Unity

Thanks. Interesting theory. However, if that’s right then Dacre has now messed up by adding “don’t marry a foreigner” to the new Britishness test rules for Clegg – as he’s now excluded the Queen too.

There’s also, of course, Winston Churchill…

While the argument about the artificiality of britishness is correct, its greatest potential strength is that it has always been the civic identity for a multinational state,
and so never an ethnic or national identity.

Other national/ethnic identities may have needed to develop a broader civic component, but Britain ought to have the advantage of clarity about that distinction, which also means it has therefore always incorporated plural identities alongside a common Britishness: attempts to obliterate these by insisting that the Scots were ‘North Britons’ etc have always tended to fail.

The existence and content of British identity therefore depends on
1. maintaining majorities who wish to be British across the different nations of Britain.

2. deciding what the content of that common citizenship is – eg the best way to deal with its potential lack of definition is probably to negotiate a political constitution.

3. Each constituent part also needing to work out how and whether to combine the “British and English” “British and Scottish” identities against those who want to seek to (legitimately) develop a democratic majority for being Scottish/Welsh/English and not British, a project which only has minority suppot at present, though certainly the content of an English dimension to being British is something that many people feel needs to be developed.

So, we have those stating ‘being born in a stable doesn’t make a dog into a horse’ which is true. That’s because horses and dogs are different species. Families even. Whereas, humans are all one species. What this really means is that there are some who confuse ‘race’ and ‘species’. Ill-educated morons, mostly, but they are manipulated and brain-washed (insomuch as there is a brain to wash) by those who know better but are happy to let the great British population believe what they’re told even if it’s arrant nonsense.

It would of course take the deeply unpleasant Daily Mail to plumb such depths.

Nick Clegg is more than British enough, and as for the “Who cares?” question, anyone who does instantly forfeits any shred of political or moral respectability they might have had.

It always made me laugh how Thatcher’s cronies were so desperate to make immigration an issue, when they were themselves of immigrant stock… Portillo, Lawson, Howard etc.

I’m more concerned that Clegg is apparentlly a species of (probably) nocturnal lepidoptera on his maternal side than the fact he’s half Dutch.

I mean, I know the Lib Dems are a bit fly-by-night…

“Dacre”, eh?

Any relation to Alexander de Dacre, 12th Century immigrant from France?

http://www.hayloft.eu/dacre.html

I think we should be told.

“Pretty much every other trace of indiginous culture on the Celtic fringes was wiped out by the English after the buggers had the nerve to fight back and almost all what people think of, today, as Scottish or Welsh culture dates back no further than the mid-19th century and the beginning of the Welsh and Scottish nationalist movements.”

C’mon. The last truly English monarch in Britain was Richard III, who was implicated in the murder of the young princes in the Tower, including Edward V, the true claimant to the throne:
http://www.medieval-life-and-times.info/medieval-kings/edward-v-biography.htm

Richard III was famously killed at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/leicestershire/8523386.stm

His successor as monarch, Henry Tudor, who became Henry VII, was Welsh. The illustrious Tudor line ended with the death of Elizabeth in 1603 and she was succeeded by James I (and VI of Scotland), the first of the Stewarts, who originally came from Scotland. The Stewarts were eventually succeeded in 1714 by the Hanoverians in the person of George I, who couldn’t even speak English.

“The thing that puzzled me at the time was that of the reasoning behind making your grandparents the arbitrary cut-off point for the Mail’s definition of British?”

Perhaps, at the risk of ruining a fairly decent joke, you should have thought a little longer.

“A grandparent” is often used a a mark of eligibility for citizenship. My right to Irish citizenry depends upon having one grandparent born on the island of Ireland. My eligibility to play rugby for Ireland or Wales (barring the age and lack of talent things) depends upon having a grandparent from those places.

Rules have changed recently, to what I don’t know, but there’s an awful lot of Ozzies and Kiwis etc with the right to either a passport or a work permit in the UK on the bais of a grandparent born here.

“A grandparent” is, as I say, often used as exactly the definition of who is pontentially “one of us” and who is not in a legal sense about citizenship.

So the notion of nations and nation-states that are build around a people comes from germany, eh? And that after the germans lived together in a loose confederation, the Holy german Empire, then in a mix form of federation and confederation in the German Reich under the Kaiser (The Reich had 4 Armies, the prussian, saxonian, bavarian, and wurtemberg armies… not just one “german army”)
Oh, or is it only the “positive” thing about nations come from Britain and France, while all “negative” things come from germany? Good thing you dont have any racist views yourself….

Plus ca change…

How many British grandparents do you need to qualify? I ask as my grandfather was born in Canada, my friend’s was born in Uganda, his wife is half Moroccan, (so 2 British, 2 not), meaning their daughter has one non British grandparent. Which, (if any of us), is actually British?

Maybe the Mail will change from supporting the Tories to the BNP next?

The last truly English monarch in Britain was Richard III…

Norman flibbertgibbet. The last truly English monarch was Aethelred the Unraede. Even Harold Godwinson was half Danish.

Oh dear! Disraeli’s grandparents were immigrants to Britain, which presumably means he should never have been prime minister:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Disraeli

If memory serves, he was responsible for making Queen Victoria Empress of India so that has serious implications.

[3] “While the argument about the artificiality of britishness is correct” – yes, but only in so far as ALL social phenomena is a construct (driven, of course by a complex set of random historical events).

Presumably the corollary implies that Irishness, Scottishness or being Welsh are equally artificial – ditto religion (etc, etc)?

So in a sea of artifice how do we decide what has value and who gets to make the call, a key question of course, about the ‘correct’ way to label things – unless you are arguing that ‘values’ themselves are but a deeper layer of the artifice onion?

@9 Tim W

So if none my grandparents were born in Britain but both my parents were what would that make me?

Can you see why this is a load of nonsense?

BTW, I used some of the paragraphs from the infamous Daily Mail article and swapped the words Nick and Clegg with Queen Elizabeth II.
This is the result.

10
There is an argument that fascism emerged in Germany because of previous folk-race ideas which best suited the niotion of a common biological/national identity, Considering the liberal state of Germany in the late19th century and it’s technological and scientific superiority, it was quite easy for the nazis to sell an idea which had it’s roots in neo-paganism and supernatural powers.
Unlike Italy, in which, the national identity was based upon Roman Catholicism and anyone could become a member of the nation-state providing they were catholics.

Sunder:

I should have, perhaps, been a little explicit in stating that the artificiality of the British nationality as a feature rather than a flaw. Its because it primarily a political construct and lack much of the baggage of ties to ethnicity and an individual culture that it works so as a civic identity.

Richard III was framed.

Henry Tudor did it.

He became King, found some princes who were before him in the lien of succession and knocked them off.

My dad was born in Venezuala to Welshmen (well, welshman and welshwoman), so I guess I better get busy deporting myself. I also failed that citizenship test which did the rounds at the end of last year, so I’m really screwed!

Bob B:

I’m with Tim J on the identity of the last genuinely English monarch but as far as the Tudors go, Henry VII’s Welsh ancestry was a bit neither here nor there after Henry IV saw off the Glendwr rebellion, much as befell the Scots after Culloden.

As a Scot I find it interesting that the English (or at least most of them) have such a stunted sense of their own nationality. “Englishness” is actually quite a difficult thing for most people to define. I think many Scots and Welsh people see themselves as British second, and Scots or Welsh first.

Perhaps that’s why the rabid “little Englander” anti-Europeanism if much of the political right in this country has always amused me. We live in a pretty good example of an “association” of nation states which seemed to work pretty well for quite a few centuries, for all it’s manifest faults. It seems something of a lack of imagination to be able to see that a European confederation couldn’t be made to work in the modern era.

Kimi:

I think you’re reading too much into my comments so to clarify with a bit of potted history of nationhood.

Probably the earliest example of nation state based on common ethnicity would be the Han Chinese.

As far as basing a national state on a common religion I can;t think of anything that predates Israel, in its biblical rather than modern sense.

In terms of developing from a top down civic identity, England would be about the earliest I can think of while the earliest that emerged from bottom-up was likely the Dutch following the Treaty of Utrecht.

What Germany provided was the ideological concept of a nation state which sits at the core of modern day political nationalism. Try reading Fichte or Herder and you’ll get the general gist of what I mean.

Oh, just in case anyone thinks of throwing Rome, the Babylonians or the Ancient Egyptians in as spoilers, they were all multi-ethnic, multiculturals empires, as were the Ottomans.

“So if none my grandparents were born in Britain but both my parents were what would that make me?”

Apologies, I dind’t explain very clearly. “One grandparent” is the least for citizenship, work permit and eligibility requirements.More than that (and yes, of course a or both parents is more than that) is simply greater qualification.

Please note I’m not talking about any “blood” or “race” rubbish. I’m talking about what actually is the law.

As a Scot I find it interesting that the English (or at least most of them) have such a stunted sense of their own nationality.

I have to disagree. I do think that the more rabid ‘Little Englanders’ suffer from that problem but most of us are pretty secure in our knowledge of who and what we are.

What, I think, puzzles people looking from the outside that Englishness is less a national identity and more a matter of being privy to series of unstated mutual understandings that bind us together in ways that, perhaps, only ever become apparent when we get into a bind and our backs are against the wall.

That’s perhaps the defining quality of the English – we’re entirely relaxed about getting on with our own live and doing own thing because we know, deep down, that when a crisis comes we’ll all put together to get through it…

…then we’ll sit down and have nice cup of tea.

@ Unity

I’m not sure what is meant by “civic identity” as a concept, whether top down or bottom-up. I think there are probably a number of earlier manifestations of “self regarding” nations.. Scotland and Portugal for example both have long histories in more or less their current locations.

Interestingly the early medieval Scottish kingdom, tho’ ethnically quite diverse, was quite successful in creating a sense of “Scottishness” which over-arched ethnic and linguistic differences, differentiated them from their larger predatory neighbour, and introduced the novel concept that a bad sovereign could be overthrown by his people.

Much of the Scottish nobility which fought in the Wars of Independence was of Norman French origin, and held lands in England. Similarly, much of the population of southern Scotland were linguistically and “ethnically” indistinguishable from people in Northern England.

My point I suppose, is that the Scots (like the British..?) were a mish mash of different groups who forged a common identity. The things which came to be seen as uniquely “Scottish” became more important to them than other factors which might have served to drive them apart.

Having four British born gran-parents doesn’t make you any more British than if you were born abroad, came here as an adult and became a British citizen.

@ Unity 24

“I have to disagree. I do think that the more rabid ‘Little Englanders’ suffer from that problem but most of us are pretty secure in our knowledge of who and what we are.”

Don’t get me wrong, I think most English people have a pretty healthy attitude towards nationality, and I agree they are secure in their knowledge of who and what they are.

My point was rather that many English people regard English and British as more or less the same thing, and that for a whole host of reasons (cultural, historical, political..) your average Scot or Welsh person has an easier time of defining their nationality than an average English person would. It is arguable that the Little Englanders and loony right “appropriated” English nationalism, and made it seem rather disreputable, which I think is unfortunate.

There is a lot to be said for the stereotypical view of the reasonable, liberty loving English. Sadly it doesn’t often seem to be reflected in the likes of the Daily Mail… or New Labour for that matter!

Galen10 @21:

“We learn to be ashamed before we walk
Of the way we look and the way we talk”

… to quote Steve Knightley. White Guilt + Imperial Guilt produces the phenomenon you describe. I first realised this in 1994, after I’d had a year to process the shock of coming back to live in the UK for the first time and was stunned at how embarrassed the English were. It looked rather Canadian to me at the time.

@25:

Interestingly the early medieval Scottish kingdom, tho’ ethnically quite diverse, was quite successful in creating a sense of “Scottishness” which over-arched ethnic and linguistic differences

Saving your reverence, this just isn’t true. The main reason Edward I hammered the Scots is that at that time there was no such sense of Scottishness. There were clan lands and loyalties which more or less functionally equivalent to the English counties, though not geographical; and the “King” in Scotland controlled rather less than half of the peoples and about 2/5ths of the land that is now subject to control from the Scottish Parliament. The Highlands, in particular, did not come to consider themselves as part of the Scottish nation until well into the late medieval period, or early rennaissance. The early medieval period is more or less 850-1150 in Scotland, 800-1066 in England. [1]

“England” was four (or more!) kingdoms til the 890s and didn’t get properly organised until Henry I & II; and it is not coincidental that barring the Despensers, nearly all the major rebellions in the high middle ages started north of Warwick.

Both what is now Wales and what is now Scotland got organised much later than what is now England. In the most brief terms possible, the reason for that was the Age of Invasions (many of which were raids by Scots and Welsh and Irish into what is now England) followed by William the Bastard setting fire to the places that pissed him off. Add Domesday Boke and follow it with Henry II’s King’s Bench and then Magna Carta, and that’s pretty much the whole of modern England on the inside pissing out. At which poiint, all of a sudden, the English started winning fights, because they were mostly fighting against divided enemies. And were lucky enough to have more lads and more money (now that the bits William had burned down, like Yorkshire, were economically viable again). Agh, I can’t be brief about this stuff even when I try, sorry. The above is inevitably very simplified for brevity, but is a reasonable summary of a very complex topic.

My point was rather that many English people regard English and British as more or less the same thing

This is a oft-repeated idea which I can only contest anecdotally, but I haven’t met a single English person who’s expressed that idea in the time I’ve been in the country as an adult, i.e. since 1993. Not once. Never heard it expressed by an English person on TV or in the papers, either. Americans, yes; they do it regularly.

However, the idea that the English think/say this is very popular indeed; I see it expressed regularly by a) people from the Celtic nations and b) Americans. And this is not new; in 1956 Michael Flanders could get a good laugh from pointing out that if we win something it’s “Britain triumphant!” and if not it’s “England loses again”. He was responding to the straight-forward Demon Maneuvre incarnation of this meme; the version you present here is the more sophisticated Double Demon variant.

Unity @22:

As far as basing a national state on a common religion I can’t think of anything that predates Israel, in its biblical rather than modern sense.

Sumer.

Re. yours at 24: as usual, I agree with NickMatGB.

[1] Except when you’re talking to the people who use ‘early medieval’ as a replacement for the discredited ‘dark ages’.

@ 27 John

“Saving your reverence, this just isn’t true. The main reason Edward I hammered the Scots is that at that time there was no such sense of Scottishness.”

Sorry..just not the case. Your grasp of Scottish history is (even looked on charitably)…. superficial.

I’d be interested to know how the Welsh on this thread define their Welshness and the Scots their Scottishness.

Galen10:

Could you provide some details? I mean, if the Highlands were indeed subjugated by Edingburgh prior to the high medieval period, fair enough; that wasn’t the historical consensus when I was studying the period, but that was 15 years ago.

Yurrzem:

yes, indeed. The nature of that narrative as it is now understood, as compared to what it was understood as in 1850, 1650 or 1150 is pretty much exactly the point.

@30 John

Tthe Scottish Kingdom being founded in 843 pre-dates the English by a few hundred years. Most of the highlands were included prior to the defeat of the Norwegians at Largs in 1263, which brought control of the Kingdom (later Lordship) of the Isles.

The early medieval history is fairly well attested. Prior to the Wars of Independence, relations between England and Scotland were generally fairly good: Edward I of England may very well have helped ensure Scottish seperate-ness for the following 400 years by his actions.

The Edinburgh History of Scotland Vol. 1 by A.A.M Duncan is a good run thru.

So the Tory shock troops are out to smear Clegg because he is a bit foreign? That will teach him for choosing swarthy parents. The Mail represents the most backward, inbred vermin this Country has to offer. I wouldn’t pish on a Tory if he was on fire.

Genuine as anyone from Labour condemned this disgusting attack, or are they hoping enough mud sticks?

I am thinking of voting Lib Dem in order to punish this evil type of politicking. If we let the Mail get away with this rubbish, then cleaning up politics is going to be impossible. So much for a new kind of politics, then we are all doomed. I wonder if complaint again the Mail will rival the attacks on Jan Moir’s attack on Gately? Perhaps people are less exercised about this type of smear because Clegg is a politician?

@10: “Richard III was framed.”

Even if he was framed – which is, at least, doubtful – he was still the last truly English monarch in Britain. IMO Daniel Defoe had the correct angle on the True-Born Englishman – the 1703 edition:
http://www.luminarium.org/editions/trueborn.htm

A true-born Englishman’s a contradiction,
In speech an irony, in fact a fiction . .

Dutch, Walloons, Flemings, Irishmen, and Scots,
Vaudois and Valtelins, and Hugonots,
In good Queen Bess’s charitable reign,
Supplied us with three hundred thousand men.(*)
Religion—God, we thank Thee!—sent them hither,
Priests, Protestants, the Devil and all together:
Of all professions and of every trade,
All that were persecuted or afraid

(*) the population in England and Wales at this time was probably c. 5 million.

Just down the road, a few hundred metres from where I sit, there’s a bricked up cave which – according to that wonderful source: The London Encyclopaedia – contained evidence of human habitation going back at least to the middle stone age. Such archeological evidence as survives in the locality indicates that early stone age inhabitants of Britain migrated here when there was a land or ice bridge across the Channel.

Several years back, the local library had a presentation about an archeology dig in the neighbourhood to uncover the foundations of a large Roman villa. The names of the locality and the district are both Saxon – as most are around here. About five miles away, seven Saxon kings were crowned before the Norman conquest in 1066 and the local Parish church is part Norman. What was the Norman manor house still stands and with roof beams of the great hall going back to the 14th century. The road names resonate a feudal past: The Ridgeway, Demesne Road . .

The original inhabitants of this neighbourhood were the foxes who still roam around – I saw one only yesterday trotting across a main road.

Galen10:

Tthe Scottish Kingdom being founded in 843 pre-dates the English by a few hundred years. Most of the highlands were included prior to the defeat of the Norwegians at Largs in 1263, which brought control of the Kingdom (later Lordship) of the Isles.

Technically the first king of the English was Egbert, succeeding to that title (rather than Bretwalda, the title Offa had carried) in 829, so not precisely ‘hundreds of years’ after 843. Even if you look at the dynasty that made it stick, Alfred is technically king of the Anglo-Saxons but even if you take a very conservative view and look at Aethalstan it’s only about 80 years.

None of these were kings of England, though.

With regard to the building of Scotland; so, exactly as I said, then. The kingdom of the Scots founded in the early medieval period (843 rather than 850; sorry, I was approximating) was by no means today’s Scotland, constituting marginally more than a third of the land area and only one of the three main pre-existing ethno-political groups. Eventually, that polity subjugated the rest of Scotland, by warfare and partly using the threat of the now-organised English. Also, not until after 1150, which is what I said.

To put it another way; as Harold Godewinson was king of the English but William the Bastard was crowned King of England, so the King of the Scots in 843 was not king of Scotland, and his heirs would not fully become so for between four and five hundred years.

There’s nothing unusual about this. The “Kings of France” notoriously controlled very little of what is now that country until much later.

The Edinburgh History of Scotland Vol. 1 by A.A.M Duncan is a good run thru.

Yes, I remember. It was a set-text for Soton’s “People, State and Nation” course, which charted the development of modern European political structures, Charlemagne to Major. Inevitably, the formation of British political structures during that period played a very significant role in the book-list.

There’s other texts which are enlightening. I would highlight George Macdonald Fraser’s text on the border reivers, of both types. It was their suppression that completed the process of making modern, royal Scotland.

The Scots had a pretty clear concept of their nation state in 1320 when they wrote the Declaration of Arbroath to the Pope. A bit strange thinking where they had come from but there you go. Concept of nationality, rights and justice are all there. Moreover, there was a clear statement that they did not feel bound by religious authority if they felt that authority did not comply with their concept of justice.

‘ Most Holy Father and Lord, we know and from the chronicles and books of the ancients we find that among other famous nations our own, the Scots, has been graced with widespread renown. They journeyed from Greater Scythia by way of the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Pillars of Hercules, and dwelt for a long course of time in Spain among the most savage tribes, but nowhere could they be subdued by any race, however barbarous. Thence they came, twelve hundred years after the people of Israel crossed the Red Sea, to their home in the west where they still live today. The Britons they first drove out, the Picts they utterly destroyed, and, even though very often assailed by the Norwegians, the Danes and the English, they took possession of that home with many victories and untold efforts; and, as the historians of old time bear witness, they have held it free of all bondage ever since. In their kingdom there have reigned one hundred and thirteen kings of their own royal stock, the line unbroken a single foreigner. ‘

‘ Yet if he should give up what he has begun, and agree to make us or our kingdom subject to the King of England or the English, we should exert ourselves at once to drive him out as our enemy and a subverter of his own rights and ours, and make some other man who was well able to defend us our King; for, as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom — for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself. ‘

http://www.geo.ed.ac.uk/home/scotland/arbroath_english.html

The sad thing – and what finally led to the Act of Union in 1707 – was that the Kingdom of Scotland went flat broke over the (utterly hairbrained) Darien Scheme:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darien_scheme

As Marx famously wrote: History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
[The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte]

But in the light of recent events concerning banks in Scotland, perhaps that should be the other way round.

RichardW:

Er, yes. Yes, they did. You will notice that 1320 is well after 1150, the end of the early medieval period. Picking up explicitly the point I touched on briefly above, 1320 is after the battle of Falkirk.

The Scotish kingdom coalesced under the pressure of invasion, just as the Welsh and English ones did. This is normal, possibly even typical.

A minor linguistic nitpick:
Scots Gaelic and Irish have the same number of vowels as English.
Welsh has seven!

Language issues inevitably colour the issue of Welsh identity(-ies) for me. It is amusing that one of the focal points of Welsh language culture is a 18th Century rehash of a mediaeval bardic competition. Having said that, it is part of an artistic tradition which still exists, and is much preferable to the idea of “culture” sold to us by the media (read:Trinity Mirror Group), which is built around the twin obsessions of five rugby matches a year and shopping.

Its notable that nobody wanted to answer my question about how they define their nationality. We all have complex histories we could refer to, but I’m sure there are many who feel a sense of English, Welsh or Scottish identity who would not pass the “True Blood” test some feel our historic royals should and yet who have a strong sense of their nationality.

As a complete mongrel whose grandmother could trace her roots back to the Plantaganets, whose Grandfather’s family were Transylvanian jews and whose other ancestors were probably able to trace themselves to Wessex Saxons I still feel English as its where I was born and its the culture I grew up in. I very much suspect that, despite claiming a greater sense of national identity, closer examination of my Welsh, Scottish and Irish compatriots’ feelings would yield much the same.

@39 Yurrzem

I suspect you might get almost as many different answers to your question as there are inhabitants. I’ve been reading recently about the work of Edmund Leach, an anthropologist who published in the 1950′s, which seems rather apposite here.

His basic finding was that group identity doesn’t necessarily vary with measurable cultural traits, whether in material things or in social values or beliefs. So people with the same cultural traits (say a language) can see themselves as belonging to different social groups, and conversely people in different cultural groups can see themselves as belonging to the same social groups.

Altho’ Leach was studying SE Asian hill tribes, follow on work has confirmed that identity is about perception; both within your own head, and how others see you, it’s not a tick list of measurable items.

I rather like the following quote:

“Cultural items may express an identity, but they do not define it. A Scotsman may wear a kilt, but he remains a Scotsman even if he doesn’t” (Peter Heather ” Emipres and Barbarians” p14)