Badenoch slams Braverman for policing who counts as English

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Kemi Badenoch has hit back at Suella Braverman for telling people who is and is not English, after the Reform UK MP said non-white people born in the UK could be British but not English.

Speaking on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, the Conservative leader accused her former colleague of identity politics that puts people into boxes and creates division rather than bringing the country together.

The row began when Mrs Braverman, a former home secretary now sitting as a Reform UK MP, appeared on the BBC’s Question Time and drew a hard line between British citizenship and English identity. She has said she is proud to be British yet not English, even though she was born in Harrow, raised in Wembley, speaks English and supports the England football team.

In a post on X she insisted that calling herself English would take a laissez-faire approach to ethnicity and deny her Asian heritage. Mrs Badenoch rejected that framing outright. She said she does not understand why some people have started policing other people’s identity. If that is how Mrs Braverman feels about herself, fine, but politicians should not run around telling some people they are not English.

The Tory leader warned that the conversation needs care, asking what her own children hear when they listen to claims like that. She pointed out that her children are half-white and half-black and that Britain is a multiracial country that should be proud of that fact.

Politicians, she argued, ought to talk about how to bring people together instead of sorting them into ethnic categories. She said she is tired of identity politics and that putting people into boxes only deepens division. That is not what the Conservative Party is about; the party is about uniting people.

The Independent reported the exchange as a dispute over racism sparked by Mrs Braverman’s remarks. Mrs Badenoch’s response kept the focus on practical unity and refused to accept that Englishness is closed to those who do not fit a narrow ethnic test.