English Identity Displacement – How I became the Wrong Sort of Englishman

THE STAGES OF IDENTITY DISPLACEMENT

The following is a breakdown of specific UK policies, political actions, and public narratives that may map onto historical patterns of majority identity erasure, in the sense of diluting or reframing English identity through institutional or ideological means. The analysis is comparative and theoretical — not conspiratorial — and focuses on how these actions function, not whether they are malicious.

Contemporary examples that may match historical patterns:

Name/identity denial – Kurds → “Mountain Turks” and White British → “legacy Britons”/ “nativists”

Urban identity replacement – USSR: “Soviet man”, “Londoner” redefined as post-national citizen

Ethno-history reframing – Franco: Catalonia as “regional dialect”, Stonehenge & Saxons reframed as multicultural

Ethnic category dilution – Bulgarian Turks → “Muslim Bulgarians”, “Anyone can be English” rhetoric

Community disaggregation – Divide-and-rule by ethnic labeling. Emphasis on sub-national identities (e.g., British Pakistani, British Indian), but not “British English”

Ethnic Reclassification

Although the ONS recognises the English as an ethnic group, the term “White British” is used as the sole racialised majority label. The English do not appear as a separate ethnic group in any of the UK’s census data, whether this be England and Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland.

It somehow relabels Englishness as merely “default whiteness” rather than a culture or people. Currently the number of English people in the UK is either unknown or unpublished. This may in part be to prevent fears arising of the English becoming an ethnic minority in the UK. The English may in fact just number between 51 – 55% of the UK’s population.

Historical Reframing

Examples include BBC/English Heritage’s new portrayals of Stonehenge, Romans etc. “Black people built Stonehenge” and Black Romans at Hadrian’s Wall. Whilst the science said that most people in Europe had darker skin than they do today, it didn’t say their skin was “black” or that they came from Africa. Similarly with the Roman Empire, “North African” doesn’t mean black, it means people like the Tunisians, not sub-Saharan Africans of Bantu ethnicity. The other lie is that there was continuous immigration into Britain over millenia.

Such reframing implies pre-modern Britain was always diverse; and dilutes ancestral ownership. The idea that Black people were “always here” is used to imply that the English are the immigrants

Civic Supersession

British is a civic identity and English is an ethnic identity. We are British citizens, not English ones and have British passports, not English ones. And yet, “Being English is civic, not ethnic” (academic & political), is a claim made without evidence. The claims of David Lammy and Sadiq Khan to be English are likewise gratuitous.

This idea replaces ethnic-cultural belonging with passport-status belonging.

Urban Identity Overwriting & Migration Framing

Whatever happened to London as an English city “London is a global city” (Sadiq Khan, Goodhart). “White people don’t represent real Londoners” and calls for more immigrants to live in London (Mayor’s office) might indicate that any ethnicity was welcome, as long as that ethnicity wasn’t English.

These statements redefine the English capital as post-national, separate from English identity. Statements like “true Londoners are not white” (e.g. Doreen Lawrence, 2012) invert ancestry-based belonging, and questions legitimacy of ethnic English presence in their own capital. What they’re saying is that England does not belong to the English.

Language Policing

There is widespread media avoidance of the term “English people”, and it’s replaced with “residents,” “Britons,” or “communities”. This has made the English invisible as a named community.

Education Curriculum Changes

There has been much emphasis on slavery/empire, decolonising the curriculum to make it less British or less English, but little evidence of focus on Anglo-Saxon or medieval continuity. Indeed there have been attempts in academia to have the term Anglo-Saxon banned too.

This shifts focus away from English ethnogenesis and national cohesion.

Flag and Symbol Avoidance

There is hesitancy to display or endorse St George’s Cross, and a tendency to criticise those who do. The cultural symbols of the English nation have been reframed as xenophobic or far-right.

Institutional Absence

There is no official recognition of English ethnicity in multicultural policy frameworks. Unlike Scottish, Welsh or Irish identities, Englishness lacks legal protection or support. If you’re not enumerated in the national census, then you literally don’t count.

Selective Memory Laws

Equalities laws protect minority expression, but do not frame majority cultural loss as an issue. The majority are not as equal as any of the minorities. In this asymmetrical cultural protection, minorities are to be preserved, majorities redefined.

Community Grants & DEI Funding

There are state-funded organisations for minority communities but “English cultural organisations” receive little support. There are Black Housing Associations, but no English Housing Associations, for social housing. Even those English cultural organisations like the English Folk Dance and Song Society are telling members that the organisation need to be more “diverse”, needed to decolonise its library and needed “two women of colour” on its board.

Implicit message: Englishness is either neutral, unimportant, or dangerous

Notable Quotes and Cases

Is This Identity Erosion?

In political theory terms, this is less “erasure” in the hard authoritarian sense, and more:

• Displacement through abstraction (replacing “English” with “British” or “urban”)

• Cultural sidelining (ignoring Englishness as an identity worth preserving)

• Asymmetrical protection (minority cultures are preserved; majority cultures expected to assimilate or disappear)

While no single policy overtly declares “the English must be erased,” the cumulative effect of these framing devices, legal definitions, and historical reinterpretations creates a situation in which the English are discouraged from seeing themselves as a legitimate cultural group.

Conclusions

Englishness is treated as the default majority — but is not named, taught, or protected. This invisibility has real political consequences: what is unrecognised cannot be mobilised or defended. “British” now functions as a multi-ethnic administrative label, while “English” is often framed either as too narrow or problematic. This subtly marginalises ancestral continuity. Just as Kurds were rebranded as “Southern Turks,” today’s Londoners may be taught that Englishness is historical, outdated, or less valid than a modern post-ethnic identity.