Band of Brothers – Recovering the English Nation
June 14th, 2012
The Labour Government 1997-2010.
In 1997 the incoming Labour government relaxed various immigration controls completely, including the crucial ‘primary purpose’ rule[22], which added an estimated 40-50,000 per annum, mainly from the Indian sub-continent. Jack Straw, Labour Home Secretary at the time, contributed the thoughtful comment on the BBC Radio4 Today Programme that the English had an “aggressive” streak in their make-up – presumably for trying to resist the relentless stream of foreigners settling in their midst. As reported by the Daily Express in 2010, none of this was an accidental byproduct of goodwill, but had the unproclaimed objective in some minds of changing Britain’s ethnic make-up “for ever”[23]. A fuller description of the immigration numbers involved in this odious process is given by this writer in “Spinning out of Control”, the first Sir James Goldsmith Memorial Lecture, 2007[24].
And so it continues. Paralysed by the politically correct (PC) neurosis, councils in Slough, London and Kent, who have borne the recent brunt of these huge inflows (now 500,000 per year gross) cannot bring themselves to ask the government to simply stop the inflow and withhold benefits from newcomers – one of the chief attractors – but only ask for more “resources”, i.e. levy more taxes on the rest of the population to pay for it. Even a left-wing Labourite, Margaret Hodge, MP for the London constituency of Dagenham, has protested (in 2007) that “an immigrant family is often given greater entitlement to community resources (she meant housing) than a settled British one”[25].
The deeper truth behind these and kindred remarks is that it is the English working class – until recently almost automatic Labour voters – who, as noted above, have retained their specifically English identity more than most – who have suffered most from mass immigration[25]. Whole districts in the industrial belt of the old textile towns from Bolton in the West to Bradford in the East have been transformed into what seem to be parts of the Indian sub-continent. In the East End of London English children are often in a small minority. People, not just buildings, trees and hills, are part of the landscape of a country and this has been transformed in parts of England’s major cities as completely as wind farms transform the countryside.
Confusion about National Identity
Talk of alleged “confusion” about national identity has been a hot media topic in the last few years. The reformed “firm left” socialist, David Blunkett, Home Secretary 2001-2004, was heard confessing on television that a new “Civic Nationalism” was needed to bind the country together and that old lefties like himself had not recognised in the past how much immigration had undermined national identity[26].
There is not the slightest doubt that this is true of many young people educated in state schools in the last 30 years or so. A public meeting in the East End of London in 2007 recorded a discussion between school children in which each was invited to say where they came from. One was from Pakistan, another mentioned India and so on – then a young English girl asked plaintively, “Where do I come from?” Shamefully, some people laughed at this point[25].
Never before in the history of nations and peoples – so far as this writer is aware – has the political establishment of a nominally democratic state stood by, observing, even encouraging, the replacement of its own people in their historic lands. It is not a great surprise to find conscious and subconscious Marxist beliefs at the heart of academic justifications for this democratic outrage[27].
Academic Contributions to England’s Undermining
In the introduction to his book “In search of the Dark Ages”, co-produced with the BBC2 TV series of the same name in 1981, historian Michael Wood gives the standard received view of the Afro-Asian mass immigration of the last half century: “Britain has always been a country of immigrants”, going on to cite “the Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Normans, Flemish weavers, Huguenots[28].” This phrase is a verbal trick repeatedly used to disrupt the sense of nationhood which has come naturally to English people, and also to Scots for over a thousand years. A people who have lived unchallenged in a land for 1,000 years are not “immigrants”, they are owners. There are three types of people movement into foreign lands: settlers, invaders and immigrants. Immigrants are people who have come into an already established named state in the previous two generations or so.