Let us now turn to the linked topics of National Identity and Immigration
Talk of alleged “confusion” about our national identity has been a hot media topic in the last few years. The reformed socialist, David Blunkett, was heard confessing in his Channel 5 film on 14 May that a new Civic Nationalism was needed to bind the country together and that old lefties like himself had not recognised in the past how much immigration had undermined national identity.
There is not the slightest doubt that this is true of many young people educated in state schools in the last 20 years or so. A recent public meeting recorded a discussion between school children in which each was invited to say where they came from. One said he/she was from Pakistan, another mentioned India and so on – then a young English girl asked plaintively, “where do I come from?” Shamefully, some people laughed at this point.
The presumption in the question that all are in some way “immigrants”, is matched by the phrase “Britain has always been a country of immigrants”, usually citing the Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Normans, Flemish weavers, Hugenots. This phrase is a verbal trick or device used by the Left to disrupt the sense of nationhood which has come naturally to English people, and also to Scots and Welsh for over a 1,000 years.
Essentially as recorded by Bede (and all subsequent archaeology has confirmed this), the Anglo-Saxons were ,over a period of some 300 years ,settlers in England, which like the English language itself, takes its name from them (not the other way round).The old English state was established by Alfred the Great and consolidated by his grandson Athelston in the tenth century The Vikings, though having a massive disruptive effect on the life of ninth century England, were ethnically the same people as the Normans who invaded in the eleventh century and both were virtually the same as the Anglo-Saxons. To all intents and purposes the English were a completely defined people by the 12th Century, living within national and county boundaries which barely changed from the 10th Century to the 20th, as can be seen in the thousands of place names recorded in the eleventh century Doomsday Book.
Immigrations which occurred in the next ten centuries were a tiny trickle by current standards: Flemish in the 13th Century, Hugenots in the 17th Century, perhaps 60,000 in total or 1% spread over 400 yearsThese were north European people almost the same ethnically as the English, speaking languages which constitute the two main roots of modern English and in one generation assimilated into the English population.
In November 1939 the Cabinet was provided with an estimate of the total non-European people in Britain amounting to 7,000 or 1.5 per ten thousand, mostly around the ports. In fact even allowing for the Russian-Jewish refugees in the 1890s and the German-Jewish refugees in the 1930s, England and the British Isles as a whole constitute, over a period of 10 centuries up to 1950, 30 generations, one of the most stable, least immigrated of all nations, matched in this regard only by Japan, another island nation.
Despite these undoubted and easily ascertainable facts, there has been an audacious, shameless, concerted attempt in some media and educational circles to disrupt the native English people’s sense of their own identity – as I have illustrated with one example from literally hundreds I have noted over the last 20 years – in favour of an all-powerful, essentially Marxist, multiculturalism which has made a virtually complete conquest of the senior ranks of the educational system .
One of the dramatic victories notched up by the multicultural warriors was the ruining of the career of a Bradford headmaster who had dared in 1986, in a relatively obscure journal, to question the motives and methods of those who would champion the supposed identity needs of Pakistani Asian school children at the expense of their learning about British history, our constitution and laws, even our language.
All this is based on a theory that immigrants need to be reminded of their racial and national origins at all times and that the laws of this country should be changed to accommodate their differences from the native population.
Here we may note the way the most successful immigrant country of all time – the United States of America – handled things over the 145 years of its unrestricted immigration period (1776-1921). At all times US and State governments sought to limit the fissiparous effects of having a multitude of languages and races, by grounding state education in the English language, the Laws inherited from the English colonies, and an undivided unhyphenated American patriotism.
In fact the certificate of naturalization required an oath not only to support the Constitution of the United States, but also a renunciation of “all allegiance and fidelity to every foreign prince, potentate and sovereignty whatever, particularly Queen Victoria in the case of British subjects.
Actually the vast majority of immigrants to any country are anxious to leave behind their native country – after all they left to go to a more successful one. It is the egalitarian, overwhelmingly Marxist ideology that sees people almost exclusively in class and race terms to be set against the native British population from whom sadly the vast majority of the egalitarians come.
In fact in its intensity and clamour, in its determination not to consult the people, egalitarianism and its step-children multiculturalism (all cultures are equal), diversity (the more differences the better) and inclusiveness (a practice which while formally avoiding racial quotas [for now] in fact operates that way), bear all the hallmarks of the psychological condition of “transference” in which a person A insists that another, B, reacts and feels under imagined stimuli the way A would feel.