King Charles - Health Apartheid Against England? Doesn't Care. But Securing a Favour from President Trump on Removing American Tariffs on Scottish Whiskey? So Important!

                                  

King Charles cares passionately about the five million people in Scotland, who, of course, deserve to keep their devolved taxes, benefit from the unfair Barnett Formula out of English taxes, and so on. But the 57 million people living in England? Not so you'd notice. We are simply the disadvantaged, demonized rump of the so-called UK... A bunch of mugs...

We noticed King Charles nipping off to America and making Scotland his priority. Yep, he asked President Trump, as a special favour, to drop tariffs on Scotch whiskey.

Great.

Then he nips back to England and continues to ignore the fact that the Barnett Formula awards higher block grants to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, allowing free prescriptions for millionaires in those countries, while the most ethnically diverse country, England, which has no national representation, is forced to charge nearly £10 per item to those just above the poverty line. And has lower per capita spending on health, education, etc.

This pandering to the tiny country of Scotland has to stop. It went too far many, many years ago, and the constant assertion that Scotland is a 'victim' and 'morally superior' to England does not hold up to any objective scrutiny.

Darien? The Darien bailout from England? Clan warfare? The fake Celtic myth of 1707, from Welshman Edward Lhuyd? Scotsman Douglas Mason, the inventor of the Poll Tax? Disproportionate activity in the British Empire, creating huge profits for Scotland and an elevated voice on the world stage (used to backstab England largely)? And then the North Sea oil is supposed to be Scotland's only?

And Wales? Not saintly either. No ancient, unified country of beauty and sweetness - a web of internecine rivalries, factions and kingdoms. And we musn't forget that Ireland was partitioned by a Welsh PM with avid backing of Protestant Scots.

No UK nation is deserving of higher care and education spending than any other.

Lord Joel Barnett himself spoke out about the unfairness of his formula to England several times.

But the only action we get is the UK Government trying to carve England up into tinpot regions, and the King nipping off to America and securing privileges for a Scottish export.

And then there's the West Lothian Question.

Wake up, people. The UK is not a united kingdom. The Scots and Welsh representatives, both devolved and in the UK Parliament, have no concern for the people of England, and simply want to butter their own parsnips. The UK Parliament simply wants to retain power over England and carve it up.

Rabid self interest all round.

And as for you? Keep paying the prescription charges and paying into the Barnett pot and shut up, OK?

The Celtic Myth Creates An Elite and Demonises England - "Celts", "Nations and Regions", "Welsh Law", The 'British' Nationality, The Barnett Formula & West Lothian Question...

The Houses of Parliament - home of the so-called 'UK' Parliament - which discriminates against its largest, most ethnically diverse country, England, in favour of white tribal myths and one-sided victimhood narratives in Scotland and Wales. The interests of fifty six million people versus the privileges of eight. No contest. The Parliamentary hogs from all corners of the UK will never initiate just change, and will continue to demonize England - for as long as they can. The situation is not sustainable in the long term as more and more people in England, of all ethnicities, are beginning to wake up to the facts.

Before anybody jumps to conclusions, I am an old style Socialist. Right Wing or Left Wing nowadays seem to be all trendy agendas and quite a lot of smoke and mirrors. Nobody in 'UK' politics cares that a poor person, just above the poverty line in Great Yarmouth or Leeds, and in fact everywhere in England, pays nearly £10.00 for a prescription, but millionaires in Scotland or Wales get them for free. This article is about fact, modernity and fairness for all.

One of the biggest causes of artificial divisions between the English, Scots and Welsh is the use of the word "Celt" or "Celtic". And 'Anglo' - as in 'Anglosphere'? Nope. There was never a language called Anglo. The language was/is English, Old, Middle, Modern - and the Anglo Saxons didn't arrive in England with the Old English language ready to unpack.

It has been proven by DNA studies that the English were and are not Anglo Saxons. The Anglo Saxons (who didn't call themselves that) married in to the existing population almost from the beginning and soon formed the early English, and the Scots and Welsh were and are not Celts.

That's all down to Welsh Nationalist Edward Lhuyd's jottings in 1707. He was writing about languages and 'Celtic' was a label he decided on.

It was never a UK bloodline, It's a myth. There may be linguistic influences (even that is uncertain - it's a label from 1707), but we are not separate ancient tribes - and certainly not ancient WHITE tribes of 'mongrel' 'Anglo Saxons' and 'pure' 'Celts'.

The fact that the the retrospectively-named 'Anglo Saxons' mixed with the existing population to form the early English is fascinating. So there is continuity in England, back to prehistoric times, and the original foundation of Englishness was an inclusive mixing of newcomers with people already here. This opens up interesting avenues to explore in the light of the DNA discoveries - the origins of the English language (the so-called Anglo Saxons did not arrive with the English language all already to unpack, and, logically, it must have evolved as a fusion with the existing population) and culture (the newcomers could not have vanquished all pre-existing culture), for instance. But the timidity of historians and the bristling hostility to anything which questions the entrenched beliefs of the so-called 'Celtic Nations' prohibits this.

The so-called Celts have become another group oppressed and abused by the awful English in centuries past.

Many 'academics' write selective studies to underpin the English=Evil narrative. They are highly selective with their material, and are easily funded, as the English=Evil narrative is popular. It sells.

The term 'Celtic' is often used in a racist sense by some Welsh, Scots and even Cornish (bandwagon-jumpers) writers and campaigners to imply a sense of belonging to this island far more than the people of England - or, in the case of Cornwall, the rest of England.

So, why do so many English bloggers and web site owners seem so happy to perpetuate the myth?

Were we once Romano-British? Nonsensical phrase - the Romans left hardly any genetic footprint. They occupied and ruled. An impact on culture and landscape? Most certainly! But not enough genes to have created a 'Romano-British' ethnicity. Are we or our language 'Germanic'? A term coined in relatively recent times. Rather an odd classification when viewed with modern DNA evidence. And 'Germanic' does not mean 'German' by the way. Celts? DNA evidence uncovers the truth, and we now have an exciting chance to view our real history, free of the likes of the Venerable Bede and Edward Lhuyd angles. 

But no, we musn't upset the ridiculous 'Celtic' narratives of a tiny minority outside of England.

On another matter, the sins of Empire... Scotland had already bankrupted itself on a colonial venture (Darien) before union with England, and was disproportionately active in the British Empire. Ireland was partitioned by a Welsh Prime Minister with fervent backing from Scots Protestant MPs.

In the case of Darien, some very vocal Scots (of course) try to blame England (as always). But, let's face it - the whole thing was poorly planned and reckless. Scotland cannot keep blaming England for its own mistakes. And England then paid Scotland's debts, and Scotland went on to make a mint of money in the British Empire, being, as previously mentioned, disproportionately active and far from a helpless minion.

The Scottish Clearances? Scots elites, not the English, did that - and Scotland's hugely disproportionate showing in the British Empire proves it wasn't some meek, 'oppressed' minion of England.

Did you know that the Poll Tax was the brainchild of a Scotsman called Douglas Mason? Well, it was! And that it was Scottish Secretary of State, who pushed for Scotland to have it a year ahead of England and Wales? Well, he did!

And Wales - an 'indigenousness' ancient nation, pre-dating all? Nope. Firstly, way, way back in the mists of history, long before England, Scotland and Wales, the Beaker People replaced around 90% of the existing Neolithic population on this island. And they didn't originate from the Welsh valleys. They came from overseas. And Wales was not a unified country even much later: it was factions, fighting and disputing each other, different kingdoms.

Welsh? An 'insular' language? Double standards there. Obviously, the island was absorbing newcomers over thousands of years. English was formed in England with clear influences from elsewhere, but that's not 'insular'? Not according to Welsh Nationalist and huge Celtic myth microphone John Rhys.

'Brittonic'? More Welsh-influenced nonsense from John Rhys, a modern word, meant to infer longer tenure on this island for a romanticised 'Celtic' elite.

Welsh Law? An ancient, egalitarian system? Pure poppycock. It's a romanticised notion from much later, designed to help Wales keep its moral superiority stance - and taking English money. 

Wales was factions, different kingdoms - and they were always squabbling and fighting. Rather like many other places. A lot of the "Welsh Law" thing is based on bits and bobs of writings from the 13th Century, apparently some of it culled from centuries earlier (no proof), and romanticised and retrofitted as something it wasn't in more recent years.

English Law and English Common Law are historical facts, well recorded. Actual history.

Do we say England was lovely? Of course not. But we're rebalancing the scales here. Selective rewritings of history to support preening and higher funding for a fiction are not acceptable.

Let's look further at Wales. Let's imagine it hadn't been incorporated into the Kingdom of England. Well, an alternative scenario might be interesting to look at. Let's say England had erected a wall between itself and this much smaller country. It will almost certainly have been invaded and there would be no Welsh identity today. No propping up its finances with Barnett largesse. Goodness knows what it would have been like today, but it would not contain people like Rhodri Morgan, proudly saying, 'We've made the English jealous!' as he abolished prescription charges for even millionaires - on English Barnett Formula largesse.

It may have been much nicer financially for everybody in England if Wales had been absorbed and flooded by people from a nation far away.

At least we wouldn't have all this current twisted, elitist nonsense.

And let's not forget that Wales voted for Brexit. 

On the subject of inclusivity, let's not forget that immigration to England is far higher than to Scotland and Wales (even proportionally) and that the white Celtic myths and victimhood narratives of Scotland and Wales do not bear putting under any objective microscope.

And yet they get copious amounts of cream from the current system.

And the Scots and Welsh may fancy themselves as 'non-racist', with their 'New Scot' bunk and so on, but their silence on millionaires in their countries getting free prescriptions, while poor people scrimp to pay nearly ten quid per item in England, and their UK MP's 'right' to influence the affairs of that far more ethnically diverse country next door speak volumes.

We are supposed to be 'the UK'. Do you ever hear the Scottish and Welsh people or politicians ever speaking against the effects of the Barnett Formula and West Lothian Question on the neighbouring, far more ethnically diverse, UK folk in England?

Once Scot Tony Blair began fanning the flames of Scots and Welsh nationalism in the late 1990s, he began a course of division and elitism, based on myths and racism.

Labour politician Jack Straw said the most awful and untrue things about England in a BBC interview at the time, simply echoing Scots and Welsh bile, all very one-sided, and it was strange that a politician should actually demonize the country he was elected in, and paid to represent, in such a way. 

Don't turn to the Tories for any different. Although they don't tend to indulge in Jack Straw style anti-England rants, they worship the Union, and England as an undifferentiated lump suits them fine.

It's Scotland's Oil! No, it's not. It's UK. When you look back, Scotland has enjoyed much largesse and had its voice tremendously amplified by the union with England, via the Darien bail-out, its access to English trading markets, and its disproportionate activity in the British Empire. On top of that, we heap the Barnett Formula, and another financial formula favouring Scotland before that. The notion that 'it's Scotland's oil' implies that what's Scotland's is Scotland's, and what's England's is also Scotland's.

The Barnett Formula, declared unfair to the poor of England by its late creator, Lord Joel Barnett, is still in force (and remember the Scots had a different formula favouring them before that), asymmetric national devolution has created the West Lothian Question in which non-representative MPs vote on English legislation, and all of this discriminates against the UK's largest and most ethnically diverse (even proportionally) country, England.

If you live in England, you have to accept that some of 'your' English legislation is decided by MPs who do not represent you, and you have no power to elect or otherwise. It is happening - just check Hansard.

The Barnett Formula provides funding on a NATIONAL basis for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, above the English funding. It does not apply to anybody living in England. If somebody ever tries to bamboozle you by talking about spending in English 'regions' take no notice. Money spent in England and contributed by English taxpayers is not the issue. Extra largesse for UK countries outside England, affording luxuries like free prescriptions for millionaires, is.

And poorer areas are not just confined to the North of England, despite the UK Government's deceitful 'regions' carve up attempts. Three of the poorest streets in England were discovered to be in the so-called 'affluent' East of England! And there are areas across the whole of England that are poorer than the Scottish average.

Every poor person (in fact every person) in England suffers the Barnett disparities. The formula, the higher block grants, is only meted out to the so-called 'nations'.

So, backing up ancient white divisive myths is a priority when it comes to a minority (eight million - the combined populations of Scotland and Wales), is it, UK Parliament?

Wikipedia is a closed shop of apparently Left Wing people. Modern Left Wing is not Left Wing at all, of course. If the state of the affairs we have in the so-called UK was occurring in any other nation, the screams and howls of protest  would resound across the relevant 'Talk' pages on Wikipedia and the injustices addressed on its 'encyclopedia' pages. But everything is played down when it comes down to England, and Wikipedia does its utmost to uphold the white Celtic myth and the 'historic victimhood' narratives of Scotland and Wales. It's an obsession there, and 'Talk' pages and English history articles are loaded with nonsense about 'Anglo Saxons' (who never called themselves that) rather than 'the English'.

Anti-English bile is present in places like Canada, Australia and America - eager to find fake roots (via the Celtic myth) and eagerly buying anti-English hate (England has long been a convenient scapegoat as nobody in government speaks for it), in some cases from recent forebears, in others from the myths and nonsense emanating from Scotland and Wales which have spread out there via the fake 'Celtic diaspora'.

The Mel Gibson film Braveheart is a complete work of anti-English fiction.

The bile from minorities in Scotland and Wales also creates tensions in England itself. I have heard several new arrivals in England on my everyday round who have read the bile and believe England is evil and was the sole driver of any past wrongs. 

This is not the truth, and not the way the UK Government should be dealing with things. Of course, England is demonised, and even mention of the name discouraged. There are no attempts to establish an inclusive, civic English identity.

Ironically, it was an English politician called William Wilberforce who led the fight to abolish the British slave trade from the late 1700s onwards.

The UK Parliament is no longer fit for purpose, and hasn't been for years. It tries to create further divisions in England with its attempts to carve the country up into artificial regions (solidly rejected by the North East, but the UK Government still persists), and its MPs are like pigs at a trough. There is poverty across England (ever been to Great Yarmouth?), yet millionaires get free prescriptions in Scotland and Wales, and the 'regions' of England are a recent UK Government invention, not based in history.

New Labour's Council for the Nations and Regions is absurd. The UK is the nation, England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are the countries making up that nation. Yet England is being carved up, while its residents pay into the Barnett pot that fans the nationalist 'we are so progressive' notions in Scotland and Wales, like free prescriptions, because of the 'regions' (England, actually, defined by its national borders) being forced to pay and submit to the inequities of the Barnett Formula.

And we know why.

The UK Parliament is completely scurrilous, and turkeys don't vote for Christmas. Fairness for England would rock their cosy gravy train to its very core.

It's the same with the BBC. Furiously 'politically correct', this organisation is a piece of broken apparatus just like the UK Parliament. It bolsters up fake white Celtic myths and one-sided victimhood narratives in Scotland and Wales, blames England for everything, and backs plans to dismember it.

The British nationality? Dates back only a few centuries, the union with Scotland, and is tied to the British Empire. 'British values'? Are we talking colonization here?

The largest and most ethnically diverse UK country, England, gets horribly discriminated against by the UK Parliament, and the BBC backs it. Flying an England flag in England? Aren't you a dubious individual? BBC 'journalists' turn out copious amounts of anti-English bile and historic white myths for Scotland and Wales, and nobody bats an eyelid. We dropped the licence fee many years ago and will never sponsor its outdated bigotry again.

The only ethical way forward is a complete reorganisation of 'UK' politics, with a domestic English Parliament and funding provided according to areas' needs, not ancient white myths and bristling, jingoistic, attitudes from a tiny minority in Scotland and Wales.

We're either a UK or we're not.

If a new UK which cares for ALL its countries as countries, is non-racist and inclusive and serves everybody equally is unobtainable, then the UK must go

Because it IS NOT a united kingdom at all.

The Irish Times On The Fake Celtic Culture Which Produces So Much Discrimination In The Modern UK

                                              

The man who launched the UK's poisonous Celtic myth in 1707 - Edward Lhuyd.

Yesterday, we were asked by an American plastic Celt why we negated the 'Celtic culture' of the UK? It was the same as negating the handed-down history of any tribe, she said. Actually not. The passing of time will blur things - and what has been handed down for generations will usually be slightly inaccurate at least - but still have a ring of truth. 

However, the UK 'Celts' were not a tribe. They didn't exist until 1707 and since then this horrible fake 'thing' has become an industry and a way of practising racism. Which is how England, the largest and most multi-ethnic country of the UK, suffers the Barnett Formula (reviled by its own creator, the late Lord Joel Barnett), the West Lothian Question and asymmetric national devolution.

By the way, the American plastic Celt began her conversation quite reasonably, she was, apparently, terribly excited about an American university study, but then ended up squawking that Scotland was a unified nation long before England, that the English did not exist until Medieval times, and so on.

These people often pose as academics, but if you demur a few times, their anti-English, racist nonsense comes billowing forth.

Somebody else in that thread, another apparent academic, ended up calling us a 'bitch'.

Fortunately, we're thick skinned.

We've found this brilliant article by Fintan O'Toole of the Irish Times. It's a few years old, and we hope he won't mind us reproducing it here - it covers the 'Celtic' industry fabulously. Our thanks to him:

Culture Shock 

Fintan O'Toole:

The first of a weekly column looks at a great Irish cultural secret: we aren't really Celtic and there never was a Celtic invasion 

There is a great secret in Irish culture. Like most Irish secrets, it is known to a lot of people. Most of them are archaeologists, and few of them like to utter it outside of their own circles. The reluctance is understandable - the secret undermines a thriving industrial conglomerate with branches in the arts, intellectual life, religion, sport, tourism, politics, popular entertainment and consumer marketing. The conglomerate's brand name is Celtic. From the Celtic Twilight to the Celtic Tiger, from Celtic spirituality to Celtic jewellery, from Glasgow Celtic to the Boston Celtics, from Celtic Woman to the Celtic Tenors, from Celtic Sheepskin (ugg boots a speciality) to Celtic castles (all built by the Normans), from Celtic Crest spring water to Celtic crosses, it covers a vast variety of images and products. It is so powerful that when Enda Kenny recently referred to Ireland as a "Celtic and Christian" society, the second part of the phrase raised far more hackles than the first. 

The secret of Celtic Ireland is that it is all bogus. There never was a Celtic invasion of Ireland or Britain. The Celtic identity of Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Brittany dates back, not to the mists of time, but to 1707. The Welsh scholar Edward Lhuyd, keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, published a book called The Antiquities of Nations, More particularly of the Celtae or Gauls, Taken to be Originally the same People as Our Ancient Britains (sic). Lhuyd, brilliantly, argued that Gaelic, Cornish, Breton and Welsh were related to the language spoken by the ancient Gauls. He called these languages "Celtic" (largely because the term Gallic then denoted the hated French) and suggested that they had spread to Britain and Ireland through migration. 

 In an intellectual culture saturated with classical learning, the link with the "Keltoi" who had invaded ancient Greece, and with the Gauls whom Caesar slaughtered and described, was flattering, not least in Ireland. Instead of being marginal people, we were the remnants of an ancient and once all-powerful European civilisation. With the rise of 19th-century cultural nationalism, this ready-made genealogy, with its neat racial distinction between Celts and Saxons, was far too useful to be refused. In an era obsessed with so-called scientific racism, it provided a seemingly natural case for Irish independence. The Celtic Twilight (or as that rare sceptic James Joyce called it, the Cultic Twalette) added a rich layer of modern cultural prestige. The bandwagon was rolling and new forces - New Age mysticism, the American search for roots, pan-European sentiment - keep giving it a push. 

Even the archaeologists who know the truth have a certain interest in not stating it too bluntly: putting the word Celtic in your title gets you a lot more sales beyond academe, even when what you're actually saying is that the Celts never got here.

But they all know about the great absence. There is an Iron Age material culture that is evident in findings from northern Europe between Paris and Prague. It is named after a site in Switzerland called La Tène and is associated with what we call the Celts (there is no evidence that these people ever used the term or even identified themselves as a single ethnic group). 

And none of the things you would find if these people invaded or migrated to Ireland - their pots, their houses, their burial-sites, their coins, their horse-fittings - exist here. There are high-end La Tène-style objects, but virtually all of them are of recognisably local manufacture. As Barry Raftery, one of the leading authorities on Iron Age Ireland, puts it of the presumed Celtic invasion, "It seems strange that a warrior aristocracy supposedly responsible for imposing so many aspects of its culture on the indigenous population . . . should have had almost no impact on the archaeological record." 

In fact, what both archaeology and genetic studies show is continuity - broadly the same people who built Newgrange continuing to inhabit the island, speaking a version of the language of the Atlantic seaboard from which they had originated. What did happen in the Iron Age is that an emergent aristocracy began to adopt the international style they knew from trade and other contacts. Local craft-workers produced their own versions of Celtic chic - a bit like us copying Gucci or Prada. It was a way for the knobs to distinguish themselves from the yobs. As the archaeologist Simon Jones puts it, "'Celtic art' . . . is not a marker of ethnic identity but of status, wealth, and power". If we are Celts today because our elites developed a taste for continental bling, then half the denizens of Foxrock and Montenotte are Italians. 

The survival, and indeed thriving, of bogus Celticism owes something to the relative timidity of the archaeological establishment and a lot more to the sheer utility of the term. Baggy, mystical, touched with the glamour of oppression, a useful way of alluding to white ethnicity without sounding overtly racist, it sprinkles a dust of profundity on much that is mediocre and meaningless. It is greatly to the credit of Irish artists that, after the first flush of the Cultic Twalette, most of them kept well away from it. This has given "Celtic" one useful artistic connotation - as a synonym for "bad".

American Films And TV - Anti-English Bigotry And Jean-Luc Picard...

We were chatting to an English Star Trek fan the other day, who commented of the Next Generation series, which began in 1987:

"I always called Jean-Luc Picard 'Jim Luck Picard'- he was so English, sitting there with his cup and saucer, coolly and calmly dealing with crises."

But the character, who seemed thoroughly English to us too, and was played by the English actor Patrick Stewart, was not English. The show's writers gave him a French name and a French background.

Why the fuck was that? Why is it that on American television and in American films the English are usually represented by shifty, untrustworthy characters and massive rewritings of history? Anybody for Mel bigot Gibson in Braveheart?

America has so many English influences - in its political system and culture - yet we are ignored or subjected to character assasination by its media. Meanwhile, plastic Irish and Scots Americans wave flags and foam at the mouth on St Patrick's Day and "Tartan" Day.

Seems like home, doesn't it?

God Bless America? How about fucking grow up, America? It's time we started speaking up for ourselves - and we don't mean as British - we mean as English!!