointing Church of England bishops. I could read a lesson at the King’s coronation or light Diwali diyas in Downing Street with my daughters without controversy.

I was often struck by how foreign leaders would assume these things must have been major symbolic moments. Yet for the vast majority of Brits they just weren’t that big a deal. I may have been the first non-white PM, but that didn’t prompt any prolonged national soul-searching.

I worry that Britain’s great democratic achievement is coming under strain. There are challenges that we must address: those posed by Islamism and exposed by the reaction to October 7, alongside those caused by the failure of those of us in government in recent years to adequately control immigration.

There is, though, something else going on: a risk that we start equating skin colour with nationality. Or that we create different classes of Briton, treating those who arrived more recently as incapable of ever being as British as those who were here in 1707, regardless of how well integrated or patriotic they are.

During the election campaign, I was shocked when footage was broadcast of someone referring to me as a “Paki”. But it was shocking precisely because it was so unusual. That kind of abuse had simply not been a feature of my political life.

Less anger-inducing, but stranger still, 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 a “brown Hindu”.

In this world, if you’re not white it doesn’t matter who you support at the cricket: you can never be English. This reverse Tebbit test is impossible for any non-white person to pass.

I don’t enjoy engaging with these kinds of arguments; my natural inclination is to ignore them. But the volume and frequency of these claims mean they need to be addressed. I felt it again after seeing some of the online reaction triggered by this paper’s report last weekend on the number of non-white kids getting into grammar schools. The reaction leaves you wondering what these children were meant to do: deliberately flunk their exams? It is all too easy to imagine what would be said if they were all bottom of the class.

I have no truck with those who offend against our sense of fairness by coming to this country illegally; I spent half my premiership trying to deport them to Rwanda. I think the bar for legal migration should be set high, which is why (among other things) I increased the salary threshold to qualify for a skilled worker visa by almost half, though I regret waiting until December 2023. But what worries me about these current debates is that they are going far beyond immigration levels: they are trying to turn Britishness into a DNA test. It is possible to want both a much more robust approach to integration and a radical reduction in immigration, and still totally reject this argument.

We cannot have a situation where people who live here, who feel British, who embrace our culture and embody our values, who strive to be the best members of society they can be, are marked down because you won’t find their name in the Domesday Book.

Once we say that this or that person isn’t really English or British because they are not white, then we are on a very slippery slope. Some people will argue that English is an ethnic identity and British a civic identity. Though if you think those nuances are heard by most people, I fear you are being rather — perhaps even wilfully — naive. If you are 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, for a two-tier society. How are children who hear this meant to feel?

There are things we need to do to bolster the democracy we have built as a nation: a far more robust insistence that everyone integrates properly and lives by our national values (a subject for another Sunday). Sport, though, can play a small but significant role in encouraging integration.

Cricket is almost unrivalled in being played by nearly every major ethnic group here. It is why I spent time as PM trying to ensure that more kids in England got to play it. To sustain our democracy, we can’t just live side by side in far from splendid isolation: we must live together in integrated communities. That means playing together too. When I think of my own adopted county of Yorkshire, what is the shared passion of both my largely white rural constituents in the Dales and the inner-city British-Asian kids in Bradford? Cricket.

If cricket can produce England teams in which every kid can see themselves, the impact will reach far beyond the boundary. We must all be on the same side, cheering for the same team.

We cannot allow race to be reintroduced into our politics. We cannot allow Briton to be set against Briton.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5907187&forum_id=2#50157010)