Norman Tebbit
We are who we are by our parents’ genes, by our inheritance of history and culture and our own experience of life.
That inheritance of history may reach back to a time before one’s family came to this island - in the case of my father’s line, in the 16th century. So, to be English today is to be an inheritor of the most powerful language in the world - literature, art, science and technology, even sport, which have done so much to shape the world, and a philosophy or culture of government which has permeated not just the Anglosphere but great countries such as India.
We English are not an introspective people. We rarely think about England (except in the field of sport) unless something malfunctions. As for Britishness, that wider concept is a way of sharing with others living in this kingdom their history and culture and our own. It provides a banner around which we can all rally for mutual aid and strength.
Since the English have influenced and been influenced by almost every other nation we know that how others see us is as much about what they are as what we are. From time to time, if it seems to affect our interests we become anxious about that, especially if we are seen as weak, a soft touch or an unreliable friend, but being mostly content within our collective English skin we are neither extrovert nor introspective and leave others to make of us what they will.
Tolerant as we are, we do not require outsiders who come to live there to put on an English identity - but we do ask that they respect not just us but our English house - its fabric and its customs. Should they not like it we would not wish to detain them there - but if they and their children wish to join our tribe we see no reason to discriminate either against them or in their favour.
Quietly, as we look back at what the English family has done, what it has given to the wider world, we take pride - not arrogant nor puffed up pride, but honest pride in our history. That pride is patriotism and without it societies disintegrate into no more than crowds jostling for shoulders in one place.
For the English the modern cry for devolution sounds like a struggle to put back the clock and chop up the United Kingdom which has been of mutual benefit to all us British islanders. If that is what the others want so be it, but they should not think that they can have both their independence bun and their halfpenny too.
However, the concept of England is changing. The false doctrines of multiculturalism and the authoritarians preaching the doctrine of the big state ruling a citizenry denied the strengths of family and of religion and of history, has ruptured the English consensus. A growing underclass, the like of which England had not seen for centuries, rootless, feckless, ill educated and violent, has begun to infest England’s great cities. The ballast of the respectable working and middle class families is shifting.
They may look for a while at outsiders from the Continent of Europe to resolve our difficulties - as the Romans and Normans did in their time - and the political classes of Brussels are eager to do today. Or they may look to an English hero - a twenty first century King Alfred - to define as he did what it meant to be English.
His victory at Edington was the birth of England and the English which led through to the Magna Carta, the Tudors, the Empire, the Reform Acts and the 20th century wars to the flowering of an English culture whose power and reach has been rivaled only by that of China at its greatest.
The English must soon choose. To succumb like Italy after Rome - or to rediscover what Alfred found in Wessex a thousand years ago.
The Rt Hon Lord Tebbit, Conservative politician and former Member of Parliament for Chingford.
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On yer bike!
Charlie Marks
27 Nov 08 at 3:13 pm
“A growing underclass, the like of which England had not seen for centuries, rootless, feckless, ill educated”
And ill mannered I would say too.
JohnJo
28 Nov 08 at 3:18 am
I hope you understand that my above comment is intended to be satirical. Mr Tebbit instructed the victims of his party’s managed decline of manufacturing to get on their bikes and find another job. If there’s a rootless, feckless underclass it’s the result of mass unemployment which destroyed countless families and plunged entire communities into despair.
Charlie Marks
1 Dec 08 at 3:56 pm
I guess that Mr Marks is part of the “festering classes ” that curently haunt this island -perhaps Mr Marks should connect with his past to see that England saved his people once –not so long ago
Max
3 Dec 08 at 3:38 pm
on yer bike Charlie Marx. The “entire communties” of which you speak were themselves created, for the most part, by previous generations who had themselves been uprooted and moved to mining and industrial centres. They were not plunged into despair but created the self-reliant, self-respecting working class of my youth. The difference is welfarism.
recovering liberal
5 Dec 08 at 5:50 am
A sharply observed essay, and while I am not familiar with the ‘bun and halfpenny’ analogy, I think I understand, and agree with, the sentiment.
Alfred discovered cakes in Wessex, he burnt them though.
Bart Hulley
8 Dec 08 at 3:15 pm
Scotland is currently having its cake and eating England’s - that’s why we want devolution.
Devolution means we keep the UK Parliament for Defence, Foreign Policy, economic policy. A devolved English Parliament would (re)balance the Union.
MiddleEnglander
12 Dec 08 at 6:56 am
I think we are increasingly thinking of England everyday because it is disappearing before our very eyes. Clearly something IS malfunctioning. Something is wrong!
To talk about influencing and being influenced by, indicates more of an outward-looking British point of view of England, rather than the fact of our parents genes, our inheritance, our English history traditions and culture etc, and of course, our own current experience of life. The fact is that we English have greatly affected and influeced the British perspective on life and love through our dominance of these islands and the wider world for so long. We have genuinely been influenced so very little by anyone ourselves - and this influence is probably only superficial anyway.
If Britain and the British were to just disappear from power in England, I’m absolutely certain that we (the English People) would revert back to our natural mode of peaceful living almost overnight…..and so would all the British remnant still living here because crime would no longer be fashionable.
English tolerance is known the world over, but tolerance has its upper limits. I think that we may be about to discover what these limits are. England is 83% of the UK and we (English) must control at least 83% of its budget. Any country or political organisation which believes that it can sieze our money and valuables (for whatever purpose), and think that can get away with it, will soon understands what it means to try to steal from the English using only statutes to protect them. The law is what The People say it is, and not what Monarch, Courts, Government, or Parliament say.
A King Alfred figure would be right for a rebellion in the 1st century AD, but our experiences of prosecting urban conflicts in Ulster, in Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afganistan, clearly indicates that the rebellion must take a very different form, but, it must be as equally reasonable as the British have been brutal in persuading people as to their true national identity.
Adrian Thurston
18 Dec 08 at 4:26 pm
The government that you were a part of presided over the destruction of so much of our manufacturing base and changed our island to that of a bunch of ’spivs and plug-changers’. We now have an island that is inundated by migrants and immigrants. We are not allowed to complain without being called racist. Migrant workers take British jobs whilst the lost, last white tribe stay at home in political slumber drugged on the soma of state welfare. And as we sink, “Dave” Cameron is akin to the dormouse in Alice in Wonderland. The destruction of our way of life and culture is the result, punishment even, for having once dominated the world and having shone like few counties ever have.
Charles Smith
3 Feb 09 at 5:31 am
“The destruction of our way of life and culture is the result, punishment even, for having once dominated the world and having shone like few counties ever have.”
I totally agree, what goes around comes around!
Mappy
16 Feb 09 at 12:29 pm
All this emphasis on tradition and heritage…yes it’s pretty and it’s interesting but if it’s a choice between maintaining it and helping people people should win hands down. Who cares whose ancestors did what? we’re all people and we’re all here now!
PeaceDove
14 Apr 09 at 4:56 pm
to be english is a matter of choice .it is the only way to save england
david johnson
17 May 09 at 9:06 am
Lets be honest here. We the English people alive now, have not invaded any countries. It was the British! Irish, Scots, Welsh and others who claim to be British. The English as people are not guilty of colonising ect.n becuase we have been colonised our selfs and controlled for centuries. The worst colonising that goes on now, is by peoples from third world countries. And lets face it. our Monarchy isn’t English is it! What what goes around comes around, and one day the English people will have their revenge on all these hostiles.
Andrew Balmbra
11 Jun 09 at 6:17 am
Destruction has come with our so called ‘democracy’ which provides for a FPTP ‘winner takes all’ dictatorship.
By allowing this to prevail we have allowed politicians to override the wishes of the ’sheeple’ and construct a control system for their suppression.
Doug White
20 Aug 09 at 6:32 am
Middle Englander calls for an English Parliament. The last thing England needs is yet more Government.
More MPs, working in more premises, served by more bureaucrats and claiming more expenses? No thanks.
(You can bet that as soon as an English Parliament is elected they would want lavish premises to rival those in Cardiff and Edinburgh.)
How much better is UKIP’s policy of sending MPs for Welsh constituencies back to Cardiff and MPs for Scottish ones to Edinburgh for one week a month - leaving MPs for English constituencies at Westminster.
They can all then discuss matters that are relevent to their individual parts of the United Kingdom.
Mike Smith
17 Feb 10 at 8:32 am
Interesting blog, as an expat Brit, now living in Argentina, this was especially interesting.
Buck Presson
26 Feb 10 at 7:18 am
Usual stuff and nonsense from this leather studded ranter. Inheritor of the most powerful literature in the world???? Absolute rubbish and a typical insult to the heritage and culture of other people and their countries.
Roy Terrs
8 May 10 at 11:05 am