What Britishness Can And Does Do That Englishness Doesn't Is To Discriminate Against All Citizens Of England

"What Englishness can't do that Britishness can do is appeal unambiguously to people of different ethnic origins," notes Janan Ganesh, political correspondent for The Economist.

It's the BBC reporting again.

But Janeh Ganesh is talking cobblers.

Britishness is not and was never intended to be a blanket nationality simply aimed at everybody living in England.

It was intended to be the blanket nationality of everybody living in England, Scotland and Wales.

With the will to do so, the word "English" could be substituted for the word "British" and an inclusive, civic English nationality be developed very easily.

New arrivals in England have "Britishness" rammed down their threats. So do longstayers

Whilst the PC crowd waste no opportunity to demonise Englishness as a non-inclusive, racist mind set.

But the English have long been a "mongrel" nation.

And all the better for it.

For a start the 'Anglo Saxons' never called themselves that, and the newcomers married into the existing population to form the early English - as proven by DNA studies in places like Oakington. And a 'Celtic' fringe? There isn't one. DNA proves that too. Edward Lhuyd's 1707 'Celtic' linguistic label did not rewrite people's DNA. The Scots notion hopped over the water from Ireland, and the Bell Beaker People displaced around 90% of the island's Neanderthal population.

Insular? This island?

What Britishness does is place every man, woman and child in England at a serious disadvantage when compared to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

The West Lothian Question, the Barnett Formula and devolution have seen to that.

A lot of this disadvantage comes from the 1707 linguistic label 'Celtic', applied to the Welsh language and other 'insular' languages by Edward Lhuyd (the 'insular' label also being a Welsh invention although the English language, with its all its quirks and richness was created in England but doesn't qualify for the 'insular' label) and later expanded into a fake ethnicity for the Welsh, Scots and Irish. 

Wasn't Wales a web of competing factions and kingdoms, slugging it out internally, not a peaceful, united polity? Yep. Wasn't Ireland partitioned by a Welsh PM with avid backing of Protestant Scots? Yep. 

Didn't Scotland attempt its own colonisation project at Darien, blame the English (as always) for its failure, then enter the Union, thus creating Britishness as a nationality and being disproportionately active in the British Empire, then blaming the English (as always) for the whole enterprise? Yep. Wasn't the Poll Tax invented by a Scotsman called Douglas Mason and implemented there a year early at the behest of its own Secretary of State - and then the English (as always) were blamed? Yep. Weren't the Scottish Clearances carried out by the Scots, and then the English (as always) were blamed? Yep.

And meanwhile the most ethnically diverse country, England, gets less per capita spending via the Barnett Formula (even declared unfair to England by its own creator, the late Lord Joel Barnett), meaning that those just above the poverty line in England pay nearly £10 per prescription item, while millionaires get then free in the far less ethnically diverse Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland, money scooped largely from the tax payers in England.

Because everything historically was the fault of England, apparently.

And then there is the little question of the West Lothian Question, in which non-accountable MPs get to vote - and sometimes decisively - on legislation affecting only England.

You see what a mess the so-called UK is?

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".

Alex Thomson Of The UK Column And The Racist White Celtic Myth, Root Of Much Discrimination Against England In The So-Called UK...

                     

British? No, no - they're Scots and Welsh only. And they're 'Celts' (so sayeth Alex Thomson of UK Column) - and such victims of the horrendous English. All fine tales built on ancient white race myths and Mel Gibson's 'CRY FREEDOM!' These fine Scottish and Welsh people had nothing to do with the British Empire! (I jest)

Isn't it strange how the Celtic myth is so plainly a myth, and yet it infiltrates so much of UK life? Take the UK Column - an often interesting and rather alternative (no problem there) news site. Sadly, there is heavy 'Celtic' nonsense in the organisation, brought to bear by staff like Alex Thomson. 

The whole venture is rather strangely organised anyway, with a complete non-questioning of the dreadful discrimination against every living soul in the largest and most multi-ethnic 'UK' country of all - via asymmetric national devolution, the Barnett Formula, the resurgent West Lothian Question, etc - and a very heavy focus on those five million souls living in Scotland.

DNA studies have more than proved that the notion of Anglo Saxons replacing the entire population of what is now England, and a grand, unified 'Celtic' civilisation occupying the entire island before that, are bunk.

In fact, bunk originating with a Welshman in 1707, who was only talking about language similarities of Gaelic and Welsh to the supposed 'Celtic' languages.

Of course, people can still call themselves British, English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish, or whatever - these are far more logical creations, but what drives the Celtic myth is largely jingoism - a sense of false pride, a vilification of the largest country within the UK, an appropriating of ancient British history, a victimhood narrative, a strong sense of exclusivity, and an insistence on special treatment.

Take the vilification, for example. Alex Thomson refers (negatively) to 'Anglo American banks'. Um, the 'Anglo' thing is piffle for a start - does he mean English or British? The most appropriate word would be British as the Scots were and are into all that - as they were with the British Empire - to a disproportionate level.

The DNA studies also call into doubt the notion that the 'olde English' derived all - or even most - of their language and culture from the minute number of invaders. It opens up fascinating questions.

But the powerful Celtic myth adherents will do all they can to crush them.

As far as the likes of Alex Thomson are concerned, his ancestors were wonderful, faintly mystical, white beings, who sounded like Clannad when they sang, tossed the caber, formed male voice choirs, and made pasties. They and their 'culture' (?) survive despite centuries of victimhood. So, DNA studies disagree? Who gives a stuff? The level of cognitive dissonance in the so-called 'UK' ensures that, up to now, there's never been much of a challenge.

And all this has made a powerful contribution to a tiny elite in the UK enjoying more funding (the Barnett Formula), far better democratic representation (asymmetric national devolution) and chances to interfere in the democracy of a far larger and far more ethnically diverse country (England). Ever heard of the (about to resurge) West Lothian Question? Ever checked out the 2003 Foundation Hospitals vote for England?

Interesting article from Prospects magazine, from 2006 - illustrating just how little we actually know about the history of these islands - and just how much DNA studies can tell us. A quick look at Wikipedia will show you just how fiercely this is resisted. I include the beginning of the article here, and a link to the full original at the bottom of this post:

Myths of British Ancestry:

The fact that the British and the Irish both live on islands gives them a misleading sense of security about their unique historical identities. But do we really know who we are, where we come from and what defines the nature of our genetic and cultural heritage? Who are and were the Scots, the Welsh, the Irish and the English? And did the English really crush a glorious Celtic heritage?

Everyone has heard of Celts, Anglo-Saxons and Vikings. And most of us are familiar with the idea that the English are descended from Anglo-Saxons, who invaded eastern England after the Romans left, while most of the people in the rest of the British Isles derive from indigenous Celtic ancestors with a sprinkling of Viking blood around the fringes.

Yet there is no agreement among historians or archaeologists on the meaning of the words “Celtic” or “Anglo-Saxon.” What is more, new evidence from genetic analysis (see note below) indicates that the Anglo-Saxons and Celts, to the extent that they can be defined genetically, were both small immigrant minorities. Neither group had much more impact on the British Isles gene pool than the Vikings, the Normans or, indeed, immigrants of the past 50 years.

The genetic evidence shows that three quarters of our ancestors came to this corner of Europe as hunter-gatherers, between 15,000 and 7,500 years ago, after the melting of the ice caps but before the land broke away from the mainland and divided into islands. Our subsequent separation from Europe has preserved a genetic time capsule of southwestern Europe during the ice age, which we share most closely with the former ice-age refuge in the Basque country. The first settlers were unlikely to have spoken a Celtic language but possibly a tongue related to the unique Basque language.

Another wave of immigration arrived during the Neolithic period, when farming developed about 6,500 years ago. But the English still derive most of their current gene pool from the same early Basque source as the Irish, Welsh and Scots. These figures are at odds with the modern perceptions of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon ethnicity based on more recent invasions. There were many later invasions, as well as less violent immigrations, and each left a genetic signal, but no individual event contributed much more than 5 per cent to our modern genetic mix.

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/mythsofbritishancestry

Alex Thomson of UK Column - proud purveyor of the totally spurious Celtic myth - which has contributed to much division and unequal treatment in the so-called 'UK' - all levelled against what is unashamedly its most multi-ethnic country, England.

End of Nations - The EU Takeover And The Lisbon Treaty

Politicians no longer listen to us. We want devolution for England as a nation? Hard titty. We want a referendum on the EU Lisbon Treaty? Hard titty...

It's odd, but the politicians suddenly seem to be all in it together. The Tories don't really seem to want to challenge New Labour that much - so David Cameron announces that those who want devolutionary parity in England are "sour little Englanders" and goes on to say that the Union is sacred. Health apartheid? Who cares?

Very few politicians in the mainstream parties seem to be acting for the electorate any more. Our wishes are blatantly ignored. So, what is going on? On the devolutionary front, there's definitely a racist, anti-English Scots/Welsh/"British"/PC faction at work, but why so few protests from English MPs?

Why is England so determinedly being broken up into regions, despite the 78% NO vote in the North East, the only area allowed a referendum?

What's going on? Why is democracy going to the wall?

This is essential reading and viewing:

We set out to make a video about the pros and cons of the Lisbon Treaty and found out to our horror the lies, manipulations and deceit behind the EU. From MEPs, legal experts and EU researches the true nature of the EU unfolded, how it really operates from behind closed doors and away from prying eyes. We discovered the massive power grab away from citizens and nations to the elites that is being proposed in this treaty. Most shocking of all was how our elected representatives are willingly handing us over to this emerging Totalitarian Superstate by deception , propaganda and outright lies.

This video details how the structures of the EU really operate, what the full significance of the Lisbon Treaty is and how it is the end of Nations within in the EU. MEPs describe their experience in Brussels and how they are undermined by the real power of the unelected and unaccountable Eurocrats who run the organization. How the politicians are working together for their own selfish needs while being used for a bigger agenda.

The video lasts for 1 hour and 22 minutes. I strongly recommend that you watch it all and read the associated material. It's all here.