Category Archives: Culture

It isn’t a crisis of capitalism but a crisis of globalism

Robert Henderson

Contents

1. Turning a blind eye

2. What is capitalism?

3. Globalisation and the developed world

4. The suppression of dissent

5. The developing world

6. The loss of national control

7. The undeveloping world

8. Supra-national politics

9. Just another outbreak of an old disease

10. Unemployment as a barometer of an economic system

11. Capitalism in a protected domestic economy

1. Turning a blind eye

Amongst the wailing and gnashing of teeth from all parts of political mainstream over the ongoing economic crisis its prime cause goes unmentioned. Free market capitalism, which has been accepted , whether enthusiastically or resignedly, by Western elites for the past quarter of a century as the only economic theory worthy of support, is being questioned. Even some of its firmest adherents are questioning whether there has been too much freedom of individual action in the economic sphere. Some mainstream commentators who write for resolutely “free market” supporting newspapers like the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail, are even beginning to wonder if capitalism is in a crisis from which it may not recover:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2022993/Capitalism-crisis-80-years-ago-banking-collapse-devastated-Europe-triggering-war.html#ixzz1aUJrGGaG

and

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/8814560/If-capitalism-does-fail-the-alternative-is-far-far-worse.html

Those coming from the left are unsurprisingly joining in the “end of capitalism” rhetoric (http://www.marxist.com/world-capitalism-in-crisis-1.htm). What you will not find are many if any mainstream politicians and economic commentators addressing the real source of the crisis: the cloying and uncritical embrace of the internationalist creed which we call globalism by Western elites, especially those in Britain and the USA.

Before I turn to the ill effects of globalism there is the tricky matter of defining capitalism needs to be addressed, because there is a case for saying that capitalism is a state of theoretical purity which does not exist in the real world.

2. What is capitalism?

Capitalism is seriously difficult to define because it shares so much with economic systems which are not considered to be capitalist. For example, if the state undertakes an economic activity such as providing healthcare in an organisation such as the NHS or nationalises the railways and coalmining are they capitalism in action? After all they employ capital, land and labour, the three factors of production in classical economics and provide goods and services to the public just as a private business would do.

What do state enterprises lack which private business has? The entrepreneur? Well, most large companies are not run by entrepreneurs but corporate administrators. The profit motive? Perhaps, but what about state enterprises which consistently make profits for the taxpayer such as the Post Office in Britain while it had a monopoly? Freedom of action? Private enterprises are heavily constrained by law and state regulation in every developed economy and state organisations are often granted a remarkable operational freedom. The risk of going bust if they do not perform? Any state enterprise can in principle be ended or privatised while private companies when they are large enough have a good chance of being rescued by taxpayers, vide the banks in the present financial crisis. An absence of private money? State businesses frequently draw all or much of their income from payments they receive from the general public in return for goods or services, for example, nationalised energy companies . Moreover, many companies which are classified as private enterprise organisations draw all or much of their income from taxpayer funded contracts. Then there are the not-for-profit organisations, especially the charities, which increasingly act as sub-contracted arms of the state as they draw much of their income from the taxpayer and the rest of their income from donations. Individual and corporate. How should they be classified? Part of capitalism? Part of the state? A separate class of economic actor altogether? It could be any of the three options.

To all those blurrings of the distinction between private enterprise and public service must be added the macro-economic fact that all developed economies have a massive part of their GDP in the hands of the state. The mixed economy is a fact of all reputedly capitalistic economies. Does that render the idea of capitalist society redundant? In a sense it does. The broad differences in developed (and increasingly the more advanced of the developing countries) is in the degree to which state control and ownership is balanced against private enterprise.

There are of course qualitative differences in the application of the law as it affects the economy and the nature of the control which is exercised over the economy by the state, especially in areas such as the banking system and the ability of foreign companies to operate. For example, while countries such as Britain and the USA allow vast swathes of their economies to be purchased by foreign countries, China will often in practice only allow foreigners in on the basis of joint ventures with Chinese firms. (http://www.booz.com/media/uploads/Making_Partnerships_Work.pdf ) . Nonetheless, there is a general similarity in the economies in as much as all are a mixture of public and private and all permit some degree of government interference and direction of the market.

Despite the difficulty of definition the term capitalism is not without utility. There is clearly a difference between a company which acts on its own behalf without state direction or assistance and a nationalised industry. Parts of mixed economies are capitalist if by that is meant private companies which operate without deriving any part of their revenue from the taxpayer, have management free to act within the general restraints of the law without state direction and which operate on the principle that they stand or fall on whether they can at least break even. The companies which receive taxpayers’ money, especially those which rely on the taxpayer for only part of their income, also have much of the aspect of a pure private enterprise business in that they will in practice dictate how things are done, the public body funding their work being essentially in the position of a customer who merely sets ends not means. Capitalism is a spectrum of behaviours rather than a clear-cut behaviour.

It is important to understand that free trade does not equal capitalism. Free trade is simply the exchange of goods, services and capital between countries. It says nothing about the circumstances in which these things are created. These can be anything from a command economy to the economies in which free enterprise is most dominant.

3. Globalisation and the developed world

Globalism equals destabilisation. Until the financial crash of 2008 the globalists argued that ever increasing free trade generally and the internationalisation of financial markets in particular increased economic and international stability by spreading risk more widely (which reduced the cost of credit and consequently increased economic activity ) and by that by making countries ever more interdependent the likelihood of international conflict was ameliorated. In fact, both ideas were pipe dreams and the exact reverse of what globalism actually creates.

There are two central elements of globalism. The first is the end (or at least considerable diminution) of protectionist practices. Domestic economies in the developed world are stripped of great swathes of their economies, including strategically important ones such as coal mining and steel making, by the removal of protectionist barriers such as quotas, embargoes and tariffs. This results in either entirely foreign imports from low-wage economies such as China driving out the necessarily higher priced goods made in the developed nations or businesses in the developed world throwing in the towel and off-shoring their production of goods and services to low-wage economies. To that is added in much of the developed world the banning of state aid and intervention by both treaties and the domestic laws and rules imposed by national governments in thrall to an uncritical belief in laissez faire economics and small government.

Getting rid of protectionist barriers and privatising state owned industries massively reduces opportunities for employment for the native populations of the developed countries. This creates greater competition for jobs which reduces wages and other conditions of employment and increases insecurity of employment. In some instances, as occurred with Britain in the 1980s, the opening up the domestic markets to imports results in the most dramatic and socially damaging of economic traumas, structural unemployment, which lays waste the primary sources of employment of large areas , the effects of which carry down the generations.

The second central element of globalism, the free movement of peoples across borders, amplifies these consequences of free trade and adds other destabilising effects. Mass migration of labour inevitably goes from lower-wage economies to higher wage economies because there is no incentive for those in higher paid economies to take a run-of-the-mill-job in a lower-paid economy. In a addition, developed economies offer not only higher wages but also many non-monetary benefits such as those provided by a fully-fledged welfare state which are absent in developing economies.

Mass migration allows employers to radically cut wages in the higher-wage economies and greatly increases competition for most jobs, especially those which require little training or skill. The difference in cost of living between the immigrant’s country of origin (low) and the developed country they go to (high) are important. Immigrants, whether unskilled or skilled, are willing to work in such jobs for mediocre pay and live in poor, cramped accommodation because they know that they will be able to save a few thousand pounds in a year or two . They can do this even if by living honestly by paying tax. But often they will be paid cash- in-hand (no deductions for tax) , and live in in a squat (the taking over of someone’s house or flat without permission and living there rent free. Many will work while they are claiming unemployment benefits. If they have saved four or five thousand after a year or two, this will be enough to buy a house or flat in their own country where prices are a fraction of what they are in a developed country. (Give Britons the chance to save the price of a house or flat in Britain by working for a couple of years in those conditions in a foreign country and you are likely to be trampled in the rush).

As more and more immigrants come to developed economies, the position of the native worker worsens. This is because not only are there are more people chasing jobs, but also because native employers increasing rely on gang masters and other recruiters who are foreign and only want to employ foreigners (frequently foreigners from their own country: in the following case it was a Bulgarian employing Bulgarians http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/277363/Workers-are-fired-for-being-British). Sometimes employers deliberately exclude native workers by insisting that those employed speak a foreign language in the workplace, for example, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1257784/Biggest-Asda-meat-supplier-excludes-English-speakers-instructions-given-Polish.html ).

In Britain many employers excuse their recruitment of foreign workers on the grounds that they either cannot get native workers to apply or that those who do apply are unqualified for the job. As the vast majority of the British jobs being taken are low or non-skilled and there are now millions of native Britons desperately seeking work of any kind, this must be an excuse in most instances (http://www.metro.co.uk/news/878903-500-queue-for-just-20-sales-assistant-jobs-at-new-poundland-store#ixzz1b85oCrLr)

Even in the case of skilled workers there is discordance between the claim of lack of skilled applicants and the numbers of skilled British workers unable to find jobs. For example, there are large numbers of doctors and nurses trained in Britain who cannot find posts in Britain, while at the same time the NHS is recruiting heavily from abroad. (http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2011/09/09/no-need-to-speaka-da-english-in-the-nhs/). More generally, new British graduates are finding great difficulty in getting both appropriate jobs and, increasingly, any job at all (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/8283862/Graduate-unemployment-hits-15-year-high.html).

All of that suggests that British employers are favouring foreigners for reasons other than they give. The most plausible causes are lower pay and inferior conditions being accepted by immigrants, the greater ease with which immigrants can be sacked , especially those who are here illegally, and the possibility of bribes being paid, especially by foreign agencies, gangmasters using foreign labour and people traffickers, to those recruiting for British employers to persuade them to choose immigrants over native workers. An example would be where a public service employer uses a foreign agency to recruit abroad. The agency will receive a hefty fee from the public service employer for each foreigner recruited and that fee will be split between the agency and a corrupt recruiter in the UK. There is also a natural disincentive for native workers to seek work where they would be in the ethnic minority in their own land, for example, if you are English imagine working a factory where the common language is Polish or Hindi even if it is not a requirement of the job that the language is spoken.

These various practices mean large swathes of employment become effectively closed to the native population. The extent of the problem in Britain can be seen from one stark statistic: out of two million new jobs created under 13 years of the last Labour Government 1.8 million went to immigrants (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1325013/Migrants-took-9-10-jobs-created-Labour.html)

The removal of protection for the domestic market, off-shoring and mass immigration has meant that material inequality has grown considerably in the developed economies over the past quarter of a century as the wages of those competing with immigrants has fallen and unemployment has risen, including an army of long term unemployed. The countries showing the greatest growth between the haves and the have nots have been the USA and Britain, arguably the two countries most committed to globalism. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/18/bronx-manhattan-us-wealth-divide).

But there is much more to globalisation than the creation of material inequality. Mass immigration does not just create competition for jobs. It means there are more people seeking housing, healthcare, benefits and education . This further increases insecurity and resentment amongst the native population, especially amongst the poor because they are the ones most reliant on the welfare state and consequently are the people most likely to be in direct completion with the immigrants.

More generally, there is the natural resistance to large numbers of foreigners settling in an area. Any sizeable influx of immigrants is never evenly spread. Immigrants in large numbers congregate in self-created ghettoes which radically changes the nature of the area they settle in. This arouses resentment amongst the native population, most fiercely and poignantly by those directly affected, but as immigrant numbers grow massively, increasingly amongst the native population generally, regardless of whether people live in areas of heavy immigration. The concern is not primarily that the immigrants provide completion for jobs, houses and social services , although those are important triggers of resentment, but anger at territory being effectively conquered by immigrants (http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2011/02/22/part-of-england-has-been-invaded/)

4. The suppression of dissent

Those consequences would be enough to condemn globalism as a political creed , but there is much more to be set in the debit column of its balance sheet.

Because native populations in the richer countries are increasingly disadvantaged and angered at the effects of immigration, the elites who have permitted it and are committed to globalism have to control the resentment and anger. Politicians do this in various ways. They use their power to prevent any honest opposition to mass immigration and its consequences by passing laws which criminalise the native population if they express dissent to the policy. They create other laws which in practice privilege immigrants, for example, the British Race Relations Amendment Act 2000 which forces all public bodies in the UK to prove they are not discriminating against racial and ethnic minorities. They use their ready access to the mass media to incessantly push the “multiculturalism is good” message and force it in school curriculums – in Britain there is barely a subject untouched by its taint, even those subjects such as physics, chemistry and maths which you might imagine would be immune can be taught from this ethnic perspective or that ethnic perspective (Islamic maths anyone?)

Companies which rely on public contracts and charities have to play by the same multicultural rules as public service organisations and large public companies whether or not r they are reliant on public contracts in practice do so voluntarily. As an overarching deterrent, all employers are liable to be taken to Employment Tribunals if someone claims racial discrimination relating to dismissal, unequal treatment or the failure to get a job and risk unlimited awards against them if a complaint against the employer is upheld.

The multicultural message and the intimidation of dissenting views is religiously supported and underpinned by the British mass media , the members of which all publicly subscribe to the idea that racial discrimination (by which they mean any preference for any racial or ethnic group not approved of by the politically correct) is the ultimate evil and as a consequence are only too willing to conduct a hate campaign against anyone at whom the cry “racist” is directed and ensure that anyone with a dissenting voice is kept from public view.

The consequence of this wholesale enforcement of the multicultural dogma is that anyone in Britain who expresses an opinion which suggests that mass immigration and its consequences are less than the quickest path to social Nirvana runs the risk of penalties which range from losing their job (especially if the person works in the public sector) to being imprisoned for inciting racial hatred.

As for the economic aspects of globalism, Western political elites and their allies in the media and other positions of power and influence have overwhelmingly bought into the idea of free trade, at least to the extent that they have been willing to agree to greatly reduced protectionism. Those who would vigorously oppose the idea of out-of-control laissez faire economics at home and abroad have been almost entirely censored out of the public picture. On the odd occasions when some brave soul breaks the censorship and puts forward in public complaints about mass immigration reducing wages or taking jobs and scarce housing or the export of jobs to the developing world , these are squashed by the media proponents of globalism with mantras such as “It’s inevitable because we live in a global world” ; “It’s market forces”; “We have to compete globally”.

5. The loss of national control

On top of all this is piled two things, the loss of control of national governments over finance and the signing up of nation states to treaties which emasculate democracy by granting powers to supra-national bodies that should rightly belong to individual states. The most striking example of this is the EU, where the nations of the European Economic Area (over 30 of them) are bound to the so-called four freedoms; the free movement of goods, services, finance and people.

The failure to control the banks and their ilk is a direct consequence of globalism. The political elites in the developed world have been driven to not interfere with the major players in finance by ideology, self-interest (think of all the cosy post-politics sinecures in private business senior politicians acquire) and fear (they are terrified that if the banks are not pandered to economic catastrophe will follow). To those bars to sane financial policies can be added the interference of supranational bodies such as the EU. The existence of such bodies has meant that even if national governments had wished to behave responsibly by restraining the bankers’ excesses, they could not have done so because it would have been judged to be anti-competitive by a supra-national body such as the EU competition Commission.

The upshot of this development was frighteningly reckless finance industry business models based on selling mortgages to those who could not possible afford to service them, the development of exotic derivatives such as Collateralised Debt Obligations and Credit Default Swaps and the relentless gearing up of their debt to deposits ratio. This last practice resulted in even supposedly staid financial institutions such as British building societies getting into serious trouble because they became dependent on constant and massive recourse to short term wholesale borrowing , something which froze once the financial panic of began in earnest in 2008.

If banking had remained primarily a national matter, as it was until the late 1980s before the sudden explosion of computers and the embrace of laissez faire economics , the damage caused would have been minor compared to what has occurred even if banks had been allowed to engage in the unsafe practices described in the previous paragraph. There would have been both far less scope for credit expansion and, where bank failures occurred, they would have almost certainly happened sooner than they did under a globalised system because there would be far fewer places for a bank in trouble to go to try to borrow to put off the evil day of insolvency. Most importantly, the national financial institutions would have been smaller and less able to cause mortal damage to the national economy and would not have had the potential to undermine the international financial system. In addition, if banking is kept within national boundaries it can be much more readily supervised. Once it expands beyond a national single jurisdiction, as it does with the EU, meaningful government supervision and control becomes utterly impossible.

6. The developing world

Those are the ills of globalisation from the standpoint of the developed world. But the developing world and the remnants of undeveloped and still undeveloping world are not left unscathed by globalisation. The developing world experiences an aggregate increase in wealth as it takes manufacturing and service industries from the developed world and improves its infrastructure. But these improvements come at great human cost. Traditional ways of living are disrupted. Vast numbers flood from the countryside to the towns where they live and, if they are lucky, work in miserable conditions. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/8818059/100-million-Chinese-farmers-to-move-to-city-by-end-of-decade.html)

Many find their material conditions (but not necessarily their psychological state) improve, but far more are actively disadvantaged by the changes. If they remain outside the cities people find their areas being denuded of many of the most able and vigorous people who leave for the cities; their land being taken with little or no compensation for infrastructure projects such as dams, railways and factories and their way of life becoming less and less sustainable. Those who go to the cities for work find their lives are worse than they were before in terms of the conditions they have to endure and subject to great job insecurity . Even in the more developed of the developing Asian countries, where most of the world’s population now lives, there is a great chasm between the haves and the have-nots.

Although offshoring production and opening up their markets to imports from low-wage economies are disruptive for the developed world and potentially dangerous because it puts them to an increasing extent in the hands of foreign powers , it also bound the likes of China and India into a dependent embrace. As the economies of the developing nations grow they will increase their domestic demand and the capacity and willingness to satisfy it which will make them less dependent on international markets. But that is a fair way in the future. At present the developing world is reliant to a very heavy extent on exporting to the developed world.

Countries such as China are also massive holders of sovereign debt of Western countries, especially of the USA. These two things mean that the developing economies are affected by the present depression (let us give it its proper name) in the developed world, which is reducing demand for the products of the developing world and, in the case of countries with large sovereign debt holdings, at risk of losing vast amounts of money. It is also by no means clear that the financial systems of the developing nations are sound, even if they have not suffered from the same ills as the developed world’s financial sector. For example, China is constantly having to patch up bankrupt [projects and organisations (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/china-business/8821094/Chinas-debt-spree-returns-to-haunt.html).

7. The undeveloping world

The part of the world which is not seriously industrialising also suffers from the destruction of traditional ways of life with nothing adequate replacing them. Again there has been a flight from the countryside to towns and cities, although in this instance it has not resulted in large-scale industrial or even substantial commercial development. The only winners are those who have tapped into the funds controlled by the elite who dispense the vast amounts of foreign Aid and the income from foreign companies for mineral rights to those they favour, whether that be through the award of government jobs or through straightforward corruption.

Many have been displaced by the demands of foreign countries, especially those extracting raw materials. Countries have abandoned their traditional agriculture and turned to farming to produce food and flowers for the developed world. A growing practice is for countries in the developing world, especially China, to buy or lease large amounts of land in undeveloped countries to produce food for the country which has purchased the land. It is a kind of imperialism, but imperialism without any sense of moral obligation to the ruled.

All of these practices mean that much of the undeveloped world, primarily black Africa, live their lives in conditions which range from abject poverty to perpetual civil war. Although I would never pretend that living under colonial rule is unreservedly palatable, it can bring order and where the colonial power develops a sense of moral obligation to those it rules, as happened with British officialdom in the final century of the Empire, it can prevent serious abuses. What most of these countries currently have is the worst of all worlds, deeply corrupt native elites who sell their countries to the highest bidder, whether that selling being in the guise of gaining aid or commerce, and foreigners exploiting their people and land. There is no check on abuse.

8. Supra-national politics

There is a special subset of internationalism, the advanced supra-national body comprised of nation states which has the nature of a federal government even if it does not have that formal structure. The EU is the only organisation which comes close to meeting that description at present ,but it provides a warning of how such groupings can display the ill-effects of globalism together with some novel features of their own.

Member states of the EU have to allow unrestricted migration within the EU (to be pedantic, within the European Economic Area which includes the likes of Norway and Switzerland as well as the EU) and accept the loss of other great swathes of sovereignty ranging from the economic (competition, the making of trade treaties) to the social (the conditions of work, health and safety).

Most dramatically for the world in general, 17 of the 27 EU states have signed themselves up to the Euro. This was a criminally reckless enterprise because it married massively disparate economies such as the German and Greek without creating a central executive with the powers of a nation state. This meant that the controlling and guiding body for the Euro, the European Central Bank, was unable to do such essential things for a supra-national currency as determine tax regimes throughout the Euro area and move money from the richer to the poorer Euro members . These errors were compounded by the failure to implement what powers existed to impose financial discipline on the Euro members such as the restriction on the size of member states budget deficit. Unsurprisingly, the Euro eventually ran up against reality and for the past eighteen months the currency’s situation has looked ever more dire as Greece, then Portugal, Spain and Italy looked candidates for a default as they found it more and more expensive to borrow on the international markets to cover their budget deficits and service their national debts, something exacerbated as their tax bases shrunk during the depression . In October 2011 the poison looks as though it might even encompass France and Germany.

The ill consequences of the formation of the Euro stretch far beyond its members. The constant delay in coming to a conclusion as to what should be done to deal with the Euro crisis, whether that be the wholesale or partial break-up of the Euro or a decision for the Eurozone to go for full fiscal integration including massive movements of money from the rich members to the poor (the only thing which might rescue the Euro), has created uncertainly throughout the world and has significantly worsened an already dire world economic situation.

The Euro crisis has also sucked in countries from outside the Eurozone to help fund the vast sums needed to bail out the Republic of Ireland and Greece. This affects the non-Euro members within the EU and those from outside the EU who are liable to provide IMF loans. Countries such as the UK have had to pay both towards the EU stabilisation fund and the IMF loans.

The lessons from the EU (so far) are that far are that such supra-national bodies amplify the general problems of globalism, especially the loss of democratic control, and add the joker of grand follies such as the Euro which have massive effects beyond the supra-national body.

9. Just another outbreak of an old disease

Globalisation should not be seen as a completely new phenomenon, although its modern extent and scale is novel, not least because of the ceaseless march of digital technology and the encouragement, or at least toleration, by Western elites of mass movements of people from the poor to the rich world . From an historical perspective it is simply the latest example of the laissez faire economic ideology capturing elites and becoming the dominant ideology.

Laissez faire economics has its roots in the late 18^th Century when Adam Smith made himself its John the Baptist with his Wealth of Nations (The Invisible Hand playing the role of God’s avatar). In comparison with those who became his disciples in the following century, Smith was responsible and restrained, acknowledging that there were things such as the provision of roads which only the state could undertake and economic areas such as armaments which should as a matter of national prudence be kept in public hands. His followers such as Richard Cobden, John Bright and David Ricardo In the 19^th century knew no such restraint and wanted little if any state interference in the economy at home or abroad.

The consequence was that Britain was tied to the idea of free trade from the 1840s until the First World War intervened in 1914. During that time the rest of the then advanced world practised protectionism while Britain outside of the Empire did not. This resulted in Britain’s dominant economic position in the world in 1850 deteriorating badly by 1914, with the GDP of the USA and Germany then exceeding that of Britain. The years 1840-1914 were a period of great economic instability in Britain with frequent booms and bust, frequent bubbles, bank failures and great damage being done to Britain’s self-sufficiency, most particularly in food. It was also a period when British industry became deficient in many of the new major industries such as chemicals, despite having been leaders in the early days of those industries. This was the outcome of an economy which was allowed to evolve without any state guidance or initiative. Come war in 1914 and Britain found itself dangerously dependent on imports of not only food but other vital materials and products, a dependency made all the more problematic with the development by Germany of efficient submarines to prey upon boats bring the imports to Britain.

Nonetheless, the period 1850-1914 saw a very considerable increase in global transactions and movements of peoples. This was a consequence of the development of the railways , the steamship, the Telegraph and vastly improved roads and the existence of the various European empires (including the Russian) which allowed much free movement of people and goods within the bounds of each empire.

But although this was a form of globalism, its pernicious social and economic effects were greatly ameliorated (at least for the developed world) by the fact that so much of the world was controlled by the European empires. The mass movement of peoples occurred within the colonial possessions not between the colonial possessions and the colonial power’s homeland. Politics was still contained within the nation state. The developed countries, with the exception of Britain, still thought their national advantage was to be gained by protectionist measures. Even Britain did not completely buy into the idea of free trade because legal preference was given to trade within the Empire

A World war and the Great Depression killed off the laissez faire creed as the elite British and British imperial ideology for 50 years. The European Empires were dismembered and the Soviet and Chinese communist blocs created . Protectionism ruled (even the European Economic Community, as the EU was then, did not greatly change the picture because it was small to begin with and the radical measures such as the single market were for the future).

After the second World War it was, for the developed world, an era of great stability. There was no war in Europe worthy of the name, the nearest approaches to it were several uprisings against Communist rule; such serious wars as the West became involved in – most notably Korea and Vietnam – were either wars of choice not necessity or native uprisings at the fag-end of European colonialism like the British fight against communists in Malaya and the French retreat from Indo-China and Algeria.

In this protectionist world the economies of the United States and Europe did not shrink or stagnate. Just as the economies of those which practised protectionism in the nineteenth century grew, so did those of the developed world grow between 1945 and 1980. It is a myth that only laissez faire economic policies produce strong growth. Britain was an exceptionally interesting case because the Attlee government of 1945-51 undertook arguably the most radical programme of nationalisation ever seen outside of the Communist world and British governments of all formal colours followed what were essentially social democratic policies domestically until the election of Thatcher in 1979

Most tellingly, after 1945 there was no general serious economic crisis until the early seventies when two extraordinary events occurred. In 1971 the USA unilaterally collapsed the Bretton Woods system which imposed discipline on the world’s freely exchangeable currencies by pegging the dollar to the gold standard and the other currencies to the dollar at fixed prices. This introduced the destabilising volatility of floating exchange rates into the world’s economic system. In 1973 the oil producers’ cartel OPEC doubled oil prices. But even these considerable shocks did not knock the world economy over ; they merely made it stagger. It took the advent of Thatcher and the American neocons to drive the economies of the developed world into a world of ever increasing make-believe where their politicians kept on saying how things were getting economically better, that countries such as Britain could become post-industrial and live off service industries alone. The insanity of that mentality can be starkly seen now as unemployment has remained stubbornly high in the developed world, something exacerbated by the present depression but not created by it.

10. Unemployment as a barometer of an economic system

Unemployment is arguably the prime barometer of the social utility of an economic system. It was very low in Britain until the early seventies running along at 2-3% (http://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons/lib/research/rp99/rp99-111.pdf). Even at the end of the 1970s its was low compared with what it has been since globalisation took off. In 1979 the Independent Labour Organisation (ILO) count of those seeking work without necessarily being signed on for unemployment pay was 1,528,000 and the figure for those signed on for unemployment pay was 1,064,000. (http://www.york.ac.uk/res/ukhr/ukhr0405/tables&figures/04%20004.pdf)

In Britain in 2011 the official ILO survey figure in August was 2,566,000 (8.1% of all economically active). Those actually signing on for unemployment benefit totalled 1,597,200. (http://www.parliament.uk/topics/Unemployment.htm). However, that is not the true figure because there were 2.58 million people claiming long-term sickness benefit (Incapacity Benefit and its 2008 successor Employment Support allowance) in February 2011. (Perhaps even more staggering there were 5.8 million working age benefit claimants). (http://research.dwp.gov.uk/asd/index.php?page=statistical_summaries).

In 1979 the long-term sick figure stood at 720,000 (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1042141/60-long-term-benefits-claimants-work-admits-minister.html). It stretches credulity beyond breaking point that there are there are some 1.8 million more people of working age who are too ill to work indefinitely in 2011 than 1979. The reality is that much of the 2.58 million will be disguised unemployment.

During the 1980s the Thatcher Governments adopted a policy of moving people off the ever growing unemployment register (those claiming unemployment benefit peaked at over 3 million in 1986) and onto the long-term sick count, where they often remained more or less permanently because much of the unemployment was structural (a consequence of deliberately destroying much of Britain’s extractive and manufacturing industry) and the unemployed simply had no jobs to go to. The policy was carried on by the Tory and Labour Governments which followed Thatcher.

How much of the 2.58 million now on the long-term sick register are really just unemployed? As it is only those of working age (16-65) who are part of the statistics, it is difficult to see why the real figure would not be similar to that of 1979. The population has grown since 1979 by a few million so let us say that 1 million are the genuinely long-term sick. Add the other 1.58 million to the ILO figure for 2011 and the unemployed rises to over 4 million. To that figure can be added those who now stay on at school until they are 18 (in 1979 far fewer did) and the vast increase of university students (from around 13% in 1980 http://www.le.ac.uk/economics/to20/greenaway03.pdf to around 40% in 2011 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1584495/Labour-sticks-to-50-per-cent-university-target.html). It is difficult to give exact figures here but it would probably push the true figure of unemployed in the UK in 2011 up to around the 5 million mark.

As an example of how globalisation brings instability, both economic and social, Britain is probably the prime example among developed nations. All it has brought to Britain is seemingly permanent mass unemployment.

It would be argued by the Thatcherites and their ilk that the high level of employment in the post-war period was due to overmanning, especially in the nationalised industries. That has some truth in it, although the extent of the overmanning is exaggerated by modern neo-liberals. It is also a question of what service is given. Much of the supposed overmanning of the nationalised industries was really a matter of giving a superior service to that which is given by the nationalised industries after they were privatised and manning levels drastically reduced.

But even if it is allowed that there was substantial overmanning in the post-war period that does not necessarily mean it was not of social and economic benefit. What needs to be considered is the overall picture of society where such overmanning exists. It ensures that most people in a society are employed. That creates social stability by giving people a routine in their lives, by ensuring that people are bound into society , by giving them a sense of purpose and most importantly a feeling of security so they can plan for the future, something particularly important when it comes to starting and raising a family.

That was essentially the situation in the period 1945-1979. People felt secure in their jobs, housing was cheap and plentiful, not least because the massive council housing programme of the 1950s and 1960s, the NHS had been created and perhaps most importantly a single adult wage was enough to support a family.

Compare that with what we have today. People in Britain are increasingly insecure. If they have jobs they fear that they will lose them. If they keep their jobs there are pay freezes or wage reductions. The unemployed seek desperately for jobs – any jobs – but find they are competing with dozens or even hundreds of people for unskilled work. It is difficult in 2011 to support a family on a single adult average wage. Housing, both bought and privately rented , has become obscenely expensive – If the average house price in 2011 was the same in real terms as the average house price in 1955 it would be less than £40,000 (http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2010/10/24/the-vicious-poison-in-the-british-economy-is-the-outlandish-cost-of-housing/). It is a recipe for rabid insecurity and the fuel for renewed class hatred and racial and ethnic strife.

The dirtiest secret of all in this matter of overmanning under the social democratic regime of the post-war years or the supposedly more efficient workings of laissez faire since 1980, is that the British government has developed a universal subsidy for employers. It is tax credits which are paid to people in work on low pay (the definition of low pay has been somewhat elastic being up to £60,000 until recently but it is still at £41,000 – http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/taxcredits/start/who-qualifies/what-are-taxcredits.htm#8). Hence, the taxpayer is in effect paying employers to take on labour, rather than, as used to be the case, the taxpayer paying the employee by funding more generously manned nationalised industries than were strictly required.

The true cost of unemployment is rarely calculated. For example, where structural unemployment occurs, as with the coal mining closures in Britain, large numbers of people are lost to work for many years, not infrequently for life. The cost to the taxpayer in maintaining long-term unemployment is immense, as is the psychological cost to the unemployed individuals and their families. Even where those made redundant get new jobs they are rarely as well paid as those which have gone. Often precious skills are lost to the country when an engineering company closes or offshores its production. These factors are rarely if ever built into cost-benefit analysis of the loss of employment. British government contracts are a good example. They are frequently awarded simply on the basis of who offers the lowest price. A recent example of this is the awarding of a multi-billion pound contract to Siemens rather than the British-based Bombardier for trains for the Thames Link. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-derbyshire-14019992). If skilled people cannot find appropriate work in Britain, they go abroad.

There is also a general economic benefit from having people in jobs, drawing regular wages and feeling secure: it helps maintain aggregate demand because people both more confident about spending and , because the money and the spending appetite is spread throughout the population the rate of circulation of money is kept high which stimulates economic activity.

11. Capitalism in a protected domestic economy

If it is not capitalism but free trade and the mass movement of people across national borders which causes instability what is the solution? WE could remove those practices and societies, but then what?

If capitalism was allowed free rein in the domestic economy but free trade and mass immigration were not, would that be the ideal regime? Capitalism in the domestic market would certainly have the capacity for damage if there was no state support for the poor, the sick, the disabled and the old in the form of ensuring that there was sufficient housing, healthcare , educational opportunity, pensions for the old and support in times of unemployment and illness within the reach of the poor.

There are also things which should remain in public hand as a matter of policy either because it would dangerous for them to be in private hands (the armed forces, police, justice) or because they can only operate efficiently as a monopoly (the post office) or are a natural monopoly (roads, railways).

Perhaps most contentiously there is a strong case for nationalising banks, both because of their potential to wreak havoc in an economy and because their nationalisation would return control over the money supply, as far as it can ever be controlled to national governments. Nationalised banks should also make a handsome profit to for the taxpayer because it would next to impossible not to regularly make large profits if they eschewed the reckless practices of the past generation. (There would of course have to be very strong constitutional bars to politicians debauching the currency.)

But even if banks were not nationalised, they would be much easier to control within an economy operating within national borders with national politicians committed to the idea of nations not internationalism. For example, national governments could ban any financial instrument which created confusion between lender and borrower, creditor and debtor. They could cap the amount of sovereign debt held by a bank. They could insist upon minimum deposits and maximum multipliers of wages for mortgages. Restrictions on lending to foreign borrowers could be introduced.

The existing banks are of course operating internationally and it might be thought that all they would have to do is shift their entire operations out of any national territory which tried to control them. There are two good reasons why they would not want to do that. First, banks may be international in their trading, but often they still have much or a majority of their business in a particular country, normally the country of their origin. That would make it difficult to shift their operations because they would have to be willing to kiss goodbye to a large part of their business if the national government of a country where they had much of their business was serious about controlling them. Any national government could simply say, all right you won’t play ball with us, we shall not let you trade in this country.. The second reason is the fact that banks rely on governments underwriting them to a large degree both in terms of guaranteeing deposits and by Central Banks acting as lenders of the last resort. There are not that many countries which can safely offer such guarantees. That would make the threat of leaving somewhat hollow.

Provided that all things are done – welfare, nationalisation, protection, control of the banks – allowing free enterprise to generally organise most things economically within the nation state is the best way of proceeding. If a general protection for strategically important parts of the economy such as farming and energy production are put in place, a judicious use of quotas for a wide range of necessary goods implemented (says, 75% of all necessary goods to be home produced) and mass immigration is outlawed, there is little harm that capitalism (or private enterprise if you prefer) can do .On the credit side of the ledger, there is undoubted great utility in having a self-organising part of the economic system which satisfies human ambition and efficiently delivers goods and services where the ability to pay is either not an issue or the good or service is not a necessity. This would cover the large majority of economic activities, because much of the welfare provision would come in the form of money to the claimant and this would then be spent to purchase food, clothes and so on provided by private enterprise. There is also an argument that it is healthy for a society to have large numbers of people who are capable of taking charge, making their own decisions. One of the problems the countries of the Soviet bloc had after the USSR split and the communism fell was the lack of people who were capable of taking charge, of creating new businesses or even doing jobs which required initiative.

The alternative to capitalism is states running command economies. These do not have a happy record. Much better to allow a properly controlled capitalism to do most of the job of meeting most human needs.

Will the elites of developed world wake up and see that globalism is the problem? Not from choice because they have nailed their colours to the internationalist banner. But fear of what is happening in the world they have created – growing class feeling, racial and ethnic strife and increasing material deprivation and insecurity – may drive them to bite the bullet. Let us hope that happens before it is too late.

The English Landscapes and Identities Project

12-07-2011 09:42 by Lucy Palmer

Hazel Down Lynchets. Credit: Ian R. Cartwright.

“A new five-year project is announced today looking at the history of the English landscape from the middle Bronze Age to the Norman period. The English landscape of fields, trackways and settlements is an ancient one. While much has changed over the 3,500 years since the agricultural landscape was laid out, surprising continuities exist. ‘The English Landscapes and Identities project’ will use a mass of mapped data for the period from the middle Bronze Age to the Domesday Book (AD1086) to explore continuities and changes in the use of the land in different parts of England

“The results will be publicly available on a website to be called ‘A Portal to the Past’, which is being created by the School of Archaeology at the University of Oxford. The project with funding of €2 million from the ERC (European Research Council) will not only map the whole of England, but also allow the research team to collect and analyse huge amounts of digital data – on a scale never attempted before….”

Patriotism is not an optional extra

Robert Henderson

Contents

1. What is patriotism?

2. The roots of patriotism

3. Nations are tribes writ large

4. The importance of a national territory

5. The democratic value of nations

6. What the individual owes to the nation

7. The liberal internationalist

8. How to move from multiculturalism to patriotism

9 No patriotism, no enduring society

1. What is patriotism?

By patriotism I mean the sense of belonging to a people, of owning a land, having a group identity, of feeling at ease with those belonging to the group in a way which meeting those outside the group never engenders, of naturally favouring your people above foreigners, of knowing that the interests of the “tribe” must come before that of any outsider. By this definition patriotism is something which the vast majority of human beings can understand because it is not an ideology but an innate human quality whose origins lie buried deep within the evolution of social animals.

The only people who may genuinely be unable to understand patriotism are the severely mentally retarded or those with a personality disorder such as autism which reduces their ability to understand social contexts. Despite their incessant repudiation of patriotism even latterday liberals understand the pull of patriotic inclinations, although of course they would never recognise the nature of their inclinations. These drive them to live in a manner which is directly at odds with their professed ideology. Look at the life of a white liberal and you will find that they overwhelmingly arrange their lives so that they live in
very white, and in England, very English worlds. They do this in two ways. They either live in an area which is overwhelmingly white – the “rightest of right-on” British folk singers Billy Bragg chooses to live in the “hideously white” and English county of Dorset – or reside in a gentrified white enclave created on the outskirts of an area such as Islington in London which has a significant ethnic content to its population– the Blairs lived there before moving to Downing Street. The latter tactic allows the white liberal to luxuriate in the faux belief that they are “living the diversity dream”, whilst in reality encountering little if any of the “joy of diversity” they are so vocally enthusiastic about. A splendid example of white liberal ghettoization is the drippingly pc TV presenter Adrian Chiles who described in a BBC programme The Colour of Friendship (18 August 2003) how he looked at his wedding photographs which were taken only a few years before and saw to his dismay and astonishment that it was in the words of the one-time BBC director-general Greg Dyke “hideously white”. With a guest list of several hundred he was unable to find a single non-white face staring out at him. The only ethnic minorities he had equal or extended contact with were those he met at work, who were of course middleclass and westernised.

The ease and near universality of understanding of patriotism sets it apart from ideologies such as Marxism and liberal internationalism. The majority of the followers of any ideology with a large number of adherents will have little understanding of it, either because they are intellectually lazy or because they lack the intellectual wherewithal to master the creed. Few Marxists have ever had a grasp of such ideological niceties as the
laws of dialectics and even fewer modern liberal internationalists understand the relationship of laissez faire economic theory to historical economic reality. The tendency for those who ostensibly support an ideology to be ignorant of it beyond the grasping of a few ideas which can be reduced to slogans is greatly inflated where, as has happened with political correctness, it becomes the ideology of the ruling elite. In such circumstances people give lip service to an ideology , even if they neither understand its theoretical basis or even agree with it out of expediency, whether that be driven by fear or ambition.

The majority of believers in any ideology are in the position of the laity in Western Europe before the Reformation when the universal use of the Latin Bible and Latin in church rites meant that the vast majority of the population were left at the mercy of a clerical elite who simply told them what to believe, whether or not it was sanctioned by the Scriptures. Such people will chant the slogans and support the intellectual leadership of their movements not because they understand and are convinced by the ideology, but because they have nailed their emotional colours to a group. Ironically, they are tapping into the same innate traits which create tribes and nations. The problem is they are creating something which is evolutionarily destructive because it drives them to attempt to destroy the natural formation of human groups through bonds of cultural and racial similarity.

Compare the situation of the follower of an ideology with that of those who respond to the all of patriotism as defined above. They cannot be so easily or routinely hoodwinked and manipulated by the few, because almost everyone instinctively understands what it is to be patriotic. It does not need to be explained to them. Whatever the behaviour arising from appeals to patriotism it is not undertaken out of ignorance. Of course, the ways in which people respond to their innate feelings need not be either pretty or moral, for at its extreme appeals to the emotions and thoughts which come with patriotism may lead to attempts at genocide. However, even in such extreme circumstances, the tribe or nation attempting genocide is at least behaving in a way which is congruent with human biology and the survival of the group, although an attempt at conquest or genocide which goes wrong may severely damage or destroy the aggressor.

2. The roots of patriotism

The sense of being separate, of belonging to a discrete group with identifiable characteristics is a necessary part of being human because Man is a social animal. Social animals have two universal features: they form discrete groups and within the group produce hierarchies – although both the group and the hierarchy vary considerably in form and intensity. Human beings are no exception; whether they are hunter-gatherers or people populating a great modern city they all have a need to form groups in which they feel naturally comfortable.

Why do social animals form discrete groups rather than treat all the animals of their species which they encounter as being part of the group? Part of the answer surely lies in competition for territory, food and mates and the limits placed on any species by their environment. For example, it would be impossible for lions to exist in much larger groups than they do because of their heavy food demands. Moreover, once the group size is established it is not possible for a species to suddenly change its size because the behavioural template will have been set to accommodate the size which exists. Man is possibly the exception to this rule, but it could be argued that humans only learned
how to form larger groups very slowly and that where larger groups form today, for example, villagers moving off the land to the cities in developing countries, this is simply the extended consequences of the long, painful steps towards extending the human group size.

Some animals, most notably insects, fish and birds, successfully form very large groups. However, the form of their association or their degree of social integration differs from that of primates (and arguably mammals generally). Social insects rely for their organisation on what are in effect simple automated responses through such triggers as
chemical releases. Fish and birds may form large groups, most probably because it affords them evolutionary goods such as greater protection from predators or easier access to mates, without engaging in much social support for one another beyond being together. Birds may assemble in large groups only when they migrate.

The most highly developed social animals amongst mammals such as primates and wolves do far more than simply congregate. They develop patterns of behaviour which require active and complex cooperation between members of the group. Such behaviour may of itself place limits on the size of a group by the behaviour being dependent upon the mental capacity of the animal. For example, it could be that a pack of wolves can only be the size it is because anything substantially larger would be impossible for the mind of the animal to comprehend or for behaviours which are essentially automatic to operate within.

There is also the question of mating strategies and the raising of offspring. Sexually reproducing social animals have to evolve strategies to maximise reproduction for the individual whilst preventing competition for mates amongst males becoming so intense it threatens the viability of the group. Probably the most common method of achieving this amongst social mammals is to have a dominant male; frequently a sexually mature male who occupies the position of the oriental despot with his harem, for example, the gorilla.
This of itself means that that the group must be clearly defined with males from outside excluded. But even where there is a looser social arrangement which permits different males within the group to not only co-exist but share the females , as is the case with the chimpanzee, there is still a sense of possession amongst the males at least and hence the need for a defined group.When a species has moved to social animal status, behaviours that intensify group behaviour such as the recognition of members of the group by scent will make the exclusion of outsiders ever more rigid. It is also probable that amongst the most advanced social mammals that the individual animals have sufficient mental awareness to become, just as humans do, accustomed to the behaviour of the members of their particular group and that becomes a major part of maintaining the group identity.
Animals generally hate novelty so it would make evolutionary sense for them to prefer those individuals with whom they have grown up to strangers.

Man is the exception to the rule of group size in as much as over the past 10,000 years or so humans have shown themselves capable of creating groups of vast size . This is plausibly attributable to the mental capacity of humans being sufficient to overcome the organisational which thwart the increase in group size of other social mammals. But this ability to increase group size massively has only occurred in recent human existence. Human settlements where people are counted in thousands rather than dozens or hundreds have a history of less than 10,000 years and even today most human beings live in small communities. From paleontological and archaeological evidence, historical accounts of how people lived and the example of tribal peoples living today, we can reasonably deduce that the natural size of human groups living without the ability to generate their own food supply through farming is a few hundred at most. Importantly, although Man can now live in larger communities, he is still in evolutionary terms equipped to live in small groups. This means that the innate tendencies which lead social
animals to set limits to the group are alive and well.

That leaves the formation of hierarchies to be explained. For animals other than Man the answer is I think simple enough, only by forming hierarchies can social groups cohere. Animals vary considerably in their physical and mental qualities. Observe any animal, even the simplest single cell organism, and differences between individuals within the species will become apparent. Some are more vigorous than others, some unusually large, some abnormally small, some more adventurous and so on. Individuals will also vary in physical capacity and behaviour by age and, in sexually reproducing species, sex.

Solitary animals compete for existential goods through direct competition with other members of their species, something they do through methods such as such as scent marking of territorial boundaries and serious fighting . When an animal is social, differences in individual quality and the urge of each individual to survive have to be resolved by something other than the methods used by solitary animals because the animals live in close proximity. Competition for desirable goods still occurs, most notably
competition for food and mates, but normally within behaviours which are not fatal to other members of the group or behaviours which are so disruptive as to threaten the survival of the group. Moreover, the development of such behavioural restraint provides the possibility for behaviours to develop which make the individuals of the group dependent upon one another, for example, the hunting strategies of the wolf which
requires the adult members of the pack to display a very considerable degree of cooperation. The development of such behaviours probably reinforces the tendency
towards hierarchy. The upshot of these various social accommodations is the formation of different social niches into which individuals with different qualities ad histories fit.

Consider what would happen if hierarchies did not exist. There would be constant conflict within the group because no individual would have cause to defer to another except from fear of physical harm. Fear is a blunt and very limited instrument of social control, whether it be of humans or animals. It is a strategy more suited to the solitary animal than the social one. Group behaviour is a compromise between the immediate advantage of the individual and the diffuse advantages derived from group activity. The compromise is given structure by hierarchies, whether that be a fixed biological distinction by sex or caste (for example, social bees) or a transient one due to the age of an animal. Hierarchies are
built on the differences between individuals and the more rigid the hierarchical structure the greater will be the selective pressures to produce individuals in the right proportions to fill the various social niches within the group.

Hierarchies also make sense in terms of the development of social animals. Social animals are descended from asocial animals. The movement from asocial to social animal is presumably akin to the evolutionary process whereby a parasite is converted to a symbiotic partner. It is a process of gradual behavioural accommodation.

Social animals on the bottom rung of the social animal ladder may do little more than associate together at certain times. The next rung up and the animal frequently associates with others of its kind. One more step and the animal forms more or less permanent groupings. And so on until we reach the ultimate social animal, Man.

The gradual evolution of social behaviour of itself points to the need for hierarchy, because at each stage of the evolution the natural overtly selfish behaviour of the original solitary animal has to be modified. That modification will only come through natural selection working on behavioural traits which favour more complete socialisation.

What about human beings? Are they not capable of breaking the biological bounds which capture animals? Does not their immense intelligence and possession of language place them in another category of being? Could Man not simply decide not to behave in a non-hierarchical manner? The fact that human beings have never done so is of itself sufficient evidence for all but the most ideologically committed nurturist to decide that human
beings cannot do it in practice and to conclude that the forming of hierarchies is part of the human template. However, to that fact can be added another, the dominance-submission behaviour which every person witnesses daily not merely in positions of formal dominance and subordination such as the workplace, but in every aspect of social life.

Societies which consist of various human groups that see themselves as separate from each other disrupt the creation of a healthy hierarchy. Instead of there being a single hierarchy within an homogenous group (defining homogenous as a population in a discrete territory which sees itself as a group), there are hierarchies formed within each group and a further overarching hierarchy formed from the various groups themselves
with each group hierarchy competing within the population as a whole.

The nature of the competition between the groups will depend on the relative proportions each forms of a population and the history of each group. The subordinate groups within the society will feel that they are there on sufferance and be suspicious and fearful of the dominant group and constantly worried that any other minority group is outcompeting them. A majority population which has been dominant in all respects within the territory will take some shifting from its position of supremacy, but the influx of substantial numbers of outsiders will nonetheless create insecurity and resentment amongst the dominant population. In such circumstances no individual , whether of the dominant or subordinate group(s), feels entirely secure because there is constant tension between groups. Most importantly for the wellbeing of the society, there is no common bond of trust between people sharing the same territorial house.

3. Nations are tribes writ large

Nations are tribes writ large. They are remarkably durable. Empires invariably fall but a nation is timeless and can be only be utterly destroyed only through an act of genocide. Even the loss of a homeland – the most traumatic loss any nation can sustain – does not destroy a people as the Jews have emphatically shown for nearly two thousand years.

A shared faith or political ideology does not make a nation. Muslims may claim to be one people, but the reality is very different as the continual strife between Muslims bears witness. Not only is there the major division between Shias and Sunnis, Muslim dominated states of the same ostensible branch of Islam are often hostile to each other, while Muslim terrorists/freedom fighters (take your pick) willingly kill fellow Muslims – women and children included – in large numbers.

Similarly, Marxist Leninists in the Soviet Union and Red China may have maintained the fiction to the bitter end of the Soviet Bloc that the international proletariat was as one, but the substantial deviations between their ideologies and the viciously repressive measures they used to deny their own proles contact with outside world (and hence with the rest of
the proletariat) told another tale.

Today, the doctrine of liberal internationalism pretends to a universality of human experience and commonality which is refuted every day by the manifold social, ethnic and racial strife throughout the world. It is an ideology which wishes the world would be as it says rather than asserts that this is the world as it is or would be under given conditions.

Nations are organic growths. They cannot be constructed consciously as the “nation-builders” of the period of European de-colonisation fondly imagined and their liberal internationalist successors today continue to at least pretend to believe. Nations are developed through the sociological process of establishing trust within the group. This only happens when others are recognised as belonging naturally to the group. That does not mean that every member of the nation is seen as equal as an individual, whether for
reasons of personality, ability or social status, but it does mean they are accepted automatically as being part of the nation. An English duke may have little if any social contact with the English working man, but each would instinctively recognise the other as English because despite their social distance they fall within the recognised template of what it is to be English.

Nor is the sense of group solidarity and empathy restricted to nations. As David Hume noted over two centuries ago when he reflected on how we respond to people in different circumstances: “An Englishman [met] in Italy is a friend: A European in China [is a friend] ; and perhaps a man [of any origin] wou’d be belov’d as such, were we to meet him in the moon.” ( A Treatise of Human Nature Book II section 2 (A Treatise of Human
Nature). The same forces which create tribes and nations are at work here as the individual seeks, in the absence of members of his tribe or nation, those who are closest to his tribe or nation.

Just as a nation cannot be consciously created the individual cannot decide in anything other than the legal sense that they are this or that nationality. A man may decide to become a British citizen through an act of will but he cannot decide to be English. That is because being English is the consequence of parentage and upbringing, something over which the child has no control. It is the unconscious imbibing of a culture something
visceral.

Most vitally, to be part of the tribe or nation a person has to be accepted without thinking by other members of the nation as a member of the nation to be of that nation. That is why the claims of English men and women to be Irish, Welsh or Scots are both forlorn and ridiculous. As the English film director Stephen Frears wittily remarked of the very English actor Daniel Day-Lewis “I knew Daniel before he was Irish”.

Like it or not, the upbringing of these wannabe Celts has made them English. Not only do they think like the English, understand English mores without thinking and are armed with a library of English cultural references, they have a personality which falls within the English spectrum. Put them in a room with foreigners or the Celts they wish to be and they will be taken for English. Such people cannot be anything but English, because only by being raised in a society where you are accepted without question as being part of the nation can the person become part of a nation. An Englishman who wishes to claim that he is a Scot cannot realistically do so because he lacks the cultural imprinting of a Scot. It is not something which can be faked.

4. The importance of a national territory

A national territory is essential to the well-being of the nation. The fate of the Jews after they lost theirs is a cautionary tale for anyone who believes otherwise. The ideal is a territory which is controlled entirely by the nation, a population which is overwhelmingly comprised of people who are authentic members of the national “tribe” through their parentage and upbringing. The prime example of such a state is the pre-union England, which was the first true nation state.

The next best choice is for a nation state containing different peoples who each have de facto their own national territory. Britain is a first rate example of such a state, with the four home nations – England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – each having their own territory. Simply having a land in which you form the majority on the ground is a great consolation and benefit . That applies even to a people such as the Kurds whose land is divided between Turkey, Iraq and Iran. Being the dominant population they have both the reassurance of their demographic control of the territory – boots on the ground – and the consoling possibility of converting that demographic dominance into political control in the future.

The Jews are an oddity. Until the modern state of Israel was founded in 1948 they had been without a homeland for nearly two millennia. They neither controlled a territory in their own right nor were the dominant people in a land. Because of that they were able to convert their religion into a cultural suit to be worn by all adherents in a way that Islam and Christianity or any political ideology never could. Denuded of their own land, they could neither be oppressed by an invader nor oppress others by invasion. They could
not exercise state power. All they had left was cultural power, whether that be intellectual or economic. The consequence was that Jewish culture rather than the possession of a homeland became the primary or even sole psychological focus of Jews.

As a consequence of the history and evolution of Jewish society, there been a strain within Jewry since the foundation of a modern state Jewish state was first seriously mooted in the 19^th century that has been hostile to the formation of such a state, because the Jewish culture which they valued was the product of not having a country to call their own and consequently would become tainted if Jews had a homeland, that Jews would become like other peoples.

Although this mentality has a certain intellectual attraction, it condemns Jews to perpetual insecurity. Although Jews have successfully developed a culture built upon the need to accommodate themselves as a minority within majority non-Jewish populations whilst maintaining a strong ethnic identity, the absence of a territory which they control has meant that their history for the past twenty centuries has been an unhappy one, punctuated regularly by abuse from the majority populations with whom they co-existed,
abuse which ranges from everyday discrimination to attempts at genocide. This abuse is the consequence of the disordering of the hierarchy humans need, the consequences being what at bottom is a battle for territory.

5. The democratic value of nations

Politically, nations are immensely valuable because the nation state is the largest political unit which allows any meaningful democratic control. Indeed, it is arguable that representative government at the national level is the only real opportunity for serious democratic control, because representative bodies below the national level are always subject to a national government. Supra-national authority signals the end of democratic control. More of that later.

Only in a country where there is a sense of shared history, culture and communal interest can representative government function, even in principle, as a conduit for the interests of the entire population. In a country which is riven by ethnic and racial difference representative democracy invariably deteriorates into a mass of competing groups all struggling for their own advantage. Policy making and its execution becomes fragmentary and it is impossible to construct a coherent approach to promoting the common good. In a nation state with a large degree of homogeneity the political process is concentrated instead upon policies which affect all, or at least the overwhelming majority, of the people. For example, before post-war mass immigration fractured Britain, the great political questions were ones related to class. Policies were put forward which either were intended to better the situation of the working class or to resist change. Whichever side a person
was on in that debate, they had no illusions that political policy was designed to meet the situation of the British people as a whole. Today political policy in Britain is at best a juggling act between the competing ethnic and racial groups and at worst a deliberately conspiracy amongst the political elite to suppress the interests of the native population to accommodate those of minority groups formed over the past 60 years by incontinent mass immigration.

Once a country’s sovereignty is breached through treaties which commit countries to bow to the will of supra-national bodies , as has happened with the constituent countries of the EU, democratic control withers on the vine because mainstream politicians of all stamps begin to formulate their policies within the context of what the supra-national body allows not in the interests of the country. Eventually, a situation is reached, as has been reached in the case of the EU, where all parties with an opportunity for power sing from the same policy hymn sheet. At that point representative government becomes a shell and democratic control is gone because there is no opportunity to vote for any party which will change matters. That is so because the grip of the existing elite is so tight on all the levers of power, most importantly the mass media, that no new party can even get a serious hearing.

Where the form of government is parliamentary, the difficulty is enhanced by the fact that very large numbers of candidates must stand to both be taken seriously and have any chance of forming a majority. This imposes an immense organisational and economic burden on the new party, not least because the party will lack experienced politicians as candidates and party bureaucrats. Add in things such as first-past-the-post voting in
individual constituencies and the deposit of £500 for each candidate which is at risk of being lost in the vote does not reach 8% of the total, and the British system is just about the best armoured against new parties gaining a foothold in government as any in the world.

Democratic control is vitally important to maintaining the integrity of the nation. There is only one general political question of importance in any society, namely, how far can the masses control the abusive tendencies of the elite? Elites as a class are naturally abusive because it is in the nature of human beings to be selfish and to look for their own advantage and that of those closest to them. That does not mean that no member of an
elite will break ranks and go against their class interest. What it does mean is that an elite as a whole will not change its spots , not least because the sociological shackles are too strong for most of those members of the elite who might be tempted to go against their class interest will be dissuaded from doing so because of the group pressures within the elite, for the elite will develop a “tribal” sense of their own, with those outside the elite seen as a separate social entity.

The less democratic control there is over the elite , the more the elite will engage in behaviours which are detrimental to the coherence of the “tribe” as a whole because the elite will seek their own advantage rather than that of the nation. Before the rise of the nation state, the abuse was generally much in evidence because elites commonly took the form of monarchies and subordinate rulers in the forms of territorially based aristocracies presiding over territories which contained various national/ethnic groups, the members of which were seen as subjects not part of a national whole. The common and deliberate policy of such elites was to “divide and rule”. Territories were also frequently subject to changes of ruler through conquest, a change of royal favour (in the case of subordinate rulers), inheritance or marriage contracts. In such circumstances there was little
opportunity for the masses to exercise any form of control over their rulers because there was no unity of feeling or sense of commonality amongst the peoples they ruled and the sense of “tribe“ was localised. It is noteworthy that arguably the most dramatic popular rising in Europe during the mediaeval period took place in England (the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381), the one large kingdom in Europe at that time with a broadly homogenous population and a territory which enjoyed meaningful central Royal control.

With the creation of the nation state there arose the possibility of democratic control. The creation of a sense of nation within a single territory responsible to a single ruler in itself provides the circumstances whereby dissent can be focused and power and influence removed from the monarch and diffused to an ever larger part of the population. That is
precisely what happened in England , with first the gradual accretion of powers by Parliament , especially over taxation, then with the development of Parliamentary government after 1689 and finally with the extension of the franchise from 1832 onwards. By the beginning of the 20th century a large degree of democratic control had been established because the elite were working within the nation state, were dependent on a mass electorate and were having to produce policies within a national context. That control lasted until the early 1970s when the elite found another way of breaking it by moving politics from the national state to a supra-national power, the EU. Once that
was done, the abusive tendencies of the elite could re-assert themselves, as they have done in spades.

6. What the individual owes to the nation

Membership of a nation places a natural duty on the individual to support the nation. Patriotism should be viewed as a matter of utility, an absolutely necessity for the maintenance and coherence of a society. The idea that a society can survive which is merely a collection of deracinated individuals has no basis in history or observed human behaviour today.

It is a very great privilege to be unambiguously part of a nation, for it is the place where you automatically belong. Just as a family is the place where most people can find automatic support so is the nation. In fact, the nation is even more reliable than a family because no one can remove the nationality which has been imprinted into a person while a family can reject a member. In an advanced country such as Britain membership of the nation state is valuable indeed, for materially at least it is still (just) a fully-fledged
life support system.

That which is valuable needs to be defended, because what is valuable is always envied by others and will be stolen if possible and destroyed if not. The state recognises this by expecting its nationals to fight to protect the national territory against an overt invader. The principle can be extended to other things such as opposing mass immigration (a surreptitious form of conquest) and defending the nation’s vital industries.

Patriotism becomes less intense as the size of the group increases, a fact noted by David Hume: “But when society has become more numerous, and has encrease’d to a tribe or nation, the interest is more remote; nor do men so readily perceive , that order an
confusion follow upon every breach of these rules , as in a more narrow and contracted society.” (Book II section 2 A Treatise of Human Nature). But that does not mean it becomes diluted to the point of having no utility. It simply means that patriotic feelings are not as immediately strong as those which attach to family and friends. Perhaps more exactly, patriotism is not called upon with the same frequency as the emotions which attach to those whom we regard with personal affection. The latter feelings are constantly with us, constantly being called upon. Patriotism on the other hand, is intermittently required to preserve the integrity of the tribe or nation. But it is always there in the
background guiding our behaviour from thinking it natural that immigrants are excluded from our territory to supporting a national sporting team.

Being patriotic by my definition does not mean constantly and stridently asserting a nation’s achievements and superiority to other nations. It simply means looking after
the national interest in the same way that an individual looks to their own interest.

7. The liberal internationalist

Liberal internationalist ideology is diametrically opposed to what Nature has decreed. It states that homo sapiens is a single species whose atoms, the individual human being, are interchangeable. For the liberal internationalist discrimination is the dirtiest of words and a word which he interprets to the point of reductio ad absurdum.

That is the theory. In practice, the liberal internationalist complains of discrimination only when it effects those whom it includes within the protective embrace of political correctness. Those outside that embrace may be abused and vilified. Most perversely this attitude frequently results in members of a majority actively discriminating against their
own people. Nowhere is this behaviour seen more sharply than in the attitude of the British elite towards the English to whom they deny any political voice – a privilege granted to the other parts of the UK – and actively abuse them by representing English national feeling as a dangerous thing.

The liberal left internationalists may have made truly immense efforts to portray nations as outmoded relics at best and barbarous survivals from a less enlightened past at worst, but despite their best (or worst) efforts they have not changed the natural feelings of people because these feelings derive from the general biological imperative common to all
social animals: the need to develop behaviours which enhance the utility of the
group.

But if an elite cannot destroy the naturally patriotic feelings the people they rule, they can severely taint and shackle them by suppressing their public expression through the use of the criminal law, for example, laws against the incitement to racial hatred which are interpreted as applying to any dissent from the politically correct position on race and immigration and civil law penalties such as extortionate payments for unfair dismissal
through racial discrimination which, curiously, only ever seem to apply to members of ethnic minorities. To this they add the ruthless enforcement of their liberal-left ideology throughout politics, public service, academia, the schools, major private corporations and the mainstream media.

So successful have liberals in Britain been in their censorship and propaganda that rarely
does any native dissent about immigration and its consequences enter the public realm, while it is now impossible for anyone to occupy a senior position in any public organisation or private organisation with a quasi-public quality, for examples, charities
and large companies, without religiously observing the elite ideology which has solidified into what is now called political correctness. The consequence is that people have developed the mentality common in totalitarian regimes that certain feelings, however natural, are somehow now out of bounds and dangerous and consequently should be the subject of self-censorship. People still have the feelings but they are withdrawn from public conversation and increasing from private discourse.

It is important to understand that even the most vociferous liberal does not believe in his or her heart of hearts that humanity is a single indivisible entity whose atoms (the individual) are in practice interchangeable. They wish it was so but know it is not so. However, the ideologically committed continue to live in hope that minds and behaviours can be changed by what they are wont to call “education”, for which read indoctrination. The rest go along with the idea because it has been built into the structure of the elite and the doubters prize ambition and their membership of the elite above honesty.

It is of course impossible to consciously force someone to be patriotic, but there is no need to because the natural instinct of human beings is to be patriotic. All that needs to be done is to remove the constraints placed on national expression by the liberal internationalists and these natural instincts will re-assert themselves . That can be done by the political elite changing their tune towards a defence of the nation and the nation state. Let the political rhetoric alter and the public mood will swing towards the patriotic. The underlying strength of patriotism can be seen in the case of England. Despite being denied any national political voice and incontinently abused by the British elite, whenever a national sporting team representing England takes the field the support is immense. Come the football World Cup and vast numbers of the flag of St George appear on everything from flagpoles to cars. Let England win the Rugby World Cup or cricket’s Ashes and great crowds fill the streets of London as they teams go on a celebratory parade. Whenever an England side plays abroad they are joined by astonishing numbers of English men and women.

8. How to move from multiculturalism to patriotism

All treaties which restrict the power of a government to act in the national context must be thrown away. In the case of Britain that means leaving the EU and repudiating treaties such as the UN Convention on Refugees and the European Convention on Human Rights.

The institutionalisation of political correctness within public service must be destroyed, both by dismissing all those employed explicitly to enforce such views (who are de facto political commissars) and by repealing all laws which both provide powers for officials and those which restrict free expression. I say political correctness in its entirety because the various strands of political correctness support each other, most notably in the general attack on “discrimination”. Leave anything of the “discrimination” culture intact and it will be used to bring in multiculturalism by the back door. It would also require many of the de facto political commissars to be left in office.

Public office, both that held by politicians and officials, should be restricted to those with four grandparents and two parents as nationals born and bred. This should be done to prevent any lack of focus because of the danger of divided national loyalties.

Mass immigration must be ended. Immigrants in a country illegally should be removed in short order where that can be done. Where possible, those legally in a country who cannot or will not assimilate fully, should be re-settled in their countries of their national origin or the national origin of their ancestors or in other countries where they will be in the racial/ethnic majority. Those who are in a country legally but who do not have essential scarce skills which cannot be supplied by the native population, should be sent back to their countries of origin – there would be few from countries who could not be returned because they would be definitely identifiable as coming from a country and few countries will refuse to receive one of their nationals even if they do not have a passport.

A written constitution is a must because otherwise any change to remedy matters will be vulnerable to easy reversal. Such a reversal could be thwarted, as far as these things can ever be thwarted, by placing a bar on what a government may do. That should include prohibitions on the signing of treaties which restrict national sovereignty and mass immigration, provisions for the protection of strategic industries and the restriction of
public office to born and bred nationals and a clear statement that the nation state exists to privilege its members over those of foreigners. Most importantly, there should be an absolute right to free expression for that is the greatest dissolver of elite abuse and general chicanery. Milton understood this perfectly: ‘

And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose upon the earth, so truth be in the field [and] we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her
and falsehood grapple; who ever knew truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter…’ [Milton – Areogapitica].

9. No patriotism, no enduring society

The value of patriotism is its ability to produce social coherence and an enduring and discrete population . Without patriotism a country becomes no more than a geographical expression and is ready prey for colonisation by overt conquest through force or covert conquest through mass immigration.

Liberal internationalists have ends which are directly in conflict with patriotism. They seek the destruction of nation states and the subordination of nations to a world order ommanding a single human society . A particularly crass example comes from the TV
broadcaster I mentioned earlier, Adrian Chiles:

“I want all the species to marry each other so that in 300 years’ time we are all the same colour.

“White people can’t talk about whiteness without sounding racist. I would love my daughter to marry an Asian or black man. “http://icbirmingham.icnetwork.co.uk/0100news/0100localnews/content_objectid=13305960_method=full_siteid=50002_headline=-Asian-for-Aide-s-girl-name_page.html#story_continue

The ends of liberal internationalism are predicated on the demonstrably false premise that diverse populations will live not merely as peacefully and productively as homogeneous ones , but produce stronger and, by implication, more enduring societies . The internationalists have no rational grounds for believing this , for the whole experience of human history and the world as it is today is that diversity of race and ethnicity in the same territory equates to violence and social incoherence. There is literally no example of a diverse society which has not suffered serious ethnic strife, whether that be outright racial war or chronic social disruption such as riots and the production of ethnic ghettos which become de facto no go areas.

Ironically, the invariable consequence of mixed populations is not as liberals would like to believe, a diminishing of aggressive national/tribal sentiment but an inflation of it. A people secure in its own territory does not need to engage in constant national expression because nothing threatens it: a people in a mixed society must constantly do so because
all the ethnic/racial groups are necessarily in conflict because of the need for each to compete for power and resources for their own group.

Because Man is differentiated profoundly by culture, the widely accepted definition of a species – a population of freely interbreeding organisms sharing a common gene pool – is unsatisfactory. Clearly Man is more than an animal responding to simple biological triggers. When behavioural differences are perceived as belonging to a particular group by that group as differentiating members of the group from other humans they perform the same role as organic differences for they divide Man into cultural species. That is how homo sapiens should be viewed, as an amalgam of species and subspecies who require their own territories to maximise peace . In addition such societal differentiation probably drives the evolution of Man . A good example of the latter would be 18^th century England and the Industrial Revolution. Would that revolution have occurred if England had not been a very homogeneous society which suffered very little immigration from the 14^th century onwards? Probably not, because large-scale immigration or conquest by a foreign power would have radically changed the nature of England.

The Liberal internationalists’ belief that human beings are interchangeable social atoms who may live as readily in one society as another is a recipe for national suicide. Patriotism is not an optional extra.

The Spring Edition of the Quarterly Review is out

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Quarterly Review Vol 5 . No 1 . Spring 2011

Editorial Derek Turner Click here

Who owns the food chain? Julian Rose Click here

Lukács and Gramsci – curiously conservative radicals Geoffrey Partington

The promised planet

Frank Ellis on Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? by Eric Kaufmann

Libya: a war of the womb Ilana Mercer

The disuniting States of America

Mark G. Brennan on Age of Fracture by Daniel Rodgers

Home schooling – an idea whose time has come? S. Jay Porter

The West in history

Michael H. Hart on Why the West Rules – For Now by Ian Morris

Jerusalem – the heavenly and profane city

Peter Stark on Jerusalem – The Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore’s

Revolution, freeze-framed

Leslie Jones on Photography and Memory in Mexico: Icons of Revolution

by Andrea Noble

Replay: Ordet Luise Hemmer Pihl

Replay: The Man Who Knew Too Much Johanna Rhiannon Johnson

Second Reading: Hakluyt’s Voyages Derek Turner

Uncollected Folk Roy Kerridge on playing the blues

Taki Taki on men (and women)

Eggs Catharine Savage Brosman (poem)

On the terrace Niels Hav (poem)

The English in North America – Locating the Hidden Diaspora

http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/browse/ne/uninews/searchenglish

Locating the Hidden Diaspora

In search of the English

Historians at Northumbria University are embarking on a groundbreaking project to explore why “Englishness” has been overlooked in America, while other ethnic groups are celebrated and well-known.

Englishness as an ethnicity is now being rediscovered and defined in opposition to other competing groups

The team, led by Professor Don MacRaild, Dr Tanja Bueltmann and Dr David Gleeson, argue that the existence of English cultural communities in North America has been largely ignored by traditional historians who see the English as assimilating into Anglo-American culture without any need to overtly express a separate English ethnicity.

Their initial research has found that from the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century, North American towns and cities boasted organisations such as the Sons of St George, where traditional English food and folk culture were maintained. The evidence suggests that the English were distinctly aware of being an ethnic group within the emerging settlements at the time, exhibiting and maintaining their ethnicity in similar ways to the Irish, Scottish and German colonists. Yet this does not appear to be recognised in history.

The three-year project entitled ‘Locating the Hidden Diaspora: The English in North America in Transatlantic Perspective, 1760-1950’, has received £286,000 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). It aims to take a fresh look at English ethnicity using thousands of untapped sources, including manuscripts and newspaper articles from this period. The team believes that their research will have wider reaching implications in shedding light on current debates in UK identity politics and Englishness.

Professor MacRaild said: “It struck us as highly surprising that, though the English in North America formed an array of ethnic clubs and societies, such as the St George’s Society, no one has shown much interest in these associations, their activities and English cultural legacies.

“The English were one of the largest European groups of immigrants in the US yet, while they settled alongside the other migrants who powerfully exerted ethnic awareness, the English are not ascribed the attributes of ethnicity associated with other immigrants.

“The Irish, Scots, Germans, and many other European ethnic groups have been subjected to dozens if not hundreds of studies, but not so the English. The standard historian’s answer has been that the English assimilated more easily to Anglo-American culture so removing the need for ethnic expression. However, far from being an invisible group within a world of noticeably ethnicised European immigrants, the English consciously ethnicised themselves in an active way. ”

Evident expressions of Englishness are found in English immigrants to America celebrating St George’s Day, toasting Queen Victoria, marking Shakespeare’s birthday, and Morris dancing. Benevolence was also of great importance, with many English associations being involved in providing charity – from meal tickets to ‘Christmas cheer’ – towards English immigrants experiencing hardships.

The team believe that Englishness has been overlooked by historians because, as the founding colonists, the English were the benchmark against which all other ethnic groups measured themselves.

Ironically, England’s relatively recent decline in global influence and the cultural changes produced by mass immigration and regional devolution has sparked increasing attempts to rediscover and define Englishness – seen in calls to celebrate St George’s Day as a national holiday and the rise in the English Defence League (EDL).

“At present,” Professor MacRaild argues, “Englishness in England is bedevilled with fears about right-wing extremists, football hooligans, and the uses and abuses of the now prevalent St George’s flag. We hope a project which will demonstrate the vibrancy of Englishness beyond England’s shores will contribute to debates about how Englishness fits into today’s multi-ethnic and increasingly federal political culture.”

Dr Tanja Bueltmann, an expert in the history of ethnic associations in the Scottish and English diasporas, added: “The growing movement for an independent Scotland has raised the issue of “Britishness” and “Englishness” in the wider society and influenced national debate about identity.

“Englishness as an ethnicity is now being rediscovered as a result of a crisis of confidence, partly influenced by the increasing fluidity of national borders and migration. Englishness is again being defined in opposition to other competing groups.”

Dr David Gleeson, historian of nineteenth-century America, said: “The project also has implications for the other side of the Atlantic. Recognising the English as a distinct diaspora gives us a clearer picture of the development of an American identity in that it complicates the idea of a coherent ‘Anglo’ cultural mainstream and indicates the fluid and adaptable nature of what it meant and means to be an American or Canadian.”

The research project will produce books, articles, an exhibition, and a series of public lectures to expatriate community groups throughout North America. The team will also work with local folk groups, including the Hexham Morris Men, and Folkworks at the Sage, Gateshead, to disseminate their findings to the wider public. International partners also working on the project are based in Guelph and Kansas Universities and from the College of Charleston.

Dr Gleeson added: “Perhaps English-Americans and Canadians will make a ‘Homecoming’, similar to the one organised by the Scottish government in 2009 for those of Scottish background, to re-establish connections with the land of their ancestors.”

Date posted: May 24, 2011

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Locating the Hidden Diaspora

The English in North America in Transatlantic Perspective, 1760-1950

Starting in 2011, the project will be funded by the AHRC for three years (Standard Route Research Grant).

Project Context

Emigration from the British Isles became one of Europe’s most significant population movements after 1600. Yet compared to what has been written about the migration of Scots and Irish, relatively little energy has been expended on the numerically more significant English flows. In fact, the Scottish and Irish Diasporas in North America, together with those of the German, Italian, Jewish and Black Diasporas, are well known and studied, but there is virtual silence on the English. Why, then, is there no English Diaspora? Why has little been said about the English other than to map their main emigration flows? Did the English simply disappear into the host population? Or were they so fundamental, and foundational, to the Anglo-phone, Protestant cultures of the evolving British World that they could not be distinguished in the way Catholic Irish or continental Europeans were? Given the recent vogue for these other diasporas, our project seeks to uncover the hidden English Diaspora in North America.

Aims & Objectives

The project’s overall objective is to offer a knowledge-shaping new reading of English ethnicity abroad, particularly in North America, by exploding enduring historical mythologies about the absence of a strong ethnic identity among emigre English between the 17th and 20th centuries. Some of the key issues of concern are:

English ethnic associationism: examining aspects of English clubs, societies and sociability around the Diaspora.

English folk traditions in the Diaspora: locating the popular culture of celebrating particular forms of Englishness.
English sporting traditions: examining the export around the world of sports from cricket, rugby and association football to Cumberland wrestling.
English literary and dramatic cultures: exploring the cultural transfer of key literary figures around the Diaspora.

Project Team

The English Diaspora team is led by Prof Don MacRaild, Dr Tanja Bueltmann and Dr David Gleeson. Researchers associated with the project are Dr James McConnel (History), as well as Dr Monika Smialkowska(English), Visiting Fellow Dr Mike Sutton and Dr Dean Allen (Stellenbosch). Dr Joe Hardwick from History also works on related themes.

You can contact us using our project email address: az.englishdiaspora@northumbria.ac.uk

Where are the English-Americans?

There are Irish-Americans, Scots-Americans, Scotch-Irish-Americans, Welsh-Americans, Polish-Americans, German-Americans , Italian-Americans, Korean-Americans, Mexican Americans, Cuban Americans, Colombian Americans, Dominican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Spanish Americans, and Salvadoran Americans, Chinese-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Iranian-Americans, and a host of other hyphenated citizens in the USA. Sometimes the hyphenation is based not on nationality but religion, for example, Muslim-American or Jewish-American. Sometimes it is based on race as in African-American or Asian-American.

There is one seemingly glaring omission from the catalogue of the culturally undecided: English-Americans. I say seemingly because there is a most obvious explanation for their absence: England was the cultural founder of the USA. Englishness is the default culture of the USA. Consequently, when the English have emigrated to the USA over the centuries they have not come to a land they felt was wholly alien or with a sense of victimhood or paranoia about their new home.

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. At the time of the first US census English descended settlers formed, according to the historical section of the American Bureau of Census, sixty per cent of the white population (http://tinyurl.com/67faop70 )and the majority of the rest of the white population was from the non-English parts of Britain ( In 1790 the population of the USA was 3,929,214 of which 3,172,006 were white and 757,208 black. http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0056/tab01.pdf).
It is possible that English ancestry was downplayed in the 1790 census and for much of the 19^th century because of the anti-British feeling caused by the American Revolution and various disputes afterwards such as the war of 1812. If so, the under recording of English ancestry would be amplified as the population expanded as time went on as the descendants of those wrongly classified continued the incorrect classification. However, whichever figures are taken one thing is certain, by 1790 the template for American society was cut and most importantly English was the dominant language, a fact which alone shows who were the dominant group for no minority could force a language on a majority.

In the House of Commons on 22 March 1775 Edmund Burke made a plea for understanding of the American colonists’ demands which was firmly based on their Englishness:

“…the people of the colonies are descendants of Englishmen…. They are therefore not only devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English ideas and on English principles. The people are Protestants… a persuasion not only favourable to liberty, but built upon it…. My hold of the colonies is in the close affection which grows from common names, from kindred blood, from similar privileges, and equal protection. These are ties which, though light as air, are as strong as links of iron. Let the colonies always keep the idea of their civil rights associated with your government,—they will cling and grapple to you, and no force under heaven will be of power to tear them from their allegiance. But let it be once
understood that your government may be one thing and their privileges another, that these two things may exist without any mutual relation,—the cement is gone, the cohesion is loosened, and everything hastens to decay and dissolution. As long as you have the wisdom to keep the sovereign authority of this country as the sanctuary of liberty, the sacred temple consecrated to our common faith, wherever the chosen race and sons of England worship freedom, they will turn their faces towards you. The more they multiply, the more friends you will have; the more ardently they love liberty, the more perfect
will be their obedience. Slavery they can have anywhere. It is a weed that grows in every soil. They may have it from Spain, they may have it from Prussia. But, until you become lost to all feeling of your true interest and your natural dignity, freedom they can have from none but you…”(http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15198/15198-h/15198-h.htm#CONCILIATION_WITH_THE_COLONIES).

The colonists for their part more often than not themselves as English. Even the rebels placed their rebellion on the ground that they were defending true English liberty, a liberty that had been usurped by the king. The Declaration of independence is a catalogue of breaches of what the colonists considered were their rights as Englishmen. (http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/american-declaration-of-independence/)

The early English predominance may not seem important at first glance because of the heavy 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 because the numbers of non-Anglo Saxons coming into America were always very small compared with the existing population of the USA. 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.

A distinction needs to be made between settlers and immigrants. Those colonising a land do not come with the intent to assimilate into an existing culture but to transplant their own ways onto fresh territory. The Greeks in the ancient world are a prime historical example.

The English who came to America in the 17^th century were intent on creating a world in their own cultural image, albeit with certain variations most notably different religious regimes. This they did in ways which remain to this day.

When immigrants enter a country their descendants will generally in time adopt at least some of the social and cultural colouring of the native population. Where there is no barrier such as racial difference or membership of an ethnic group with a very strong sense of identity such as the Jews, assimilation will often be complete within a generation or two. Even in a situation of deliberate conquest, the invader if fewer in number than the conquered – as is normally the case – will become integrated through intermarriage
and the general pressure of the culture of the majority population working through the generations. The demographic working out of the Norman Conquest over several centuries as the French invaders became English is a good example.

In the creation of a society, the further the distance from the founding culture the greater the need to maintain a sense of separateness. It is interesting that other missing hyphenated Americans are Canadian-American, Australian-American and New Zealand-American. That is plausibly because they are coming from societies which derive ultimately from England and which were founded by predominantely English settlers. That does raise the question of why the non-English Britons who went to the USA have self-consciously maintained their hyphenated status, most notably the Scots and the Irish. The answer most probably lies in the fact that they felt themselves to be peoples who were subject to England. In short, they were people who bore a grudge against England. It is worth adding that Americans who call themselves Scots-American or Irish-American today are indistinguishable from American-Americans in everything except for a sentimental attachment to their Celtic ancestry and a residual polishing of an historical victimhood.

The demographic significance of the English in the USA remains to this day. It is true that the percentage of those formally identifying themselves as of English origin has diminished. The 1980 US Census showed 26.34% of the US population (49, 598,035) claiming English ancestry (http://www.census.gov/population/censusdata/pc80-s1-10/tab02.pdf). There is no up to date census information, but the US Census Office’s 2008 American Community Survey shows only 9% of respondents claiming English ancestry, although that still makes them the third most numerous national group after the Germans and the Irish (http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/ADPTable?_bm=y&-qr_name=ACS_2008_1YR_G00_DP2&-geo_id=01000US&-ds_name=ACS_2008_1YR_G00_&-_lang=en&-redoLog=false&-format=).

This strong diminution in 28 years makes no sense if it is taken as a literal reduction. Common sense says that millions of English descended people have not suddenly vanished from the USA. Nor, in view of their early predominance and continuing substantial emigration of the English to the USA after independence, does it make any sense for there to be more Americans with Irish or German ancestry than English ancestry.

The explanation for the fall is plausibly threefold: as the founding culture of the USA those with English simply think of themselves as Americans; as the oldest group in the USA, English ancestry on average is probably far more distant than other ethnic groups and lastly many of those with English ancestry will have mixed that ancestry with other groups especially more recent arrivals and will have claimed that allegiance instead of English. There is also the temptation in an age of group politics for people to claim an ancestry which they feel will be most advantageous to them. As the English in the USA do not make a song and dance about being English, other groups which do are likely to attract
those with a divided ancestry. The prime example of this is the way American presidents claim Irish ancestry no matter how tenuous whilst often ignoring much more substantial English ancestry. (http://presidentsparents.com/ancestry.html). There is also the general pressure of political correctness which casts WASPs (into which category English-Americans would generally fall) as an abusive and dislikeable elite ethnicity. That may
add to a general propensity to not identify as English.

A strong pointer to the continuing English connection with the USA are surnames. In 2000 the US Census Office released statistics showing that of the top ten most frequently occurring surnames in the USA, eight were of English/British origin. http://www.census.gov/genealogy/www/data/2000surnames/index.html

Because of her origins and history Englishness is spread throughout US society. 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 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. 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 USA-born white Americans whatever their regional origin. Americans often affect not to understand English accents other than received pronunciation, 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.

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 which is still remarkably and recognisably English. English-American would be a tautology.

The importance of the continuing influence of the English for the USA can be seen by imagining what the situation would be were no unhyphenated Americans, if there was no group within the population which was devoid of a sense of victimhood, of being ill-at-ease with the society in which its members were born and raised. All that would be left would
be a society in which every racial or ethnic group competed,. There would be no stability or sense of social cohesion. At worst, it could be a recipe for incessant civil war. The English descended and English assimilated part of the population which sees itself as simply American provides the ballast which holds US society upright.

Ire in Babylon

UK Cinema Release Date: Friday 20th May 2011

Official Site: www.fireinbabylon.com

Written and Directed by: Stevan Riley

Starring: Viv Richards, Gordon Greenidge, Michael Holding, Ian Botham, Jeffery Dujon, Colin Croft

Genre: Documentary

Runtime: 1 hour 27 minutes (approx.)

Between 1980 and 1995 the West Indies cricket team never lost a series, a most remarkable thing. They did this through discovering a discipline they had never consistently shown before and the development of a bowling attack consisting of three or four genuinely fast bowlers, a fast bowling lineage which began in the mid 1970s with Holding, Roberts and Daniel and ended in the mid 1990s with Walsh, Ambrose and Bishop. Their dominance was aided by the failure of umpires to implement the cricket law banning persistent short-pitched bowling – arguably because of a fear of being called
racist – but in truth they were formidable even without bowling four or five short-pitched balls an over. The runs scored against the West Indies in their period of dominance were almost certainly the hardest earned in the history of Test cricket (the first Test was played in 1877).

Those with no knowledge of cricket will have read that paragraph and said, no, not interested. Let them bear with me for a moment. It is a film about a sporting side but it is far more than that. Primarily it is a masterclass in black victimhood and insecurities in which cricket takes a distant second place. That explains why the film has been greeted with such rapture by British film critics who are signed up to the “ol’ whitey bad, black good “ liberal agenda (for a wide range of quotes see http://www.fireinbabylon.com/press.html).
The Daily Telegraph’s review is typical: “Director Stevan Riley’s joyous and uplifting film is a celebration of a sporting triumph and all its implications for black politics and culture.” (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmreviews/8524438/Fire-in-Babylon-review.html)

The director Stevan Riley made no bones about the purpose of the film: “a story of freedom, independence and black pride through bat and ball”. (http://www.channel4.com/news/fire-in-babylon-what-lessons-for-west-indies-cricket-now). The result is a film which is an unrestrained act of pro-black propaganda, with whites and England painted as the colonial oppressors and the Asian populations of the West Indies relegated to the role of non-persons. Within this context, the West Indies team of the late 1970s to the mid 1990s is portrayed as a vehicle for the political consciousness of the newly independent West Indian countries; a means by which the black West Indian population (but not the white or Asian West Indians) could assert themselves and show themselves to be able to compete with and dominate their old colonial masters.

Those not familiar with cricket in general or West Indies cricket in particular will require some background. The West Indies is not a nation state. Rather it is a collection of British ex-colonies in the Caribbean (Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados being the main islands) plus one on the South American continent (Guyana). Cricket is the only thing which brings them formally together.

The history of West Indies cricket is a mirror of the racial and ethnic tensions in the
ex-colonies. The team until the 1970s was a mix of whites, blacks and Asians (mainly those who had ancestors who came from the Sub-continent). Until 1960 the West Indies cricket team (known as the Windies) was always captained by a white man, apart from the odd match where injury or other absence of resulted in no suitable white player being available.

Throughout the period of white captains there was a growing restlessness amongst black West Indians for a black captain. After the appointment of the first black man , Frank
Worrell, to the (regular) captaincy in 1960, the participation of white and Asian players steadily diminished – in the case of whites it might be truer to say effectively ended. Geoffrey Greenidge was the last white player to represent the West Indies (in 1972) before Brendon Nash appeared in 2008 (and he was a white Australian who qualified for the West Indies through his mother), while no Asians were chosen between Larry Gomes’ final appearance in 1986 and Shivnarine Chanderpaul’s debut in 1994. This left a side entirely composed of black West Indians. In the late 1980s the
Windies Captain Viv Richards proudly described his side as “a team of Africans”.

There is no mention in the film of this exclusion of whites and Asians from the Windies side during their period of dominance, nor Viv Richard’s celebration of the fact that he was leading an all black side. This is scarcely surprising because those interviewed in the film are all black and the interviewer did not ask awkward questions.   Famous white cricketers and commentators such as Geoff Boycott , Ian Botham and Jeff Thompson who had
played against the Windies during their period of dominance   were interviewed by the director, but strangely not a single interview of a white man conducted for the film appeared in the film. Tellingly, white faces were almost absent from the film except for the action shots. Ditto Asians.   Instead the film was packed with interviews with
West Indian cricketers and commentators who had either played in or seen the Windies at their height , and film or commentary of black West Indian   celebrities uch as Bob Marley, Bunny Wailer, Lord Short Shirt, Burning Spear (no, I am not making the names up) and Gregory Isaacs who happily mixed with players such as Viv Richards.

A deep-rooted black paranoia shows itself in the interpretation as patronising of white attitudes and responses which are at worst neutral and at best complimentary. The
description “Calypso cricket” by whites is interpreted as meaning that West Indian sides play in an attractive but brittle and unthinking way. In reality it was simply a bit of lazy labelling by journalists and broadcasters without any intent to patronise or insult.

Australians turning out in great numbers to applaud the West Indies touring party as they toured the streets of Melbourne at the end of the 1960/61 series against Australia was dismissed as Australians being happy to applaud losers (they lost the series 2-1).
In fact, they were being applauded because the series was (1) thoroughly exciting with the first tied Test in history and (2) Test cricket was going through a period when it was feared that slow, defensive play was killing the public’s appetitive for the game and the series was seen as a renaissance of attractive cricket.

The only instance in the film of a white man suggesting that the Windies were chokers was made by the England captain in the 1976 series between the Windies and England. This was the South African Tony Greig (playing for England after qualifying residentially) predicting before the series that the Windies “would grovel”. Had he made the comment about Australia or an Australian made it about England it would have just been treated for what it was, a bit of “pre-fight” banter. In the film it is treated with an immense earnestness as if it was the deadliest of insults.

This outrage is very odd because the central thesis of the film is that until the late 1970s the Windies were a team which often contained great individuals, but hich was all too prone to not playing as a team, whether that be because of racial strife (especially under white captains) , the difficulties of bring people together from different countries in a representative team or the lingering effects of colonialism which led to an unconscious lack of belief in themselves. (The alleged weaknesses were supposedly only cured after Clive Lloyd became captain and eventually moulded the Windies into a relentless machine for winning. )

This story is some way adrift from reality. It is untrue that the Windies were a consistently brittle side before Clive Lloyd became captain. They always had great players and in the space of four years in the 1960s they won two series in England and beat the Australians in the West Indies. By 1965 they had good claims to be the strongest side in the world. That they declined towards the end of the 1960s and early 1970s was simply the natural consequence of a great side growing old and losing important players. In short, it was simply what any top cricketing Test side experiences, peaks and troughs of performance.

One of the most intriguing passages is the series between Australia and the Windies in 1975/76 when the Australian fast bowlers Lillie and Thompson physically knocked the Windies about so badly that the series was lost 6-1. That was time when the Windies captain Clive Lloyd decided on playing a three or four man fast bowling attack. In fact, what appears to have been the real turning point was the rebel Packer matches of a
few years later. Kerry Packer was an Australian media mogul who signed up (to
the horror of the national cricket boards who banned the players from playing
Test cricket) many of the best cricketers in the world, including most of the Australian and West Indies players.

The Packer series began badly for the Windies who folded weakly in an early match. According to the film, Packer came into Windies dressing room and gave them a tongue-lashing along the lines of improve or you will be on a plane home. Packer also arranged for then to use a physiotherapist and fitness trainer by the name of Denis Waite because he was doubtful about their fitness. (http://www.catholicnews-tt.net/joomla/index.php?view=article&catid=49:sports&id=174:sports010209&option=com_content&Itemid=82). Waite, a white Australian, got them fit and psychologically prepared. By the end of Packer’s rebel games (they lasted two years) the Windies had started to win relentlessly. It could be argued that the Windies built their later success on a platform constructed by two white men, Packer and Waite.

The other great hand-up from ol’ whitey was the decision of the English cricket authorities in 1969 to relax the qualification rules for county cricket, the English domestic first class teams. This meant that foreign players, including most of the major West Indian cricketers of the period 1970-1995, were able to play regular professional cricket in England. This both gave the Windies players a regular source of income from cricket (something which had never been readily available before) and a great deal of experience both of playing and English conditions and culture.

After 1995 the great days were over, although they were still competing for another five years or so as the great old players held the team together. After 2000, the Windies team declined rapidly until it became a pathetic shadow of what it had been only a few years before. Why did this happen? Perhaps it was this:

“The things that had driven us in the past were no longer important to the newer generation. Black pride and its militancy, the shrugging off of our colonial legacy, Frank Worrell completing the West Indian version of the Jackie Robinson journey, these things have been historically severed” Calypsonian David Rudder on the difference between the 80s and today (http://www.espncricinfo.com/magazine/content/story/483624.html)

If Rudder is correct, that paints a bleak picture of the future of the West Indies not only as cricketers but generally. What he is saying is that only the mixture of anger and fear left by colonialism is sufficient to energise West Indians.

From a purely cricketing point of view the film offers many examples of great fast bowlers in action. Those too young to have watched cricket in the 1970s and 1980s should watch the film and see the difference between genuine fast bowling and what passes for it now. In particularly I was reminded of what a nightmare Jeff Thompson was at his best , not merely one of the fastest of bowlers, but one with an uncanny knack of getting a ball to rear into a batsman’s face from barely short of a length. Most of the action shots are of batsmen being hit or nearly hit, which is a little unedifying, but they do give a
graphic idea of exactly how much courage and skill is required to face great fast bowling. The most poignant shots are those of a 45-year-old Brian Close batting against Holding and Roberts in 1976 before the era of helmets and being repeatedly hit on the body, an assault he met with a remarkable stoicism.

Those wanting a flavour of the film can click on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n57LPYiragE

How English football became foreign football played in England

Robert Henderson

English football has “enjoyed” the benefits of more or less unrestricted market forces
and the globalist ideology for twenty years. The result is instructive: a combination
of huge amounts of new money (primarily from television, sponsorship, inflated ticket
prices, the cynical merchandising of club strips and money introduced by immensely rich foreign owners) and greatly increased freedom of movement for footballers has gone a long way to destroying the character of English professional football and the nature of its support.

Before all this happened English league football had existed very successfully for more than a hundred years – the Football League was formed in 1888, the first in the world. With 92 clubs, England has supported (and still supports) the largest full-time professional football league in the world (since 1992 the Football League has been divided into the Premier League – the old First Division – and the Football League which contains the other three divisions. As there is relegation and promotion between the Premier league and the rump of the Football League, the position structurally is essentially the same as the old 4 division Football League).

Despite many alarms about clubs going bust, very few went out of business in those one
hundred odd years. Their teams were overwhelmingly staffed by Englishmen and the minority who were not English were almost always drawn from the rest of the British Isles. Players frequently stayed with one club for much of their career and many came up through the youth and reserve teams of the clubs for which they played. Frequently the players were also supporters from childhood of their clubs. Ticket prices were cheap and even the poor could regularly watch their teams. It was truly a game for all.

The poorer clubs made ends meet by selling players to the richer clubs. Even if a player was out of contract, a club could demand a transfer fee or insist on a player continuing to
play for them, provided they had offered the player another contract not inferior to the one he had previously had with them. Until the early 1960s, players were subject to a maximum wage and could not move at all if a club refused to release their league registration.

Very much a controlled market. The point is it worked. English club football was stable. After the reforms of the 1960s players had reasonable freedom of movement and decent wages. The Football League was also strong in footballing terms. Until they were banned from European competition in 1985 after the Heysel stadium disaster, English clubs dominated European club competition, winning the European Cup every year between 1977 and 1984. Although such extravagant success was not matched at national level, the England side had a record which was more than respectable – in the 1990 World Cup, despite having been kept out of European club competition for five years, the England side reached the semi-finals.

In twenty years the leading English clubs have gone from being staffed overwhelmingly by English players to a position whereby most Premiership clubs regularly put out sides with
fewer than half the side made up from English players. In some cases, such as Fulham and Chelsea, teams frequently take the field with two or fewer English players. In 2009/10 the average number of foreign players in the first team squads of Premier League clubs was 13. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/eng_prem/8182090.stm.) Moreover, the more prominent the club, the less likely English players were to play English. Arsenal illustrates the change dramatically: 1989-90 season: 19 players were born in UK, two born abroad; in 2009-10 four players were born in the UK, 23 were born abroad. The Premier League inquiry into the “tapping-up” of the then Arsenal and England left back Ashley Cole by Chelsea (http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/eng_prem/4596209.stm)n quotes Peter Kenyon of Chelsea as claiming that ‘Cole told him at the meeting that there were a series of cliques at Arsenal, that the “team was primarily run by the French boys” and that he was concerned with a lack of team spirit at Highbury. (http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/premier-league/french-clique-runs-arsenal-coles-revelation-to-chelsea-492976).
That epitomises what is wrong with the current English elite mentality. Arsenal
are a team run by a French manager who has systematically excluded English
players from the team whilst ensuring that his own countrymen are dominant in
the imports.

Why do foreign managers favour their own? It is partly because those are the players they
know. They come to England knowing next to nothing about English players other than those in the top clubs or England side. Football below the Premier League is unknown to them. But there is also the ethnic factor. When a foreign manager comes into a country the thing he is most fearful of is a homogeneous phalanx of native players. He fears this because they people he doesn’t understand and because they are representatives of the dominant culture. The manager’s response is (1) to divide and rule by bringing in many foreigners and (2) to bring in many of his own countrymen to act as a cultural guard for him.

But it is not only foreign managers who have gorged on foreign players. British managers,
including English ones, have done so albeit to a lesser degree. One of the drivers of this behaviour is driven by the demands of owners for instant success. It is obviously easier to buy an established player from abroad than taking a chance on young English players untried at first team level. Even if the foreign players do not bring success the manager can say well I tried and the board can point to foreign purchases as evidence that they are “willing to invest”. However, there are other incentives, legal and illegal, for English managers to buy foreign. Managers’ contracts can contain clauses which give them a percentage of any fee if a player is subsequently sold on. That’s the legal way. The illegal way is to take “bungs”, that is, payments made to a manager by the selling club as a reward for selling a player they would not otherwise have sold or persuading the board of the buying club to pay far more than a player is worth. Deals for foreign players make it much easier to hide bungs because the buying and selling clubs are in different legal jurisdictions.

The destruction of the old ties between players and their clubs has other pernicious effects.
Foreign players are mercenaries and move very frequently chasing higher wages. The wages of players have become so astronomical that the future of many clubs has been placed at risk. The fans have been milked by ticket prices which have gone through the roof. Many of the poorer followers who had watched their clubs man and boy have found themselves unable to continue going regularly to games. What has happened in the Premiership is mirrored in varying degrees by the clubs in the Football League.

If other circumstances had remained the same, things might not have changed radically. But of course circumstances did change and, indeed, the Premier League would almost certainly not have been formed when it was formed if new media opportunities had not arrived. Satellite television was in its infancy, but provided a dynamic competitor for the terrestial channels. The only British satellite broadcaster BskyB was in severe difficulties in its early years. The company decided to try to save itself by concentrating on high class sport. It began paying massive amounts for sporting events which had previously been seen only on terrestial TV. No sport was more handsomely rewarded than Premiership football. The formation of the Premier League resulted in a five year contract with BskyB worth £304 million, riches which utterly dwarfed anything which had gone before. Not only that, but the amount of televised football was massively increased. That in turn increased media exposure generally which inflated revenue greatly as international interest grew. The Premiership TV deal in 2010 was worth £1.4 billion (http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/premier-league/premier-league-nets-16314bn-tv-rights-bonanza-1925462.html)

To the new TV money was added much increased sponsorship deals, itself driven by the additional media exposure football was getting. Merchandising became a racket with the larger clubs changing their strips every five minutes. Clubs also found they could put their ticket prices up substantially and still fill their stadia. This was not surprising because Margaret Thatcher had insisted after the Hillsborough disaster in 1989 that clubs in the higher divisions become all-seater. That commonly reduced the capacity of stadia by 50%. By the early 1990s that policy was taking effect.

So much money came into Premiership football that it changed utterly the way the top clubs were run. Many floated on the stock market and became responsible first and foremost to their shareholders. They could also afford to pay wages which matched those of the more extravagant clubs on the continent such as Real Madrid and Inter Milan. If nothing else had changed, it is a fair bet that the likes of Manchester United would still have employed some of the great foreign players of the world. However, the numbers would have been few and the quality high. Unfortunately, in the decade in which the new money became available, two events greatly increased the mobility of players both
domestically and internationally. These led to a massive influx of foreign players, managers, coaches and eventually owners into England.

The first event was ever increasing scope of the EU’s single market regulations followed by the “Bosman ruling”. Together they allow free movement within the EU of players with
citizenship of an EU country, provided the player is out of contract. (Bosman is an obscure Belgian footballer who in the mid 1990s successfully challenged the right of his club to prevent him playing at the end of his contract by refusing to transfer him by holding onto
his registration).

The position was worsened by the pusillanimous behaviour of successive British Governments when dealing with players from outside the EU. In theory any non-EU player can be banned from playing in Britain. However, the Major government introduced a system of work permits for such players whereby any player playing more than 75% of his country’s international matches in the previous year could play in Britain (the rules
were somewhat tighter for the weaker FIFA ranked nations). Not content with this concession, clubs began pleading special circumstances, to which the Government almost invariably acceded if the appeal was from a leading club. The result was that for the Premiership at least, any player from anywhere could in practice be employed.

Without the Bosman ruling allied to the Single Market regulations and government weakness over non-EU players, the basic form of British football would have remained. Players would not have been able to move very freely between countries or even within clubs in England. Football wages would still have risen, but by nothing like the as much as they have because the bargaining position of players would have been much less.

Perhaps most importantly, teams in the higher divisions, including the Premiership would
have spent the money they have allowed to go out of English football through foreign transfer fees and wages (very few English players have gone to foreign clubs) on English players and with English clubs. A good deal of the transfer money would have gone to clubs in the lower divisions, strengthening their position and English football generally. As things stand, Premiership clubs have virtually ceased buying players from the divisions
below the Premier League.

The effect of the ever growing reliance on foreign players is the exclusion of not merely established English players from the leading sides but also the denial of opportunity to the coming generation of England players. Talented English youngsters are being denied regular opportunities or any opportunities at all. It was not from a lack of talent. Take the case of Liverpool. In the 1990s their academy produced McManaman, Gerrard, Fowler, Owen, Carragher. That was under British managers. From 2000 to 2010 Liverpool had foreign managers, Houllier and Benitez. Not a single Academy player gained a regular place in the first team. This was all the more surprising because Liverpool won the FA Youth Cup in successive years (2006,2007). To add insult to injury, Benitez not only refused to use any the Academy players from these years, he instigated a “reform” of the Academy which prompted the departure of successful Academy director, the old Liverpool
player Steve Heighway.

Opportunity is the key. This has always been a problem. To take a few examples from the 1980s Peter Beardsley nearly slipped through the net before making it in the big time, John Aldridge was in his late twenties before being given a chance in the old First Division and Gary Lineker was a comparatively late developer who did not play for England until he was twenty-three. If this occurred when most places in the top division of English football were available to Englishmen, it is one greatly magnified today when most positions are not available to Englishmen.

All the major English clubs have academies with age group teams running Ajax-style from
primary school age upwards. In the first half of the nineties, Man United’s youth football produced Beckham, Scholes, Butt and the Neville Brothers for England. Ominously in the last five years, no other English youth player has come through to be a first team regular. In the past fifteen years, Arsenal have produced only three players from their own resources (Parlour,Ashley Cole and Jack Wilshire) to command a regular place in the first team. Chelsea have produced one – John Terry.

The denial of opportunity to English players inevitably damages the English national side. There are 20 teams in the Premiership which gives 220 starting places. Less than half of those places go to English players. Does anyone doubt that if another 120-150 or so English players were given the opportunity to play in the Premiership, a dozen or so would not show themselves to be of international quality?

All in all, a very dismal story for anyone who cares about the long-term health of English football, which is looking less than rosy. Players’ wages have become so grossly inflated – they have risen fantastically since 1990 with players being paid £200,000+ a week at the top of the scale – that they threaten the viability of many clubs, A few clubs, such as Blackburn Rovers when they won the Premiership, have managed to arrive at the absurd situation of playing more in wages than their total income.

The heavy dependence on TV money is potentially dangerous. In 2000 the English Football League (then known as the Nationwide Football League) discovered the worth of a private contract. They signed an agreement with ITV digital for a three year contract worth around £300 million to show Nationwide games. A year into the contract, ITV Digital found that they grossly overpaid for the contract and presented the Nationwide with a take it or leave offer of £50 million instead of the contracted £189 million which was still to be paid. This was refused and ITV Digital placed in administration.
(http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/football-league-sues-itv-digital-for-acircpound178m-651218.html).
The result was many clubs below the Premier League being severely embarrassed as they had budgeted on the assumption that the ITV Digital money would be paid. The same scenario could conceivably hit the Premier League. BskyB no longer have a monopoly of Premier League TV rights because of the intervention of the European Competition ommission. Setanta obtained some of the rights when the last TV contracts were signed. They rapidly failed (http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2009/jun/22/setanta-espn-premier-league-tv).
It is conceivable that the at some time in the future either BskyB will run into trouble or the Premier League will cease to have its international appeal and bids for Premiership matches plummet. That would place most Premiership clubs and all Football League clubs
(they receive a share of the Premier League money) in serious difficulties because many of their players are on long contracts (as a result of Bosman) with grossly inflated wages. Clubs such as Manchester United and Chelsea would doubtless be able to become very rich by marketing their own TV but most clubs would be much poorer.

The other financial dangers to football in England arise from foreign owners. Some, such as the Glazers at Manchester United, take a great deal of money out of the club to both finance the massive borrowings they made to purchase the club and in profits. That means fans are paying more and more for tickets and merchandise and there is less money to spend on players. The situation is also only sustainable if United continue to have the same sort of success and world-wide appeal. Others are immensely rich men or consortia such as the owner of Manchester City and Chelsea. The danger here is that the owners may lose interest and sells the club on to someone without such deep pockets who cannot bear the cost of the existing players’ contracts. The other danger is that an individual such as Roman Abramovich runs into the same sort of trouble that his fellow Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky who now languishes in a Russian jail or simply goes bust. That would leave the club high and dry unable to meet running costs. As more than half of current Premier League clubs are foreign owned this is a real source of danger.

What the present plight of English football shows is that the market is inappropriate in some spheres of economic activity. Football is not the same as selling baked beans (as the erstwhile MD of Birmingham City, Karen Brady, once said). Football is about sport. It is
about trib al loyalty. The emotional relationship between the fan and the club is intense. It is formed most commonly in youth and remains until the fan’s dying day. It is only incidentally about money and business.

A combination of excessive money and the free movement of people has turned a social institution, English professional football, on its head. It has gone from being a sport available to all even at its highest level to one affordable only to the better off. The national character of the game has been tossed aside in the pursuit of money. The long term interests of the English game have been ignored. And for what? The satisfaction of businessmen who have no concern for anything other than the balance sheet.

The ill effect of market forces and free trade on football illustrate the shortcomings of the
market. When selling bake beans it may be the most efficient and desirable method of meeting the customers needs. When more than mere material need or profit are involved, the market is not merely inefficient in producing the desired ends but is positively destructive.

What happens in football occurs in all our major team spectator sports. County cricket games commonly start with four or five foreigners in a side; rugby union teams are awash with South Africans, New Zealanders, South Sea Islanders and Australians.

What goes for sport goes for the rest of British society. Our industry and commerce is
increasingly run by foreigners or exported abroad incontinently; senior public service positions go increasingly to foreigners. Immigration on a massive scale continues to undermine the economic prospects of native Britons.

Generally, the elite attitude is that a foreigner has exactly the same status in Britain
as a British citizen, who is no longer privileged by the fact of being British in culture as well as name. That is a recipe for the dissolution of a nation state.

Will there always be an England, whatever the origin of its people?

The title of this piece is taken from an article by Charles Moore in the Daily Telegraph (16 April 2011 – http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/charlesmoore/8454662/Will-there-always-be-an-England-whatever-the-origin-of-its-people.html ). Moore’s article addresses a fact which to most, probably all, people is obvious , namely, that human beings are not interchangeable units who can be moved from and to societies in large numbers without having effects which change the nature of the society which receives the immigrants. The article is noteworthy because this profoundly important truth has been resolutely censored by the mainstream British media for over forty years and denied by mainstream parties of all political colours.

Moore was prompted to write the article by an experience on 14 April. He was due to attend an St Georges Day dinner at the Honourable Artillery Company (held early so not to clash with Easter) where he was to give the toast to “England”. The venue was in Sussex and he went by taxi only to find that his driver was very much at variance with the theme of his intended evening, viz;

“ In these days of satnavs, few drivers really know where anything is: this one got slightly lost. Eventually, I had to stand in a central London street in my white tie and tails, waving my arms and calling in the driver on my mobile phone. He was a friendly man, who quickly endeared himself to me by saying that I had a “lovely accent”. He spoke somewhat fractured English and when I asked him where he was from, he said Bangladesh. It turned out, however, that he was born and had spent his entire life (about 40 years) in England.

“He asked where I was going after dinner. I said Sussex. He had never heard of it.

This experience caused Moore to ask a question forbidden by the commissars of political correctness:

“What, I asked myself, was his “England”? If he had had the misfortune to sit in on my speech that night, would he – even if he spoke the language better – have picked up any joke or reference that I made? Would names like the Duke of Wellington, Tennyson, or William Blake have rung even the faintest bell? “And did those feet…?,” we sang. “What feet?,” my driver might have wondered. Anyway, what is “England’s green and pleasant land” to a man who lives 50 miles from Sussex but has never heard of it? He told me he finds our climate horribly cold, so that when he wants to get out in the country, he flies “back” to Bangladesh. “

Having trodden deep into the treacherous marsh of political incorrectness, Moore attempts to rehabilitate himself by placing his feelings within the realms of political correctness:

“These thoughts made me brood. Part of the pleasure of the England which I was trying to talk about is that it is shared. I am English-English (with a little Irish thrown in), but England is not the special possession of those like me, and I wouldn’t want it to be.”

England as a special place for the English? Heaven forfend! However, having made his obeisance to the god of multiculturalism, he blots his liberal credentials copybook further by continuing

“The point about a country is that it belongs to all its settled inhabitants. I don’t think that the driver felt excluded from an England which he wished to possess; rather that he simply had very little idea of it. He had an idea of London as a place (and of Tottenham Hotspur as a football club), and Britain as an entity that issues passports, but England? Little more, perhaps, than a geographical expression, and, as I say, his geography was vague. “

Moore than sways back into politically correct mode with

“Yet I could not possibly claim that I am a better citizen of this country than he. He works and, I expect, pays his taxes. He has a family. He patiently and politely drives businessmen to meetings and even takes men in white tie and tails to incomprehensible ceremonies. What I was on about that evening probably has less to do with the way we live in this island now than does this pleasant Muslim doing his bit to make London the most successful and cosmopolitan commercial hub in Europe. “

I was particularly struck by Moore’s grovelling and defeated acceptance that the Bangladeshi taxi driver was more representative of England than Moore and the people with whom he was about to celebrate St George’s Day.

Moore than goes on to retail the massive immigration since the advent of Blair in 1997 – the population of the UK has risen by more than two million through net immigration since then. He then breaks the liberal omerta on immigration by pointing out the salutary fact that net immigration only tells us “about overall numbers, but not about the composition of the population. It conceals the fact that hundreds of thousands of British-born people left and many, many more non-British people came. “

All well and good. He then adds

“Most of us do not want immigration on this scale. That is shown by every poll. But, in another sense, most of us do. You and I want someone to serve us in a bar and clean the hospitals and make cheap clothes. I want someone to drive me across town so that I can make my Colonel Blimp remarks to a friendly audience.

Here Moore continues to swing backwards and forwards between honesty and political correctness. He confuses the fact of immigration and the jobs done by immigrants with what the native population wants. All immigrants do is displace native workers by a mixture of taking lower wages than the natives (which they can afford to do because the savings they make are multiplied several times in value when they take the savings back to their own country) and colonising areas of work especially those which are organised by gangmasters who themselves are often foreign and generally only employ people from their own ethnic or national group. Moore’s view is that of the white middle-class liberal who would cannot conceive of immigrants ever competing with him for jobs, healthcare or housing.

Moore also shows a remarkable lack of imagination when it comes to breeding rates:

“Above all, we show, in our obsession with birth control, that we do not want to provide a big enough next generation of people like ourselves. Demographic projections now show Britain overtaking Germany as the largest EU country in 30 years or so. None of that growth will come from the indigenous white population. “

I doubt that it has ever occurred to Moore that much of the cause of native English families having children at below replacement rate is directly or indirectly due to the mass post 1945 immigration and its consequences. These plausibly may have reduced the willingness of the native population to have children from a mixture of demoralisation through seeing parts of their land colonised and the competition for jobs, housing, schools and welfare which immigrants have brought. It is also a fair bet that many native white families have left England because of the immigration. There is also the point that demography is notoriously unreliable at making accurate predictions. Without the post-war immigration it would not matter very much that the native population’s breeding rate was below replacement level because a new equilibrium would gradually emerge. With mass immigration the lower breeding rate of the native population is of the greatest importance because it is conceivable that within 50 and certainly 100 years the native English could be a minority in their own land through a mixture of continuing mass immigration to the UK (the vast majority of which comes to England) and higher breeding rates amongst immigrants and their descendant populations.

Moore ends by flying the white flag as he accepts the end of England as inevitable:

“All this need not be a total disaster. It is possible, though hard, to forge a United Kingdom made up of many ethnicities. Leaders like Mr Cameron are right to try to insist on common standards and better rules, rather than to despair. But whatever it is, and however well it turns out, it cannot be England. Perhaps when I am very old, my grandchildren will ask me what England was. It will be a hard question to answer, but I think I shall tell them that it seemed like a good idea while it lasted, and that it lasted for about 1,000 years.”

Moore is a defeatist when there is no need to be one. The dissolving of England and the English in a multicultural immigrant soup is not inevitable. The size of non-assimilated populations is not yet so vast that nothing can be done. Most of the immigrant populations is compressed into the larger towns and cities. Geographically, most of England is still occupied by the English. Mass immigration could be ended if Britain recovered control over its own borders by withdrawing from the EU, repudiating all other treaties and conventions which facilitate immigration to the Britain such as the UN Convention on Refugees and throwing over the globalist ideology which currently holds sway. Having stemmed the flow, a British government could then start reducing the numbers here by removing illegal immigrants, followed by the departure of those without work, followed by the removal of those without British citizenship whose work is not absolutely necessary . Native Britons could be given the right to take a job occupied by an immigrant if they had the ability to do it. The benefits of the welfare state (barring emergency healthcare) could be denied to first generation immigrants. British citizenship should be withheld from those who cannot or will not assimilate. Those actions would allow meaningful control over the size of the ethnic minority populations in England.

What Moore does not address is his own position and the position of those of his class and position. Moore has spent his life as a journalist (over 35 years). Between 1984 and 2003 he was successively editor of the Spectator magazine, the Sunday Telegraph and the Daily Telegraph. Never at any time in his various editorships did write or speak out forthrightly against the malign effects of mass immigration or allow any of the publications he managed to forthrightly promote such views. Instead, he was if not content willing to play the politically correct game when it came to race and immigration. If doubts were expressed they were always couched in terms which attempted to place them within the parameters of politically correctness. Immigration was not bad per se, it was merely a question of numbers. When immigrants misbehaved, stories which dealt with the misbehaviour were placed on a pc cushion along the lines of “immigrants are generally a great boon to the country”. This latest article shows Moore is still trying to do the same thing. Nonetheless, it is a significant breach in the carapace of political correctness which has grown over England in the past fifty years and should be welcomed for that reason.

Human accomplishment and the English

Robert Henderson

In his book “Human Accomplishment”   the American Charles Murray
calculates the contribution to civilisation made by   individuals
throughout history up until 1950. To give his calculations as much
objectivity as possible he measures the amount of attention given to
an individual   by specialists in their field in   sources such as
biographical dictionaries – put crudely, the greater the frequency of
mention and the larger the space devoted to an individual, the higher
they score.

Murray quantifies   achievements under the headings of   astronomy
(Galileo and Kepler tied for first place), biology (Darwin and
Aristotle), chemistry (Lavoisier), earth sciences (Lyell),   physics
(Newton and Einstein),   mathematics (Euler),   medicine   (Pasteur,
Hippocrates and Koch),   technology (Edison and Watt),    combined
scientific (Newton), Chinese philosophy (Confucious), Indian philosophy
(Sankara), Western philosophy (Aristotle), Western music (Beethoven and
Mozart), Chinese painting (Gu Kaizhi and Zhao Mengfu), Japanese
painting (Sesshu, Sotatsu and Korin),   Western art (Michelangelo),
Arabic literature, (al-Mutanabbi) Chinese literature (Du Fu), Indian
literature (Kalidasa),   Japanese literature (Basho and Chikamatsu
Monzaemon), Western literature (Shakespeare).

Objections have been made to Murray’s methodology such as the fact that
many of the great achievements of the past, especially in the arts,
have been anonymous, which give it a bias towards the modern period,
and    fears that it has a built-in Western bias – the representation
of non-Western figures in the science and technology categories is
minimal.   Nothing can be done about anonymity – it is worth pointing
out that the majority of those heading the categories lived at least
several centuries ago – but Murray substantially   guards against
pro-Western bias with the breadth and number of his sources and it is
simply a fact that science and advanced technology arose only in the
past few centuries and that both are essentially Western achievements.
It is also noteworthy that Murray’s method only places one of his
fellow   countrymen at number one in any category    (Edison   in
technology). If any bias exists it is unlikely to be conscious. At
worst, Murray’s findings can be seem as a fair rating   of Western
achievement.

The list of those heading the various categories (see second paragraph
above) suggests that Murray’s method is pretty sound despite any
possible methodological shortcomings, because those who come top are
all men of extreme achievement. There might be arguments over whether
Aristotle should take precedence over Plato or Kant, but no one could
honestly argue that Aristotle was an obviously unworthy winner of first
place in the philosophy category.

Of the 13 categories which can include Westerners (they are obviously
excluded from non-European literature and art),   Englishmen   are
undisputed firsts or share first place with one other in four: biology
Darwin   with Aristotle;   Physics Newton with Einstein;   combined
scientific Newton alone; Western literature Shakespeare alone.   No
other nation has more than two representatives at the top of a
category. The thirteen Western including categories have a total of 18
people in sole or joint first place. England has nearly a quarter of
those in first place and more than a quarter of the 15 who are drawn
from the modern period, say 1500 AD onwards.

Apart from those coming first,   the English show strongly in most of
the Western qualifying categories (especially in physics – 9 out of the
top 20, technology – 8 out of the top twenty – and Western literature).
The major exceptions are   Western art and   music, where English
representation is mediocre.   I think most people who think about the
matter at all would feel those cultural strengths and weaknesses
represent the reality of English history and society.

The fact that England shows so strongly in Murray’s exercise gives the
lie to the common representation of the English as unintellectual.
Moreover, there is much more to human intellectual accomplishment than
the fields covered by Murray, most notably the writing of history and
the social sciences, areas in which England has been at the forefront
throughout the modern period: think Gibbon, Macaulay, Herbert Spencer
and Keynes.

English intellectual history is a long one. It can reasonably be said
to begin in the early eighth century with Bede’s Ecclesiastical
History of the English, which amongst other things firmly establishes
the English as a people before England as a kingdom existed (“At
present there are in Britain…five languages and four nations –
English, British, Irish and Picts…” Book One).

In the late ninth century comes Alfred the Great, a king whose reign
was one of constant struggle against the Danes, but who thought
enough of learning to teach himself to read as an adult and then engage
in translations into Old English of devotional works such as Pope
Gregory’s Pastoral Care, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History and Boethius’
The Consolation of Philosophy.

From Alfred’s reign comes the Anglo-Saxon Journal (ASJ), a work also
written in Old English. (There are nine surviving versions written at
different places, eight of which are in Old English with the odd man
out being in Old English with a Latin translation). The journal is
a history/myth of Britain and a narrative of the settlement of
Anglo-Saxons within it until the time of Alfred and then a putative
record of and commentary on the great events of English life from the
time of Alfred until the middle of the 12th century (like all such
medieval works the veracity of the ASJ is questionable, but at worst it
gives a flavour of the mentality of those living at the time). The work
is unique in medieval Europe for its scope and longevity and is
particularly noteworthy for the fact that it was written in the
vernacular throughout the three centuries or so of its existence, this
at a time when the normal language for writing in Western Europe was
Latin.

The    Norman   Conquest   subordinated   the   English    politically,
linguistically and socially for the better part of three   centuries,
but it did not kill English intellectual endeavour.   Those three
centuries of oppression saw the emergence of many of the ideas which
were later to produce the modern world. John of Salisbury   produced a
work on politics (Policraticus 1159) which was “the first attempt in
the Middle Ages at an extended and systematic treatment of political
philosophy” (G H Sabine A History of Political Theory p246) and one
which argued for a form of limited monarchy and the overthrow of
tyrants, views given practical English expression in Magna Carta
(1215). The period was also noteworthy for the strong showing of annals
and histories, most notably those of Eadmer (Historia Novorum or The
History of Recent Events – it covered the period 950-1109), Henry of
Huntingdon (Historia Anglorum or History of the English 5BC-1129) and
Matthew Paris (Chronica Majora).   In addition,   the Common Law was
formed,   English became once more a literary language (Chaucer,
Langland),   John Wycliffe laid the intellectual roots   of    the
Reformation and, perhaps most impressively, ideas which were later to
provide the basis for a true science emerged.    England was the mother of the modern world.

To have produced Shakespeare, Newton and Darwin alone would have been
a great thing for any nation, but for England they are merely the
cherries on the top of a very substantial intellectual cake. Beneath
them sit dozens of others of serious human consequence: the likes of
Ockham, Chaucer, Wycliffe, Francis Bacon, Marlowe, Halley, Hobbes,
Locke, Gibbon, Priestly, Cavendish, Newcomen, Faraday, Austen, Dickens,
Keynes, Turing… ‘Nuff said.

Hertfordshire English Democrats Supporters Club

Not Left, Not Right, Just English!

Category Archives: Culture

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The English Landscapes and Identities Project

12-07-2011 09:42 by Lucy Palmer

Patriotism is not an optional extra

The Spring Edition of the Quarterly Review is out

Quarterly Review Vol 5 . No 1 . Spring 2011

CONTENTS

The English in North America – Locating the Hidden Diaspora

http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/browse/ne/uninews/searchenglish

In search of the English

———————————-

Locating the Hidden Diaspora

The English in North America in Transatlantic Perspective, 1760-1950

Project Context

Aims & Objectives

Project Team

You can contact us using our project email address: az.englishdiaspora@northumbria.ac.uk

Where are the English-Americans?

Ire in Babylon

How English football became foreign football played in England

Will there always be an England, whatever the origin of its people?

Human accomplishment and the English