Rishi Sunak warns against linking skin colour with British identity

Former British prime minister Rishi Sunak has sparked a debate on race and ethnicity in the UK, warning against equating skin colour with nationality and speaking about his own identity as both English and Hindu. The first politician of Indian heritage to serve at 10 Downing Street said Britain must not create different classes of citizens based on race or when their families arrived in the country.

Writing in his regular Sunday Times column and referring to a lecture he delivered at Lord's Cricket Ground last week, Sunak argued that cricket and sport more broadly can help bring people together. In the Marylebone Cricket Club's Cowdrey Lecture, he said sport could play a role in encouraging integration at a time when public debate around identity and immigration remains sharply contested.

"I worry that Britain's great democratic achievement is coming under strain," Sunak wrote. He said there were challenges "posed by Islamism and exposed by the reaction to October 7 [attack in Israel], alongside those caused by the failure of those of us in government in recent years to adequately control immigration".

He added: "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." Referring to the Tebbit Test, coined by former Tory MP Norman Tebbit in 1990 to suggest that migrants who backed the cricket teams of their heritage rather than England showed a lack of integration, Sunak said: "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."

Sunak said he himself would have passed that test as a child. "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... 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." He added: "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."

The 46-year-old Conservative MP for Richmond, who became prime minister in October 2022 before losing the July 2024 general election to Keir Starmer, said comments from some sections of British society during his time in office questioned whether he could be English while being 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," he wrote. He warned against a situation in which "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 they are newer migrants.

Sunak said sport could still play "a small but significant role in encouraging integration", adding that cricket was "almost unrivalled in being played by nearly every major ethnic group here" and that this was why he had tried as prime minister to ensure more children in England got the chance to play it. He concluded: "We cannot allow race to be reintroduced into our politics. We cannot allow Briton to be set against Briton." His remarks come amid growing far-right rhetoric around immigration, with Reform UK leader Nigel Farage describing illegal migration as an "invasion". Overall, Sunak's intervention linked the debate on race, migration and belonging to his own experience and to his argument that sport can help hold together Britain's multi-ethnic democracy.