Category Archives: Culture

Black and Asian cultural separatism in the UK

The British Film Institute (BFI) funded research  produced a report in 2006 entitled “Media Culture: The Social Organisation of Media Practices in Contemporary  Britain” (http://www.bfi.org.uk/about/pdf/social-org-media-practices.pdf).   

The report focused on “ the relationships between cultural tastes and knowledge as expressed in film and television preferences, and ethnicity, social class, gender and education” (p 4).  I shall be concentrating on the findings relating to how ethnic minorities relate to the English.  

The research  was based on a ”survey of a nationwide representative sample of adults resident in Britain at the time the survey was administered (November 2003 to March 2004).3 This survey comprised a main sample of 1564 supplemented by an ethnic boost sample of 227 drawn, in roughly equal proportions, from Britain’s three main minority ethnic groups: the Indian, Pakistani and Afro-Caribbean communities” (p 9).  The main sample included 7% ethnic minorities.

My observations on the quotes from the report appear in bold.

Rejection of Englishness

 “….Eastenders is very popular, more so than with the main sample, and the same is true of the Australian soap Home and Away. There is, however, a marked disinterest in Coronation Street, especially on the part of Indians and Pakistanis.

“(ii) While, in the cases of popular dramas, The Bill is very popular with all three groups, and especially the Indian and Pakistani groups, other popular dramas like Midsomer Murders and A Touch of Frost are strikingly unpopular, and – although this is not shown in the Chart – more so on the part of those born in Britain.

“These findings show, in some cases, a distant relation to programmes that conspicuously embody the values of ‘middle England’ (Midsomer Murders, A Touch of Frost) as well as those of northern working-class culture (Coronation Street) while, in others, suggesting a strong but selective interest in American and Australian imports.” (p26)

Eastenders has significant numbers of ethnic minority characters, Coronation Street does not.  

“The members of all three minority ethnic groups go more regularly to the cinema than do the population generally. Indians and Pakistanis are especially fond of cinema-going with 46% and 41% respectively going once a month or more frequently compared to 18% of the main sample. It is notable, too, that members of the ethnic boost file are more likely to have large collections of film on video. Five percent reported collections of 200 or more films compared to 1% of the main sample. Watching film clips on the internet is also more popular with all minority ethnic groups than is true of the British population generally. Eighteen percent of the Indian and Pakistani respondents, and 13% of the Afro-Caribbean respondents, reported this use of the internet compared to 7% of the main sample. Members of the Indian and Pakistani communities are also more likely to use the internet as a means of accessing news and sport. Thirty nine percent of Indian and 35% of Pakistani respondents use the internet for this purpose compared to 22% of the main sample, with Afro-Caribbean usage falling a little below this.” (p19)

“With regard to digital, satellite or cable television, however, each of the three minority ethnic groups accesses this to a greater degree than the population as a whole – around 73% for Indians and Pakistanis and 63% for Afro-Caribbean respondents compared to 55% of the main sample. Internet access is less, however, especially for Pakistanis, 33% of whom reported internet access in contrast to 54% of the main sample and 56% and 45% of the Indian and Afro-Caribbean respondents respectively.” (p20)

“The members of all three minority ethnic groups, and especially Afro-Caribbean respondents, are considerably more likely to have access to digital, cable or satellite television than members of the main sample . The Indian and Pakistani groups show strong preferences for ethnic or overseas channels,  but low involvement in popular channels. This interest in overseas channels is especially marked among members of the ethnic file born overseas – 19% compared with 6% of those born in Britain – just as these have relatively little interest in popular channels (1%) compared to their, on the whole, younger British-born counterparts. The use of non-terrestrial movie channels is high on the part of both Afro-Caribbean and Indian respondents…” (p23)

The greater use of the cinema, private film collections and digital, satellite and cable television by blacks and Asians  can be plausibly explained by a desire to access media which is not English/British.

“ The Afro-Caribbean members of the sample are pretty disinterested in Channel 4 but highly involved in Channel 5, with Indian and Pakistani respondents also more interested in this channel than the main sample.” (P22)

Channel 5 shows more programmes with black and Asian participation.

“It is notable, too, that, in terms of preferred genres, documentaries are relatively low in the priorities of all three minority ethnic groups which, conversely, show a strong preference for news and current affairs programmes – particularly on the part of the Afro-Caribbean and Pakistani communities. Those born overseas are also much more likely to prefer these kinds of television than are the UK born: 30% in contrast to 13%. Indians and Pakistanis are not much interested in soap operas and all three groups are less interested in dramas than the main sample. Indians and Pakistanis are particularly fond of comedy on television, and Afro-Caribbean people like television quizzes, game shows and television sport, which is also popular with Indians. No member of the ethnic file indicates reality television as their most preferred television genre (and it figures highly in the dislikes of all three groups), and the same is true of programmes centred on the home (cookery, home improvements, gardening) on the part of the Afro-Caribbean and Pakistani respondents. These programmes also figure quite highly in the dislikes of all three groups, especially for Afro-Caribbean respondents who, along with soap operas, rated this as the type of television they liked least after reality television.” (pp24/25)

“Coming, finally, to films, the lack of interest in documentaries that we have seen in relation to television is echoed for all groups except for the Afro-Caribbean, and the marked lack of interest in costume drama and literary adaptations – one of the stable outputs of the British film industry – is striking (Table 1). This is also toward the higher end of the least-liked film genres for the three groups, especially Indian respondents. Indian and Pakistani respondents are, unsurprisingly, strongly interested in ‘Bollywood’ – especially those born overseas (24% compared to 10% of British born) – while Pakistani respondents show a strong liking for science fiction films, although this is almost entirely accounted for in terms of British-born Pakistanis. There is zero interest in art or alternative cinema across the three minority groups and Afro-Caribbean respondents have an especially strong aversion to war films: 19% indicate this as the film they like least – more than twice the rate of the main sample and that for the other minority ethnic groups.” (pp26/27)

Most documentaries shown on British television or in British  cinemas concern English/British history and culture and are presented by native Britons.

“The responses reported in Table 2 are a little more puzzling. Discounting the World Cup which, unlike the other television events, is clearly one with a global reach, here the greater likelihood that those born in the UK will know about these events than do those born overseas is not accompanied by a greater liking for them – a tendency that is especially evident in relation to the Queen’s Christmas message. Clearly given the relatively youthfulness of those born in Britain, age is a factor here. But this may also in some cases reflect a rejection of, or distancing from, certain key aspects of the national culture: none of the British born Indian and Afro-Caribbean respondents, for example, are part of the 3% of the UK born who watch the Queen’s Christmas message. This interpretation is all the more plausible when considered in relation to the similar tendency that is evident in the other aspects of film and television choice already discussed: the lack of interest in television programmes with strongly white, middle-England associations (Midsomer Murders, A Touch of Frost, in contrast to The Bill, for example, the differences in responses to Coronation Street and the more multicultural Eastenders, and the strongly negative reaction on the part of minority groups to the classic signature of ‘quality’ British cinema – costume dramas and literary adaptations…” (pp33/34)

This finding shows an active wish to reject native British culture especially that deemed English.

“One striking difference in relation to film – that relating to the genre set in which women have the strongest interest – reflects the inclusion of Bollywood within this set. For while women within the ethnic file like this a good deal more than the men, it recruits far more support from Pakistani and Indian men than any of the other genres in this set do from men as a whole. Perhaps the most consequential finding here, however, is the strong disconnection of black and Asian Britons from ‘respectable film’ – the set with the strongest national associations – and from the war/westerns/musicals set of ‘older popular cinema. But the stronger interest of black and Asian Britons in the ‘younger popular film’ set is equally notable. This is echoed, in the case of television, by the high rate of interest of black and Asian Britons in the ‘younger popular television’ set, and the lower rates of interest in relation to the main sample that are evident for both ‘respectable’ and ‘older popular’ television – again, both groupings with strong national associations (news, current affairs, nature and history documentaries in the case of ‘respectable television’; quiz and game shows, cookery, home improvement and gardening shows, and the more international police and detective series) “(pp 73/74)

The lack of interest in programmes with a strong national, that is, English/British, interest is further evidence of the rejection of British/English culture.

“In the case of visual art, for example, 62% of the ethnic sample had not heard of Turner, the most well known of all the artists we asked about, compared to 27% of the main sample and 22% of the White English group. We see a similar patter for Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice: 34% of black and Asian Britons had not heard of this compared to 7% of the main sample and 4% of the White English. those born overseas and, in the case of Pride and Prejudice, the respective figures are 17% and 47%.” (pp 73/74)

This lack of knowledge of English culture is probably  a consequence of the disproportionate  avoidance  English broadcasting and films and the failure to teach English/British culture and history  in schools.

 “In Table 11 we compare things which members of both our ethnic and main samples never do. Here, watching broadcast television and, more dramatically, going to the cinema increase significantly for second- and third-generation migrants, as do eating out, going to the theatre and going to night clubs and, to a lesser extent, of going to pubs. There is a similar tendency in relation to visiting art galleries. There is, however, virtually no change in levels of participation relating to going to museums, art galleries, bingo, orchestral concerts, and a notable decrease so far as visiting stately homes and historic houses – key institutions of national heritage – are concerned. “

This passage shows that native born blacks and Asians  are becoming less not more absorbing of English culture, what might be termed passive cultural ghettoization.  

“Distinctive forms of taste connected with ethnicity tended, in this sample, to emerge within Indian and Pakistani groups rather than Afro-Caribbean. Chief amongst these were the high level of cinema participation, especially of Bollywood films, which were viewed by families together either at specialist cinemas or at multiplexes, and the high level of satellite television ownership, with forms of participation in the former group being more explicitly connected to diasporic identities.

“Focus groups with Pakistani and Indian middle and working classes revealed the importance of satellite channels, such as Zee TV, the Asian Channel and B4U, which were watched as sources of entertainment, particularly Asian dramas or soaps, sources of information about new cinema (specifically Hindi or ‘Bollywood’ film releases) and sources of news.” (p110)

This shows the active cultural ghettoization which is taking place.

 Conclusion

What do we make of all this? It paints a picture of blacks and sub-continental Asians  becoming less not more s integrated into the cultural and social life of the country as the years and generations pass.   The concentration of black and Asian population in British cities facilitates both cultural and physical  ghettoization.

There is an especial  failure to engage with English culture, something which is of particular significance because the large majority of  black and Asian settlement  in the UK is in England and more than four fifths of the UK population reside in England.  

Blacks and Asians in Britain show at best no interest in becoming assimilated and at worst an active desire to resist such assimilation.

On the face of it, none of this is surprising because of the doctrine of multiculturalism which has been promoted assiduously by the British elite since the 1970s.  But that does not mean multiculturalism was something forced on blacks and Asians (and other minorities).  Rather, it is plausibly a response by British politicians in the 1970s as the previous official  government policy of integration or assimilation was shown to have failed miserably with ghettoes of black and Asian immigrants and their offspring already formed.  Multiculturalism was a response to social development which politicians either could not or would not check. It simply validated what was.

The Coalition Government has made a good deal of noise about the ills of multiculturalism,  but have done nothing meaningful to turn back the tide of separatism.  Nor are they likely to do so because it is not only natural for human beings to try to live in racial/ethnic groups and to maintain the culture of the group.   Mass immigration and its consequences will not go away. In its practical effects it is a form of conquest.

England and the rejection of violence

Why was England so different from other countries in its political, social and economic  development?  How was it that only in England did parliamentary government evolve and the one and only bootstrapped industrial revolution arise?  Perhaps much of the  answer  lies  in the fact that the English, in comparison with any other large nation, have long been wonderfully  adept  in dealing  with the central  problem  of human  life –  how  to live together  peaceably.  A  Canadian  academic, Elliott Leyton,  has  made  a study of English  murder through  the centuries in his book Men of Blood. Leyton finds that the rate of English  (as  opposed  to  British murder) is phenomenally  low  for a country of her size  and industrial development,  both now  and for centuries past.  This strikes Elliott  as  so singular that he said  in  a recent interview “The English  have  an antipathy to murder  which borders  on eccentricity; it is one  of the great  cultural oddities of the modern age.” (Sunday Telegraph  4 12 1994).

 This  restraint  extends to warfare and social disorder. That is not to say England has been  without violence,  but rather that  at any point in her history the level of  violence  was  substantially lower than in any other comparable society. For example,  the  English Civil War  in the  17th  Century  was, apart from the odd inhumane blemish,  startlingly free of the gross  violence common on the continent of  the  time  during the 30 Years War,  where the sacking and pillage of towns and cities  was  the norm. A particularly notable thing,  for civil wars are notorious for their brutality. 

The  way  that  England  responded  to the  Reformation  is instructive. She  did not suffer the savage  wars of religion which  traumatised  the  continent  and  brought  human calamities  such as the  St Bartholomew Day’s  Massacre  in  France  in 1572,  when thousands of French  protestants  were   massacred at the instigation of the French king. 

It  was not that the English did not care deeply about  their  religion,  rather that they have been, when left to their own  devices,  generally loth to fight their  fellow  countrymen  over  anything.  English  civil  wars  have  always  been essentially  political affairs  in which the ordinary  person has little say, for the struggles  were either dynastic or  a clash  between Parliamentary  ambition and  the  monarch.  Even the  persecution of  the  Lollards  in  the late fourteenth  and fifteenth centuries and the persecution  of Protestants  under Mary I had a highly political aspect.  The former  was a vastly disturbing challenge to the  established social  order  with men being told,  in so many  words,  that   they could find their own way to salvation and the latter  an  attempt  to  re-establish not merely  the Catholic  order  in  England,  which had been overturned since the time  of  Henry  VIII’s  breach  with Rome,  but also what amounted to  a  new  royal dynasty with Mary’s marriage to Philip of Spain.

Even the prohibitions on Catholics and non-Conformists  after the  Reformation had a fundamental political basis  to  them, namely, they were predicated on the question of whether  such people be trusted to give their first loyalty to the crown.

The treatment of foreigners

Compared with  other  peoples,  the  English  have been noticeably restrained  in their treatment of other  peoples residing  within their country.  A few massacres of  Jews  occurred before their expulsion from England in 1290,  but from that  time  there has not  been  great slaughter of a minority living within  England. Since  1290  there  have been occasional outbreaks of anti-foreigner violence. During the Peasants’  Revolt  London-based Flemings  were  murdered.  In later times an anti-Spanish “No Popery”  mob was  frequently  got up in London and he influx of Jews and Huguenots in  the 17th and 18th centuries caused riots,  one so serious in 1753 that  it  caused the repeal of a law naturalising  Jews  and Huguenots.  But  these riots did not result in great  numbers of dead, let alone in systematic genocidal  persecutions of any  particular group.  Most notably,  the English  fonts  of authority,  whether  the crown, church  or  parliament,  have   not incited let alone ordered the persecution of a particular  racial or ethnic group since the expulsion of the Jews.  They  have persecuted Christian groups, but that was a matter  of  religion  not  ethnicity, the  Christians  persecuted  being  English  in the main. The only discrimination  the  English  elite  have formally sanctioned against an ethnic group for  more than half a millennium was the inclusion of Jews within  the  general  prohibitions passed in the half century  or  so after  the Restoration in 1660 which banned  those  who  were  not members  of the Church of England from holding  a  crown  appointment such as an MP or election to public offices  such  as that of MP.

This comparative  lack of  violence  can plausibly be seen as the ground for England’s maintenance and unique development of a Parliament and  the development of the rule of law a  consequence  of England’s political  arrangements. From that sprung the gradual erosion of monarchical authority. Put those three developments together and there is arguably the ground upon which first a great commercial edeifice was built followed by industrialisation.  

But even if that is the immediate cause of English development it does not explain why  the English become  exceptionally peaceable within their own territory.  One could argue that being an island helped, not least because England has not been subject to a forced foreign conquest  from the continent  for the better part of a millennium. However,  England has suffered a good deal of inter-nation warfare within the British Isles, especially with Scotland. She has also fought many a campaign around the world, both as England and later under the banner of Great Britain. It is not that the English are or have been naturally timid.  

Perhaps the fundamental answer to English peaceableness  lies in the fact  that the English enjoyed a level  of  racial and cultural  homogeneity  from very early on.  Long  before  the English kingdom existed Bede wrote of the English as a single people.  The  English have never killed one another  in  any great  quantity  simply  because one part of  the population  thought  another  part was in some way not English.  That is the best possible starting point  for  the establishment of a coherent community. 

The  favoured  liberal  view of England is  that  it  is  the mongrel nation par excellence.  In fact,  this is the  exact opposite of the truth.  The general facts of immigration into England are these. The English and England were of  course created  by  the  immigration of Germanic  peoples.  The British  monk, Gildas,  writing  in  the  sixth  century, attributed  the  bulk  of  the  Saxon  settlement  to the practice  of  British leaders employing  Saxons  to protect   the Britons from Barbarian attacks after Rome withdrew around   410  A.D.  The English monk Bede (who was born in  A.D.  673)   attributed  the origins of the English to the Angles,  Saxons   and  Jutes who came to England in the century  following  the   withdrawal  of  the  Romans at the  request of  British  war leaders.

Archaeological  evidence suggests that  substantial  Germanic settlement in England had a longer history and  dated  from  the  Roman  centuries, perhaps from as early  as  the  third  century.  What is certain is that in her formative  centuries  following  the  exit  of  Rome, the  various invaders  and  settlers  were drawn from peoples with much in  common.

They  were  the  same  physical type, there  was  a  considerable similarity of general culture, their languages  flowed from a common linguistic well. When the Norsemen came they too brought a Teutonic  mentality and origin. Even the Normans were Vikings at one remove who, if  frenchified,  were not  physically  different  from  the English  nor  one imagines utterly without  vestiges  of  the  Norse mentality.  Moreover, the number of Normans who settled  in England immediately after the Conquest was small, perhaps as few as 5000.

After  the Conquest,  the only significant  immigration  into England for many centuries were the Jews.  They were expelled  from England in 1290. There was then no really large  scale  and  sudden immigration from outside the British Isles  until  the flight of the Huguenots after the revocation of the Edict  of Nantes (which granted limited toleration to the  Huguenots within France) in 1684 by Louis X1V.

There was other immigration in the period 1066-1650, but it was  small and highly selective. Craftsmen of  talent  were  encouraged particularly in the Tudor period. Italian families  with  trading and banking expertise (such as it was in  those days) appeared  after the expulsion of  the  Jews.  Foreign  merchants  were  permitted,  but for much of  the  period  on sufferance  and  subject  to  restrictions  such  as forced  residence within specially designated  foreign quarters. 

The  upshot of all this is that for six centuries  after the Conquest  England was an unusually homogeneous country,  both racially  and culturally. This is reflected in the  absence since  the  Norman Conquest of  any serious regional separatist  movement within the  heart of English  territory. There  has been meaningful resistance  at  the periphery  – Cornwall,  the Welsh marches and the  far north,  but  even that  has  been  effectively dead since the sixteenth century. Englishmen have fought but not to create separate nations.

The unusual restraint of the English  is also shown in their dealings with foreigners  abroad. England did not routinely go in for sack and pillage as was common on the continent and occasional massacres  often occurred in special circumstances,  for example,  Cromwell’s in Ireland happened in   aftermath of a  massacre of Protestants in Ulster in 1641 and the fear that Ireland would be used as a springboard for a Royalist invasion of England.

Nowhere was the restraint seen more emphatically than in the Empire. If  a people were forced to become part of an empire, the British Empire was indubitably the one to join. There were of course outrages committed in the Empire’s name,  but there was no general policy of  cruelty and, for the final century of the Empire’s existence, official British policy towards the colonies was that the interests of the natives should come first.  

If  the  theory that a homogeneous population long occupying a territory without suffering foreign conquest results in greater social restraint  is correct,  this may have  a profound implication.  Assuming that personality is substantially innate, natural selection will act upon the type of personality which is best suited to the environment. It could be that the native English are, on average,  genetically better suited to live in a society in which politics are decided by peaceful transfer of power and business and personal disputes are mediated through the law.   On top of any genetic propensity is added the culture of restraint which has developed from the genetic propensity over the centuries.

Should it be true that the English have a unique genetic national shape and  a culture which uniquely plays to that genetic national shape, then mass immigration will weaken both by introducing both different genetic types an competing cultures.

English liberty and the Peasants’ Revolt

Nothing  demonstrates the Englishman’s  long held lack of deference  and desire to be his own man better than the Peasants’  Revolt in 1381. General resentment  of  privilege  and  particular  hostility  to  the imposition  of  a  tax  (the  Poll Tax) considered  to  be both unreasonable  and illegitimate,  was given  unambiguous  voice.  For  a brief period the  fog  of  obscurity which  ordinarily  covers  the  masses  in  the mediaeval world  clears. A remarkable  scene meets the  eye for we find not a cowed and servile people but a robust  cast of  rebels  who far from showing respect  for  their  betters display  a  mixture of contempt and hatred for everyone  in  authority bar the boy-king Richard II.

Perhaps  most surprising to the modern reader is the  extreme  social radicalism of their demands which might,  without  too  much exaggeration,  be described as a demand for  a classless society.  The  Revolt may have had its origins in  the  hated Poll  Tax  but it soon developed into a series  of  general political demands. One  of  the  revolt’s  leaders, the  hedge-priest John Ball, reputedly preached “  Things cannot go  right in England  and never will until goods are held  in common  and there are no more villeins and gentlefolk but  we are  all  one  and  the  same”, and the  anonymous  and  revolutionary  couplet “When Adam delved and Eve span/who was then  the gentleman?”  was in men’s mouths.  The  mediaeval chronicler Jean Froissart  has Ball preaching:

Are we not descended from the same parents, Adam and Eve? And  what can they sow or what reason can they give why they  should be more masters than ourselves?  They  are  clothed  in velvet and rich stuffs ornamented in  ermine and  other  furs while  we  are  forced  to  wear  poor  clothing.  They have wines and fine bread while  we  have  only rye and refuse of straw and when we drink it must be water. They have handsome manors…while we must have the wind  and rain in our labours in the field and it  is  by  our  labours that  they…support their  pomp.  We  are called slaves  and if we do perform  our services  we are beaten and  we  have  no  sovereign to  whom  we  can complain…let  us go to the King  and remonstrate  with him; he is young  and from him we may obtain a favourable answer,  and if not we must seek to amend our  conditions ourselves. (Simon Schama  A History of Britain p 248)

Whether  or not these  words  bore any resemblance to  Ball’s actual words,  whether or not  they were black propaganda (on behalf  of  the  elite)  by Froissart  to  show  the  dangers society  faced  from  the  Revolt,  we  may  note  that the sentiments are  compatible with the demands  made by  the rebels in 1381.

When  the Kentish men  led by Wat Tyler,  an Essex man, met the  14-year-old king Richard at Mile End  on 14  June,  they demanded  an  end to serfdom and a flat rent of  4  pence  an acre.  The  king  granted the plea.  When the  king  met  the  rebels  a second time Tyler shook the king’s hand and  called him  “brother”. Tyler demanded a new Magna  Carta  for  the common people which would have  ended serfdom,  pardoned  all outlaws, liquidated all church property  and declared  that all men below the king were equal,  in effect abolishing  the peerage and gentry. Richard, much to the rebels’  surprise, accepted  the  demands,  although  cunningly  qualifying  the acceptance  “saving  only the regality of the crown”.  A  few minutes later Tyler  was  mortally wounded, supposedly after he had attempted to attack a young esquire in the royal  party who had  called him a thief. His death signalled  the beginning of  the end of the  revolt for without  Tyler  the Revolt  lost direction and  those who  remained  willing  to resist were pacified in the next few weeks.

During the Revolt the rebels  did not  run riot, but acted in a controlled  manner, attacking  the  property of tax collectors, other  important  royal servants and  any property belonging to the king’s uncle,  John of Gaunt. Any identifiable Exchequer document was ripe for destruction.  

The revolt  began in  Essex when  the commissioners attempting  to  collect  the Poll Tax were  surrounded  by  a  hostile  crowd  on 30 May 1381.  Physical threats  were  made  against  one  of the commissioners,  and  the  commissioners retreated  from the immediate task  of attempting to  collect the tax.  This  brought in the Chief Justice  of the  Court of Common Pleas to restore order. He was captured by an  even larger  crowd  and made to  swear on oath that  no  further  attempt  would  be made to collect the  tax  the  area. The  names of informers  who  had provided  names to the commissioners was discovered and the culprits beheaded.

The spirit of rebellion soon spread. By 2 June a  crowd  in the village of Bocking  had sworn  that they would “have  no law  in England except only as  they themselves moved  to  be  ordained.” 

The rebellion  had infected Kent by the end of the first week in June.  By the time Wat Tyler,  an Essex man by birth,  had  been elected to lead the Kentish  men  the demand was for the heads  of the king’s uncle John of Gaunt,  the Archbishop  of Canterbury Simon Sudbury and the Treasurer Sir Robert  Hales. After Tyler’s first meeting with Richard,  Sudbury and  Hales were  captured and beheaded by the rebels. No deference  or want of ambition there.

The  extent  to  which the Revolt frightened  the  crown  and nobility can be seen in the violence of Richard’s words  when he addressed  another group of rebels at Walthamstow on  22 June,  by  which  time the danger was felt  to  have  largely passed:

You wretches,  detestable on land and sea ;  you who seek equality  with  lords  are unworthy to  live.  Give  this message to your colleagues.  Rustics you were and rustics you are still:  you will remain in bondage  not as before  but incomparably  harsher. For as long as we live we will  strive  to  suppress you ,  and your misery  will  be  an example  in  the eyes of posterity .  How ever,  we  will spare your lives if you remain faithful. Choose now which you want to follow .  (Simon Schama  A History of Britain p 254 )

Part of England has been invaded

Part of England has just been  invaded.  The Hampshire town of Aldershot has suddenly been treated to a an exceptionally large dose of “the joy of diversity” by the transformation of the town through a massive influx of Ghurkha soldiers and their dependants, viz:.

“ Rushmoor Borough councillor Charles Choudhary, who has responsibility for community support, said thousands of Gurkhas had moved in since those with four years service earned the right to UK residency. [Rushmoor Borough Council  includes Aldershot]

He said: “We welcome the Gurkhas, they have done a lot of service for this country and it is very much appreciated. I understand that it is because of their ties with Aldershot that they all come here.

“But it is the number of people arriving that is the problem. When you’ve got 6,000-9,000 coming to the town it’s bound to have an effect on all services, it’s quite natural.” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/defence/8319201/One-in-ten-of-the-population-of-Aldershot-is-Nepalese-after-an-influx-of-Gurkhas.html

Here is the Daily Telegraph reporting on some of the effects as of 22 February 2011:

“Today, one in 10 of Aldershot’s 90,000 residents hails from Nepal. Gerald Howarth, the local MP and a defence minister, recently raised the issue with David Cameron, claiming that public services are at risk of being overwhelmed.

“One surgery in his constituency has had to take on an extra GP after Nepalese incomers, many of them elderly and unwell, swelled its patient list from 6,000 to 9,000. Some 800 children with Nepali as their first language have arrived in the constituency and must be accommodated in schools. Overall, there has been a 280 per cent increase in Nepalese households in the past year, with 20 new people arriving every week.” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/defence/8339467/The-Gurkhas-in-Aldershot-Little-Nepal.html

The Telegraph misses out jobs and housing. What is truly amazing is that between 6,000-9,000 have been housed in a county which is one of the most expensive in the country for property? Many native Britons cannot find a home there. Here is   Rushmoor Borough Council   assessing the local housing situation in 2009:

“The HNS  [Housing Market Assessment] established a newly arising need from around 700 households per year, who are unable to buy or rent in the market. By deducting the annual supply of affordable housing, the total affordable housing need was identified in the region of 680 dwellings per year.

“This level of affordable housing need, combined with market demand, is significantly higher than the level of provision set out in the Draft South East Plan and, therefore, cannot be delivered.” http://www.rushmoor.gov.uk/media/adobepdf/p/h/housingstrategyupdatemay09.pdf

Ironically, this report is topped with two photos, one of a white family and one of a white pensioner couple all beaming.  One rather suspects they are not smiling now.

Most of the Gurkhas will have arrived recently because they only got the right to settle in Britain with full entitlement to the welfare state  including social housing  in 2009.  How can Aldershot suddenly accommodate at least 6,000 extra people when they cannot meet the housing needs  of their own people?

Nor are the Gurkhas housed in sub-standard accommodation because as  Rushmoor Borough Council  stipulates  on their website:

“ Before this country allows immigration, the Home Office require confirmation from us that the accommodation provided for that person reaches a certain standard.

“In most cases, properties will be inspected to ensure that they are in a reasonable condition, that there are adequate kitchen and bathroom facilities and that the property will not be overcrowded with additional people living there.

“You will need to complete  Application for an Immigration Inspection form [46kb] to request an accommodation inspection and this service costs £109.57 plus VAT. Payment is required before an inspection can take place. Please ensure that all names on the form are spelt correctly and you have given the right dates of birth.

“If the property is owned by a private landlord or a housing association, you need to get permission from your landlord before you request the inspection.” http://www.rushmoor.gov.uk/index.cfm?articleid=9094

‘Mr Howarth’s intervention has unleashed a torrent of previously suppressed opinion, with 70 per cent of his constituents backing his decision to raise this sensitive issue at the highest level. On the website of the local newspaper, gethampshire.co.uk, one resident notes that it “reflects what very, very many people in Aldershot are saying under their breath”.’ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/defence/8339467/The-Gurkhas-in-Aldershot-Little-Nepal.html.

How did this invasion come about?  In 2009  the actress Joanna Lumley led a campaign which forced the Brown Government into abandoning rules that prevented members of the Gurkha Brigade who had  retired before 1997 settling in Britain. This meant that Britain took on a considerable burden:

“In total there are 36,000 former Gurkhas: if their immediate families are included, then more than 100,000 Nepalese citizens are eligible to move to Britain. Since May 2009, the Government has issued more than 7,500 visas… Settlement costs for ex-Gurkhas could run up to £400 million…” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/defence/8339467/The-Gurkhas-in-Aldershot-Little-Nepal.html

Howarth does not mince his words regarding  Joanna Lumley. ‘”You have to be objective in politics,” he says. “And that campaign was a nakedly emotional tugging of the heartstrings. It completely failed to take into account what would happen afterwards.” Miss Lumley was not available for comment yesterday.’ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/defence/8339467/The-Gurkhas-in-Aldershot-Little-Nepal.html

I’ll bet she wasn’t available and won’t be available for a very long time.   She has done  the classic liberal bigot thing of playing the bleeding heart in public whilst knowing she will not suffer the consequences of her actions.

Because she is rich it will not be Lumley who finds herself without decent accommodation because of the influx; it will not be Lumley who has to fight  her way through a crowded GP’s surgery; it will not be Lumley who has to send  her children to overcrowded schools where English is not the first language of the children; it will not even be Lumley who finds her immediate domestic  territory invaded by the mere presence of so many Ghurkhas because she lives in a house which will be well away from the mess she has created.  That is the plain obnoxious  truth.

But important as all those things are, they are details in a more fundamental loss; the loss of control of territory. Effectively, the Gurhkas have captured part of England.  They have done this with the collusion of the British government and the cohort of media liberals who amplify and fan the demands of foreigners to come to our land.

The permitting of mass migration is a criminal act.  It it is the most profound of all treasons, because unlike foreign invasion by force it cannot  negated simply by acts of war.  The immigrants or their descendants take or obtain through birth citizenship of this country and thus gain a legal legitimacy that no foreign invader can have. Nor can they be driven from the country as a foreign invader might be, because many  will not have a country willing to receive them.

How should Lumley be brought to a realisation of her  actions? I suggest this.  Her home and any other property should be confiscated and used to house native Britons in need of housing.  She should be forced to live in the most meagre of accommodation, preferably in a tower block where she is the only white English resident.  Her wealth should be seized and used to defray the costs of the Gurkha  invasion.  Ditto any  future earnings she receives which are above  the level of the state support for the unemployed.   (Well, a man can dream). Then she might just possibly understand fully what she has done.

As for the Gurkhas, I have long taken the view that the employment of mercenaries (for that is what they are) is simply inappropriate in post-imperial circumstances.  On that ground alone I would dispense with them.  Nor are all  Ghurkhas paragons of devotion to Britain. They may even be using the mass invasion of  Aldershot as a means to an end by suggesting that if the full British pension is  paid in Nepal many would return there:

‘”There are too many cultural and language barriers here,” says Mahendra Lal Rai, the director of the Gaeso centre, and a third-generation Gurkha (his father lost an arm in the Second World War). He lowers his voice and points at the quiet huddle glued to the television. “If they are given equal pensions, many will go back home and live with dignity.”’ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/defence/8339467/The-Gurkhas-in-Aldershot-Little-Nepal.html

As Gerald Howarth says  that smacks of blackmail: “I don’t like the implicit threat over pensions: ‘pay us more and we’ll go back to Nepal’. What am I meant to say to other servicemen? There’s huge competition to become a Gurkha, and they signed up on a pension that bought them a decent standard of living at home.” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/defence/8339467/The-Gurkhas-in-Aldershot-Little-Nepal.html

Amen to that.

This incident is dramatic because of  its  size,  speed and its concentration in one town, but it is symptomatic  of what has happened to England over the past 60 years (the vast majority of UK immigration is into England), namely,  the steady conquest of England by those who will not or cannot assimilate wholly into English  culture. Indeed, many immigrants make active attempts to remain  outside of English culture.  To accept for settlement  such people in vast numbers is to at best import racial and ethnic conflict where it did not exist before and at worst to sound the death knell of England.

The rate of  invasion is increasing. From 1997 onwards Labour in their period of government allowed three million   into Britain ( http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/8339075/More-than-three-million-migrants-under-Labour.html)  This is one of the two primary reasons for the present and growing housing shortage, the other being a failure of governments for over a quarter of a century to ensure that the rate of house building remained buoyant.  More fundamentally, many of those immigrants  have received British citizenship (which  these days given out as easily as  candyfloss at a cinema) and are entitled to vote. A million or  two new voters concentrated in city constituencies can have a big effect of a general election.  It is unlikely that these new voters  will vote for any party which stands on a platform of stopping mass migration and very likely they will vote for politicians who support its continuing. Thus is our political system and society corrupted.  

Those who are old enough to remember what England was before the post-war immigration really took hold – and I am one of them – will know what we have lost. England has gone from being a wonderfully homogeneous country with a great degree of personal liberty in deed and speech  without  any  racial and precious little ethnic conflict where the native population felt utterly at ease because they felt secure in their territory  to a land wracked with ethnic and racial disquiet where the imposition of the totalitarian ideology known as political correctness means a  man can lose  his livelihood or even suffer imprisonment simply  because he has either spoken frankly about the ill effects of immigration or simply expressed his frustration by racially abusing someone in an argument.

We have perhaps another generation to stop this madness.  After that ethnic minorities will probably form a quarter or more of the population and civil war will be the only remedy.

A fundamental malaise

I had this piece published in Wisden Cricket Monthly in 1991. The situation has not changed substantially. The re-entry of South Africa to Test cricket has removed the excuse for South Africans to play for England but this has in practice had little effect, vide Trott and Pietersen in the present side. The position with foreigners in county cricket has significantly worsened following the Kolpak judgement which resulted in the right of anyone with a passport from any EU country and those with associated EU status to work in any EU state.

The foreign invasion of English cricket is matched in all our other important team sports: football, rugby Union and rugby league.  The situation of such sports is an accelerated microcosm of what is happening to English society in general. Those with power, influence and authority are wilfully allowing our country to be invaded (there is no other word which adequately describes what is happening) by those who cannot or will not fully assimilate. It is the most fundamental form of treason because once here they have effectively conquered our territory as they form alien outposts in which they attempt to replicate the cultures from which they came and this isolates their descendants born here.  

                 A Fundamental Malaise

If the loss of the Ashes series [1990/91] is to be a watershed, it must  be  seen for what it is; not just a defeat but  an humiliation; and an humiliation heaped on many others in the past ten years. Until that unsavoury fact is accepted  the process of renewal cannot begin, because the causes of the truly sorry state of English cricket will not be honestly sought. Instead,  comfortable excuses will be made, false   comfort found in thoughts about cricketing cycles, of how things will take a turn for the better simply by the passing of time.

Many reasons have been given for England’s present cricketing weakness; too much limited overs cricket, poor opportunities in the schools and so forth. The problem with these excuses is that other, more successful countries, experience the same difficulties, if difficulties they truly are. This being so, it is reasonable to look for a deeper, more general, cause.

The quality which distinguishes contemporary English cricket from that of other nations is a lack of pride. This I ascribe largely to the destruction of any real sense of national cricketing identity. How can an eleven substantially composed of ex patriot South Africans, Asians and West Indians command any sense of belonging? It is, in effect, no  more than a team of ‘All Stars’. The same defect operates at the county level.  It is this loss of the cricketing equivalent of patriotism, which I believe to be at the bottom of the present failure to produce a worthy England eleven.

Too readily, I fear, British nationality is used as no more than a legal convenience; vide Nasser Hussein, who before departing for the West Indies blithely stated that he thinks of himself as Indian although – how big hearted of him – for cricketing purposes he considers himself to be “English” (this was reported in the Daily Telegraph). And this is a man   who has spent the greater part of his life in England. What then of the Smalls, Lambs, Smiths, and Malcolms who spent either all, or the greater part of their childhoods, in foreign cultures?

The rot began in 1969 when the residential qualifications for county sides were considerably relaxed, and foreign players, both official and unofficial, flooded the county scene. The self-interested such as Imram Khan may argue disingenuously that their presence improves the standard of English players. That this is a demonstrable nonsense can be shown by   reference to the steady decline in England’s performance since 1969, the date at which qualification rules were greatly relaxed. The decline is particularly marked since the  mid nineteen eighties by which time, interestingly, most of the pre-1969 generation of cricketers had retired.

Some might argue that the decline would have been more pronounced without the introduction of foreign players, but  this is an illegitimate form of reasoning.  I can say as a matter of fact that England’s performance has declined since 1969 by reference to the years prior to 1969. No one can say as matter of fact that England’s performance would have been worse since 1969 without the participation of foreign players in county cricket, because there is no point of comparison. The only way to test the matter is to have a comparable period (twenty one years) with foreign players excluded (I say a comparable period because an English first class cricketing generation is approximately twenty years).

The disadvantages arising from foreign players are generally well rehearsed – lack of opportunity for English players, the improvement of foreign players and so forth – but there is a consequence  which I have never seen or heard discussed, in print or over the air, namely, the evasion of responsibility. The general attitude of English players seems to be that of the amateur to the pro in a league side. They assume a   subordinate position to the official foreign players almost as a matter of course. If English players do not feel that they can take the leading part in their county eleven what chance can they have when promoted to the England side?

I believe the qualification for England should be the same as  that which I consider would be a sane basis for the citizenship of any country, namely, the imbibing of a culture.  Where  a man is born  is  irrelevant.  What distinguishes him is his instinctive allegiance to a culture and the assumption in childhood of the manners and values of that culture. The successful ingestion of manners and values produces the social colouring necessary for any coherent society and allows a man’s peers to accept him without question as one of themselves. That unquestioning acceptance is  the only objective test of belonging. The most unhappy and unnatural beings are the Mr Melmottes of the World who ‘…speak half a dozen languages but none like a native.’ These are men without country or psychological place. 1

The problem was crystalised by the Duke of Wellington. To those who insisted on calling him an Irishman he replied “if a man is born in a stable it does not make him an horse”. To this I would add that if a man is born in a house but later chooses to live in a stable, he does not become a horse.

What practical measures can be taken to recreate a true English first class cricketing community? The first step should be to exclude all cricketers classified as “Overseas Players” under the present rules. The second is for counties to agree to a self-denying ordinance to ensure that genuine  EEC nationals and those with passports of convenience, for  example, Kevin Curran, are excluded. The third and most contentious, is to accept only those players who have either spent their childhood in this country or have received what is a effectively a British upbringing abroad – Dermott Reeve would be a good example of the latter. All eligible players would have to pass the test of being accepted as English, Irish, Scotch or Welsh by their peers.

In the coming season we have the prospect of Graham Hick playing for England. Now, as a runscorer (although not as a stylist), I rate Hick very highly indeed. In fact, young as he is, I will stick my neck out and say that he is the nearest thing to another Bradman (although he is no Bradman) the cricketing world has yet seen. Having watched him bat on   five occasions, on all of which he has scored more than fifty, I am left with a memory of the sort of mechanical efficiency which is recorded in contemporary descriptions of the Don. If he played for England I do not doubt that he would score heavily. On cricketing grounds the temptation to include  him in the England side is very great.  Yet objectively, there is no more reason to play Hick now than there was seven years ago. All he has done since then  is  spend approximately half of each year in Britain and refrain  from playing for Zimbabwe. In no discernable sense is he more British now than he was at the age of eighteen. Let the  selectors signal a new beginning by telling Hick openly that they will not select him, now or in the future.

But apart from the question of practical success or failure, there is another reason why English cricket should be restricted to those with a genuine cultural stake in Britain. For me, the present England side mocks the very idea of national teams. Why? Well, it is essentially an aesthetic judgement.  The inclusion of South Africans, West Indians and an Indian in recent elevens offends my sense of rightness or proportion, just as a badly drawn picture or self  conscious acting performance does.

My feelings about the England side apply equally to county cricket. If I go to a county match I want to see twenty two players who have an unquestioned and primary allegiance to Britain. I do not want to see “All Star” elevens. When I see Yorkshire take the field I feel satisfaction, notwithstanding their often disappointing play in recent years. It simply   feels right, that sense of what is fitting again. How sad that the thin end of an extremely broad wedge has been forced into Yorkshire CC during the winter. Let us hope that it is  not the harbinger of something worse.

 1 Melmotte is a character in Trollop’s ‘The Way We Live Now’

Cameron’s “British values” enshrine political correctness

David Cameron’s definition of Britishness contains within it the  three central tenets of political  correctness: racial equality, gay rights and sexual equality. That means anyone, indigenous or immigrant, who does not agree with political correctness is, in NuTory Boy’s eyes,not British. 

This is decidedly sinister. It means that the official Government position now makes  illegitimate those who, for example,  wish to object to mass immigration on the grounds that it is a surreptitious form of conquest, anyone who refuses to accept that civil partnership is equal to marriage or those who reject the idea that sexual equality means there must be women in equal numbers to men  in  every form of employment.

Cameron is also being disingenuous. Just before the last general election the Equalities Act 2010 (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/section/4)  was passed with all-party support. The Act  has jurisdiction over what are termed ”protected characteristics” . These are:   age; disability; gender reassignment; marriage and civil partnership; pregnancy and maternity; race; religion or belief; sex; sexual orientation 

The key characteristics are  “race” and “religion or belief”.  The whole apparatus of UK public service (including schools) are required to “protect” all the categories. “Protecting”  race and religion or belief means in practise that multiculturalism will be preserved. To take one example, it will be impossible to teach British history honestly because it would be deemed either insulting or excluding to ethnic minorities.   Disability and marriage also offer opportunities for the reinforcement of multiculturalism.

The cultural fragmentation of the UK also has the devolution dimension. Where do  ethnic minorities actually stand in  a devolved UK? German-born Labour MP   Gisela  Stuart  writing in online  magazine  openDemocracy.net  in December 2005 described  the problem, whilst also gaily  insulting  the English:  “It  has only been in the last five years or so that  I  have heard  people  in my constituency telling me ‘I am not British –  I  am English’. That worries me.

“British  identity is based on and anchored in its political and  legal institutions  and this enables it to take in new entrants  more  easily than  it would be if being a member of a nation were to be  defined  by blood.

“But a democratic polity will only work if citizens’  identification is with  the community as a whole,  or at least with the  shared  process, which  overrides their loyalty to a segment.”   (Quoted  in  Birmingham Mail 18 11 2005)

The  problem  for  people such as Ms Stuart  is  that  Britishness  was destroyed by  devolution.  There is no longer a comfortable overarching label of British under which everyone can be placed.  All that is  left for the people of Britain to cling to are emotional ethnicities.  

The  situation   is most acute in England because  that  is  where  the majority of ethnic minorities in the UK live.  There is  hard  evidence that ethnic minorities in England  routinely do not think of themselves as  English.   In 2005,   the CRE  commissioned from the research  firm Ethnos  a  poll designed to discover how Britons   identify  themselves (http://www.cre.gov.uk/downloads/what_is_britishness.pdf).  A couple of passages  are particularly telling:

“In  England,  white  English  participants  identified  themselves  as English  first and British second,  while ethnic minority  participants perceived themselves as British. None identified as English, which they saw as meaning exclusively white people.”

“Britishness  was  associated  with  great  historical  and   political achievements,  but  only  amongst white  participants  (whether  from England,   Scotland  or  Wales),   not  those  from   ethnic   minority backgrounds”.

This tells us two things: ethnic minorities in England routinely reject the idea of Englishness and ethnic minorities everywhere in the UK have no identification with Britain’s past. So much for Britishness.

Want to win literary competitions? Pretend you’re black

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

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

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

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

See also comments at http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2011/02/want_to_win_lit.php

Now for the story.

——————————————–

Black

Robert Henderson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Jesus! What a fucking mess!

The future of Englishness in films

It  may  be that the present popularity of Englishness  in  films  will pass,  although it shows no sign of doing so soon.  But  even if overtly English films do not maintain their  present  high global profile the use of English actors, whether playing “English”  or not,   will  surely  continue for there is an immense cast list  of  acting talent  in  England – I never cease to marvel at exactly how  good  the average English actor is.

There is a problem with films projecting Englishness , a narrowness of subject. What is missing from most modern English films, or at least those which get a wide release,   is the representation of English society  outside  the  middle  and  upper classes,  something  which was  the  staple  of  British  cinema  in the Fifties and Sixties.  Films set in  the  second world war have been long out of fashion – these by their nature  tended to depict  people of all classes – and there is nothing equivalent  now to  the flow of Ealing comedies and their ilk or even the  Carry  On films.

Good  films  which  deal with a broader range of  English  society  and character are still being made.  Some of the best in the last 15  years are Croupier, Last Orders,  Nil by Mouth, Twenty-four Hour People, Sexy Beast,   Human Traffic, The Full Monty,  Football Factory, and My Summer of Love  and many of the films of by Mike Leigh,  especially  Life  is Sweet,  High Hopes,  Naked,  Career Girls, last orders  and  Vera Drake.   But these,  with the odd exceptions such as The Full Monty  and Vera Drake, get little international exposure.

Nonetheless,  the  fact that films such as the Full Monty and  the  two Guy  Ritchie  “mockney”  gangster films Lock,  Stock  and  Two  Smoking Barrels   and  Snatch  did  have  significant  international   success, including  success  in  America,  does suggest that  the  appetite  for Englishness  is not  simply a liking  for middle class and upper  class Englishness.  It  could  be  that it is simply  a  lack  of  widespread distribution  of  films with workingclass English settings  that  sways Englishness   in   modern   films  towards   the   middle/upper   class representation.

It is a great shame that such films do not get a broader release.  Take a  film  like  Last Orders.  The cast alone tells you  it  is  worth  seeing:  Michael Caine,  Bob Hoskins, Ray Winstone,  Tom  Courtney, David  Hemmings and Helen Mirren.   It  is  a  film  which  traces  the  lives  of  four  working class Englishmen from the 1930s to almost the present day. It is  a master class in showing how even the lives of the poor  can carry  the  full  weight  of  drama.   I doubt whether it was shown  on  a  hundred  screens in England.

Sadly, the greatest  problem for our filmmakers is  getting  their   films into cinemas,  not least  because  the  main distributors  in Britain concentrates  almost  exclusively  on  “safe”  commercial films backed by massive marketing,  which  means  in practice the showing  of  “surefire” Hollywood products. Many English films never see a cinema screen and others receive such  a limited distribution they might as well have been left in the can. Many do not deserve to, especially those funded by lottery money. That public money  would  have  been better spent buying  a  national  distribution network.  That would have given British filmmakers the reassurance that  if  they  produced  something  halfway decent it  would  get  a  decent distribution.  Fewer  films would be made no doubt but  more  would  be worthy of showing widely and more would be shown.   A more rounded view of Englishness would also be on show.  Variety being the spice of life, that  would  be  the greatest guarantee of  the  continuing  health  of English cinema,  for there can only be so much of a market for one type of Englishness.

America’s love-hate affair with England in films

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

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

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

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

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

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

The  English were the numerically dominant settlers from the  Jamestown settlement  in 1607 until the Revolution.  Moreover,  and this  is  the vital  matter,  they were overwhelmingly the dominant settlers for  the first  one  hundred years.  Even  in 1776  English  descended  settlers formed,  according to the historical section of the American Bureau  of Census,  nearly sixty percent of the population and the majority of the rest of the white population was from the non-English parts of Britain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The appetite for Englishness in films

What qualifies as a “culturally English film”?  How about this:   it is a film which either has an English context such as The Libertine or has a  cast  which  consists wholly or largely of  English  actors  playing “English”, for example, Girl with  Pearl Earing.

English  themes  and English actors have always had a good bite of  the Anglophone filmic cherry,  but they are making   a particularly  strong showing in recent years.  A look at the all time global box office, that is,  money taken solely at the box office, is revealing.

Of  the ten  largest grossing English language films in history,  six  have an indubitably English ambiance:   Alice in Wonderland (Tim Burton), Lord of the Rings: the return of the king  and two each of the Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Carribean.  The odd men out are Avatar, Titanic, Toy Story 3 and  the Dark Knight.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films

Three of the odd men out  have significant  English  flavour,  whether from overtly  English  characters  (Titanic, Shrek) ,   a  story  with  English  associations (Titanic) or actors using an English persona (Star Wars,  for  example, the  characters of Obi wan Kenobi,  the Galactic President and   C3PO).

The six highest grossing English language film franchises are in descending order Harry Potter, Star Wars, James Bond, Shrek, Lord of the Rings, Pirates of the Carribean.  http://finance.yahoo.com/family-home/article/111362/highest-grossing-film-franchises . Of these only Star Wars and Shrek do not have a specifically English tone.   (The Chronicles of Narnia and  His Dark Materials – both very English in tone – also have the making of lasting franchises. )

It is true that those  films and franchises are are ranked on revenues unadjusted for inflation.* However, that does not stop them for being a a good  pointer to what was popular.  What they tell us is that there is a considerable appetite for Englishness amongst modern film goers. (It is also true that adjusting for inflation has its problems  because of changing exchange rates and multiplying tickets sold by an average present-day ticket price is a dubious practice because ticket sale data is often dubious, especially for older films).

What is the attraction of Englishness?

It  is obvious why Englishness should have appeal within  England,  but why does it have international appeal? The fact that we have English is our  language might seem  a significant advantage internationally,  but it  is  doubtful whether that advantage actually counts  for  much   in practice  because English films are competing against large numbers  of other  Anglophone films,  including the output of the most potent  film industry in the world, that of America.

If  it  is not the language is it  the nature of the  films  themselves which attract?  Perhaps part of the  reason for the recent success lies in the type of Englishness that is  generally  depicted.  What  foreign audiences see most are versions of  middle and upper class Englishness.

Often  this  is a version of Englishness which has a  large  dollop  of fantasy such as  that shown in “Notting Hill”  or is Englishness in  an historical  setting,  with Jane Austen and  Dickens   adaptions   being perennial favourites.  But even these films,  somewhat distant as  they may  be from the realities of modern English life,  still have  a  very English feel to them. The settings are English,  the voices are English and above all the  personalities are English.

Such  films  have  the  dramatic advantage of  both  appealing  to  the foreigner’s general stereotype of the English, which is largely derived from the English middle and upper classes, and of providing unusual and glamorous settings.  Such themes and settings also mean these are often characters   who have influence and power and a good deal to lose,  all good dramatic material.

There  is also the legacy of the British Empire,  an institution  which was  not only dominated by the English in terms of personnel  but  also culturally – the history and literature taught to colonial peoples  was English  to  the end and the institutions implanted –  Parliaments  and Common  Law – were English institutions.  Even after the end of  Empire the   BBC,  particularly the World Service,  continued to  project  the middle/upper  class version of Englishness through the dominant use  of received pronunciation speakers.

The   Empire   was  an institution  which  affected  not  merely  those peoples  and  territories  which were  formally  colonised   but  other  countries such as Argentina,   countries which were  heavily influenced  by English capital and settlers.   Nor was the Empire simply that which existed at its end,  vast as that  was in both geographical and  ethnic scope.  There  is  also  the USA, which  was  an  English  founded  and culturally dominated state, hence the fact that its language is English and  its  most  important public  institutions  variations  of  English institutions. More of the USA later.

Perhaps  there is also a purely aesthetic aspect of the attraction.  It could  be that the English middle class/upper class persona  is  simply arresting,  interesting in itself. In particular,  perhaps that persona seems specially  apt for characters in position of power and privilege.

It  is  worth noting that important  people  in English language  films dealing  with  historical  subjects  have  long  been  acknowledged  by Hollywood   to  be best played by English received  pronunciation  (RP) speakers.  This  trait began early in the history of  the  Talkies  and continues to this day.  In the recent film Troy only Brad Pitt  playing Achilles “disgraced” himself by  not being able to muster a serviceable RP  voice.  Received  pronunciation and the  persona  it  creates   may naturally   seem  authoritative not merely to the English but  to  many other peoples, even if those peoples are not naturally well disposed to the English.

The dramatic shape  of English films must also play its part.  Take the three great English “franchises”:   LOTR, Harry Potter and James  Bond. In  addition to their Englishness they  all have  very strong  dramatic architecture.

Tolkein wrote the Lord of the Rings as a conscious attempt to create an English  myth  and  he does admirably  evoke  a  rural  pre-industrial,  timeless  England.    He also succeeded in creating an English Odyssey, a  world  full of the magical and fantastical.   Harry  Potter  is  the English public school story brought up to date and cunningly mixed with magic and co-education. Bond is the spy thriller plus social cachet.

The LOTR appeals to  the deep human  thirst   for myths,  of  something utterly beyond the everyday. It is a world of trolls and magicians,  of warriors  and beautiful high born ladies.   Tolkein  is first  rate  at creating  archetypes,  especially   Sauran (Evil),  Gandulf  (the  good magician  with a touch of the messiah) and Aragorn (the  perfect  hero, noble  in thought and deed,  beautiful,   great at arms,   gracious  in manner,  brave  beyond what is human and above all  utterly  resolute).

LOTR attracts for the same reasons the Odyssey and Iliad have  captured the  imagination  for the better part of  three thousand years.  It  is epic.

The  English public school story succeeds firstly because it is  gives, Jane Austen-like, a small, enclosed  society upon which to hang a drama. The  traditional English Public school story has verve.  The  boys  are anything  but  solemn.  There  is a good  variety  of  personality  and  interest.  There is competition within forms,  within houses,  and with other  schools.  Games loom large. The interplay between characters  is between adults and children,  something which is rare in other types of films where children are generally absent or peripheral.  But   the  success  of the public school story  is  more  than  just  a  setting. One only has to see an American attempt at the same theme such as  Dead  Poets  Society to realise that merely setting a  story  in  a boarding school is not enough. Dead Poets Society is dreadfully earnest and  the boys so lacking in genuine high spirits as to be mere  wraiths compared to the robust English fictional schoolboy in the line from Tom Brown  and Scud East onwards through to Bob Cherry and  William Brown.

There  is  an  essence of Englishness which needs to be  added  to  the setting. The Harry Potter phenomenon is not difficult to explain.  Add magic  to the   traditional   public  school  mixture  and   the   already   rich opportunities for plot and character are greatly multiplied.  Children, despite  the  hype  about adult Potter devotees,   make  up  the  large majority  of  Potter  fans.  They naturally  gravitate  towards  school stories   because it is their world. Children also adore  the  idea  of magic,  not  least because the world of  children,  particularly  young children,  is subjectively magical because the child  is  inexperienced and   deals  with  what they do not understand by  comforting  acts  of imagination.    The secret of HP’s success is Rowling’s creation  of  a convincing  children’s  world  which  includes   the  escape  from  the everyday.

As  for Bond,  spy stories  are of course widely popular but none  have the  glamour or lasting power of Bond.  That is because   Bond is  much more  than  a spy.  He is a state authorised killer but  he is  also  a gent,  an old Etonian,  expelled at the age of 14 for having an  affair with  one of the school’s maids,  and a practised seducer of  women  in adult life.  Such a background allows him to move in privileged circles with  their concomitant glamour.   Bond  is a gentleman heavy  just  as Raffles  is  a gentleman burglar.  He gives  the viewer the  thrill  of violence and sex wrapped in gentility.

The irrelevance of “relevance”

The  success  of films such as LOTR and Harry Potter dismay  those  who believe  that  people  will  only show an interest  in  that  which  is relevant to their lives.  How, they wail,  can people  be so fascinated by   the  depiction  of societies so unlike,  at  least  superficially, their  own  experience?  How  can the  creatures  of  privilege  be  so attractive?   The  obvious answer is simple:  human beings  most  enjoy dramas  which  are removed from the familiar mandating   of  their  own lives.

There  is  nothing  new in this. Shakespeare’s plays are  full  of  the doings  of kings,   nobles and gentry which dominate the doings of  the common  man,   yet  from  their  first  performances   they  played  to audiences  with  a  large  proportion drawn from  the  lower  ranks  of society.  Films   from their early days have done a  roaring  trade  in showing  the  great at work and play.    In the heyday of  the  British boys’  comic,  George Orwell wrote an essay wondering about the immense fascination which the Greyfriars stories (those with Billy Bunter,  Bob Cherry et al) held for working class boys who bought the Magnet in vast numbers.  They  did  so for the same reason  that  workingclass  adults watched  films  of lives different  from  their own but not so removed from their understanding to be alien: it provided  exciting  novelty without weirdness.  That is probably much of the answer  to why Englishness is popular in film today.

*In  real  terms  earlier films such as Gone With  the  Wind  had  world  grosses  larger than the films listed above,  but the circumstances  of  modern  film distribution are completely different from what they  were  when Gone with the Wind was made (1940),  or even what they were twenty  years  ago.  When  Gone With the Wind came out the  only  way  for  the  ordinary  person to see a film when it was released was in a cinema,  a  situation  which essentially remained   until the advent of  videotape.  Now the ordinary person can not only go to the cinema, they can get the film  not long after its release on DVD and often see it on  television within a year.