Kemi Badenoch has rejected assertions by her former colleague Suella Braverman that English identity is restricted exclusively to white people.
A dispute over racism was triggered after Mrs Braverman, a former Conservative home secretary now serving as a Reform UK MP, stated on the BBC’s Question Time programme that non-white people born in the UK could be British, but not English.
The Tory leader accused Mrs Braverman of practising "identity politics, where people keep putting other people into boxes".
Mrs Badenoch told ITV’s Good Morning Britain: “I don’t understand why all of a sudden some people are policing other people’s identity.
“I think identity is something very personal.
“If that’s how she feels about herself, I think that’s fine, but what I’m worried about is, you know, politicians running around telling some people that they are not English.”
She added: “I think that we need to be very careful with this sort of conversation.
“What are my children hearing when they’re listening to things like that?”
Mrs Badenoch said: “My children, they are half-white and half-black. We are a multiracial country. I think we should be proud of that.
“I think politicians should be talking about how we bring people together.
“I am tired of identity politics, where people keep putting other people into boxes. I think it just creates more division.
“That’s not what the Conservative Party is about. The Conservative Party is about uniting people.”
Braverman, who was born in Harrow and raised in Wembley, previously said she is “proud to be British” and declared she was “not English”.
In a post on X, she said: “As I’ve said before, I’m not English. I’m proud to be British.
“My family and ancestors have a link to Britain which spans centuries. But in no way are we English. Yes, I was born in England, speak English and support the England football team. And indeed, I love England and the English people.
“But to say I’m English is to take a ‘laissez-faire, anything-goes’ attitude to ethnicity, citizenship and identity. It also denies me my Asian heritage.
“The liberals (many of them in today’s Conservative Party) take this cosmopolitan approach to Englishness. They’re terrified of being called racist so they say that anyone, as long as they’re born here, can be English. I take the conservative approach.
“Englishness is an ethnicity. There have been English people for centuries and we need to recognise this more if we are to start taking a more muscular approach to citizenship and nationality. And no, it’s not racist to say this.
“Other countries have no qualms in limiting who can be part of their citizenry and use ethnicity and culture as criteria. Here, the dogma of multiculturalism has been so corrosive that some people don’t actually know who we are anymore.”
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