Suella Braverman—One of Britain’s Bravest Women
"I will never be truly English: here is why"
On February 26th, 2025, Suella Braverman’s article “I will never truly be English: here is why” was published in The Telegraph. In this piece the former Home Secretary, Tory party politician, current MP, and woman of Indian heritage Braverman lays out what we all know to be true: that to be English is to be a member of a distinct ethnic group defined primarily by ancestry.
To her point Braverman writes:
“For Englishness to mean something substantial, it must be rooted in ancestry, heritage, and, yes, ethnicity – not just residence or fluency.”
When promoting her piece on Twitter, Braverman went on to say, in part:
“ … too many people are nervous about asserting English identity for what it is: ethnic, racial and based on ancestry.”
Suella Braverman is correct in the most common-sense manner imaginable. She has decided to take up this baton because, as she has said in previous interviews, she worries about the demographic changes happening in Britain and what it means for the future of the country she loves. This is a theme she repeats in her article, stating:
“Our identity crisis is the result of decades of neglect, complacency, and cowardice. We have allowed what once made England distinctive to be diluted, denigrated, and demonised. Now, more than ever, we must define what it is we are fighting for – before it slips away entirely.”
This is a fundamentally nationalist argument and one I have made many times alongside my fellow writers here at White Papers. If we are not fighting to maintain the demographic majorities of the titular peoples of the West then we are fighting a losing battle. No matter how good the integration scheme, no matter how well immigrants and their descendants can hold down a job, and no matter much you teach patriotism in the schools, England (and the West) will be lost if we dilute the native English and broader set of European peoples so strongly that they cease to exercise political control over what were once our nation-states.
Suella asks at varying points in her piece why people who dislike Britain, don’t speak the language, and oppose our culture and traditions should be considered English. The answer is that they shouldn’t, a conclusion both she and I agree on. Holding a British passport does not impart upon a human being a British identity and it certainly does not make them a member of the ancient thousand-year-old societies that the English, Scottish, Welsh, Cornish, Manx, Irish, and others built on these rainy islands.
One thing Suella Braverman does not do is call for this demographic change to be reversed. I suspect because this raises awkward questions about her preferred and stated identity as a “British Asian” with a “deep love, gratitude, and loyalty to this country.” She further goes on to claim that being honest about ethnic identities is “what living in a multi-ethnic society entails.”
Well, I do call for a reversal of the Great Replacement in the United Kingdom and I have written thousands of words on the topic over the course of the past six months. Britain cannot be a definitionally multicultural or multi-ethnic society in the modern liberal sense, we tried that project and—as Suella herself admits—it has failed us. This does not mean, however, that Britain needs to be some kind of caricature state of 100% “racial purity,” such a thing would be rather silly, sounds utopian and dangerous, and doesn’t reflect the reality of human experience.
Instead, what I call for - and what any reasonable British nationalist calls for - is a return to the nation-state model of Britain. A model where the overwhelming majority of the population is of native British extraction and where the express purpose of the state is as the vehicle for the self-determination of the British people. The vast proportion of recent immigrants and their descendants who do not identify as British, have failed at integration, are a drag on our welfare state, and wish to leave (as 66% of young BAME1 people do) can and should be incentivized to leave the same way they or their ancestors arrived.
Yet, even after a reversal of the Great Replacement some Britons will still marry foreigners, adopt foreign children, or hire someone from abroad to do highly specialized work. Other people, the small minority of non-natives who genuinely love this country as Suella Braverman does, can and should choose to stay as I have outlined in my own British Remigration Policy Platform.
Ultimately what needs to change in a post-Great Replacement future is the volume of people coming into Britain – it needs to be substantially lower – and that those people we do welcome to this country make a proper attempt at integration. An integration that will be made easier when the native British once again constitute the overwhelming majority of the population instead of the current state of affairs where we are shrinking toward minority status.
Suella Braverman has proven herself one of the bravest women, and politicians, in Britain by deciding to tackle issues of ethnic and racial identity head on and in defence of the native English. I encourage her to use her growing platform, popularity, and common-sense approach to identity as a springboard encourage remigration of the many people that she rightly points out aren’t really all that British to begin with.
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For our non-British readers: BAME is the acronym used until 2021 by the Office for National Statistics to represent Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic peoples living in the UK. The ONS phased this acronym out due to confusion over whether to include mixed-race individuals and whether or not "Minority Ethnic" should also include non-British White minority groups such as Poles, Russians, and soforth. Joseph M. Bright is using BAME here to refer to the non-White segment of the British population.
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