Legals

Like any community the English have no easily definable borders but in law the English are defined as what is known as a "racial group" by reason of their "national* origins", which means that they are members of a community whose members share a history, culture, ancestry and communal name, and are identified with a territory ie England.
 
There are legal definitions for what it takes to be part of any particular racial/ethnic group but in reality people do not need a legal definition to be told what they are because it is something that they instinctively know.

Because of this as a charity we just define our main beneficiaries as being the people who would describe their ethnicity on the new ONS monitoring forms as being English (you can see the new form on our website). For the purposes of the charity we use the term English in it's ethnic sense ie the charity is for the benefit of the people who would classify themselves as being ethnically English as opposed the ethnically Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Afro-Caribbean, Asian, Polish, etc.

*a nation is not a geographical area of land, it is a group of people if you like - a large extended family

The Courts have set out the following test for membership of a racial group (the English in the terms of this charity are a racial group and have a racial identity in law) for purposes of the Race Relations Act –

a)      you have a reasonable belief that you are  a member of the group; and
b)      other members of the group accept as a member.

It is possible to be a 100% member of an ethnic or nation racial group if one is not also a member of another similar racial group by virtue of the application of the tests at (a) and (b) above.

The English are also an ethnic group for ethnic monitoring purposes. The Office of National Statistics use the following definition for an ethnic group as set out by the House of Lords.

“An ethnic group has a distinct identity, based on recognising a long shared history and having distinct cultural traditions, which may be related to one of the following chrematistics:

-         Ancestry
-         Geographical origin
-         Nationality
-         Country of birth
-         Cultural traditions
-         Religion
-         Language

In his summing up of  a court case involving claims of discrimination by BBC Scotland against an English journalist (BBC versus Souster), Lord Cameron of Lochbroom stated that:

“a racial group may be defined by reference to it’s communal origins and traditions, which may be either “national or “ethnic”…I observe words such as English..are used in common parlance both as nouns and as adjectives in what can only be described as a racial sense…Thus to speak of…“the English” is to denominate a group having a particular historical identity in terms of their origins”

A non-legalistic definition of what it is to be ethnically English –

“The English gave their name to England and have lived in it ever since. People who have since come to England , and merged into the English population, and are indistinguishable from the English, and claim no identity other than English, and are accepted by the English as being one of their own, are English”

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