Apparently I Was Born in the Wrong Country

I have never particularly liked calling myself British.

Partly that is because “British” has a frankly enormous amount of historical baggage attached to it: the Union, empire, colonialism, conquest, bloodshed, the whole fucking lot. I am much happier saying that I’m English, Scottish, or Anglo-Scottish depending on what I’m actually talking about. Those words mean something more specific to me. “British” often feels like being handed a box containing several centuries of history and being told to smile for the photograph.

But apparently even that is too complicated now.

There is a particular strain of nationalist politics in the United Kingdom that seems determined to reduce belonging to ancestry, birthplace, ethnicity and some vaguely defined concept of cultural purity. Reform UK talks about putting “British workers first”, prioritising “British-born” people and restricting rights based on citizenship and nationality. Restore Britain’s philosophy of national belonging goes considerably further, arguing that citizenship does not necessarily make someone part of the nation “in any real sense”, discussing “ancestral continuity” and “demographic security”, and explicitly describing the “White British population” as Britain’s historic majority.

There is an important distinction here that keeps getting blurred. Great Britain is the island containing England, Scotland and Wales. The United Kingdom is the state comprising England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. “British” can describe the citizenship or identity associated with the United Kingdom, but it does not mean “English”. England is one country within the UK and one of the three countries on Great Britain. When people talk about protecting “British” identity while treating English culture as the unquestioned default and everyone else as an awkward complication, they are quietly redefining Britishness as Englishness.

And apparently, that somehow makes me the wrong kind of British.

I was born in Spain. I was not an immigrant.

I was born in Zaragoza, Spain. That is a fact, and I have no reason to hide it. I was born there to British nationals, and I was given a British passport by the British Embassy in Madrid because I was British from the beginning.

What I object to is the implication that being born in Spain makes me an immigrant.

It doesn't.

I came home.

I did not arrive in England as an adult with a suitcase, a work visa and a five-year integration plan. I was a fucking baby. My parents were not making some grand decision to abandon Britain and start a new life in Spain; I was born there because that was where the circumstances of my birth happened to unfold.

I also did not physically touch English soil until I was about six months old. There is a fairly important reason for that: I needed intensive neonatal care. I was a newborn in hospital. I was not spending six months conducting a trial run of Spanish life before deciding whether England looked appealing. I was there because I needed medical care.

So when somebody tries to turn my birthplace into evidence that I was some kind of foreign arrival, I have to explain that there was no migration decision involved at all. Once I was well enough to travel, I came to England, the country where I would grow up. I was educated here, English is my native language, and England is home, at least for now.

It is fucking ridiculous that this is something I have to explain.

The bit nobody quite says out loud

The rhetoric often presents itself as though it is simply about citizenship. Fine. Citizenship is a legal category. States need one. I have one. The UK government recognises several routes to British citizenship, including through British parents when somebody is born abroad.

But once you move from “who is a citizen?” to “who is really part of the nation?”, you are talking about something else. When the answer starts depending on ancestry, generations of family presence, demographic continuity and whether someone is part of a supposedly historic population, you are no longer describing a civic category. You are constructing an ethnic hierarchy.

Restore Britain’s own paper makes that distinction fairly explicit. It argues that people can hold British passports while supposedly not being part of the nation “in any real sense”, talks about ancestry and inter-generational connection, describes the “White British population” as the historic majority and treats demographic change as a question of “security”. That is not merely an argument about border control. It is an argument about who counts.

Which gets rather awkward once you remember that Britain is not England.

Britain is not England

Wales is part of Great Britain and the United Kingdom. Scotland is part of Great Britain and the United Kingdom. England is part of both as well. Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom but not geographically part of Great Britain. Its existence alone should make it obvious that the political state and the identities within it are not one neat ethnic category.

Yet a lot of this rhetoric seems to assume that “British” means English by default, with Welsh, Scottish, Cornish and Irish identities becoming deviations from the norm.

Welsh people are not foreign because they speak Welsh. Scottish people are not foreign because they speak Scottish Gaelic. Cornish people are not foreign because Cornwall has its own Celtic history. Yet Nigel Farage described Welsh people as “foreign speakers” in a video about a wedding in Wales, which would be a fairly impressive statement even if Wales were not literally part of the country he was talking about.

That is what makes my own situation so funny.

Is e Eòghann an t-ainm a th’ orm, bidh mi a’ bruidhinn Beurla, rugadh mi san Spàinn, tha mi ag ionnsachadh na Gàidhlig, agus tha mi às an seo.

My name is Ewan, I speak English, I was born in Spain, I am learning Gaelic, and I am from here.

That is a perfectly ordinary description of me. Yet somehow, through the purity filter, it becomes complicated. I speak English, so fine. I was born in Spain, apparently suspicious. I am learning Scottish Gaelic, so now I have gone and started speaking another language.

Shock, horror!

Scottish Gaelic is an indigenous language of Scotland. I am learning it because I find it fascinating, because it connects with my name and interests, and because I care about the language and culture around it. I am not pretending my family secretly spoke Gàidhlig for eight hundred years; I don't know that, and I have no interest in inventing an ancestry story to make myself sound more authentic.

The point is that none of these facts are mutually exclusive. I can be English, Anglo-Scottish, born in Spain, a native English speaker and someone learning Gàidhlig. I can also be from here. If somebody's definition of belonging cannot accommodate that without producing an existential crisis, the problem is their definition.

The English have a history too

There is another problem with this obsession with historic populations and ancient ownership: the English did not simply emerge from the soil fully assembled.

Early medieval England involved existing Britons and incoming Angles, Saxons and Jutes. English identity and the English language developed through migration, settlement, conflict, assimilation and political consolidation. The kingdom of England itself emerged gradually from earlier Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. English Heritage and its account of the political unification of England make that history rather difficult to reconcile with the fantasy of an ancient, fixed and ethnically uniform nation.

That does not make modern English people fake, and I am not trying to make that argument. I am English. It simply means that Englishness has a history, and history involves change. People moved, languages developed, kingdoms formed, borders shifted and cultures influenced one another. That is normal human history.

So the idea that Britain was once some pristine ethnic inheritance which was later spoiled by outsiders is not a serious account of the past. It is a political fantasy.

Even the symbols don't survive the purity test

Take St George. The patron saint of England was not an Englishman. English Heritage notes that he was probably a Greek-speaking Christian from the Roman Near East, associated with Cappadocia, and that he never visited England. His association with England developed centuries after his death.

Christianity does not make the purity argument any easier. It arrived through the Roman world and became established in Roman Britain; it was not the pre-Christian indigenous religion of these islands. English Heritage has the history.

I am a Pagan, so I have absolutely no reason to invoke an Abrahamic God to prove my Britishness. But the contradiction is useful. If “native” is supposed to mean whatever existed here first, then Christianity is foreign compared with the pre-Christian traditions of Britain. If it means indigenous language, English is not the only language with a claim to these islands. The purity test keeps moving because there is no coherent endpoint.

Even the Union Flag is a composite symbol formed from the crosses associated with St George, St Andrew and St Patrick. Wales is not separately represented because it had already been politically incorporated into England before the flag in its present form emerged. The history is political and complicated, not a tidy ethnic diagram.

And hell, even the Royals

Even the monarchy has a rather inconvenient history for ancestry purists. George I was born in what is now Germany and came to the British throne through the succession arrangements created by the Act of Settlement. He was much more comfortable speaking German and French than English.

Queen Victoria married Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, and the royal family remained associated with that house until George V changed the family name to Windsor in 1917, during a period of intense anti-German feeling.

Apparently a German dynastic name can be rebranded into something acceptably British when it is attached to a palace, while I am supposed to answer questions about whether I really belong because I happened to be born in Zaragoza.

That is the point at which this stops looking like a coherent philosophy and starts looking like a series of rules invented after the fact.

This is also why I hate the word “British”

My problem is not that Britain is unreal or that Englishness is illegitimate. I am English. I grew up here. This is my home.

My problem is that “British” can mean the political and civic identity associated with the United Kingdom, or it can be used as shorthand for a particular nationalist idea in which English culture is treated as the default and everything else is expected to justify its presence. In that version of Britishness, Welsh becomes foreign, Celtic languages become exotic, Scottishness becomes conditional, and people with the wrong ancestry or birthplace are expected to explain why they belong.

That is the version I want nothing to do with. It is not really Britishness. It is English ethnonationalism wearing a Union Flag.

And I am not going to pretend I am the primary victim of that ideology. I am white as fuck. I do not experience racism in the way people who are actually targeted by it do. But I do not need to be the primary target of something to recognise that it is bigoted, historically illiterate and fundamentally unpleasant.

Cornwall is exactly why this matters

Cornwall is a useful example because it makes the categories even messier. Cornwall is part of England today. That is the constitutional reality. But Cornish identity has its own history, and Cornish is a Celtic language of the Brythonic branch. Cornwall underwent a long process of political incorporation and linguistic and cultural assimilation into England, alongside the decline of the Cornish language.

You can acknowledge that history without pretending Cornwall is secretly a sovereign state. You can also recognise Cornish identity without deciding that only people who meet some ancestral purity test are entitled to it.

That is the problem with treating ancestry as the foundation of legitimate belonging. Eventually somebody has to decide which identities are old enough, which languages are native enough, which families have been here for enough generations and which people are allowed to say that a place is theirs.

I am not interested in that game.

I don't need a bloodline

Ancestry matters to people. So do family history, culture, language and place. I am not arguing otherwise. What I reject is the idea that ancestry is a premium subscription to belonging.

I do not need to prove that my family stood on a particular patch of British soil for eight hundred years before I am allowed to call England home. Somebody who moved here later should not have to spend the rest of their life apologising for failing an ancestry test either.

And the purity argument collapses under its own contradictions. If “native” means pre-English Briton, the development of English identity becomes inconvenient. If it means pre-Christian, Christianity becomes inconvenient. If it means indigenous language, the islands contain several traditions that do not fit an English-only model. If it means ancestral continuity, the history of the monarchy is awkward. If it means Britishness must equal Englishness, then Wales and Scotland have somehow become guests in a union they are constituent parts of.

There is no magical point in history where everyone became sufficiently British and then remained exactly the same forever. There never was.

I came home

I was born in Zaragoza to British parents. I was given a British passport by the British Embassy in Madrid. I spent my first six months in Spain because I needed intensive neonatal care, and when I was well enough to travel, I came to England and grew up here.

I was not an adult migrant. I did not choose Spain over England and later reverse the decision. I was a baby receiving medical care. The fact that I was born in one country and grew up in another does not create some contradiction that needs to be solved.

That is why the sentence matters:

Is e Eòghann an t-ainm a th’ orm, bidh mi a’ bruidhinn Beurla, rugadh mi san Spàinn, tha mi ag ionnsachadh na Gàidhlig, agus tha mi às an seo.

My name is Ewan, I speak English, I was born in Spain, I am learning Gaelic, and I am from here.

All of it is true.

I do not need a bloodline, an ancestral subscription plan or eight hundred years of uninterrupted residence to make it true. I know where I was born, and I know where I grew up. Those are different facts, and neither one cancels the other out.

I was born in Spain.

I came home to England.

And it is fucking ridiculous that, in 2026, I still have to explain the difference between those two things.