Ethnic identity and national identity are two principles that have always sat uncomfortably together in my life. I was born and raised in England, and yet my surname has a suspiciously Mediterranean ring to it. If Morello is English, it is English like Rossetti or Disraeli, not like Browning or Thatcher. My great-grandfather, Juan-Battista Morello was a Gibraltarian merchant of Italian, probably Sicilian, ancestry. He came to England at the end of the 19th century and married a woman of Welsh heritage named Mary Davies. Their son, my grandfather, whose name was Carlo Arturo — though he would only be known as Charles Arthur — married a woman the ancestry of whom is unknown, for she refused to speak of her family, childhood or upbringing.
Their son — my father — married Yvette Mazierski, the daughter of an English woman and a World War II refugee from Poland. Their son married a Romanian immigrant. I live in Bedfordshire with my wife and half-Romanian children, permanently perplexed for I understand only half of everything said in my home. I love my family, but if we were dogs we couldn’t be shown at Crufts. This is my ethnic identity. And yet, were you to ask me of my national identity, I would tell you that I am English, and not only English, but intensely English. I love this land, its people, its countryside, its customs and traditions, its pubs with their refreshingly tepid beer, its ancient institutions and tacitly settled way of life — all that we used to call a constitution before the 18th century ruined the word. The personal tension I have felt between national and ethnic identity is, I believe, based on a mistake.
https://europeanconservative.com/2021/01/patriotism-national-identity/