Category Archives: English language

Want to win literary competitions? Pretend you’re black

I am white. I wrote this story as an experiment to test the effect of political correctness on literary competitions. I did this by creating a story which both had a black theme and was written in a way which implied the author was black. However, the judges of the competition had no certain knowledge of my race or background.

Black was entered in the 1996 London writers completion. It came fourth. There were several thousand entries which meant that winning was something of a lottery and, consequently, the fact that my entry made it to the last four at my first attempt masquerading as black strongly suggested that the nature of the story had influenced its choice as one of the best out of thousands.

When I attended the award ceremony there was hilarious consternation when I went up to accept the prize because the judges had all assumed that the author of black was black. There was also a great rumble of amazement amongst the audience – I noted a solitary black face in the entire gathering.

Although I wrote the story for the purpose described and the dismayed look on the judges faces as I responded to my name being called was worth a tidy fortune, the story had other purposes. I wanted to explore the mentality of blacks towards their lives in England and just to complicate matters I distinguished the character further by making him highly intelligent. This allowed me to have him set apart from the mainstream black mentality which in turn enabled me to examine racial issues from an angle few blacks would have approached and to slaughter the holy cows of black victimhood.

Now for the story.

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Black

Robert Henderson

I’m black. Yeah. Black! Black! Black! And I mean coal skin and I mean flat nose and I mean thick lips and I mean woolly hair and I mean…what do mean? I mean I’m not your honky nigga with a skin the colour of Cappuccino and those nice Caucasian features which don’t frighten the horses or white liberals, least ways, not overmuch.

I’m going to tell you what it’s like being me, being me being black, being me being black in Britain. And I’m going tell you without any liberal lying and self-delusion rockfalling the road to truth.

Let’s begin with what everyone but a blind man can see. You’re all probably thinking that because I’m real dark, my parents are. But that ain’t the way it necessarily works. Sure enough, my old man’s black as the proverbial Ace of Spades, but my ma’s quite a few shades lighter on the genetic Dulux chart. Me? I’m a tint or two up the whitey frightening level from my old man.

Fascinating subject genetics, but a touch complicated so hang on to your neurons and throb your axons for a sentence or three. You mate a pure white and a pure black and you get a mulatto. Now, a mulatto will always be a colour midway between the parents. Why? Because the child takes half the genes for colour from each of its parents. But breed two mulattos and their children can be anything from pure white to pure black because the parents can give them all their white genes or all their black genes or a mixture of both. Mate a pure white or a pure black with someone of mixed race or mate two people of mixed race other than mulattos, and you can get every colour variation other than pure white or pure black, unless, of course, those mixed race parents have enough black or white genes to add up to pure black or pure white. You can relax those neural connections now.

Same basic genetic thing with facial features, although that’s more complicated. My ma’s got a nice refined whitey type face and my old man on a bad day looks like he’s auditioning for King Kong. Whose features have I got? I’ll give you one shafting guess.

Now the moral of this tale is that with a different throw of the same genetic dice I could have been one of those honky niggas which don’t frighten ol’ whitey too much. On the other hand, if my parents had been mulattos I might have been ol’ whitey or even blacker than I am. Who says God ain’t got a fucking sense of humour? I guess He’s just sitting up in heaven laughing his head off and saying you shouldn’t have been conceived if you can’t take a joke.

Where do I live? I live in England. I live in London. I live in Brixton just off the Railton rioting Road. Not that I have to live there, I just choose to do that. Why? Because there are lots of people who look like me and talk like me and don’t make me think that I’m a fucking freak.

Am I angry? Yeah, I’m angry, really pissed off. I walk down the street and I see a white man talking to another white man and they laugh. Now my brain tells me that they’re just laughing, but my heart says they are laughing at you, boy, laughing at you ‘cos your black and big and threatening and my heart says that they’re telling you, boy, that you don’t belong here.

The worst of it is my brain says they’re right, I don’t belong here. Intellectually I can understand exactly why whitey don’t want blacks around, don’t want me around. Flush away all the liberal anal discharge about humans being humans being humans and what do you have? You have invasion of territory. It’s as simple as that. Well, simple to say but not simple to act upon, not simple to cast away all them comforting sops and part truths about how the world is morally black and immorally white, not simple to desert all you know.

Back to the starting line. My old man came from Jamaica in 1959. Settled in Notting Hill. Came with his head full of the Empire, the mother country and Pax Britannica. Them things seem not merely antiquated now, they seem incredible, but truly, brothers and sisters, that’s how it was forty or so years past.

Anyways, my old man was hardly off the boat before he had a real surprise because Mosley – yeah, that Mosley – arrived and there were white riots indubitably, categorically, beyond any argument, saying ‘No blacks’. And here were signs on boarding houses saying ‘No blacks’. And there were employers saying ‘No blacks’, or at least ‘No blacks’ in anything other than grovelling positions. And there were pub landlords saying ‘No blacks’. And there were neighbours saying ‘No blacks’. And there were…there were a thousand and one other things saying ‘No blacks’.

Now, you might have thought that my old man would have taken the hint and gone home. But, of course, he didn’t, just like all those other mother fucking stupid black men who wouldn’t see, perhaps couldn’t psychologically see, what was before their eyes, in their ears, about their brains, and who now sit and whine away their old age saying “I hate England. It so cold. It no place for me when I is old.”

So my old man stayed and stayed, always talking about going back to the old backyard, but having his life quilted ever more into England. After a few years he met a nurse from Antigua – there’s an up-your-arse cliché for you. Soon they were married. A few years past that o’clock and I came into the world. Thirty one years, two hundred and twenty three days later I’m still here, being black in England. That’s my first humping problem.

My second humping problem, a real undiluted knee-you-in-the-gonads difficulty, is that I’m not just black, I’m smart. And I don’t mean streetwise, though I’m that too. I mean smart as in very high IQ – very, very high IQ – smart as in educated, smart as in understanding without being told, smart as in being curious about everything. That kind of smart. I’ve got a hell of a memory too, just soaks up data like sand receiving the sea, and a Rolls Royce query and retrieval system rattling around my head. Add to that diamond pointed psychological cuteness and an instinctive sense of the sociological, toss in a pristine aesthetic awareness and you’ll have some small idea of what it’s like to be inside my head.

I can just hear you all – black, white, brown or yellow – saying, that’s a get-you-to-the-back-of-the-uterus problem? Or maybe you’re thinking that there should be an exclamation sign rather than a question mark at the end of that sentence. Perhaps you’re down the middle correct in thinking so. So, conjure up a Bateman cartoon, ‘The nigga who was super intelligent!’ If you’re of an ironic mind, you’ll easily be able to imagine all the honkies hitting their heads on the ceiling.

So, yes, it’s a real screwing problem and the real screwing problem is that there ain’t many people like me full stop and hardly any of them are black and in England. That’s not surprising, of course, because there are only about a million or so blacks here. That means I’m fucked by genetic necessity because natural intellectual talent like mine is real rare and contingently shafted by nurture because most blacks in Britain come from working class families who never put much store by education, leastways not beyond reading, writing and counting.

But knowing the why’s and wherefores of a problem don’t signify when the problem is hurting you day by day. It ain’t so much that I’m lonely, it’s more that almost everyone irks me because they seem so slow and ignorant and uninterested and as like me as chalk is to cheese. I think it’s the being uninterested which pisses me off most. Believe me, brothers and sisters, being smart means I’ve got an even bigger bird about my neck than being black.

So, I’ve got two twenty-four carat problems I can’t do a damn thing about. I can’t make myself white. I can’t make myself stupid. In fact, it’s enough to make Jesus Christ forswear his mission. But short of moving my existence to a different plane, like creating myself a cadaver, there’s nothing I can do but occupy a point in space and experience what may be.

You might think that I could at least pretend to be stupid but that’s more difficult than you might imagine, because being generally smart like me means that you do everything faster and better. If you’re like me, it don’t matter how hard you try, sooner or later you are going to forget yourself and do something too well or understand something too easily.

But if I can’t act stupid, I can try to fit in with my peers, my fellow Jamaicans, my fellow West Indians, my fellow Afro-Caribbeans, my – God help us – fellow Africans. So, I dress in the fashion. I wear my hair in the fashion. I play music in the fashion. I even speak in the fashion, though at times it pains me, saying “ain’t” and “fucking” and suchlike, rather than speaking with a genteel vocabulary and a proper respect for case, number, mood and tense as I could, I should, I would, if being black didn’t define mylife.

But fitting into a black universe ain’t a joy ride for someone like me. Being generally smart means that I can’t buy the black supremacist rectal effusion. When I hear some stupid nigga spouting off about how the Roman legions invading England in 43 AD were led by a black Muslim or that Beethoven was of African descent, I don’t merely reject it, I find it grotesquely embarrassing.

Then you’ve got those platinum plated daydreams, Rastas, worshipping an African who lived in a way they couldn’t even begin to understand. And that ain’t just because he was living in Africa. No, they couldn’t know because Selassie was a real, live, autocratic king and who the fuck in this day Britain understands what is to be such a king or what such a king may do? How much of England have I in me? I can’t rightly say. I know that the English don’t think I’m English. I know that I don’t feel any kinship with the English. No, that’s bullshit! What I mean to say at this point in my rage is that I don’t feel any kinship with whitey, period, full stop.

But on the other hand – there’s always another hand – I don’t feel at ease with blacks born and raised abroad in the same way that I do with blacks born and raised in England. And I don’t feel as much at ease with Africans as I do with West Indians. So it ain’t a simple straight down the line yes or no circumstance.

I reckon the English are the strangest people. You might think that a nation who ran the only world empire worthy of the name for a century or three would be pretty cosmopolitan. You might think that a people who lived in a very mixed city like London would be cosmopolitan. You might think that a people who lived side by side with an almost equal population of blacks in Brixton would be cosmopolitan. Not on your humping life. I won’t say that no Englishman failed to go native during the Empire. I won’t say that there aren’t Englishmen who sincerely believe in universal brotherhood. I won’t say that no Englishman ever made a genuine attempt to accept blacks as just people. But I never met one who could do it wholly convincingly. Always the barrier, always the sense of difference. But then blacks never act natural with whites, although with them it’s being too aggressive just to show that they’re not uncle Toms or all over whitey just to show that they’re just like honky inside.

Once, I thought I had an English friend. Exact physical opposite to me : all ash blond colours and fine cut features. Moved well too, a natural athlete. Add to that the fact that he was a newly graduated, post graduate, top of the range mathematical physicist – and they don’t come much better equipped with the wetware than that – and you’ve got a real superior being. Charming too.

Anyways, he and I would sit as happy as sand boys talking for hour after hour about the strange world of quantum physics with its Never Neverland particles. And we would see how such things related to cause and effect, free will and a thousand other necessary consequences of being. I’ve never felt so much in harmony with anyone.

We went on sublimely for months like this, this honky and I, but for all the pleasure I took in our talk I couldn’t help noticing that this brilliant, engaging whitey wasn’t over keen to introduce me to his honky friends. And he certainly wasn’t stubbing his toes in his haste to meet any black I knew. So eventually I asked him why, and all this beautiful honky, this putative friend, this man I felt was so like me as to be my intellectual twin, said was ‘It must be coincidence’. Fucking coincidence! Not, ‘I’m embarrassed by you’ or even ‘My friends might be a little put out by you’ but a ‘a coincidence.’ I could have accepted either for its honesty. That’s when I finally learned that ol’ whitey wasn’t for me. At that time he was everything for me: I was just an idle amusement for him. That’s the epitome of white and black in England!

I reckon the secret to understanding the English is to realise that they have a superiority complex. It don’t matter how much they’re ridiculed or insulted, they still think that they are superior, not self-consciously, but simply as part of the natural order of things. What with never being invaded for so long and running an Empire and producing the only bootstrapped Industrial Revolution and generally being top dog in the world for a century or more, perhaps that ain’t surprising. In fact, the English are the only people in the world who don’t have to lie about their past to feel good. The strangest thing is that they don’t realise their good fortune.

Now, I’m going to say something which will surprise you, for a nigga who don’t feel any affinity with the English. I’ve had a love affair with the English language for as long as I can remember. I love its powers of description, its precision, its lyricism, its general all round utility and toughness. And I never love it more than in Chaucer’s time when it was in-your-face honest and direct and there wasn’t a black in England. The English language is psychological home to me. Ain’t that a fine joke for a nigga like me in 1996 and in England?? Well, if you thought that joke was good, let me tell you another one.

I’m a real old theatrical at heart, but how can someone who looks like me play the great roles other than Othello? I would like to be – you all think I’m going to say Hamlet – but fuck Hamlet, a whining loser. Who do I want to play? I want to play Richard the Third, an heroic man and a tragic man. Who could wish to be more than that in his three score years and ten? I want to play Henry the Fifth, a man transmuted. I want to play Lear and Coriolanus and any number of other honkies. I want to be all these English people, and a whole cartload more, but I can’t simply because I’m black as black could almost be, and I look like King Kong’s first cousin.

One thing in particular about the English has always hacked me off into the clouds, right up into the resentment strato cumulus. You might think that they would prefer blacks to Asians, or at least West Indians to Asians. After all, we don’t really have any fucking culture except white culture, British culture, English culture. But it don’t work like that. No, on the whole whites prefer Asians. Why? Well, being sociologically inclined and historically cute, I could spin you a fine old tale of class and education and intellect. But I don’t believe it’s any of that, or at least, not any of that in the main.

A black can be as intelligent and as educated and as intellectually mature as can be, but somehow it don’t make any difference to ol’ whitey or, for that matter, ol’ browny or ol’ yellow, when it comes to behaving naturally with a black. In fact, I reckon ol’ yellow is the most complete racist of the lot because he don’t just think he’s superior, he thinks everyone else is at his pleasure. To tell the truth, ol’ yellow don’t care for any other human being even in the way that I might care for a dog. Truly, brothers and sisters, may God help us all if the East comes West again.

But that’s a digression. Back to the problem. Or rather, on with the problem. So what is this devil’s mark which makes human beings sit apart as surely as if they were models cast from opposing dies? I reckon it has to be physical. Why? Because we know that immigrants of like physical type ton the majority receiving population can integrate absolutely in a couple of generations. That don’t mean that such immigrants necessarily must or do assimilate absolutely, but at least it’s possible. That’s never the case where the immigrant is of a different racial type. So, my brain tells me that racial prejudice, racial separateness or whatever you want to name it , has to be down to good old Nature, red in tooth and claw and never asking more from an organism than that it passes down its genes to another generation. I must own that this matter of racial prejudice fascinates me. Thought about for a long, long time. I reckon it’s all down to S E X. You see, there’s something called assortative mating which is common throughout the animal kingdom. Now, that’s just a bit of jargon for saying like goes to like, or more correctly that certain aspects of an animal, such as size or colouring, become signals for mating. So animals seek other animals which resemble themselves in these particulars. For why? Because any animal wishes to mate successfully. For a physical peculiarity to be chosen as a mating signal, it must be commonly found within a species. Ergo, an animal’s best chance of ensuring that it’s offspring mate is to produce offspring which closely resemble the majority of its species.

Now, humans are genuinely different from any other animalbecause they’re both much brighter and vastly more self-conscious. So they don’t just select mates according to physical signals. They chose mates using class, wealth, education and culture as their mating signals. But they also select mates by racial type and all historical experience is that racial type is the most emphatic assortative mating signal. Worse, to the liberal way of thinking, men, being self-conscious and creators of culture apply the same criteria when selecting their friends and acquaintances. That’s why, brothers and sisters, that’s why you have racial prejudice.

Why, you might well ask, if this assortative mating is so powerful do a goodly number of white women breed with black men? Well, you must first understand that assortative mating is only a tendency not an absolute natural law. Then you must realise that the overwhelming majority of white women breed with white men. Which leaves us with the white women who do breed with black men.

The stripped truth is that most of them are working class and uneducated and broke. So they ain’t got a lot to offer any white man worth anything. Which means that they have a choice only between some idle do nothing white no hoper and a black with money or prospects. Of course, that ain’t the only reason that white women go with black men, but it’s a common reason.

Why don’t white men breed with black women as often as white women breed with white men? Well, that’s real simple, it’s the men who set the agenda in any society. Always has been and always will be. A woman takes her status from her man and a man must preserve his status. Now, if I belong to the highest status racial type in a society, I take a mighty risk in having children of mixed race because they will be discriminated against. Consequently, I don’t do it, well, not if I’m smart I don’t.

Do I like white women? Well, I like the look of them. But the trouble is that they never act natural with a black man. In fact, whites never act natural with blacks. Even if a white woman’s trying to be nice, it’s all self-indulgent guilt or nervous bonhomie or unintentional superiority.

And black women? Well, black women tend to get on with honky more than black men because they don’t threaten and there’s always good old S E X. Black women are always trying to straighten their hair and whiten their skin. But it don’t do most of them no good in the end because black men don’t like it more often than not and white men ain’t likely to take sexual notice. Real sad, ain’t it?

Who do I most despise? Taking one thing with another it’s the ol’ liberal whitey, forever going on about how awful racism is and how wonderfully tolerant he is and how intolerant others are. Yet this sonofabitch can’t even bear to send his children to school with our children. And isn’t it strange that these people, who are forever going on about how they are the friends of coloured folk, always seem to live in places which don’t have many black folks actually entering their lives in any meaningful sense? And that’s true whether it’s liberals living far, far away from those black and brown faces which frighten them so much, or in one of their “gentrified” places, close by where black and brown faces abound, but set aside from the black and brown faces by leafy squares and wagonloads of money.

You don’t believe me? Then take a trip to the ancestral home of white liberals. Go to Hampstead and something seems odd. You are in central London but there’s precious few black and brown faces. If you walk on the two main shopping streets, perhaps you’ll see one coloured face in six. But you get off those two streets and it’s an ocean of honky.

The thing to understand about ol’ liberal whitey is that he is a masochist, and masochists only enjoy pain which they can control. So, they will tell the black man anything so long as they don’t have to actually live with the black man or send their children to school with the black man or spend any significant amount of their own money helping the black man or letting the black man have a slice of their ruling class pie.

If you want understand how much I despise liberals, let me say that I’ve got vastly more respect for the white working class. At least they tell the truth about how they feel.

Truth to tell, the time’s long past for some honest talking by blacks about blacks in Britain. There are some exceptionally stupid blacks in public places who think that white liberals mean what they say. There are some even stupider blacks in public places who don’t believe that liberals mean what they say, but think that it doesn’t matter because circumstances will always make the white establishment behave as though it believed what liberals say. And there are some quite stupendously stupid niggas who believe that and also think that they can insult ol’ whitey to their heart’s content for ever without ol’ whitey taking enough offence to do something. Ain’t that something!

Now, my brain tells me that minorities are always going to be fucked by the majority, tells me that if a minority makes a big thing about being separate, they’re putting up signs saying persecute us, tells me that if a minority becomes more privileged than the majority, it is shouting from the rooftops, get those gas ovens working! But blacks don’t want to hear such things. No, blacks want to hear fairy tales. Blacks want to behave as though they are miraculously protected by God. What mother fuckingly stupid niggas.

Perhaps it ain’t their fault. It’s just stupid black people and stupid white people living out a fantasy. Can you imagine what will happen if race riots really start to take hold? I can. Let’s suppose that we have a nice little rising in Brixton or Toxteth or St Paul’s. Let’s suppose further that a dozen whites are killed and perhaps a hundred or so are injured. Pretty small beer by international standards, but that’s all it will take in safe, cosy old England to make ol’ liberal whitey run like the wind for cover. That brothers and sisters is when you’ll all discover that you’ve been living in a dream. What, you say, what if blacks are killed? Ah well there’s your want of intellect, there’s your emotional blindness. It don’t matter how many niggas are killed because we are a small minority. In the end we have to lose. That’s the political arithmetic.

Now don’t get me wrong, I can get myself up in the indignation stratosphere about slavery and the way blacks were treated for a long time after slavery died. Late at night, with a few drinks inside me and the pulsing radical brothers and sisters whispering in my ear, I can be shouting for reparations for blacks, demanding the world to smooth away the past. But that’s just weak self-indulgence and a form of slave mentality, for all I’m doing is asking honky to control my life as surely as if I was on a plantation. I’m saying to honky, you give me money for hurts never done to me or my father or grandfather or great grandfather nor done by you or your father or grandfather or great grandfather. Put like that, it don’t seem reasonable. Even more to the point, put like that such reparations seem like fairy gold.

Why don’t I go and live in Jamaica? Well, the truth is that’ve been there. And the even bigger truth is that I didn’t like it there, didn’t fit in. For Jamaicans I was always an outsider. In fact, they called me Englishman. There’s a fucking irony for you.

But it wasn’t just that. I was bored in Kingston and if you’re bored in Kingston, boy! will you be bored anywhere else in the West Indies. In London I can always find something to do. And everything works, more or less anyhow. And then there’s that little old British welfare state with its benefits and its free education and its free health service. You only sniff at that if you’ve got it and don’t know that you’ve been born. Try living in a country without them things and see how you get on.

Who do I blame for this suppurating mess of a racial predicament? Well, I would like to just say ol’ whitey, nice and clean and simple. The trouble is, in my heart of hearts, don’t feel that ol’ whitey is to blame, or at least, not ol’ whitey generally. No the honky side of the blame equation is all those self-deluding liberals and internationalist simpletons dreaming their dream of the brotherhood of man plus the Pax Britannica merchants who wanted to pretend that the peoples of the Empire were just one big happy fucking family. And you can add to them all the white cowards in power who weren’t deluded, but didn’t have the backbone to stop what was happening back in the fifties.

That’s the honky side of the blame equation. And the black side? There we find all the stupid blacks who thought that they could Uncle Tom their way to whitey heaven. Behind them come those blacks who believe ol’ liberal whitey or pretend to believe him.

But most of all I blame my father and my mother and all those other selfish, stupid niggas who came here, found racism all about them, yet stayed and had sons and daughters knowing full well that their sons and daughters and their children and their children ad infinitum would suffer the same rejection. And one last thing. To go back to where we began, I’m really sick of hearing those mothers and fathers standing round now saying “I hate England. It so cold. It no place for me when I old.” Well, it never was no place for you when you was young or middle aged but you stayed. So don’t stand there now whining as though it’s anybody’s fault but your own.

Perhaps the trouble with the English is that they are too controlled, too law abiding. Perhaps if riots had been real serious in the beginning. Perhaps…a thousand times perhaps.

Jesus! What a fucking mess!

America’s love-hate affair with England in films

When you go to the cinema think of how often English legends such as Robin Hood are used by Americans. Reflect on how, until recently at least, American universities would give as a matter of course considerable time to the study of writers such as Shakespeare and Jane Austen. These things happen naturally and without self-consciousness because English culture and history is part of American history.

Despite the recent US appetite for Englishness on film they have a schizophrenic relationship with this country. They produce Anglophobe abortions such as Mel Gibson’s “The Patriot” – a film set in the American War of Independence which depicted the 18th Century British as Nazis – are vestigially paranoid about “King George” and constantly use the English in films as stage villains.

Overtly, Americans ignore their English origins. The most absurd example of this on celluloid I have come across occurred in the feature film length cartoon Pocohontas which dealt with the Jamestown settlement of 1607, the first permanent English settlement in North America. The leader of the expedition, John Smith, was given an American accent while the rest of the crew had English ones ranging from stage cockney to upper class cad.

The consequence of this denial of their origins makes America a very peculiar country in that it lacks a coherent foundation story. King George and the British are the villains and American colonists the heroes … and that’s about it. There is a great blank hole in American history, namely, where did they and their dominant culture come from? The answer of course is England.

Ultimately the USA is the child of England: no England, no United States. The nonexistence of the United States alone would have made a colossal difference to the history of the past two centuries and to the present day, not least because it is and has been for a century or more responsible for a tremendous proportion of global scientific discovery and technological development. If the English had done nothing more than lay the foundation of the United States it would have done a mighty thing.

At this point I can hear the cry of many: why the English not the British? Was not the United States formed as much by the Scots and Irish as by the English? There will even be those who will press the claims of the Germans. A little careful thought will show that no one but the English could have been responsible, although many peoples and cultures have subsequently added to the considerable variety of American life

This English predominance may not seem important at first glance because of the immense non-Anglo-Saxon immigration which occurred from the eighteenth century onwards. Would not, a reasonable man might ask, would not the later immigration swamp the earlier simply because of its greater scale? The answer is no – at least until the relaxation of immigration rules in the sixties – because the numbers of non-Anglo Saxons coming into America were always very small compared with the existing population of the USA.

When immigrants enter a country their descendents will generally adopt the social and cultural colouring of the native population. The only general exception to this well attested sociological fact is in a situation of conquest, although even there the invader if few in number will become integrated through intermarriage and the general pressure of the culture of the majority population working through the generations. Thus at any time in the development of the USA the bulk of the population were practisers of a general culture which strongly reflected that of the original colonisers, namely the English.

Immigrants were therefore inclined to adopt the same culture. America’s English origins spread throughout her culture. Her law is founded on English common law. The most famous of American law officers is the English office of sheriff. Congress imitates the eighteenth century British Constitution (President = King; Senate = Lords; House of Representatives = The House of Commons) with, of course, the difference of a codified constitution. (It would incidentally be truer to describe the British Constitution as uncodified rather than unwritten). It is an irony that their system of government has retained a large degree of the monarchical and aristocratic principles whilst that of Britain has removed power remorselessly from King and aristocracy and placed it resolutely in the hands of elected representatives who have no formal mandate beyond the representation of their constituents.

The Declaration of Independence is full of phrases and sentiments redolent of English liberty. The prime political texts of the American revolution were those of the Englishmen John Locke and Tom Paine. The American Constitution is designed to alleviate faults in the British Constitution not to abrogate it utterly. The first ten amendments which form the American Bill of Rights draw their inspiration from the English Bill of Rights granted by William of Orange. The American Revolution was conducted by men whose whole thought was in the English political tradition.

The English influence is written deeply into the American landscape. Take a map of the States and see how many of the place names are English, even outside the original thirteen colonies which formed the USA. Note that they are divided into parishes and counties.

Above all other cultural influences stands the English language. Bismarck thought that the fact that America spoke English was the most significant political fact of his time. I am inclined to agree with him. But at a more fundamental level, the simple fact that English is spoken by Americans as their first language means that their thought processes will be broadly similar to that of the English. Language is the ultimate colonisation of a people.

Moreover, the English spoken by the majority of Americans is still very much the English of their forebears. It is, for example, far less mutated than the English spoken in India. The English have little difficulty in understanding Americans whatever their regional origin. Indeed, it may come as a surprise to many Americans that the average Englishman probably finds it easier to understand most American forms of speech than some British accents and dialects. Americans often affect not to understand English accents, but it is amazing how well they can understand them when they need something. Oscar Wilde’s aphorism that “America and England are two countries divided by a common language” was witty but, as with so much of what he said, utterly at variance with reality.

The English heritage in America is far from spent, not merely in its language and institutions, but also in the fact that more Americans have some form of English lineage than any other group and even if the do not think of themselves as English by descent, the personality traits of the English in as far as they are genetically determined are passed on and reinforced by those extant cultural relics of Englishness.

There is a special relationship between England and America but it is not the one beloved of politicians. The special relationship is one of history and culture. American culture is an evolved Englishness, much added to superficially but still remarkably and recognisably English.

What applies to the USA, broadly applies also to Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Even American actors go English . Those old enough to remember the classic age of Hollywood will recall the habit of American stars appearing in films with an English context to resolutely refuse to make any attempt to adopt an English accent. In recent years there has been a complete reversal of this. To list just a few big names: Johnny Depp (The Libertine, From Hell, Pirates of the Caribbean and Corpse Bride), Julianne Moore (The End of the Affair), John Malkhovitch (The Libertine), Gwyneth Paltrow (Emma and Sliding Doors), Reese Witherspoon (Vanity Fair), Danny Huston (The Constant Gardener), Liv Ulman, Viggo Mortensen, Elijah Wood and Sam Astin (all Lord of the Rings), Natalie Portman (V for Vendetta) . Non-American foreign actors have also been doing their bit. Russell Crowe (Master and Commander), Brendan Gleeson (Troy), Eric Bana (Troy), Cate Blanchett (The End of the Affair), Nicole Kidman (The Others), Natalie Portman (V for Vendetta).

The success of English films in America also gives the lie to the American’s frequent claim that they cannot understand what the English say because they “kinda talk funny”. This fantasy is mercilessly guyed in the film The Limey where Terrence Stamp plays a cockney gangster in America and the American characters constantly say they cannot understand him. In fact, as anyone who has had dealings with Americans will know they can all understand very well – when they want something.

It is perhaps not so surprising that films with RP speakers in it should be understood by Americans, but it is noteworthy that they also watched in large numbers the two Guy Ritchie mockney gangster films which were full of the cockney vernacular. They watched in even greater numbers Johnny Depp’s hilarious take off of Rolling Stone Keith Richard in Pirates of the Caribbean.

English education and the great grade inflation fraud

English education has suffered greatly from its politicisation in the liberal internationalist interest, but even more fundamental damage was done by progressive teaching methods which failed to provide many children with an adequate grasp the three ‘Rs’ (and left a depressing number either completely illiterate or what is coyly called “functionally illiterate”, while most are unable to do simple arithmetic and lack any sense of number or proportion, so that they have no idea whether the sums they poked into their calculators produced answers which were correct.

The most obvious consequence of the gradual decline in educational standards was an erosion in exam quality. At first it was small things. Practical exams for science O Levels were dropped. Then came multiple choice questions. The curricula in all subjects shrank. New, less academic subjects such as media studies found their way into the exam system and elbowed the academic aside. Eventually came the ultimate corruption of the exam system with the introduction of continuous assessment. With the fall in school standards, the universities and polytechnics inevitably had to drop their standards.

The corruption of exam standards was further driven by a desire to expand the numbers of children passing school exams and the numbers going on to Higher Education. To this end O Levels and the old CSE exams for less able pupils were abolished in the 1980s and replaced with the General Certificate of Education (GCSE). Around the same time a decision was made to vastly increase the numbers of students in Higher Education. To make this policy more attractive to would-be students, the polytechnics were renamed universities in 1992, with the consequence that more than 100 institutions with that title were suddenly competing for students, with as we shall see later, evil effects.

The consequence of having a single exam (GCSE) for all 16 year olds was predictable: to prevent embarrassing numbers of failures, the standard of the new exam had to be reduced below that of the already much less demanding O Levels of the 1980s (even so, in 2005 around 30 per cent of children fail to gain five GCSEs at C grade or higher.) The upshot was that the GCSE candidates either left school at 16 lacking even the rudiments of education needed to fill run-of-the-mill jobs – many are functionally illiterate and even more lack basic numeracy – or entered A Level courses woefully under-prepared, especially in subjects such as maths. A Levels and degree courses were again, of necessity, reduced in standard to adapt to pupils and students who were substantially under-prepared compared with those arriving under the pre-GCSE examination regime.

At the same time as standards were eroding, the Tories introduced in the 1980s the madness of league tables and targets. The consequence of these – not just in education but generally – is to distract from the actual purpose of what an organisation is supposed to do and to promote dishonesty in the pursuit of attaining the targets and showing well in league tables.

The league tables provoked even more tampering with the academic standards of school exams as examination boards competed with one another to produce the “best” results, that is, ever higher pass rates and grades and schools chose the examination board most likely to give them ostensible examination success.

The response of both politicians and educationalists to the inexorable rise in GCSE and A Level results since GCSE was introduced has been to hail them as evidence that educational standards are continually rising. Such claims have the same relationship to reality as Soviet figures for the turnip harvest or tractor production. All that has happened is that both the difficulty of exams and the severity of marking has been reduced. In 2004 an A Grade in GCSE Maths from Edexcel, one of the largest exam boards, could be gained with 45 per cent (Daily Telegraph 18 9 2004), while a “B” grade at one Board in 2004 (OCR) could be a obtained with a mere 17 per cent (Sunday Telegraph 16 1 2005). (When challenged about lowered grade marks, those setting the exams claim that the questions are becoming more difficult.) Course work, which counts towards the overall exam mark, is reported as being either routinely plagiarised from the Web or showing other evidence of being other than the pupil’s unaided work.

In addition to the lowering of exam marks and the fraud of continuous assessment, school exams have begun to shift from final tests to modular exams which are taken throughout the course. Hence, pupils on such courses never take an exam which tests them on their entire course.

Of course, all this change to school exams, combined with the introduction of the national curriculum tests, creates a great deal of extra work for teachers and distracts them from the actual task of teaching – pupils are tested at 7, 11, 14, 16, 17 and 18. It has also spawned a truly monstrous examination bureaucracy, which according to a recent report from the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (a state body) costs £610 million per year (Daily Telegraph 14 2 2005) and has left the country desperately scrabbling around for examiners.

The frequent complaints of university teachers about the inadequacy of the students coming to them and the even more vociferous complaints of employers about applicants who lack competence in even the three “Rs” are pretty substantial straws in the wind suggesting a general educational failure. My own direct experience of youngsters all too often bears out such complaints – I find especially depressing recent graduates with good degrees from top universities who are bizarrely ignorant of their degree subjects and poorly equipped to research or analyse.

The universities also joined in the grade inflation caucus race. I went to University in the late sixties. In those days – when less than 10% of UK school-leavers went to university – Oxford and Cambridge awarded around 40% of undergraduates the top two degree classifications . The newer universities were much stingier, many awarding only 4-5% of firsts and 30% of upper seconds. They did this to establish their credibility. Now it is common for universities to award firsts to more than 15% of undergraduates and firsts and upper seconds to two thirds of those who graduate. A recent (I Jan 2011) Sunday Telegraph investigation discovered “The universities awarding the highest proportion of firsts or 2:1s last year were Exeter, where 82 per cent of graduates received the top degrees compared with just 29 per cent in 1970, and St Andrews – Scotland’s oldest university, where Prince William met fiancée Kate Middleton – where the figure was also 82 per cent compared with just 25 per cent in 1970.

“Imperial College London and Warwick both granted 80 per cent firsts or 2:1s last year, compared with 49 per cent and 39 per cent respectively in 1970. At Bath University the figure was 76 per cent last year compared with just 35 per cent in 1970. “http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/universityeducation/8235115/Dumbing-down-of-university-grades-revealed.html

There was some grade inflation before the late eighties but it was small compared with what has happened since. Until, the late eighties universities received their funding in the form of a block grant from a government body called the Universities Grants Committee ((UGC) This meant there was no temptation to inflate degree awards because the money did not follow the individual student. The UGC was scrapped in 1989 and the money attached to each individual student. This changed the relationship between the university and student from being one where the student was seen as just that to one where the student became primarily a bringer of money. This relationship changed again with first the abolition of grants and then the introduction of fees which made placed the student in the position of customer.

Anecdotes are always tricky as evidence, so let us consider an objective fact which explains why widespread educational incompetence is inevitable in the circumstances which have been created. IQ is normally distributed within a population, that is it forms a Bell Curve with most people clustering in the middle of the curve and a few people at the extremes of the curve. Such a distribution means that the proportion of the population with IQs substantially above the average is quite small – approximately 25 per cent of the UK population have IQs of 110 or more. Now, it is true that IQ as a measure of academic success is not infallible, not least because motivation is necessary as well as intellect. But what is true is that a decent IQ is necessary for academic success. Put another way, someone with an IQ of 150 may or may not take a First in maths: someone with an IQ of 90 never will.

The way IQ is distributed means that the ideal of an exam suited to everyone (GCSE) is a literal nonsense, because that which would test the brightest would be beyond the large majority and even that which the majority could cope with would be beyond those in the lower part of the ability range. The grades awarded for GCSE bear this out. The large numbers of those getting the top marks mean that the exam is too easy for the brightest, while the 30 per cent or so of school-leavers who cannot attain 5 passes at C grade or better tell you it is too difficult for the lower part of the academic ability continuum.

A similar problem of fitting exams to a very wide ability range has affected universities. Tony Blair set a target of 50 per cent of either school-leavers or people under the age of 28 (the target seems to move) to be in Higher Education – at the beginning of 2005 the percentage is over 40 per cent. Blair’s target meant that many of those at university will have mediocre IQs.

Let us assume for the sake of simplicity that 50 per cent of school-leavers is the target rather than 50 per cent of those under 28. There are only around 25 per cent of people with IQs of 110 or higher in any age group. If every one of those 25 per cent went to university (50 per cent of those scheduled to go to university if the Blair target is met) it would still leave the other half of those going to university to be found from those with IQs of less than 109. Hence, with 50 per cent of school-leavers at university, at least half the people taking degrees would have, as a matter of necessity, moderate IQs. In fact, the position is worse than that, because significant numbers of those with IQs substantially above average will not go to university. That means even more than 50 per cent of students would have moderate IQs. Trying to set degree courses suitable for people with, say, IQs ranging from 90-160 cannot be a practical proposition.

The coalition government has not committed themselves to Blair’s 50% target but neither have they said it will not the reached or even exceeded, the Government line being anyone who wants to go to universitty should go.

The upshot of all this is that the better universities can no longer trust an A at A Level to be a true reflection of excellence because so many people are awarded As and a new A* grade has been introduced in the hope that it will distinguish outstanding candidates. However, this is unlikely to be a long-term solution as it is a sound bet that A* will be awarded in ever greater numbers.

English education, immigration and political correctness

What allowed progressive education to go from being a primarily a method and philosophy of teaching to a potent political ideology was mass immigration. Originally the progressive view of immigrants was that they must be assimilated into English society. When it became clear by the mid-seventies that assimilation was not going to work, progressive educationalists rapidly switched to the doctrine which became multiculturalism. By the early eighties assimilation was a dirty word in educational circles. The educationalists were followed by the politicians.

Multiculturalism was embraced as a mainstream political ideal in the late 1970s because politicians did not know what to do about mass coloured immigration and its consequences. Both Labour and the Conservatives initially promoted the French solution to immigration – make them black and brown Britons. But by the end of the seventies integration was deemed by our political elite to be a failure at best and oppression at worst. Multiculturalism was its successor. Once it became the new official doctrine, the many eager Anglophobic and internationalist hands in English education and the mass media were free to give reign to their natural instincts.

The idea behind multiculturalism is that it squares the immigration circle of unassimilable immigrants and a resentful native mass by saying everyone may live in their own cultural bubble. In practice, this required the suppression of British interests and the silencing of British dissidents on one side and the promotion of minority cultures and the privileging of the immigrant minorities on the other.

English history and culture ceased to be taught in schools in any meaningful way. Where it was part of the curriculum, it was the subject of ever increasing denigration. Politicians of all parties gradually became more and more reluctant to speak out for the interests of the native Briton. Laws were passed – most notably the Race Relations Act of 1976 and the Public Order Act of 1986 – potentially making it an offence to tell the unvarnished truth about race and immigration or make any telling criticism of any minority ethnic group.

As the new elite doctrine of multiculturalism became established, it became necessary not only for the elite themselves to espouse it but anyone who worked for the elite. Any public servant, any member of the media, any senior businessman, an professional person, was brought within the net. This produced the situation we have today whereby no honest speaking about any subject within the pc ambit is allowed in public without the person being shouted down and in all probability becoming either a non-person or forced to make a public “confession” reminiscent of those during the Cultural Revolution.

Most importantly, multiculturalism allowed the progressives to portray Englishness as just one competing culture amongst many, all of which were equally “valid”. This had two primary implications: other cultures should be given equal consideration within the curriculum and any promotion of one culture over another was illegitimate. In fact, these implications were never followed through. Practicality meant that the multiplicity of cultures in England could not all have equal billing, while the promotion English culture was deemed to be “oppressive” both because they are the dominant “ethnic” group in England and because of their “evil” imperial, slave-trading past. The educationalists’ cut the Gordian knot by treating the inclusion of items of any culture other than English within the school curriculum as a “good”, while insisting that references to England and her people should always be derogatory and guilt inducing.

The better part of a quarter of century of this policy has resulted in English education system being successfully subverted. English cultural content has been marvellously diluted and denigration of the English is routine bar one thing: the liberal bigot invariably lauds the toleration of the English towards immigrants, a claim at odds both with historical reality and the liberal’s general claim that England is a peculiarly wicked and undeserving place.

English education has officially become not a way of enlarging the mind and opening up intellectual doors, but merely a means to produce “good” politically correct citizens and workers equipped for the modern jobs market. The last Labour Government has decreed that pupils are no longer to be pupils but “learners”. The desired ends for these “learners” are “Be healthy; stay safe; enjoy and achieve; make a positive contribution; and achieve economic well being.” (Daily Telegraph 19 2 2005). This is a programme couched in language remarkably similar to those of totalitarian regimes such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

The Blair Government introduced citizenship lessons in schools – I will leave readers to guess what makes a good citizen in the Blairite mind – and played with the idea of introducing a citizenship ceremony for all 18-year-olds. The present coalition shows no sign of radically altering matters because they are always trying to do two mutually exclusive things at the same time: get rid of some of the more outlandish examples of political correctnmess whilst appearing to be very politically correct. The consequence is little movement as the one impulse tends to cancel out the other.

The only world empire ever worthy of the name

The British Empire was, like the industrial revolution, essentially an English phenomenon. It is a myth that the Empire was largely run by Celts, especially Scots. It was overwhelmingly staffed by the English, as the difference in population between England and the rest of the UK would suggest. The Celts may have been represented disproportionately to their proportion of the British population, but they were still very much in a minority amongst the British in the Empire.

Practically, there were two Empires. The first including the American colonies, ended in the first half of the nineteenth century and was primarily driven by trade and political competition between the major western European powers, all of whom lived in fear of the other gaining European ascendency through their passion of colonies which were seen as a source of wealth and hence power. The clichéd idea that Britain obtained an Empire in a fit of absent mindedness really will not stand up. England sought an empire consciously in the seventeenth century because they feared the power of other colonising nations, particularly Spain. The second developed from the 1830s and forties when colonisation began to be seen officially as primarily a duty rather than a political or commercial enterprise,

Trade not plunder was the engine of the early Empire. The American colonies became England’s largest overseas trading partner. England’s relations with India were primarily those of a trading nation until Clive’s victories in the mid eighteenth century. It was not until the second English empire that the imperial ideal became dominant.

As for overall material gain from the Empire, it is a moot point whether the Empire from start to finish turned a profit. The Boer War, for example, cost Britain £200 million pounds at 1900 prices when Britain’s GDP was approximately £2 billion. If the same proportion (10%) of today’s GDP (2010) was devoted to a war, the expenditure would be in excess of £147 billion.

David Landes in the “Wealth and Poverty of Nations” dismisses the claim that colonialism was the primary cause of the wealth of European powers or their cultural offshoots such as the United States, by pointing to inconvenient facts such as the experience of Spain, the greatest power in Europe between 1500 and 1650, and Portugal. Despite the immense wealth generated by their American possessions, as societies they remained poor even during their period of greatest material gain from the Americas. Nor did their rulers achieve financial respectability – the Spanish Crown managed to go bankrupt in 1557, 1575 and 1597. As for the slave trade, one may point to the wealth of Britain at the time of abolition and in the century which followed. In 1807 Britain’s GNP was approximately £200 million pounds. By 1914 in was over £2 billion pounds. (Prices in 1807 and 1914 were approximately the same as far as these things can ever be judged) At most, Mr Landes allows that the wealth received by Britain from the slave trade, India and the Americas may, but only may, have slightly accelerated the first Industrial Revolution.

Whether Empires are ever morally justified is a moot point. I must confess to veering instinctively towards Gibbon’s view of the matter, namely that great empires are to be regretted because they impose uniformity and allow a man no escape from +a government which he cannot either tolerate or be tolerated by. But my head tells me that in practice the harshest and most morally obnoxious societies are those which are based on Oriental despotism, dynastic kingship or primitive tribal association. The British Empire mainly ruled over peoples who before the British came behaved in a manner which would appal latter-day liberals..

What is certain is that compared with every other empire ancient and modern, the British Empire was a model of restraint and in its final century, of deliberately benign government. For those who would dispute the matter, let them consider the cruelty of the French in Algiers in the decade prior to Algerian independence or the Chinese now in Tibet.

The British Empire gave a great deal, both material and moral to those it ruled. The humane values to which the Commonwealth pays at least lip service to as the defining values of a civilised state, are English values. It may even be that in the long run the representative institutions which have been so perverted in many of Britain’s ex-colonies will bear the fruit of democratic rule. Political institutions do not guarantee democratic ways, but they do provide the opportunity if times become more propitious.

Perhaps the most amazing fact about the Empire is the small number of Britons who were involved in the administration of colonies. The subcontinent is perhaps the best example. At the height of the Raj, the 1921 census of the Indian Empire (which included Burma and the states which became Pakistan and Bangladesh) shows a total population of 318,492,480. The total British (white) population was 115,606. This represents 0.036% of the population or one white for every 275 Asians. The 2001 UK census shows approximately 2,083,759 residents of Pakistani, Indian and Bangladeshi origin. (www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=273). This represents 3.6% of the official population of Britain in 2001, or one subcontinental Asian for every 28 whites. The British figures are understated because of illegal immigration and the fact that the census relied on self-reporting of racial type. In addition, the Asian population has grown since 2001. Nonetheless, using the 2001 census figures, If immigrants from the subcontinent were in Britain in the same proportion as the British were in the subcontinent, their numbers would be approximately 21,000 as opposed to the two million plus which are now resident. (These comparative figures also show how unreasonable it is to try justify sub-continental immigration to Britain on the grounds that Britons colonised the sub-continent. The British in India did not swamp the native population anywhere because they were in such tiny numbers. The numbers of sub continental Asians and their descendants in Britain is large enough to allow what is effective colonisation of parts of the country).

The Empire was a most remarkable phenomenon in its scope, disparate nature and, until the advent of the steamship, its utterly daunting lines of communication in vessels most men would not now trust for a trip across the Channel. At its height it covered approximately a quarter of the world’s population, drawn from the four quarters of the earth. It was the only world empire ever worthy of the name. It will probably be the last because the political, material and technological circumstances of the world are never again likely to be conducive to such dominion.

As a coda, I would add that the existence of the Commonwealth, which is a voluntary association of states, is unique. Never in the whole of history have the past members of an Empire so immediately and willingly associated themselves with their erstwhile imperial masters.

Ultimately the USA is the child of England: no England, no United States

Ultimately the USA is the child of England: no England, no United States. The nonexistence of the United States would have made a colossal difference to the history of the past two centuries and to the present day, not least because it is and has been for a century or more responsible for a tremendous proportion of global scientific discovery and technological development.

The English were the numerically dominant settlers from the Jamestown settlement in 1607 until the Revolution. Moreover, and this is the vital matter, they were overwhelmingly the dominant settlers for the first one hundred years. Even in 1776 English descended settlers formed, according to the historical section of the American Bureau of Census, nearly sixty percent of the population and the majority of the rest of the white population was from the non-English parts of Britain. This English predominance may not seem important at first glance because of the immense non-Anglo-Saxon immigration which occurred from the eighteenth century onwards. Would not, a reasonable man might ask, would not the later immigration swamp the earlier simply because of its greater scale? The answer is no – at least until the relaxation of immigration rules in the sixties – because the numbers of non-Anglo Saxons coming into America were always very small compared with the existing population of the USA.

When immigrants enter a country their descendants will generally adopt the social and cultural colouring of the native population. The only general exception to this well attested sociological fact is in a situation of conquest, although even there the invader if few in number will become integrated through intermarriage and the general pressure of the culture of the majority population working through the generations. Thus at any time in the development of the USA the bulk of the population were practisers of a general culture which strongly reflected that of the original colonisers, namely the English. Immigrants were therefore inclined to adopt the same culture.

America’s English origins spread throughout her culture. Her law is founded on English common law. The most famous of American law officers is the English office of sheriff. Congress imitates the eighteenth century British Constitution (President = King; Senate = Lords; House of Representatives = The House of Commons) with, of course, the difference of a codified constitution. (It would incidentally be truer to describe the British Constitution as uncodified rather than unwritten). It is an irony that their system of government has retained a large degree of the monarchical and aristocratic principles whilst that of Britain has removed power remorselessly from King and aristocracy and placed it resolutely in the hands of elected representatives who have no formal mandate beyond the representation of their constituents.

Moreover, the English spoken by the majority of Americans is still very much the English of their forebears. It is, for example, far less mutated than the English spoken in India. The English have little difficulty in understanding USA-born white Americans whatever their regional origin. Indeed, it may come as a surprise to many Americans that the average Englishman probably finds it easier to understand most American forms of often affect not to understand English accents, but it is amazing how well they understand them when they need something. Oscar Wilde’s aphorism that “America and England are two countries divided by a common language” was witty but, as with so much of what he said, utterly at variance with reality.