Clive Pinder asks who decides which citizens count as indigenous. It is a fair question, and the international law on indigenous peoples has already answered it. In the first of a three-part series, Terrence White argues that the English, and the British more widely, are an indigenous majority, and that the right such a majority most needs is the right to remain one.
Once upon a time, when 'citizens' were subjects, a passport was for getting out of Britain rather than into it, and a Welshman found in Chester after dark could be put to death, nobody much wondered how to define the English, or the Welsh for that matter. Such matters seemed self-evident and, the nobility apart, our individual origins were mere shadows in the mist of myth and lore.
Now immigration is on such a scale that our way of life is changing, sometimes beyond recognition. A global anti-culture has been laid upon us. To avoid being dissolved by it, we are compelled, like indigenous peoples everywhere else, to define what had always simply been true. It is the common quandary of native peoples: who is 'us', and, by implication, who is 'them'?
Clive Pinder's article for the Daily Sceptic paraphrases this question as "who decides which citizens count?" The civic nationalists answer that nobody should decide: culture is learned, so anyone can join. The ethnic nationalists answer with biology, which invites Clive's jibe about Yorkshiremen being extradited to Scandinavia. Clive himself seems to have alighted on a compromise: Englishness, like Britishness, has an ethnic definition, inherited by descent, and a civic one that newcomers can acquire by embracing the customs. That is a luxury that can be afforded only until a determination is required about who is a British native, or what counts as a British custom. Then his question rebounds: who decides?
There is a third answer, and the world has been using it for decades. It is the law of indigenous peoples.
Within that rubric, indigenous peoples elsewhere have developed their own definitions, built on up to three pillars: descent, self-identification and community acceptance. In Australia, where Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander status carries real legal force, all three tests must be met. In 2020 the High Court held that Aboriginal people who meet them cannot be deported as aliens, even if they are not citizens. The earlier Mabo decision made a continuing connection with the land a requirement for land rights. Hawaii, by contrast, relies only on a strict ancestry rule: homestead land goes to those at least half-native-Hawaiian by descent from the islanders of 1778, wherever and however their families have lived since.
Indigenous does not mean minority.
Most people assume that indigenous peoples are, by definition, small and marginalised. In September 2026, answering a petition to recognise the English, Scottish, Welsh, Cornish and Manx as indigenous peoples, the Foreign Office replied that no national minority or ethnic group in the UK falls "within the scope of 'indigenous peoples'" as the term is understood in "international instruments". It names only two: the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007), a non-binding declaration Britain voted for, and the International Labour Organisation's Convention 169 (1989), which Britain has never ratified. If the Foreign Office seeks to rely on their definitions, it is just flat-out wrong.
Take the Convention first. It is the main treaty that defines indigenous peoples, and it covers peoples descended from those who lived in a country "at the time of conquest or colonisation or the establishment of present state boundaries" and who "retain some or all of their own social, economic, cultural and political institutions". Self-identification is the third test. Being a minority is not a requirement. Neither is having been colonised: the establishment of present state boundaries is enough.
Nor does indigenous status depend on the government's say-so. Official recognition is not the test, precisely so that governments cannot define a people out of existence, as the British Foreign Office seeks to do. The principle of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is that an indigenous people determines its own identity and membership. The Declaration does not require minority status, either.
In practice, majorities are recognised. The iTaukei are the majority in Fiji, which has ratified Convention 169. The Inuit are the large majority in Greenland, and Denmark recognises them under the same convention. In Malaysia, the Malays are both the majority and a constitutionally protected people, with a special position written into Article 153 of their constitution.
The implication of the Foreign Office's position is that peoples anywhere in the world do not exist at all, or are not indigenous to their land, until and unless somebody has colonised them. That is itself a colonial way of thinking – perhaps a hangover from Empire, and fitting for a department that swallowed the old Colonial Office. But it is not how the courts have seen it. In the Mabo case, Australia's High Court held that the indigenous people's rights to their land sprang from their own laws and customs, not from any grant by the Crown. Those rights existed while the indigenous people were the majority, were older than colonisation, and survived it.
So the question is not whether a majority can be indigenous. The secretariat of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues is blunt about what has happened to indigenous peoples who are minorities: "Throughout history, their rights have always been violated." It follows that, for an indigenous majority, becoming a minority is a genuine danger.
The real question, therefore, is what indigenous status protects while it is held by the majority, and what it would protect as that majority becomes a minority.
Why the majority matters
Clive was replying to Andrew Devine, who argued in these pages that "civic nationalism can only work when the indigenous people remain the dominant majority". Clive's answer is that culture "can also be transmitted through schools, institutions and everyday life". But that just proves Andrew's point. Schools and institutions do not run themselves. They carry the culture of whoever staffs them, governs them and votes for those who govern them. In a democracy, that means the culture of the majority.
The culture itself travels mainly through families, as Clive concedes: customs, loyalties and prejudices pass down "along with the family silver". So the question is what happens to that inheritance when its carriers are no longer the dominant group.
The evidence is mixed in an instructive way. Minorities in Britain often feel strongly British. Survey research finds that British-born people of mixed parentage identify as British about as strongly as the majority, and some minority groups score higher still. Britishness, as a civic loyalty, travels well.
Culture is a different matter. Most people would not regard Diwali, the festival of lights, however beautiful, as a British custom, yet it is celebrated by many people who are legally British. So under Clive's test, someone could speak the language, swear to the principles and pass the examination without adopting a single native British custom, and then claim, as an Englishman, that his own customs are now English. This is the dissolution of the indigenous culture that the UN seeks to prevent.
Partner choice is the clearest test of whether our culture is being passed on. Research on British marriages found that people of Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi heritage remain markedly more likely to marry within their own group, even after allowing for generation and education. Religion and language follow the same pattern: families pass on what they have. Nobody should resent that. It is exactly what the English are doing when they pass on theirs.
But mixing alone does not settle the matter. About a third of British-born people of mixed parentage report little attachment to either culture. Integration through marriage works best when one culture is clearly the one the children are raised in. This is why indigenous law makes self-identification a fundamental criterion. Descent alone does not make someone part of a people; they must also claim it.
That is the heart of the question. A civic identity can be shared by everyone. A distinctive national culture, with its customs, humour, festivals and assumptions, needs a group that holds it as its own and is large enough to set the tone. At the 2021 census, where ethnic group is entirely self-identified, about two-thirds of people under 25 in England and Wales were White British, against about three-quarters of the population as a whole, and nearly nine in 10 of those over 65. The tone-setting group is shrinking from the young end.
Who decides
Clive makes the familiar point about the Anglo-Saxons: that up to three-quarters of the ancestry of early medieval eastern England came from across the North Sea, but this is irrelevant. Māori arrived in New Zealand some 800 years after the Anglo-Saxons came to England, and it would take a braver man than me to tell Pouri Rakete-Stones that he is not indigenous.
Clive's suggestion that DNA testing would be a feature of descent recognition also falls flat. International law's line is clear and deliberate: neither the UN Declaration nor the ILO Convention mentions biology or DNA at all. Both take an administrative view. iTaukei status in Fiji uses a register and a family line; Māori status relies on a declaration. Even Hawaii's strict 50% bloodline rule rests on birth certificates. None rests on a laboratory.
A similar administrative approach for the UK would rely on the ILO definition: the population at the establishment of present state boundaries. For the United Kingdom, that would be 1922, when the Irish Free State seceded and the United Kingdom took its present shape.
British immigration law already works this way. The UK Ancestry visa admits Commonwealth citizens with a grandparent born in the UK or in Ireland before March 31st 1922. Whitehall chose the same date, and has never needed a laboratory, because the records exist. The General Register Office holds every birth, marriage and death registered in England and Wales since 1837. A £16 million contract with Siemens to digitise them was abandoned in 2008 with only half the job done: births to 1934 and deaths to 1957. Finishing it, with the help of AI, would make tracing descent to 1922 routine.
In 1922 the UK population was almost entirely 'White British', as the current census would define it. But a 1922 cut-off would also capture the Jewish families who arrived before the First World War, and the Huguenots, Flemings and Irish before them. The cut-off is a date on a register, not a judgement about anyone's ancestry.
Open questions for British natives to decide include:
1.the degree of descent that would permit someone to be a British native,
2.how to treat broken lines of nationality, such as an intermediate generation forsaking their British indigeneity for another citizenship,
3.by what criteria to recognise future issue from intermarried generations;
4.the role of self identification, and
5.the role of community acceptance.
These are issues that have been considered by other indigenous groups, and Part 2 of this series will look at those.
Nonetheless it is worth noting here that integration by marriage is common, which is how the Normans became English, and Malaysia works on the principle that one Malay parent is sufficient for the children to be considered Malay. Under that structure, Kemi Badenoch's children would be recognised as native British through their father, a Wimbledon-born man of Scottish and Irish descent.
Clive's third-generation Sikh from Birmingham is the hard case. He is fully British and fully a citizen, but not, by descent, indigenous. His children may be, depending on whom he marries. That is not a slight. It is simply what the word means, in the same way that a third-generation Englishman in Auckland is a New Zealander but not Māori.
Clive's alternative is "a demanding examination" and an oath of allegiance, after which newcomers would be recognised as English. But this, like the community-acceptance test some indigenes have adopted, is fraught with the potential for corruption. His principles are admirable, but he will not be the one setting the exam. One can already foresee other views being declared 'British' whether or not many British people hold them: a commitment to EDI, say, or to the policies of the government of the day. A test is also easy to cheat, and passing one says nothing about what it means to be English. Englishness is not a costume to be put on after an exam; it is a lived and embodied way of being.
The rights of an indigenous majority
Indigenous rights are usually written for minorities who are being dissolved into the majority society. For a majority, the dissolution is quieter: homes allocated to new arrivals while its own young are priced out, and institutions that no longer represent it or embody its customs. Its rights are therefore rights of continuity rather than restitution: to halt the process, not reverse it.
The UK has not ratified the ILO Convention, and the UN Declaration is not binding, so none of these rights yet exist in British law. I set them out here to signpost what Parliament might legislate in the spirit of the UN's protection of indigenous rights.
The right to keep its institutions. Retaining one's own institutions is part of the ILO definition. For the English and British, those institutions include Parliament, the common law, the established Church, the monarchy, the BBC, the National Trust and the parish. A good deal of public frustration with those institutions comes from a sense that they no longer feel like ours. An indigenous majority is entitled to expect that its institutions keep its character.
The right to consent to its own transformation. No people are obliged to become a minority in its own homeland without being asked. The UN Declaration requires states to obtain indigenous peoples' "free, prior and informed consent" before adopting measures that may affect them, and protects them from "forced assimilation or destruction of their culture". Neither the ILO Convention nor the Declaration mentions immigration specifically, but the principle is plain: a people's consent is needed before its circumstances are changed for it. Successive governments have presided over record levels of immigration of people with no ancestral ties to Britain, without ever seeking a clear mandate for them.
The right to equal protection. The UN Declaration insists that indigenous peoples are "free and equal to all other peoples and individuals" and must be free from discrimination "based on their indigenous origin or identity". Equal protection is exactly what many in Britain believe they have lost under so-called 'two-tier policing'. In 2025 the police chiefs' own "Anti-Racism Commitment" stated that equity does not mean "treating everyone the same or being colour blind". The same year, Parliament legislated to stop sentencing guidance that, in the Government's own words, "risked a two-tier justice system", and Baroness Casey's audit of grooming gangs found examples where the ethnicity of perpetrators was "avoided altogether".
The right to keep its land. The UN Declaration recognises indigenous peoples' right to "the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned, occupied or otherwise used or acquired". In Britain much of that land is held in family farms passed down through generations. Since April 2026, those farms have faced inheritance tax above £2.5 million per owner: a charge on the very continuity indigenous law exists to protect. The same question – how a people keeps a stake in its own land – applies with greater force to the young who cannot buy a home at all.
On the Opposition's reading of the OBR's own forecasts, more than a third of the new homes built by 2030 will be absorbed by net migration. Meanwhile, affordable housing is being prioritised for asylum seekers, and district councils bypassed to house them. And in the private rented market, the Home Office's contractor Serco has offered landlords five-year leases at guaranteed full rent, with bills and council tax paid, to house asylum seekers: terms no local family can match. As Lord Empey put it in the Lords, the Government was "introducing a new class of tenant", and evictions of existing residents are being reported as a result. A people that cannot buy a home, and whose own Government outbids it on behalf of foreign settlers, is losing its land.
The right to renew itself. The most basic right of any people is to have children and raise them in its own culture. The fertility rate in England and Wales fell to 1.39 children per woman in 2025, the lowest on record and far below the 2.1 needed to sustain a population. It has long been lower among UK-born women than among mothers born abroad. A government that took indigenous continuity seriously would make it easier for young couples to marry, buy a home and raise a family before their late 30s.
Indigenous rights are not, in principle, a second class of citizenship: the UN Declaration is "widely viewed as not creating new rights", and insists that indigenous peoples are "free and equal to all other peoples and individuals". But in practical terms, they do create two types of citizen, such as in the decisions in Mabo and Love. Although every citizen keeps the same votes, the same courts and the same equality before the law, measures that promote indigenous flourishing must necessarily at least present a bias. This issue will be examined in greater detail in Part 3 of this series.
Indigenous status describes a line of descent and a cultural inheritance, and it takes nothing from a hard-working, third-generation Sikh in Birmingham.
Patriots and pedigree
Clive ends by saying England deserves patriots, not pedigree certificates. More important than either, though, England needs an identity.
Patriots of every origin can defend England's liberties, and many do. But a culture is more than its liberties. It is a way of life handed from parents to children, and it survives only where enough families hand it on. Cultural flourishing is not the breeding programme Clive fears. It is, in the words of the UN's own commentary on the Declaration, one of indigenous peoples' core demands: "the preservation and flourishing of their cultures." It is what every people on earth expects for itself, and what the international community already grants to indigenous peoples everywhere except, apparently, here.
So who decides which citizens count? All of them count. The question is narrower: who carries the inheritance that made this country what it is, and does that group have a right to go on carrying it? The answer can be written down without a single DNA test. It needs a date, a register and the willingness of the English to assert, with unapologetic pride, that they too are a people.
A declaration of interest: I came to Britain on an ancestry visa, with a Scottish grandparent on one side and an Irish one on the other. Under a descent rule of the kind used in New Zealand or Hawaii, I am a British native through them, just as Kemi Badenoch's children are through their father.
Terrence White is a former emerging-markets banker specialising in the extractive industries, where he learned that earning the free consent of indigenous communities meant understanding what they were trying to protect.
https://dailysceptic.org/2026/10/30/the-english-have-the-right-to-remain-a-majority/
https://dailysceptic.org/2026/10/28/england-is-a-glorious-idea-not-a-dna-test/