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From card to ID Today, former Home Secretary David Blunkett made his return to UK political life. He chose as his subject English identity – an indefinable quantity which, by dint of its indefinability, we purportedly lack. His objective, according to Madeleine Bunting, writing in the Guardian, is to formulate a progressive definition of Englishness. She omits to tell us why English identity cannot be left alone but must be formulated – or engineered – to meet the progressive agenda. I suppose now, a few weeks before the election, is a good time to lay down the Labour marker for Englishness - to make it safe for the Multi-cult, to make the English confident and welcoming multiculturalists. No matter that the left has spent forty years denigrating us as racist sinners, delegitimising our views, twisting our history, poisoning our language, denying the veracity of our ties of blood and our claims to this land, lauding strangers and silencing our dissent … nothing must be left un-engineered. Ms Bunting also omits to remark upon the superb irony of a man who as Home Secretary saw “no obvious limit” to immigration now trying to help us through our supposed exile from self. If ten million … twenty million … forty million immigrants do not obviously represent an upper limit then England has no resonance for Englishness. It is indeed a progressive definition which treats of such inconsequence where once giants stood - the rulers of a quarter of the globe, the inventors of human rights, modern parliamentary democracy, Conservatism and liberalism, industrialisation and modernity itself. (No, it’s not all good, far from it. But it is great.) Somehow not noticing this mighty presence in the world Bunty warns us against an Englishness that is “nostalgic, cricket on the village green stuff - and racialised that it becomes conflated with white.” Oh dear oh lor’. Bunty sweetheart, it’s shocking I know. But the English are white. I am white. You are white. For pete’s sake, even the shameless, peroxide underclass that can’t see past the nearest black penis is regrettably white. To acknowledge our northern European phenotype doesn’t require us to “conflate” it with anything. I know there is much difficulty in casting off your anti-racist pretentions but we are bloody well WHITE. The rather small study on which Ms B bases her concerns for Englishness was a review of the urban young in Plymouth and in Bristol. Plymouth is in Cornwall, which is the wrong place to start asking about the English. Might as well go to Skye. Well, almost. Bristol is a modern multicultural city. In general – and notwithstanding the sad but true fact that girls who were questioned won’t have had a clue about Englishness because girls don’t – the multi-culturally propagandised young are scarcely likely either to know much or, if they do, to say it. It isn’t easy after all. National identities are curiously difficult to pin down. The media glitterati of Islington couldn’t do it just by references to stirring, positive stuff like Lowry paintings or fish ‘n chips. People are stubborn and will insist on defining themselves by what they are not. The Scots, Welsh and Irish, for example, are not English. And the English are not the black and brown immigrants they have to accommodate. “Does it matter, “ the Bunt asks, “that Englishness has so little pull on these children? Ask yourself, when was the last time you described yourself as English?” Well, Bunty, old girl, it matters because our children are English andthe future of England. They must be told the whole Rushtonian truth. Obeisance to the testosterone-driven street culture of the double-digit blacks who have washed up on our economic shoreline is not part of being us. We do not find ourselves in their works, such as they are. We are separate and are to be found only when separately considered. And Mr Blunkett? His speech will be reported tomorrow, no doubt. But the man is blind. An obvious limit, one would think. I’m not sure he’s in a position to speak of our Englishness at all. Comments:2
Posted by Fred Scrooby on Tue, 15 Mar 2005 02:42 | # Blunkett is such a piece of slime. What, is that stumbling, lurching member of the undead still flailing onward with the unmistakable look of the void behind his eyes? I can smell the mold and must from here, across the Atlantic. Can’t anyone make him get back into his coffin? Political death hasn’t taken him? 3
Posted by Mark Richardson on Tue, 15 Mar 2005 09:42 | # I like Ms Bunting’s hilarious line about English identity: “that kind of nationalism was a 19th century European invention.” So, just as we are supposed to believe that male and female are social constructs, and that “binary opposite” sexuality (heterosexuality) is a social construct, and that race is a social construct, so too is national identity just a construct, an “invention”, of the nineteenth century. No inherited, unchosen form of identity is even allowed to have a real existence for liberals like Ms Bunting. Instead, as Ms Bunting puts it, we are to “piece together” our own “complex, hybrid” identity (usually liberals also stick in the word “fluid” at this point when discussing identity). Identities, for liberals, are things we choose for ourselves by our own reason: they are, in liberal speak, “rational attachments” as opposed to mere “destiny”. 4
Posted by irena uderska on Tue, 15 Mar 2005 10:34 | # Blunkett was Home Secretary in a government that has just banned hunting and labelled hunt supporters criminals. Hunting is a superb example of the glories of Englishness. They would never, of course, ban Islamic or Jewish ritual slaughter. 5
Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 15 Mar 2005 11:00 | # Meanwhile, Gordon Brown has thrown his hat into the national identity ring, aiming at that early 18th Century invention, Britishness:- http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1526058,00.html Interviewed on BBC2’s Newsnight he said, “I think the days of Britain having to apologise for our history are over. I think we should celebrate much of our past rather than apologise for it and we should talk, rightly so, about British values. If you look at the whole span of British history, it’s time to emphasise that that is at the core of our history, that’s at the core of our Britishness and it’s such a potential influence on our future that I believe we should be talking about it more, not less.” OK, first Britain is a political entity, not a nation. The pursuit of a false British identity has, over the last three hundred years, done even more than immigration and multiculturalism to harm if not Englishness itself, then the perception of it. As a Scot and a multiculturalist canny Gordon may well be seeking to hobble the sense of Englishness, including the progressive one Blunkett wants to promote. Instead, we English must celebrate “British values”. These, naturally, are the values of the Multi-Cult and the political state which he would rule if only it wasn’t for the present occupant of No 10. Neither Brown nor Blunkett are social scientists. They are power people and I am not convinced that they fully buy into the faith of self-authoring. Certainly, they deny the reach of Nature into our being and the cogniscance of that as the foundation of identity. But thereafter they are motivated less by the pursuit of the free self than by that of power, and their utterances reflect this. 6
Posted by Fred Scrooby on Tue, 15 Mar 2005 14:29 | # “I think we should celebrate much of our past rather than apologise for it and we should talk, rightly so, about British values. [...I]t’s time to emphasise that that is at the core of our history, that’s at the core of our Britishness and it’s such a potential influence on our future that I believe we should be talking about it more, not less.” —Gordon Brown What they need to be talking about is the British race: what’s “at the core of British history,” what’s “at the core of British Britishness,” what’s going to “influence the British future,” is the British race. Blunkett and Miss Bunting, keep your filthy, rotten, stinking hands off it, race-replacers! Filling England, Scotland, Wales, or Northern Ireland completely up with Pakistanis, Chinamen, Nigerians, or Jamaicans will radically, irrevocably change, kill, and replace those nations. It’s not as if there’s something in the air that hovers above the British Isles that makes people Brits, by being breathed in. It’s something in the genes that makes them Brits. The other side may reply, “Whoever said anything about ‘filling England up’? We only want to let some of them come.” If they do, they must propose a strictly-enforced upper limit on immigration of incompatibles, a limit beyond which the native race be threatened with percepible racial change. But the other side refuse to do that. Instead, we get Blunkett’s “There is no theoretical upper limit.” Then he and they can go straight to hell because we see what their real motive is. Pakistanis in their aggregate, Chinamen in theirs, or Nigerians or Jamaicans in theirs—all fine, wonderful people I’m sure—are never going to be the same as Brits in theirs and anyone mindless or brazen enough to argue the contrary is either evil deliberately, or so bereft of wit, such an intellectual non-entity, he shouldn’t be paid a moment’s attention but laughed off any stage. Mind that—mind race—and all else will follow: the race may lose its way temporarily; it may stumble or fall; but it will emerge alive from the fever swamp. Otherwise it’s gone forever; a thing of the past; vanished from off the face of the earth, if moronic, clueless women who should be home knitting, making dinner, and having babies instead of embarrassing themselves by pretending to have a masculine brain when they’ve the diametrical opposite, and undead political-hack zombies, the likes of this Bunting-Blunkett pair, get their hellish way. 7
Posted by Steve Edwards on Tue, 15 Mar 2005 19:53 | # The Japanese have an upper immigration limit of approximately zero. Israel only accepts Jews. Malaysia openly states that Israelis and Serbs are not allowed visas. Why, oh, why is there so much hypocrisy on immigration? Still, I love this progressive redefinition of Britain. Why doesn’t the authoritarian goon just admit he wants to abolish Britain? It’s perfectly clear that every single one of his policies are working towards that goal, so why can’t he say it? 8
Posted by Steve Edwards on Tue, 15 Mar 2005 19:54 | # Say, what do you guys think of the New American? 9
Posted by Mark Richardson on Wed, 16 Mar 2005 09:19 | # Guessedworker, you might be right about Blunkett not self-consciously pursuing liberal ideas about the self-creating individual. Isn’t it interesting, though, that a journalist like Madeleine Bunting does do this in such an explicit way. She’s yet another name added to the list of those in the political class who self-consciously pursue liberal political principles. 10
Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 16 Mar 2005 11:10 | # Mark, Brown and Blunkett have backgrounds in old Labour socialism. In Scotland and the north of England and, indeed, in Wales the political establishment is still coloured by traditional socialism, though the industrial substructure from which it arose has - like the Soviet Union - gone. I don’t believe that, as a whole, this tradition is very focussed on self-authoring. If it thought at all, it did so on the basis of class-warfare. It did not look beyond collectivism. Indeed, its vision of the working man involved next to no personal psychological change for him. The eponymous Andy Cap was never required to select his “self” from a limitless range of possibilities, and would be neither bright enough nor lightweight enough to wish to do so. On the other hand, the cultural marxism of New Labour begins from the Jewish standpoint that white gentiles - very much including working-class white gentiles - are dangerous oppressors and must themselves be freed from their “authoritarian personality”. That freedom leads inexhorably to the liberal ideal of self-authorship and, naturally, comes complete with the Jewish fantasy of the salad bowl. On the whole I prefer class-warfare. 11
Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 16 Mar 2005 11:19 | # On the liberal side of the equation the desire to be free will, like the poor, always be with us and, like the relief of poverty, always be addressed to ill effect. Freedom tugs at the heart and mind with such universality, constancy and power, we recalcitrant Conservatives are lost for words of reply. Consider the words of the pop song, Unwritten:- I am unwritten, can’t read my mind, I’m undefined Staring at the blank page before you Reaching for something in the distance Oh, oh, oh I break tradition, sometimes my tries, are outside the lines Staring at the blank page before you Reaching for something in the distance Feel the rain on your skin Staring at the blank page before you Reaching for something in the distance Feel the rain on your skin Oh, yeah, yeah How, as a Conservative, do you compete with that? 12
Posted by Mark Richardson on Wed, 16 Mar 2005 12:09 | # Interesting. Who wrote/performed the song? I agree that the mindset of old style socialism was healthier than the more advanced liberalism of today. At least the pre-1930s Australian socialists had healthier ideas on nation & family. Even so, the deconstruction of class - the idea that inherited class shouldn’t matter and shouldn’t affect who we are or what we choose to do - is part of the same kind of logic driving modern day liberalism. As to freedom, I think we have to hammer home two arguments. The first is that the liberal concept of freedom is something very specific and differs from our instinctive understanding of freedom. The second is that even our truer, instinctive understanding of freedom is one good to be defended among many goods, rather than a supreme, overriding organising principle of politics. 13
Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 16 Mar 2005 12:50 | # Natasha Bedingfield is both songwriter and singer, I believe. Her home page is here:- “Unwritten” was the title track of an album released this year. The lyrics of the other songs are here:- Mark, I would certainly appreciate some of your always subtle thinking on the freedom issue, especially the firstof the two issues above, in the form of an MR post - should the muse appear to you in the middle of one night. Post a comment:
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Posted by seelow heights on Tue, 15 Mar 2005 01:49 | #
I recall reading a condescending Guardian profile of a BNP’er. The BNP member made a reference to the interests of the indigenous English people. The Guardian put the word “indigenous” in quotes. Clearly the Left believes that certain disfavored groups(and only them) have no rights to the lands of their ancestors.Why is it that affluent European countries, of all the populated places on the planet (according to Leftist dogma), are bereft of indigenous peoples? Pure nonsense.Yet the leftists(along with their neocon fellow-travelers) are those who set the agenda in the West. I am not impressed by the left-neocon division over the war in Iraq, since a war against a white Christian nation(like Serbia) finds them united.