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I suppose I am with @Crowstep. Phillips just has a difference conception of what it means to be British than people like Tomlinson. It seems like she's hardly alone in this. According to the British Social Attitudes survey:
It appears that quite a lot of British people agree with Phillips that being British is more rooted in adapting to British institutions and laws than having a particular ancestry. To the extent the British people are the authors of what it means to be British they seem to be moving more towards a Phillips definition than a Tomlinson one.
It's certainly obvious she does have a different conception. The point relates more to how she can have such a difference in conception when the cases are functionally identical outside of the obvious fact that one is her ingroup.
To your point, there are plenty of people who view Israel as an invalid state that should be destroyed. I don't think she much cares to bend herself to the court of public opinion on that one. In fact she sees herself fit to actively fight against it and say that those who think that way are wrong.
It doesn't make any sense to assume she is making these decisions on a case by case basis and just coincidentally supported a concrete case for ethnic identity when it happened to be hers.
It's kind of ridiculous to even float that as a possibility when the factual nature of the matter is so obvious. Every ethnically British person in the world could believe that being British was civic and yet they would still be ethnically British whilst an Indian would not be. And if they though otherwise they would be factually wrong. Just like it's not a matter of opinion whether someone is white or black. The history is there.
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I mean, even the most hardcore British/English nationalist would likely dispute that being born in Britain is necessary to define Britishness; otherwise we would exclude such eminently and obviously British figures as Rudyard Kipling (born in Bombay, India) and Richard Dawkins (born in Nairobi, Kenya).
I am fairly certain those listed could trace their ancestors to the battle of Agincourt.
But if you want definition of britishness (and europeaness). If you have no blood connection to that soil from before 1960s you cannot be British/European is fine definition.
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I doubt this survey carefully filtered out those who are not ethnically British. So '5% of native British change their minds about Britishness, the 15% of society that is now immigrants say 'I iz BRITISH nigga, fuck yo racist ass, think you own this island'. Not exactly persuasive.
The survey doesn't have a break out for "ethnically British", whatever that means. But it does break the survey down by people who do/don't consider themselves British and by White/Other Ethnicity. In both cases the numbers are pretty close to the population numbers. Among Whites, 59% think it is important to have been born in Britain (vs the population 55%) and 41% think it is important to have British Ancestry (vs the population 39%). Among those who identify as British the numbers are 59% (the same) and 40% (1 percentage point lower) respectively.
You realize can't puzzle out what that might mean? This is your honest best effort (lack of) understanding?
As a descriptive comment about how British people use language, we don't consider "British" to be an ethnicity. Self-identifying as "British" is a marker for civic nationalism, and self-identifying as "English" is a marker for ethno-nationalism. Everyone agrees that "English", "Scottish", "Welsh" and "Irish" are ethnicities and nations, but it isn't clear how they relate to Britishness. Scottish ethno-nationalism is (again, descriptively) explicitly anti-English and is increasingly linked to a left-aligned secessionist movement, Welsh ethno-nationalism is implicitly anti-English because it is tied to preserving a non-English language, and Irish ethno-nationalism is basically anti-Britishness boiled down to tar.
Reform don't run candidates in Northern Ireland, and do badly in Scotland. Welsh Reform do very well indeed, but they do so by being the only party in Wales to uncomplicatedly oppose Welsh language policy, not by running the same messages they do in England. "Monoglot English speakers shouldn't be second-class citizens in parts of the UK" is the kind of position which blurs the distinction between ethnic and civic nationalism.
I suspect "I meant that British identity (specifically as opposed to English, Scottish or Welsh identity) is civic" is the motte Phillips was planning to retreat to if her comments got her into enough trouble.
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It means ethnically British. You know, the people who lived in Britain for a thousand years. Who are more like each other than they are like anything else. Those guys. Importantly, it does not mean the 6 million EU citizens who applied for citizenship post-Brexit and the breakup of free movement, who are already getting on to 10% on their own.
In any case, thanks for breaking down the numbers.
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