Can you be English and non-white? It's a question that keeps stubbornly resurfacing in our political discourse.

Last weekend, the former prime minister Rishi Sunak gave his view in a column in the Times, arguing that national identity should not be turned into a DNA test. After leaving office, Sunak, the UK's first prime minister of colour, was subject to claims by a prominent podcaster that he was not English because he was a "brown-skinned Hindu". Reflecting on this, Sunak described it as a "reverse Tebbit test": the sociological concept measuring the loyalty of immigrants – and their children – in the UK depending on which cricket team they supported in international matches. "Once we say that this or that person isn't really English or British because they are not white," he wrote, "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."

Sunak is right that this conversation isn't really about nuanced distinctions between ethnic and civic identities. The questioning of one's Englishness is deeply insidious, as it is not solely articulated through supposed "legitimate concerns" about the pace of immigration, crimes committed by migrants or ethnic minorities, or anxieties around jobs and access to public services. Instead, it is presented as a question of first principles: whether you are a "good" or "bad" minority, a citizen or non-citizen, your ancestry or skin colour means you will never truly belong. Your claim to belong in this country, and that of your descendants, will always be implicitly lesser than those who could, at least theoretically, trace their ancestry back to Oswald of Northumbria. That idea is deeply uncomfortable for many, rejected both by those who hold progressive views on immigration and community integration, and those who otherwise hold conservative views of national belonging and hardened borders.

There is growing concern among sections of the British right about increasingly "ethnonationalist" impulses emerging on its fringes and entering mainstream political debate. That has particularly gathered steam with the rise of Rupert Lowe's hard-right Restore Britain. These beliefs belong to what the Financial Times's Robert Shrimsley described as the right's own "woke wing", which fusses over "the great replacement theory and the betrayal of the west". More moderate conservatives will want to distance themselves from these views as much as they will from the black-clad far-right mobs that descended on Portsmouth and Dover this summer.

There are indications that some of these views are gaining greater public legitimacy. An analysis by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) last year found that the percentage of those who believed "Britishness" was something you were born with had almost doubled in two years (from 19% to 36%). But there are reasons for those on the right to worry that the popularisation of these once-fringe views could alienate them from the majority, who still reject them. According to the IPPR analysis, only 3% of people believe that being a "good" British citizen requires having white skin, while at least 74% of English people believe that Englishness is not defined by ethnicity. The hard right's attachment to a politics of ethnicity also threatens to upend a project that the broader conservative movement has been at pains to build over the years: a multi-ethnic coalition that can hold anti-immigration views without the Englishness or Britishness of its own members being called into question. That means maintaining a definition of national belonging that minorities can actually attain.

So it may feel curious to see the Tory traditionalist Jacob Rees-Mogg, no ally of Sunak, release a series of videos on X stating that "everyone who has a British passport is equally British or English" and positing that the English are "a mongrel people, not an Aryan master race". But the desire to openly define Englishness, and Britishness, in exclusively ethnic terms remains relatively fringe, and it is not a politics that yet finds a broad coalition. Perhaps unsurprisingly, two of Sunak and Rees-Mogg's lead opponents were minority politicians on the hard right: Reform spokespersons Suella Braverman, who insists that she cannot be English, and Zia Yusuf, who recasts the argument in familiar culture war terms about those who have "betrayed" our country, and insists that "people are furious about what Rees-Mogg and Sunak are saying".

That preoccupation over ethnic nationalism isn't purely a feature of the modern hard right; in 1701, the English writer Daniel Defoe wrote The True-Born Englishman, a poem to defend William III, born a sovereign Prince of Orange, from xenophobic attacks disparaging his lack of ethnic "Englishness". Defoe wrote: "Thus from a mixture of all kinds began, / That het'rogeneous thing, an Englishman", referring to the English, as Rees-Mogg did, as a "mongrel half-bred race". That speaks to something that is worth remembering when questions about who gets to be English recur: it has never been a property passed down intact from one generation of ethnically pure Englishmen to the next. Instead, it has continually been remade through migration, assimilation, conquering, marriage, conversion and settlement.

Attempts to impose a simplified ancestry-based definition quickly become absurd, as Lowe saw when, in August, he could not answer whether or not he would consider King Charles, whose father was born in Greece and who has German and Danish ancestry, a "white Briton". But even a more inclusive civic-nationalist definition of Englishness raises questions with no settled answer: is it defined simply through citizenship or through language, accents, behaviours, "values", culinary preferences or sporting affiliation? For those who believe that it is an ethnic identity based on ancestry, how many generations back must you be able to trace your lineage?

Even if ethnonationalist views are stymied by more moderate voices on the contemporary right, the surfacing of these discourses is still deeply troubling for many ethnic minorities. Its traction may, for now, be limited, but it still risks contributing to a "common sense" assumption that there is something like a pure English ethnicity determined by race. Interestingly, ethnic-minority adults themselves are more likely to view Englishness as tied to heritage, and prefer an identification with Britishness. I can't speculate on each individual's reluctance, but it doesn't displace a simple truth: there is no single, historically fixed population from which today's "English" have descended. From the Celts, the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings, the Normans, the Huguenots, Jewish and Irish communities – England is ancestrally mixed. That waves of arrivals over the past century have been Caribbean, African and South Asian has only made this more observable.

For those who believe Englishness is threatened and marginalised by demographic change, it is precisely this process that has allowed it to endure: continued participation and attachment, not bloodlines and biological inheritance. Even if the ethnonationalist right wants to project a future based on a kind of racial nostalgia, English history itself offers very little support for it. It is a politics with nowhere to go.