The ethnicity debate has now gone from the far right fringes of politics and into mainstream. We’ve had Suella Braverman (correctly) stating that she is not English, and Ben Obese-reJecty MP claiming he is (even though he’s Ghanaian, and previously said as much), and Rishi Sunak saying he feels English therefore he is, despite having Indian parents, marrying an Indian, and raising his children in the Indian tradition. Meanwhile, we’ve seen David Aaronovitch and Dan Hodges asserting that English isn’t an ethnicity at all. They’re all over the shop.
There's a lot of resistance to the idea that the English are a distinct people even among English people. The multiculturalist indoctrination runs deep. But there’s more to it than that. A great many English people will think of their friends and colleagues of another ethnic origin as equal in all things (apart from the Welsh) - and couldn't, and wouldn't tell them otherwise. That does not mean English ethnicity does not exist. It just speaks to the fundamental decency of most English people.
We tend not to like blood and soil ethno-nationalism, and regard it as a little grubby because it is not generally in our nature to exclude people on that basis. It is part of our Christian character. Our sense of decency overrides it. While I do see the logic in ethno-nationalist arguments, and very often agree, there is still something I really don't like about it on an instinctive level - not least because of what it leads to when you follow it to its logical conclusion.
You see this when you grow up in a place like Bradford. Where I lived, there was a Pakistani corner shop, and one day the owner's car was daubed with racist graffiti. "Pakis go home it said".
Generally speaking, Pakistanis aren't liked in Bradford and that was the case before grooming gangs were heard of. Not least because they came here without our consent. They were not needed or wanted, and their presence hasn't been beneficial. But nobody condoned the racist graffiti, everybody rallied round to offer support. Whatever our feeling about mass immigration, we frown on racist harassment.
That's still my basic software. I hate mass immigration. I want most of it reversed. And while you may find it difficult to believe, I detest racism against the person. I hold what could easily be regarded as racist attitudes because there are certain cultures I really do not like and will never be persuaded out of that. I do not believe any culture of faith is above criticism. It is, however, not in my nature to be abusive without proper cause.
There's carve-out for behaviour on social media, of course, because it’s a political platform where we do politics, and its a space inhabited by the worst race grifters who actively court racist abuse, and deserve what they get. I like a racist shitpost as much as the next guy - because good satire always has some basis in truth.
As such, stepping over the line from where my politics are to where hardliner ethno-nationalists are is a bridge too far for me, especially when it encompasses Jews who have made a massive contribution to the economic, social, and cultural life of the country. Jews are behind some iconic British brands such as Triumph motorcycles, Airfix, and Tesco (founded by JE Cohen, who flew in Royal Flying Corps in the First World War).
It just falls apart when I'm expected to accept that anyone who holds a British passport is "just as British as me" where there are virtually no barriers to obtaining a British passport - and when recent immigrants are low IQ garbage from the third world who will never contribute anything, and whose presence makes Britain objectively worse. It has cheapened and diluted the very concept of citizenship, in a way that is very difficult to repair. Ethno-nationalism is an inevitable consequence of this.
Ethno-nationalism, though, is not a useful ideological/policy framework because there are some people of all ethnic backgrounds who have a right to be here and in fact deserve to be here - not least a great many Europeans - some of whom are as dear to us as our own families.
This is why I think it's a mistake for political parties to get sucked into the ethnicity debate. Some would have it that its a binary question much the same as biological sex, but there are nuances to ethnicity and there is no workable ethnicity based system to ascertain who should be here and who shouldn't, unless your objective is an exclusive ethno-state where belonging is contingent on skin colour and not a lot else. That's not practical or reasonable, or even likely - and this is where Peter Hitchens is right. Any attempt to bring it about would likely be monstrous. The last such European attempt is still within living memory, and it's what historians have often described as "bad".
At the opposite end of the policy spectrum, meanwhile we have the multiculturalist, whose answer to this predicament is to deny the very existence of British ethnicities, and base our society instead on nebulous humanist values, and make no demands of incomers to fit in. That won't work either. It's part of the reason we are seeing a resurgence of ethno-nationalism.
I'm of the view that if you want the ethnicity debate to go away then you have to make nationality mean something more than just an official document. If you want a society built on "British values" then you have to define them and uphold them - and exclude people who do not exemplify them. Certainly, it means nothing if a nation does not have borders.
As to what defines those values, that's a broader philsophical question. The English are an island race. Our culture and psychology evolved separately from the continent. We are different - and we have different values, which is why we have different politics, a different national psyche and fundamentally different attitudes. As such British values are not abstract from British people.
I could have a pretty decent stab at defining them, but right now I am more interested in the emergency fixes to avert a broader societal unravelling that could easily take us to the brink of civil war. The philosophical debates can wait. Right now we need to deport all illegals, abolish ILR, reverse the Boriswave, and end Islamic sectarianism once and for all - even if that means shuttering mosques, banning the burka and deleting all welfare entitlements for anyone whose parents were not born here.
I don't know if that will be enough to repair the social fabric but it sounds like a pretty good start to me. I'd rather get cracking with that before we break out the DNA testing kits, and bore ourselves into extinction with protracted debates over who is and isn't English.
I am English. My name means forest dweller, as you might deduce.
I can trace my maternal blood line back to Elizabethan England. I guess that makes me English to such extent as any of us are purely anything.
My friend is English in the sense he was born in Morley. His parents were Serbian. They came here to escape the nazis. His father, once here, joined the Royal Navy and fought in WW2. BUT, he is not ethnically English. He is Serbian and he looks Serbian. Nonetheless, he has every right to be here. For practical purposes he is English but he is in fact just British. We agree on this. He has a British passport which was earned by his father at the very least.
You can become British but you cannot become English, Welsh, Scots or Irish.
What I am suggesting is a civic sense of British nationalism, which isn't very satisfactory if you can just rock up and get one the next day, which is where we are at.
British passports need to be earned and that means behaving in a way commensurate with that status.
I found out today that we now have people coming here from Sth America to escape socialism and being granted asylum on that basis.
This has to stop and all aliens need to be deported.
A lot of this is excellent but I think you miss the urgency of the matter. The ethnic English are a real people and the basic situation is that we are (for all that we may dislike fakse victimhood narratives) effectively an oppressed people in our own (and only) nation. We are being rapidly replaced, and our very existence is denied by both the imported and the indoctrinated. A hundred years ago everyone knew who the English were and schoolchildren were taught to be proud of their Englishness which was acknowledged as an ethnicity.
Today our existence is only framed as real when we are being demonised or blamed for all evils. This attitude and the fact that this attitude is the dominant, university taught marker of middle and upper class respectability explains much of why our children can be gang raped in their thousands and the system aided and abetted that while the exposure of it hasn’t changed their positions or policies at all. The betrayal is enormous both on replacement and rape, and the disparity between everyone else’s ability to recognise and defend themselves with State approval and our lack of representation is vast. There are 15,000 BAME advocacy groups in the UK, and zero English advocacy groups. The only poitical party that dares to state that it exists for the English are the English Democrats, and they are tiny. We might well be the least represented ethnic group on the planet.
I’m very glad that you mention Jews as the idea that English nationalism requires bullshit Jew hatred sickens me and I’ve always opposed those lunatics. But the overall truth remains that we either develop some unapologetic ethnic awareness and self loyalty or we disappear. For me given how we are now being treated and some shared enemies doing that treatment, the ethnic English and Jewish Zionists should actually make natural allies. We can reacquire self awareness AND select appropriate allies with shared values. We have to do both or just become another people who no longer exist, which is what much of the middle and ruling class want and claim is already the case.