I get sick of articles like this.
But hang on, historians will cry. Hasn't Englishness always been like that? Isn't it true that much of what people imagine to be the quintessence of our national identity - from fish and chips (originally a Huguenot dish), Handel's Messiah and the Great Western Railway to Marks & Spencer, ITV and the House of Windsor - was created by immigrants or the sons of immigrants?
Fish n' chips aren't even English, according to the writer. Well, if the Huguenots were tucking into fried battered fish, lovely crisp chips, mushy peas, salt, vinegar and white bread and butter I'd be surprised! It gets on my nerves the way Englishness has to be dismantled all the while - unlike other nationalities. Surely everywhere has foreign influences? After all, wasn't the haggis originally Greek and didn't an Englishman invent the modern kilt?
It always seem faintly racist to me to read the scribblings of some PC folk: "All the good English stuff came from abroad. Because the English folk already living in England were thick and completely uninspired.... When one good thing had happened we had to wait ages for the next immigrant to arrive and invent the next..."
And if the writer of the article linked to here imagines that the "sons of immigrants" cannot be English, well, that's a very odd attitude.
Diverse influences in national cultures should be highlighted, celebrated, but not piously flagged up in this way.
Big hat-tip to the lovely Witanagemot Club.
'But hang on, if we are talking about fish and chips, wasn't the modern curry invented by Englishmen - and wasn't Balti cooking also invented in England? And talking about inventing stuff, isn't it a fact that in the list of the 100 most important inventions known to have benefited man, is it not true that China has the most inventions credited to it, closely followed by England - leaving the entire rest of the world, including the States wallowing in a wake of thick stupidity?'....
ReplyDeleteYes it bloody well is!
Come to think of it, I will collate the list which I have in a book and publish it in a post next week.
The guy who wrote that crap in the Times is an utter pillock. He's one of those illiberal arses who likes to think he is some kind of intellectual genius in the Oscar Wilde mould. No doubt he'll think that Damien Hirst is a talented artist, Tony Blair really was an honest kinda guy and that all English nationalists are right wing thugs....
That article says more about his pathetic narrow minded prejudices and twisted mindsets than it does about us wanting fairness and equality for our country in this supposed union of equals.