THERE is a moment, every time a major football tournament comes around, when I feel two things at once: excitement and unease. I love the game. I hope that England wins. But, as the St George’s flags go up on streets and in shop windows, I notice something else: a quiet anxiety among many ethnic communities who have called this country home for generations.
The flag isn’t the problem. The problem is what some people are trying to make it mean. Far-Right groups have claimed the cross of St George as their own, and, for many of us, that association is hard to shake.
When Paul Ince became England’s first black captain in 1993, we dared to hope that football could lead the way: that the colour of our shirt might prove more powerful than the colour of our skin. Fast forward 30 years: Marcus Rashford, Bukayo Saka, and Jadon Sancho are racially abused after missing penalties in a Euro 2020 final. Fans at Elland Road jeer when play is paused for Muslim players to break their Ramadan fast. The songbook of England’s chants now includes “Stop the boats.” The beautiful game is not insulated from ugly politics.
I was born in London. By any reasonable definition, I am English. But, because I am not white, I tend to be described as “British”. It’s a subtle distinction, but with a significant effect. Britishness, as a civic identity, is broad and inclusive. Englishness, as it is commonly understood, still carries an unspoken assumption about a specific ancestry. In fact, this assumption was written into the 2021 Census: the option to identify as “English” was only available under the “White” category.
But black people have been in England since the Roman era. We helped to build this country, and we died defending it: less than a century after emancipation, black Caribbeans volunteered for the West Indian Regiment in the First World War, fighting for a King they had never seen. So it is long past time to broaden our ideas about who gets to be called English.
LAST September, 110,000 people gathered in Trafalgar Square for the Unite The Kingdom rally (News, 19 Sepember). The rhetoric from the stage was alarming, laced with hostility towards Muslims, migrants, and the “other”. But, looking at who was in the crowd, the picture was more complicated than a simple “far–Right” label allows.
Many of those present were not, perhaps, driven primarily by racism but by despair. The phrase most often heard was: “No one listens to us.” The World Inequality Report 2026 tells us that the top one per cent are wealthier than the bottom 90 per cent combined. The past 15 years have been the worst for ordinary UK earners in living memory. Manufacturing has declined. Social safety nets have frayed. Trust has eroded. Young people today face a genuine risk of faring worse financially than their parents. For many, the future seems bleak.
When people feel invisible and abandoned, they look for someone to blame. Far-Right movements are expert at providing easy answers and convenient scapegoats. The solution is not to dismiss that anger, but to address the underlying reality — and to refuse to let that anger be weaponised against the most vulnerable.
As a minister of religion, one of the things that troubles me most is the way in which religion is being co-opted by those who would use it to divide. Christo-Nationalism is not Christianity, but a political ideology dressed up in an aesthetic of crosses, sun-dappled churchyards, and Bible verses.
But the faith that I know — the Christianity of Jesus — is about humility, forgiveness, and inclusion. It is about reaching out to the people whom others walk past. It does not build walls: it opens doors. It does not keep people out: it invites people in. It does not divide people into groups: it is for all.
WHICH brings me to Windrush Day, which celebrates black Caribbeans who began arriving on the HMT Empire Windrush in 1948.
The independent report into the Windrush scandal, finally released in 2024, confirmed what many of us had always suspected: every single piece of UK immigration legislation between 1950 and 1981 was designed, at least in part, to keep black and brown people out. As the writer Gary Younge said, it was not an accident: it was cruelty by design. “A system cannot fail those it was never meant to protect.”
This Windrush Day, I find myself thinking about the set of new stained–glass panels in St Mary Redcliffe, in Bristol, which replaced the ones that honoured the slaver Edward Colston (Leader, 16 June 2023; News, 1 September 2023). One of the new panels depicts the Holy Family — Mary, Joseph, and the infant Jesus — in a modern contextualisation of the flight to Egypt, crossing the sea in a small boat, fleeing danger, seeking safety. It is a simple yet powerful image, asking us: whose side are we on?
The Church of England brings divided communities together — not by pretending the tensions do not exist, but by creating genuine encounters that let people see each other as human beings rather than as threats. That is slow, unglamorous work, but it is the only kind that lasts.
Gandhi said that our ability to reach unity in diversity would be the beauty and the test of our civilisation. In 2026, that test is live. The suffering of anyone in this country diminishes all of us. The flourishing of each one strengthens us all.
When Winnie the Pooh was asked how to spell love, he said: “You don’t spell love. You feel it.” It sounds simple; but, in a country where too many people feel unseen, unheard, and unloved, perhaps that is exactly where we need to start.
Canon Guy Hewitt is the Church of England’s Director for Racial Justice. He was a leading campaigner for the Windrush generation to be recognised as British citizens (Podcast, 27 April 2018).