What does it mean to be British?

What does it mean to be British, and does it matter? For many politicians, interested only in building up an electorate likely to preserve them in the enjoyment of power, being British means no more than being here in Britain. With such a view being popular in Westminster it is not surprising that the native white British population finds itself marginalised and even penalised, as if the fact of having a British ancestry were a cause of shame. If we will not support the agenda of the Common Purpose generation of politicians then they have shown themselves quite willing to replace the electorate rather than modify their policies.

David Cameron, for instance, has determined that he will reduce net migration to a smaller figure than the hundreds of thousands it presently represents. But the measure of net migration means that if every white British native left the British Isles and was replaced by an immigrant then Cameron would be satisfied that he had acheived his ambition. But what an ambition! Andrew Neather has famously exposed the New Labour agenda behind unlimited immigration, and elsewhere he was happy to publish a statement saying of the high levels of migration we have experienced..

The results in London, and especially for middle-class Londoners, have been highly positive. It’s not simply a question of foreign nannies, cleaners and gardeners – although frankly it’s hard to see how the capital could function without them.

Clearly those in power have no great interest in preserving the cultural and social integrity of the native white British population. We can hardly turn to them to develop a description of what it means to be British. Indeed for most of our political class it means nothing at all other than representing the accident of geography that leads us to be living here rather than somewhere else.

So what does it mean to be British, and why does it matter? Tim Stanley in the Telegraph, trying to smear the EDL and suggest that Islam is the more English, makes a mistake when he quotes George Bernard Shaw trying to suggest that there is no substance to the idea of being English. Shaw says..

It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.

Stanley’s error is to suggest that agreement between people is what makes a nation. It does not. It is a matter of fact that Shaw is correct in his observation. But Shaw also points out that such disagreements are between those who share a common nationhood, which remains unshaken by their disagreement. Shaw illustrates the truth that we are English, or Welsh, or Scottish, or British before we agree with each other, and despite any disagreements we might have.

There are certainly cultural differences between the various nations living in the British Isles, but although we might well identify ourselves as English, or Scottish, before we consider ourselves British, nevertheless the integral nature of our shared history and identity means that we are all of indeed British before anything else. How is this so?

From the point of view of political nationality we are all of us citizens of the United Kingdom, and subjects of the Queen of the United Kingdom. In our General Elections we must elect representatives for the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Of course this does not mean that other local loyalties might not be more important to us, but we cannot deny that there is a shared political reality which unites British people.

But it is this shared political reality which has been subverted and corrupted by politicians at all levels for their own interests. We are no longer able to rely on this political identity to be the guarantee of our British national coherence. Indeed it is this very political identity which is being dispensed without restraint upon all who come to live here in the British Isles, and in so doing is weakening our social identity as British people.

We must look elsewhere to determine the bounds of our national identity. The Roman Empire failed, to a great extent, because it eventually opened up the citizenship to all, so that it no longer meant very much to be a Roman, and it certainly meant no great loyalty to the city itself which was the foundation of Rome. Citizenship became a commercial transaction instead of a great honour. We are running headlong towards the same destiny since we offer citizenship so cheaply, and even to those who hate everything that matters most about the British culture, nation and heritage.

Looking elsewhere we must return to the original and universal nature of nationhood which refers always to a shared ancestry. One example of this is found still in the Scottish clan system, however much it is a construction of Victorian period. The very reason for the name of our country is that it is the land of a particular people. We live in England because this is the land of the English, we are not English because we live in England. We live in the British Isles, and in Great Britain, because this is where the British live. We are not made British because we live here, but the islands are named after us, they are the Isles of the British.

Who are the British? It is, in the most important sense, those of us who are rooted by birth and lineage in this land which is named after us. In a second post we can consider how it is possible for someone not of this lineage to become British, but we must not place what is a secondary consideration before that which is primary. Someone may perhaps become British. But we are already and always will be British.

Those of us who can trace our ancestry back to the beginning of the 20th century and are not part of a very well defined minority community such as that of British Jews, can be sure that in all probability we have direct ancestors whose lineage is rooted in even the period before the Norman Conquest. There will, perhaps, be other influences here and there, but they will not be very marked. In my own family I have one ancestor, my great-great-great-grandfather, who was a Frenchman. For the rest, I have found no other migrant influences over the past 250 years. This is the case for most white British people whose ancestry is known back to the 19th century.

More than this. Those white British people who are not recent migrants are almost certainly related to every other white British person by innumerable lines of family connection. In fact the population of Britain in the 11th-12th centuries is our common ancestry. We are all of us descended from these same people. In the most important sense this is what makes us British.

This doesn’t mean that all British people will agree with each other, just as a family may fall into angry arguments. But it is the basis for our shared identity, history and culture whether this is recognised by every British person or not. A family is not made up of every person who might happen to be in a house. And there are certainly times when a visitor to our home might behave much more politely than one of our own children. But this doesn’t change the nature of what it means to be a family.  A visitor, however well behaved, does not have the same shared traditions, does not have the same shared experiences, does not have the same relationship to every other member of the family.

Nor can we expect those who visit Britain, and wish to live here for a variety of reasons, to have that same relationship, that same shared culture, whether recognised or not. It is impossible to imagine, for instance, that any white British person could consider the genital mutilation of a small girl to be normal. It is so far from our shared culture, however strained that culture might appear to be. But there are visitors to Britain who consider it entirely acceptable, even commendable.

Let’s begin with the most basic definition of what it is to be British. It is to have a majority of grand-parents who are also British. Of course this need not be the only definition of being British, but it should be the most basic and the most important. We are British not primarily as a status which can be acquired, but because of our family relationship, such that we are born into the British national family.  Other means of becoming British will be considered in a second post, but for most of us we have not become British, we just are British.

How can this be measured? One simple, but accurate, criteria would be to state that all those who have three or more grand-parents who are British may be considered British if they themselves were born in Britain. The precarious state of British social coherence would seem to require such remedial action. Each of those grand-parents would be British by virtue of being born in Britain of grand-parents who were in the main British. This seems reasonable. There is scope for immigrant ancestry in even the most recent periods, but on the whole a British person is born in Britain of British parents and grand-parents. We are the native inhabitants, and our ancestry is the guarantee and description of our ethnicity.

I’ve already mentioned my French ancestry. How would this affect my own status? Am I British by this definition or not? I have already suggested that it is quite possible to be British and have one grand-parent who is an immigrant. It is therefore equally possible, by this definition, to have several great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents who were also immigrants. The issue is not whether or not we like immigrants and have them as members of our family tree. But the pressing and urgent issue is what it means to be British rather than simply someone living in Britain, and this must always begin with the rights due to birth and ancestry.

Under this definition Nick Clegg is not British. His mother is Dutch, and his father is half Russian, so he is only one quarter British. Does this matter? Well I think it does. It is is possible to ask whether Clegg has an appreciation for the shared British culture and atttudes. He has stated quite clearly that he has been much influenced by his Dutch mother and considers Holland to be a better society than England. In his own words..

I think, too, that my mother’s classic sort of Dutchness instilled in us a degree of scepticism about the entrenched class configurations in British society. Rightly or wrongly, you just felt that the Netherlands was a much more socially mobile country, where you weren’t judged by your accent, your education or your background as much as you are in this country. I was acutely aware as a youngster that, frankly, things just seemed to work so much better in the Netherlands than they did in Britain – or England, at least. There was just a feeling that something was holding this country back, at a time when – perhaps in part because of the devastation of the war – large parts of Europe were palpably moving forward, politically, economically, in terms of infrastructure…

It would be odd to hear a British politician insisting that everything was better in Holland, but it is not surprising to hear an Anglo-Russo-Dutch politician saying such a thing. But the question then arises whether someone with such a background should be a representative in the UK Parliament. Just how much does Nick Clegg understand and respect our own British culture and values? Not very much it would seem.

But Nick Clegg is only representative of the devaluing of being British in modern times. A large proportion of the electorate has even less connection to Britishness, and relies on the geographic definition of becoming British. By force of numbers, especially in our urban centres, those who are native British are supplanted and even excluded from society by those who have become British in a variety of other means.

What is surely necessary is to state clearly that being British is different to becoming a resident of the British Isles, or even a citizen of the United Kingdom, and that those who are British must have additional and primary rights which cannot be easily gained by those who are not ethnically British. These rights might well include membership of the Houses of Parliament, membership of the Judiciary and senior positions in Public Services.

Let’s be clear. This is not racism. There is no idea that being British is necessarily better than being French, or Mexican, or Kenyan. But being British does mean something, and preserving our British national coherence and integrity is as much the right of the British people, as it is of any tribe in the Amazonian rainforest. If the British people are not able to maintain an identity then Britain ceases to exist. It is no longer the Isles of the British, but a Northern European region with a mixed population, and our identity is only preserved by privileging our culture, history and traditions above all others, and restricting to a very great extent all positions of authority and influence to those who are native British.

This is not the last word. There must also be ways for others to become British, and there must also be a recognition that many people are not British at all but are presently immigrants welcome to live in Britain, and others are of Anglo-Dutch ethnicity, as Nick Clegg, or many other such mixed backgrounds. But being British matters, and must matter even more as our national identity has come under greater threat than ever before. Those of us who are native British are united to each other in many ways and share the same ancestors. We are a family, even if riven with dissent. Before it is too late we must recognise what we have together and preserve our national coherence before it is lost.