Article in the Quarterly Review, Volume 6, No. 2, Summer 2012

S F Bush

In 1986 a journalist, John Gaskell, asked rhetorically in the Sunday Telegraph, “Who are the English?”[1]  His meaning was clear: the English had disappeared into the melting pot of the word “British”.  Other nations in the United Kingdom could proclaim their identities while enjoying the privilege of Britishness, but we, the English, could not.

Fortunately a sympathetic letters editor allowed me to reply to Gaskell the following week and at the risk of sounding too self-referential, it is perhaps pertinent to my theme to recall what I said[1]:

“The English are the race after whom England is known.  They were first mentioned (as the Anglii) by Tacitus in AD98.  They are the subject of the History of the English Church and People by Bede, written around AD730 – the greatest historical work written anywhere in Christendom in the 1000 years after Tacitus, and ordered to be translated into Old English by Alfred the Great himself.  They are known the world over in every language as the natural owners of the land of England.

There are about 42 million of the historic English people living in England (out of about 50 million now living in England).  There are probably twice this number of people of English descent in the other Anglo-Saxon countries.

Place of birth has nothing to do with being English.  The Duke of Wellington, when asked if the fact of his having been born in Ireland didn’t make him an Irishman, replied to his questioner: “If you had been born in a stable, would that have made you a donkey?”

Many people wrote and telephoned me about that letter, revealing the depth of unhappiness about what was happening to our native land.  Typical and touching was the letter from Mrs J Fothergill of Kent, who wrote: “As a very ordinary Englishwoman, but nevertheless very proud to be so, may I take this opportunity of saying ‘Thank you’ for stating so succinctly the definition of true Englishness  I shall cut out your letter and carry it in my wallet.”

The concepts of Englishness and of England have been under attack since the 1970s, during which decade Britain joined the EEC, the Scottish Nationalists gained 5 seats in Westminster, the IRA-led insurrection in Northern Ireland was at its most intense, parts of British industry slid into anarchy under attack from militant trades unions, and the effects of mass Afro-Asian immigration were signalled by the passing of the Race Relations Act 1976, the third such in 11 years.

It might be thought that all five of these developments concerned the British State as a whole, which to an extent is correct of course.  Yet the left wing of English journalism and the sociology parts of English academia have used the atmosphere of crisis in attacks on the British Empire and the supposed class-ridden English society, which was allegedly responsible for the decline of British power and influence.

My purpose in writing this article is to see how these five developments have been built on during the last 30 years to attempt the deconstruction – even abolition – of the very idea of the English people and with it the concept of the English nation.  Such an attempt would have seemed absurd, preposterous even, before about 1970.  Until about then, Continental governments and their peoples would customarily refer to Britain as England, or Angleterre, Inglaterra, Engeland, and more widely in Arabic and Asian languages, Britain is still rendered as Inglesi or similar.  President de Gaulle who died in 1969 almost invariably referred to l’Angleterre in discussions and speeches.  President Johnson of the USA was in the habit of referring to “Mother England”, and so on.

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A speech at the first Goldsmith Memorial Lecture on 22nd May 2007, at University College in London.

To read the text please click on the link to the “Governance of Britain” page of the Britain Watch website.

A letter to the Sunday Telegraph which was published on 4th February 2007.

The way we can restore the notion of Britishness to our nation (Profile, Comment, January 28th) is by stopping the habit of deferring to people who appear to believe that the supposed interests of newcomers to this country should be the basis of policy in every sphere of Government.

Under this rule by minority interest, the genuinely great achievements of the British peoples, ones which from Alfred the Great onwards have shaped the world (the colossal literature, the scientific enlightenment of the 16th and 17th centuries, the industrial revolution, the founding of the colonies in North America and Australasia, plus the modern states in the Indian subcontinent, the tremendous victories in most major European wars) are ignored in favour of obsessive preoccupation with anti-racist themes designed to make indigenous Britons ashamed.

The democratic fightback has to start in schools: parents must insist that our children are taught a chronological account of our history with an emphasis on its achievements.  Actually, most immigrants like to be part of a successful country: they tend to approve of military and business success, not weedy New Labour preoccupations with failure and equality.

A speech given to the Society of St George, at their annual dinner to celebrate St George’s Day, at the Mere Golf Club in Cheshire, on 24th April 1998.

To read the text please click on the link to the “Nationism” page on the Britain Watch website.

A letter to eurofacts which was published on 11th October 1996.

One appreciates the general drift of John Murray’s article eurofacts (13th September) refuting allegations of English xenophobia, but to do this it is not necessary to assert tht “Our present Queen, like Victoria, has no trace of English blood”.

After the Norman conquest, the direct English royal line was re-established by Henry II, grandson of Henry I and of Matilda, daughter of St Margaret, Queen of Scotland.  St Margaret was great grand-daughter of Ethelred II (the unready), the great grandson of Alfred the Great.  Likewise, while Henry VII was indeed grandson of Owen Tudor, his mother was the great great grand-daughter of Edward III, direct descendent of Henry II.

Finally, to complete the line to our present monarch, George I (of Hanover) was the great grandson of James I, who was great grandson of Henry VII.

Our present Queen is in fact the great (34 times) grand-daughter of Alfred the Great, which works out at an average of exactly 30 years per generation.

An article which appeared in The Field in their August 1989 edition.

A letter which followed from this article under the title “The Surrender to Europe, What We Give Away” can be found in the letters section.

Three years ago the Yorkshire town of Ripon celebrated the eleven-hundredth annivesary of its Charter, a set of rights given in 886 by Alfred the Great.  Following defeat of the Danes eight years earlier, Alfred had put together a new law code, based on custom and the code of the earliest English King 300 years before.  At a time of extreme danger and upheaval, by pragmatic good sense our greatest King laid the foundation of England with boundaries which have barely moved a mile in 11 centuries.  This continuity is unmatched in history.  Indeed, until the recent insensitive disruption, even the county boundaries had hardly changed.

Three hundred years after Alfred’s death, King John was reminded in Magna Carta that Kings of England are bound by the same law as binds their people.  A further 300 years on, Henry VIII broke with Rome over precisely the issue which faces our nation today: namely, who or what is to be the supreme source of law in this country?  For all the politicians’ talk about ‘pooling’ sovereignty, that is what the issue is about and that truth is clearly dawning.

Just as in the 1530s, so in the 1980s the inclinations of the governing establishment are divided between those whom Henry VIII called ‘Englishmen papistical’ and ‘Englishmen entire’.  Thomas More, the leader of the former, in specifically defining limits on English sovereignty declared, “I am not bound to conform to the Council of one realm against the General Council of Christendom” – words which, with the substitution of Europe for Christendom, are precisely those enjoined on our Prime Minister by the ‘Europeanists’ today.  England in the 16th century faced immense danger from the hostility of a vastly stronger Continent.  Thoms Cromwell’s robust reply, “This realm is an empire”, ultimately carried with it the support of the English people, as will the Prime Minister’s Bruges speech in due course.

From 1534 until the present, the single most significant statement of the way we are governed is the 300-year-old (this year) Bill of Rights, which reaffirmed the ancient liberties of the subject and his right to be governed by laws sanctioned only by the Parliament of this country.  Doubtless because of fear of drawing attention to the incompatibility of this most fundamental of our freedeoms and what is being proposed by the European Commission, the authorities have offered no public celebration.  The Post Office, ever subservient to passing fashion, has issued no stamp commemorating this momentous event, preferring instead to remind our people of such riveting events as the Telegraphic World Congress and the International Postal Union.

The contrast of our national continuity with the situation on the Continent could hardly be greater.  There, most states (with the exception of Denmark) are of recent creation – West Germany 1953, Italy 1870, Belgium 1831 and so on.  Whole countries have been chopped up, put under other regimes and put back again.  Even France and Spain date only from the 15th century in anything like their present boundaries.  Parliamentary government is of even more recent creation – unstable (Italy has had 40 governments since the war) and tending towards frequent lapses into tyranny and revolution.  In the last 200 years every EEC Continental country has been freed from its own or its neighbour’s tyranny at least once, and in the case of France three times, by British soldiers on their own, or in company with their English-speaking allies from the British Empire and the United States.

Because national boundaries and systems of government on the Continent have changed so frequently, there has arisen a strong tendency to rely on bureaucracy – the one permanent feature – issuing instructions on the basis of general enabling laws.  It was the civil service in France which provided the strong defence of French interests as governments came and went in the third and fourth Republics.

It is clear that the EEC Commission is a precise reflection of these tendencies, having a strong preference for issuing directives and instructions using an enabling Act – in this case the Single European Act (SEA) – as its legal cloak.  It was a deception to represent this Act, which was smuggled through the British Parliament in 1986 despite the misgivings of the Prime Minister, as merely another stage in completing the common market.  It is a device adopted by European federalists to achieve by stealth what would be rejected by the British people if they were given chance to vote on it.

The imposition on our country of rules issued by the European Commission using the majority in the Council of Ministers, allowed by the SEA, now impinges directly on every one of us.  ‘EEC threat to British farmers’, ‘EEC VAT ruling will hit hospitals and school fees’, ‘EEC will bar upland forest grants’, ‘EEC threatens village halls’, ‘Britain bows to EEC over lorries’, ‘EEC restricts bird shooting’, are but a selection of recent news headlines.

Voting techniques in EEC affairs are a travesty – many decisions in the Council of Ministers are taken now on the basis of one country, one vote, Holland, Denmark, Belgium, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Luxembourg, whose combined population is 51 millions, have seven votes to the one vote for Britain’s 57 millions. Even where weighted voting applies – as in the European Assembly in Strasbourg – the aforesaid seven countries have 134 seats to Britain’s 81.

The extraordinary thing, unbelievable if it were not happening, is that the British people pay huge sums of money to belong to this system.  Something in the order of £2 billion per annum is now pased to Brussels and this figure is achieved only after time-consuming applications for grants and rebates from a much larger gross sum initially paid.  Put in perspective, this sum is about the annual cost of the whole British university system.  Between 1973, when Britain joined the EEC, and 1988, £11 billion was paid, enough for instance to rebuild over the same period the whole of the railway network from scratch.

Why, it may be asked, are we doing this?  The reason usually offered by Europeanists is that of belonging to a large free market of some 300 million people.  The key point, which they never mention, is that this market is open to any European country whether they belong to the EEC or not. Britain’s trade with Sweden, a non-EEC member, and theirs with Germany is as free as Britain’s with Germany – freer in many cases because of smaller non-tariff barriers to trade.

Another reason often advanced is that membership of the EEC is necessary to prevent our technological domination by the USA and Japan.  The technological benefits of large units are, however, vastly overstated by politicians eager for roles to play.  With the possible exception of a moon-shot and certain nuclear missile projects, there are probably no technological goals outside the competence of an industrial nation of 60 million people.  In the USA, the world’s most powerful computers and the most advanced work-stations are made by relatively small firms staffed by gifted individuals.  In Britain, three companies produce three out of the five best-selling therapeutic drugs in the world – an astonishing achievement.  Most, if not all, European joint ventures are essentially there to guarantee sales in the participating countries, rather than for production or technology reasons, Concorde being perhaps the outstanding example.

So if free trade and technology are not the reasons for our membership, what is?  We are left with simply a word, ‘Europe’, and a sense that we must belong for fear of being left out.  It is the belonging for its own sake rather than any calculation of national advantage which motivates the main advocates of European unity in this country.  In fact, over large parts of the political establishment ‘Europe’ has become a matter of blind faith – the more disquieting the facts about it, the more we are led to think that we must believe in it.

‘Europe’, including its topical controversy, the European Monetary System, is in fact merely the latest in the futile quest for external quick fixes to Britain’s economic problems.  “I wish to dissipate, if I can, the ideal dreams of those who are always telling you that the strength of England depends on what it possesses beyond these shores.  Rely upon it, the strength of Great Britain lies here within the United Kingdom.”  So spoke Gladstone in 1879.  It is entirely apposite today.

None of the improvements in our manufacturing industry in the last few years owes anything to the EEC entanglement, any more than Germany’s industrial renaissance did.  It is the labour and capital efficiency of our industries which matter – as farming has demonstrated continuously whether inside or outside the EEC – together with access to world markets and that farsighted commitment to long-term research so clearly shown by our pharmaceuticals industry.

The political establishment, largely ignorant of the requirements for a successful modern industry, but still anxious to play a world role, gave up on Britain after Suez in 1956, taking directions first from Washington and, increasingly now, from Brussels.  Fear has been a dominant emotion in the British political establishment for a long time – fear of Germany before the Second World War, fear of Washington’s disapproval after it, and now, most absurd of all, fear of being left out.

This timidity has been accompanied by a carelessness with our national assets which no French government, for instance, would contemplate.  The Continental Shelf Act of 1964 handed to Norway large sections of the North Sea oil rights to which it was not entitled under international law, while British fishing rights in those same waters were put into a common EEC pool by Mr Heath’s Government in 1973.  Even our supreme asset, the English language, was compromised by the assurance given to France that Britain would not contest the position of French as the EEC’s official language, a language which is only the third most widely spoken mother tongue in the EEC and, in the world, less widely spoken than Portuguese.

Language is, perhaps the most fundamental point of all.  When in 1929 the French foreign minister, Briand, circulated his project of a European federal union, it was rejected by the then British Government in language which admitted of no ambiguity.  The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Snowden, declared that Britain would not be the ‘milch cow’ of Europe.  While in the intervening 60 years Britain has consistently opposed a federal union, signs are that powerful, probably predominant, Continental interests are determined to realise the Briand concept of European unity.  By this is meant a sovereign Government, the only meaning of the world ‘unity’ to which its Continental advocates attach any importance.

We are at a crossroads for which Alfred’s and Henry VIII’s England provide the only parallels: whether or not to continue to exist as a self-governing nation.  We have nothing of substance to fear from a separation from the EEC.  As a member of the society of English-speaking nations, we have an enormous asset.  English provides a channel to the wider world beyond Western Europe as important to the entrepreneurs of Elizabeth II as the sea was to the merchant venturers of Elizabeth I.  In freeing ourselves from this latest Continental entanglement we have everything to play for and nothing to fear but fear itself.

An article published in an edited version by the Daily Mail around 28th April 1988.

It was written in response to a succession of articles in the Daily Mail from December 1987 to February 1988 by David Thomas and Stephen Bates

“The history of England is one of Mankind’s outstanding successes. It is instructive to prove the secret of a destiny as fortunate and impressive as that of ancient Rome”. So opens the concluding chapter of André Maurois’s Histoire d l’Angleterre [published in translation by Bodley Head in 1956].

Such a tremendous compliment paid by a distinguished writer from one great culture to the people of another would cut no ice however with our schools’ educational establishment, even if they knew of it, to judge from the way our history has been taught – or rather not taught – in our State schools in the last ten to fifteen years.  And under the new GCSE it will get worse, because far from it being deemed instructive to probe the secrets of our own history, the examining boards deem it hardly worth studying at all.

Thus for example in World History 1870-1986, out of 38 examination syllabuses, Britain specifically appears only once under British Empire 1919-1939, ranking along with Italy, Spain 1919-1939 and Turkey as subjects for our children to study.  Russia on the other hand may be studied in four syllabuses and even Germany is allotted three.  It has to be remembered also that in an absurd welter of options, which differ from Board to Board, candidates study only a tiny minority of the syllabuses on offer, so most will emerge knowing no specifically British History at all, though they may be well up on Russia.

I believe the philosophy of the GCSE examination to be educationally wrong, and indeed impractical, for all the key subjects, but in history this is made worse by its conjunction with another perhaps even more pernicious tendency – that of ileanation – the tendency deeply embedded in our largest educational authority, whence the name is derived, to “praise in enthusiastic terms” as W S Gilbert has it in the Mikado, “all countries but their own”.  In world History 1870-1986 it is more than simply perverse not to allot Britain and its Empire a syllabus for any but a 20 year span, when in the early part of the period at least it was the greatest power in the world.  It is in fact a crime to deny our children a knowledge of their own history and to keep from them as far as possible any reference to Britain’s and specifically England’s tremendous achievements in shaping the modern world.

What history should our children be taught in school?  History teaching should as its first duty provide our children with a framework of facts about our long history as a nation, now longer than any other, starting with Bede’s great work – the greatest work of history in any language in the first millenium – and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, initiated by Alfred the Great himself.

In the latter we have a unique, readymade framework, covering the very formation of our country through and beyond the Norman conquest, some six hundred years, with original manuscripts in Old English which all of our children may see for themselves.  They can identify where the very word English to describe the Anglo-Saxon peoples is used for the first time and where England, the land of the English, is derived from it.

They can find described in matter of fact tones some of the most inspiring tales which echo throughout our history – the soldiers fighting on at the Battle of Maldon in the words of that great English poem of a thousand years ago “the spirit shall be bolder, the heart the firmer, courage the greater, the more our strength declines”.

As a nation of course in the six centuries of vigorous consolidation following the Norman conquest, our strength did not decline, but grew through ups and downs to reach its tremendous climax in the industrial revolution and the British Empire.  Both were made by the industry and energy of countless individuals, but for all the vast changes they wrought, basic themes – above all the spirit of fortitude, captured in the lines above, by which the Empire’s soldiers withstood the terrible losses before their final triumphs in 1918 – remained unchanged.

From this Empire, one third of the countries  of the United Nations owe their very existence as English-speaking or English-using nations.  For a nation of five and a half million people on the edge of Europe at the beginnings in 1600, this is an unparalleled achievement and should be known by every British child.

Our children need also to know for instance that the slave trade, immemorial custom in Africa and Asia, and in Europe before Christianity, hideously extended to the New World for a period, was put down by the Royal Navy which maintained anti-slavery patrols in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans for most of the nineteenth century.  History knows no other example of such immeasurable reduction in suffering by the action of one country on behalf of all.

Our children need to know for instance of the Punjab, where over a period of about 40 years under the Raj, a desert of around 18 million acres (the size of Scotland) was turned into the granary of modern India by the largest irrigation project in history.  Well might the Spanish-American philosopher, George Santayana, comment, “Never since the heroic days of Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master”.

Our children need to know these things not to boast of them – after all they were done by our forefathers not by us – but to take heart from them, to have standards as British children to live up to.

Instead of the truth about our history, however, the media, principally TV and films, feed our children an unending diet of unbalanced scorn and denigration.  Recent feature films, including some by foreign directors who abuse our country’s hospitality, portray a sick England with decay, riots, police brutality and evil capitalists.  Now most normal children will not see themselves and their country in such an abject light, but will react by behaving badly amongst themselves and especially in the presence of foreigners.  The appalling hooliganism of football fans on ferries and all too shamefully in Belgium, undoubtedly owes itself to excessive drink, but also to a debased and ignorant football “nationalism”.  Belgium, a country established by Britain, in whose defence hundreds of thousands of those fans’ great-grandfathers fought and died, which commemorates that sacrifice in Ypres every night at 8 pm, still, has thus seen the best and worst of our people.  But how many of those fans knew anything about Belgium and its place in our history?

In my view the first and most important objective of history teaching in schools is not to teach the pseudo skills and puffed up “concepts” prescribed by the GCSE Examining Boards, which will leave most of our children bored stiff and knowing virtually nothing at all, nor is it to concern itself with other cultures and other parts of the world, except as they interweave with our own, but is to teach the history of our country as the foundation of patriotism and national self-respect.  This is something that children of all abilities can learn and enjoy; it is something this country will never be happy without.  It should be the coping stone in the National Curriculum – more important than any of the sciences taken individually and I write as a professional engineer.  It is now up to all parents who agree, to act together to wrest the history curriculum away from the educationalists and give it back to our children.

A letter to the Daily Telegraph which was published on 4th March 1988 and reproduced by arrangement with the Daily Mail.

While Simon Heffer (article, Feb 27th) is dead right to point out the way the GCSE syllabuses effectively pervert the teaching of history (and English too), he did not really indicate why this has happened.

The main drift of history teaching in state schools for some years has been to exclude as far as possible any reference to Britain’s, and specifically England’s, tremendous achievements in shaping the modern world.

Reference to the British Empire, from which one third of the countries of the United Nations derive their very existence, is hardly ever made, except to focus on some incident, wrenched out of context, from which in order to pass an examination English school children are invited to criticise and deplore their own country.

The fact is that the schools’ educational establishment – the inspectorate, the teachers’ unions, the colleges of education and the examining bodies – is heavily penetrated by people who can only be described as denaturalised – people, as W S Gilbert said, who “praise in enthusiastic tones all countries but their own”.

The bias against English children knowing their own history (Scottish children are mercifully largely preserved from this nonsense) is all too sharply pointed up by the regard being paid, in some quarters, to the alleged needs of ethnic minority children to know about the history of their countries of origin, a view now clearly influencing the history syllabuses for all children.

As an antidote, therefore, to the anti-British and indeed anti-Western tenor of the all too typical questions picked out by Mr Heffer, I offer the following as standard ingredients for future GCSE history examination:

a)  Describe what you regard as the three greatest achievements of the British Empire, 1600-1950;

b)  Identify the reasons why Britain became the first industrial nation and thus the progenitor of the modern world;

c)  Give your views on why English has developed from a language spoken by perhaps a million people at the time of Alfred the Great to being the most widely spoken language in the world today.