Andy Burnham - Let's Set England Against Itself. Ignore the Poor across the Country. Barnett Formula? Wonderful!

                           

The Celtic (1707 linguistic term from Welsh Nationalist Edward Lhuyd, not an ancient UK ethnicity) myth and all things horrible, Andy Burnham. Look after the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish (don't mention Darien, disproportionate activity by the Scots in the British Empire, the partitioning of Ireland by a Welsh PM with avid backing of Protestant Scots, the invention of the Poll Tax by Scotsman Douglas Mason and its implementation there in 1989 by its own Secretary of State, Wales as separate rivalries and kingdoms, not an ancient, unified country) and pander to their one-side retellings of history. And as for the far more ethnically diverse England? Stuff that!

Isn't it gross that it looks like we're getting a non-elected PM, with no loyalty to England (he has bragged of Scots and Irish blood - very odd and rather racist), who wants to break England further into pieces? Well, all UK, Scots and Welsh MPs favour that, of course.

Burnham is, of course, co-author of Head North (featuring a UK outline mainly featuring nationally devolved Scotland on its cover).

Now, the Barnett Formula and West Lothian Question - producing fiscal and democratic deficits for England - will continue, although Burnham once mentioned 'tearing up' the Barnett Formula. But nobody wants to upset the fierce Tiny Scotlanders. 

Burnham wants an office in the North. The North of where? Well, he didn't mention it by name, but he obviously means England as Scotland has its own domestic parliament, higher per capita spending from the UK tax pot (Barnett Formula), a Scottish Minister in the UK Parliament, non-representative MPs in the UK Parliament helping pass legislation on England (West Lothian Question), and free prescriptions for millionaires. Wales has that too.

Lord Joel Barnett, creator of the Barnett Formula, later decried it repeatedly as unfair to people across England. Burnham tries to divide and rule by caricaturing southern and eastern England as 'haves' and the North as 'have nots'. In reality, the picture is far more nuanced, with appalling areas of poverty across the South and East.

Three of the poorest streets in England in the English Indices were found to be in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, in recent years.

Burnham, a Cambridge University grad himself, is a totally silly divide and ruler.

Keep the UK Parliament gravy train going, continue to pander to nationalistic nonsense from Scotland and Wales (who are far from innocent in UK history) and sod the vast majority in England.

The UK's most ethnically diverse country by far.

And he brags of having Irish blood. No such thing. DNA studies have taken all that nonsense apart, and waving that as a flag of inclusivity and diversity is ridiculous.

Just above the poverty line Saleem in Great Yarmouth pays nearly £10 per prescription item. Super rich Angus in Edinburgh or Cerys in Cardiff get them free.

Meanwhile, the UK gravy train of divide, rule and discriminate against England continues.

It's driven by anti-English/England attitudes, and the refusal of anybody in politics to speak for England. A lot of Scots and Welsh arguments could have been discussed years ago, and refuted where necessary. It never happened. So, England became the rump of the UK, with Scots and Welsh bile unchallenged, and more and more privileges for those tiny elites in those far less ethnically diverse UK countries.

Diversity, equity and inclusion?

After asymmetric national devolution kicked off in the late 1990s, England was reviled by Labour politician Jack Straw, the then Home Secretary (!) on the BBC. All the one-side, completely unchallenged, bile from Scotland and Wales was trumpeted, and Straw described the English as 'very violent' and said England has subjugated the other countries.

I'm sorry, UK history is not a history of saintly countries and one sinner country. Any objective viewer can see that. It is not a Marxist oppressed/oppressor narrative made real. The fact that the very ill-informed, rather bigoted Straw chose to revile the country he was elected in, was even more remarkable.

What Jack Straw said to the BBC in 2000 - demonizing England, which, of course, had no nationally representative government even then! Perfectly natural, surely, in light of non-accountable politicians from devolved UK nations voting on England's domestic legislation (West Lothian Question), and the Barnett Formula - awarding more money to less ethnically diverse UK nations largely out of the English tax pots, that England should be questioning? Since then, UK politicians have kept their 'UK' gravy train safely on the rails by hardly ever mentioning England, confusing voters in England as to what is UK-wide legislation or simply English, and planning to hack it up, in deference to sanctimonious bigotry from Scotland and Wales.

Let's balance reality a bit by looking objectively at Scotland and Wales:

Darien; the Darien bail-out; disproportionate Scots' activity in the British Empire; clan warfare; the fact that Wales was not a unified ancient nation but factions and kingdoms - fighting each other; the Celtic linguistic term from Welsh Nationalist Edward Lhuyd, expanded into a fake ancient and exclusive ethnicity; the invention of the Poll Tax by Scotsman Douglas Mason and its implementation there a year early by its own Secretary of State; the partitioning of Ireland by a Welsh Prime Minister with avid backing of Protestant Scots; The Clearances - by the Scots themselves, not the English...

And the Scots and Welsh Nationalists then climbed into their fake pulpits to denounce England as the sole UK wrong-doer.

And the UK Parliament went along with it for asymmetric national devolution, including the disgracefully one-sided statements of Jack Straw.

Funnily enough, the British nationality is only a few hundred years old. It was intended as a pan-Britain identity at the time of the union with Scotland. The time of Empire. So, with the UK Government tying to instill 'British' values in everyone in England, what are they? Colonisation?

Some Scottish Nats like to argue that the oil off its coastline belongs to Scotland alone. Of course it doesn't. Scotland was bailed out by England after its disastrous Darien colonisation attempt, and then made a huge splash on the world stage and enormous amounts of dosh from the British Empire, being disproportionately active. Made possible by the union with England. 

And it has benefitted hugely from asymmetric national devolution, the Barnett Formula (from 1978) and another formula, Goschen, from 1888, giving it higher funding.

I'm afraid a union is a union, and that doesn't mean what's England's is also Scotland's, but a natural resource off Scotland's coastline is Scotland's alone.

And the oil receipts don't nearly cover Scotland's funding and UK benefits over the centuries.

From the UK Parliament website: big money for Scotland. Meanwhile, England is to be hacked up into divisive, expensive tinpot regions, and still receive lower per capita spending (Barnett Formula) AND still suffer a democratic deficit via the West Lothian Question. You cannot demonise England and treat it as the UK residual, which the UK Parliament does, while sponsoring national fervour and entrenched exclusiveness elsewhere in the nation. Nations and regions? In a union of four countries?

But the last laugh may be on Burnham and the racist UK Parliament. By dividing England into regions with Mayors and other officials, it's highly likely there'll soon be a great reckoning about who has what - and that includes the democratic and fiscal privileges delivered to Scotland and Wales.

Destabilising England is, in our view, the fastest way to destabilise the so-called UK. It's been treated as the rump of the UK since devolution, and often before, with Wales and Scotland having Secretaries of State, and the Barnett Formula, dating back to 1978.

And Scotland had the Goschen Formula, dating from 1888, to favour it financially before that..

Highlighting the true haves and have nots across Britain by regionalising England should provoke some interesting times, amidst lots of expensive new politicians and raised voices.

Domestic parliaments for all the UK nations and a vastly slimmed down UK Parliament for pan-UK legislation is the simple answer. Then England could decide on its own internal governance with no need for further devolution. Counties were rather good.

But the UK Parliament gravy train refuses to let go of England.

This way is going to be very messy and noisy.

Well, the UK Parliament has denied England for so long, it will be fun to watch as its chickens come home to roost.

Russell T Davies of the Doctor Who Revival: Inclusive and Wonderful or a Bigoted Tiny Welshman?

Russell T Davies strikes a 'dramatic' pose. Of course, in modern Britain everybody should be equal and we all should strive for togetherness. But he regards himself as Welsh first and foremost and has an agenda.

Russell T Davies is very much a modern TV writer. He writes Coronation Street style dialogue (Queer As Folk) and uses other people's creations (Doctor Who). We don't find him very original at all.

But Russell believes in a world without barriers of race, gender, etc. He believes in a wonderful present and future.

Or does he?

Actually, we believe Russell to be very bigoted indeed and the guy seems rather typical of a branch of the 'Woke' movement that is actually loaded with bigotry and spite.

But only against accepted groups. Every era has its accepted recipients of bigotry, and for a very long time the English and England have been accepted targets.

Russell used his early Doctor Who revival stories, for instance, to fire potshots at the English on several occasions. He even took an old socialist phrase 'Britain for the British' and turned it into 'England for the English'.

English people - of any origin - are just as likely to demean their own people and country. Which shows the effects of the anti-England/English bias over many decades. We have been brainwashed.

Born in Wales himself, and with severe 'Little Walesian' leanings, Russell believes that his own country (of about three million souls) is somehow lovely and England (apart from Manchester - which he never mentions is an English city, but sees it as a separate entity) is not. Historical, one-sided victimhood narratives abound here.

And nonsense is rife. 'Welsh Law'? For centuries, long before Wales, the area was competing factions and kingdoms, slugging it out, not a unified country. 'Welsh Law' is romanticised later nonsense, designed to bolster up the 'we're so lovely and separate' narrative.

In a recent Doctor Who story, Russell had English scientist Sir Isaac Newton portrayed by a man of colour, although the actual man was not. Well, fine, who cares? But then Russell portrayed the Scots inventor of the early television system, John Logie Baird, as white - and with ginger hair. Um, couldn't HE have been a man of colour too?

This was obviously because the Scots were not disproportionately active in the British Empire (they were, actually) and were always lovely people set upon by the dastardly English (watched Braveheart, dear?), and linked of course to RTD's very own country, Wales.

Scotland almost bankrupted itself with its own colonisation attempt at Darien, then eagerly joined England and was disproportionately active in the British Empire. Later, of course, Ireland was partitioned by Welsh Prime Minister David Lloyd George, with avid backing of Protestant Scots.

The trouble is, of course, historical revisionism and the fake and highly racist Celtic Nations nonsense (the Celtic notion was applied linguistically not ethnically by Edward Lhuyd, dated from the 1700s and has been debunked by DNA studies) which Russell sees as binding him to his 'fraternal' Scots 'brothers' and 'sisters' and people with other preferred pronouns.

There is much bigotry emanating from the tiny countries of Scotland and Wales. But nobody sees it because they are always projecting it onto England, as are the 'Great and the Good' in England, By the way, England is by far the largest and, even proportionally, ethnically diverse UK country, so the bigotry from the so-called Celtic Nations could be called racism. 

It is all very well to have 'right on' legislation called things like 'New Scots', but when you and your politicians are curiously silent about the Barnett Formula and West Lothian Question, which hugely disadvantage the far more ethnically diverse population of the country next door, England, and is largely funded by them, the whole picture becomes very distorted indeed.

United Kingdom? Or uncaring self interest?

It was Rhodri Morgan who crowed: 'We've made the English jealous!' when green-lighting free prescriptions for even millionaires in his own country. On Barnett Formula largesse. So, the largest and most ethnically diverse UK country is discriminated against  - and has to provide much of the money for that discrimination.

Russell was - and is - curiously silent.

Our whole political system is riddled with racism - from the Barnett Formula (loathed by its late creator, Lord Joel Barnett), and the West Lothian Question to the sorry state of asymmetric national devolution. Our media, particularly the BBC, hurries to back up the notion of England=Evil.

So, the largest and most ethnically diverse UK country gets the worst deal of all from the 'UK' setup (and do check out William Wilberforce, English politician, whose stance against slavery from the late 1700s onwards was pivotal to ending it), and people like Russell T Davies are attempting to brainwash a whole new generation while laughing like Doctor Who villains. 

All the way to the bank.

'UK' Parliament Appeases Welsh Nationalists While Cutting Pensioners' Winter Heating Allowance In England...

The UK Government, which is cutting heating allowances for pensioners in England, is specially employing people who speak Welsh for telephone and other enquiries in departments like Work & Pensions (DWP). 

Um, how many people in Wales speak Welsh fluently, if at all? How many people in Wales speak Welsh only and not English? 

Recruiting people specially to speak Welsh is a huge waste of money, while other things go hang. There are around three million people in Wales and they speak English. Quite a number of them are not even Welsh. 

This is not to say that people shouldn't learn Welsh, appreciate Welsh, study Welsh, etc, etc, but employing people to speak it specifically in 'UK' Government departments is absurd.

The grip of asymmetric national devolution - the Barnett Formula (which was loathed as unfair by its own creator, Lord Joel Barnett) sees higher spending in Wales per head of population than in England already. 

Before people talk of different spending levels within England, the Barnett Formula applies only nationally to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. 

The 'UK' Government is mad. And its support of the Welsh nationalist thing, the fake white Celtic myth of 1707, historical victimhood revisionism, etc, is way over the top when you consider the far larger and far more ethnically diverse population of England today. 

Asymmetric national devolution discriminates against every living soul in England, regardless of the origins of the person. 

Spending money to appease Welsh nationalists is simply not on. The Welsh are not an ethnic minority struggling with the English language. There are plenty of people who have genuine difficulties in understanding English to whom any such initiatives would be better directed. 

Or how about spending the Welsh language cash on pensioners' winter fuel payments?

Ncuti Gatwa - Doctor Who - Scottish Not British - and Russell T Davies's Past Form...

So, Doctor Who, now led again by racist Welshman Russell T Davies (witness some of his insular Welsh anti-Englishness via the article here) is "Rwandan-Scottish", not Rwandan-British? Does not compute. 

The first black guy to play the Doctor and he comes from a country of five million, who enjoy the elitist Barnett Formula (reviled by its late creator, Lord Joel Barnett), exercising the West Lothian Question, the fake, racist Celtic victimhood nonsense, and all the benefits of asymmetric national devolution. And Ncuti is the FOURTH actor from that country of five million souls (in a nation of over sixty million) to play the Doctor, and this is supposed to be celebrated?

Nope. If his family had come to England, he'd probably say he was British. He'd have it rammed down his throat, as we all do in England. As he's not and doesn't view himself as such, this is obviously not about inclusivity, it's about exclusivity, Russell T Davies's evil agenda against the largest and most ethnically diverse (even proportionally) 'UK' country, England, would do the Toymaker he nicked from original Who in 'The Giggle' proud.

I think the show is now made in Wales - a country of three million souls - yet the vast majority of BBC licence fee payers don't live there, do they?

Did anybody else notice that Davies's Isaac Newton, a white Englishman, was race-swapped? But the Scots inventor John Logie-Baird, was left white? But surely the Scots were disproportionately involved in the British Empire? Why not do a little tweaking there, RTD? Don't they deserve a sanctimonious rewriting too? Nope. Scotland is part of RTD's fake fraternity of Celtic Nations and so, historically, MUST remain white.

When a Woke person claims they are all for inclusivity, do check if they're Scottish or Welsh. The vast majority of the time they'll probably be fine. But, while Tommy Robinson, etc, make the news, the racism of the smaller countries is far more rampant, infects our whole system of government, yet often slips under the radar.

Investigate. You might just discover that all is not what it seems.

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".

Scoto-Britain

From Our Kingdom:

Historian Richard Weight called for a progressive nationalism that emphasised the hybridity of English identity, noting that "there's a hyphen in Anglo-Saxon."

Historian?! What a twit. The vast majority of us know the English aren't a "pure race". What about challenging the racist "Celtic" twaddle emanating from Scotland, Wales and Cornwall? No hyphen in "Celtic", and no sense of reality, either. And by the way: the 'Anglo-Saxons' never called themselves that, it's a retrospective naming, and they were, according to logic and DNA studies, a minority in England anyway. There were other people and ways forming England and Englishness - which we did and do call our country and its people. Even more influences now in the modern day. How's that for inclusivity? 

Unfortunately, pandering to racists and historic victimhood nonsense in Scotland and Wales by the so-called 'UK' government means that the largest and most diverse UK country, England, gets the worst treatment, via the Barnett Formula (loathed by its late creator, Lord Joel Barnett), the West Lothian Question and asymmetric national devolution in general.

How's that for racism?

This e-mail from a Scots Nat on the comments thread made us smile:

The current fiction is that Britain is a unitary state and always has been. Once England and Englishness are acknowledged as a nation and a nationality Scotland and Wales have to get the same treatment. Currently they are considered and treated as provinces of a unitary Anglo-Britain.

But they have been recognised as something very special and exclusive those eight million souls in Scotland and Wales combined - there is asymmetric national devolution and England doesn't exist, dear - it's artificial regions, ruled by a Scottish Raj. It's a Scoto-Britain if anything. You can even die in England for want of medication available on the NHS in Scotland (subsidised by the English).

What will it take to make some people pull their heads out of their backsides?