Band of Brothers – Recovering the English Nation
June 14th, 2012
English National Identity
Until the era of mass tourism and coincidentally Britain’s entry in 1973 into what was then the European Economic Community (EEC), most English people outside London referred to themselves as “English” when asked to fill up a hotel registration form. Some still do. As remarked above, EEC membership required precision in describing their country. Even so, many were puzzled by the description on their passports: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It’s a long name so the abbreviation UK has largely replaced it and England in common discourse. This has come as a relief to US Presidents who in deference to the American-Irish vote have previously wrongly referred to the UK as “Great Britain”[13].
Undermining the idea of the English Nation
As stated at the beginning of this article, the very notion of an English Nation has been under attack from a variety of sources – academic and journalistic – since the 1970s. Gaskell’s 1986 article was a reflection of this and the response to my letter of rebuttal was an indication of the widespread dismay and unhappiness his article had caused.
The five visible elements of dismay listed in the introduction – rise of Scottish nationalism, the IRA insurrection in Northern Ireland, mass immigration from Africa and the Indian subcontinent, the trades union-led anarchy in British industry[14], and entry into the EEC, all contributed to a widespread sense of failure of the British state, and worries about England’s future in particular[15].
The broadcast media did its best to aid the sense of failure by adding the key ingredients of guilt and spite. The influential BBC television series in 1972 on the British Empire[16] was full of fabricated sequences[17]: no attempt at balance or proportion was made by the makers – fresh college graduates imbued with the Marxist beliefs, assumptions and ignorance of many of their lecturers in university arts faculties. Coupled with the indictment of the USA for its treatment of its former Black slaves (about 12% of the US population), pressure to abandon the White Australia policy, Maori agitation in New Zealand, and the rise of Québec nationalism in Canada, the 1970s saw all the Anglo-Saxon countries indicted for their alleged racialist treatment of the rest of the world. This indictment was not withstanding the fact that only 25-30 years earlier in the second world war the Anglo-Saxon Allies had put down at huge cost in money and lives history’s most powerful racialist regimes, and crucially, returned all the liberated (AMGOT[18]) territories to self-rule either immediately or after a period of dedicated tutelage[19].
Of the five elements, three remain in 2012: Scottish nationalism, membership of the EEC (now EU), and mass Afro-Asian immigration (to which from 2004 has been added uncontrolled immigration from Eastern Europe (at around 1.5 million over 7 years, more than the natural increase in the British population).
The Political Contribution to Undermining the English Sense of Identity
This has been achieved by admitting many times the numbers of Afro-Asian immigrants envisaged after passing the 1962 Commonwealth Immigration Act[20]. This Act, passed in the teeth of hysterical opposition by the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskill, established three categories of voucher permitting immigration for settlement. In practice only category A applied to employment-based permissions and these were limited to 5,000. Crucially though, fantastically one might think, each A voucher allowed unlimited numbers of “dependants” which by 1969 amounted to 11 each, giving 60,000 admissions all told, a figure first publicised in the national press by this writer[21].
Despite widespread public opposition, articulated particularly by the late Enoch Powell in the late 1960s onwards, non-European immigration continued at 60-80,000 a year net, to which the asylum route was added and exploited by immigration lawyers in the 1990s.