What makes an English person?

What make an English person?

The word English is used here in a broad traditional sense, it can be substituted for Scottish, Welsh, or Irish but it is in this definitive old sense as used to denote the common make up of Great Britain. It has been said that the English are a mongrel race made up of many European influences over thousands of years. This may be true but the important thing to note is that the make up and assimilation of different influences occurred over a long slow period of time, time that allowed for similarities of nature, modes of expression, dress, custom and languages to develop into a broadly recognise common view. Apart from the actual location of the English people i.e. those based in the province part of England, the most obvious thing that separated the peoples of GB internally was the adoption of local accents wrapped around an English ‘tongue’. Although the Irish, Welsh and Gaelic languages still persist as a part of local custom, the predominate everyday spoken working language is English with accents. Similarities of dress, work, habits, common history and culture practice gained over a period also formed the mode of being English, matched by the adoption of sport and politics. What football team, cricket team or political party one supported focusing on the home ground, county or country, helped defined one as English as indeed actually being born in England.

Unfortunately the English are dying out. It has become common to see on all government and public forms, the whole gamut list of ethnic origins. Within this, one sees British being used as the denomination for anyone born in Britain or acquiring British nationality, English as a racial tag is increasingly not used and presumably not encourage to be used as a defining racial tag, in order to support the Politically Correct view of the UK being a multi racial society. This fostered image of a multi racial society is patently untrue. England as other provinces are not multi racial, to be so would require an equality of numbers which there is not, an obvious look of being a homogeneous population which has latterly diminished and is fosters by a multi racial pretence that we are all now the same under the British tag. This ignores the new generated cultural and racial differences of recent years. As one MP enquired, ‘raised doubts as to which cricket team they support? Who do they bat for when it is their innings?

England begot the English over hundreds of years establishing a common ancestry that matured slowly to develop the world identity of being English. Expansion of the population took place and was stimulated by a number of social and economic shifts natural to the influencing periods. The character of the English may have come from the divers European influx over this time but it took on the mantle that bound them to the eventual English identity. The core features of the English were strong and vigorous enough to accommodate the assimilation of many European extracts and this process of assimilation catered for ‘non-Caucasian’ too (not a accurate pale skin term).

Up to the 1950’s the process of population expansion by immigration was very slow. Slow enough not to make any real impact on the perceived English identity and allowed scope for adequate integration for the new people to meld into the English way of life so that their children need not feel the pull of a racial cultural identity that was never wholly theirs. Today the children of these people, if they see them selves free of the tenuous ethnic culture origins are born and bred English and may well know who to bat for.

Coming from a place that had a huge influx of Irish after the potato famine with a grand father who was Irish, with my own father who was first generation born in England and me being the second, does not mean that I can claim any actual affinity to Ireland or the Irish. I am not English with an Irish tinge I am English through and through. In a similar vain I have come across Chinese, India, and African looking people who likewise see them selves as rightly being English. The Scottish, Irish and Welsh would perhaps consider themselves to be of their type first and maybe British but not necessary English yet they are locked into the English record.

Now however and for the past 40 years with an active immigration policy, the country (without being asked) had allowed unknown thousand of legal and illegal immigrant into the country at a rate that has been far too fast to allow any meaningful assimilation. And whereas Caucasian may have a better chance of blending in should they desire, the non-Caucasian have a much more difficult task. A task not made any smoother for them without the aid of preparatory indoctrination.

How can any assimilation take place without some basic knowledge of the ‘adopted’ country? We have not insisted on them speaking English, not introduce cultural education, not appraised them of the legal observation they have to comply with, not encouraged them to adapt and crucial erroneously undermined and blatantly ignored our own standards to accommodate foreign mores that have been given preference over our own. This gives raise to Political Correctness to mould the majority to the minority.

The insidious nature of PC has blinded politicians to what actually is developing within the country and fostered an assumption that all will be well in the long run as the English with their generally tolerant ways will accept some measure of discomfort, dislocation and make allowances. That the policy intention of importing the new immigrants was to bring some skills and cheap labour to become economically active and integrated was superficial. It assumed they would find their own way and disperse around the UK. This approach went against the nature of human beings, they invariable, when placed in a strange situation, seek to group in areas that are or can be made familiar resulting in identifiable ghettos. That this has occurred should be no surprise and that the impetuses to maintain a familiar culture that subsequently isolate the next generation from the surrounding host results in discomfit and uncertainty of identity.

Politicians and policy makers do not live in the new encampments and have continually chosen to overlook the expanding separate culture within the country. They have been active in suppressing any concerned views and vigorous in not wishing to challenge their own perpetuating perception. A few MP’s have tried to illuminate growing issues of splintering diversity but the force of parliamentary pressure has made them shrink away. As a show of solidarity and confidence in the social environment, senior politicians talk to the ethnic leaders and are given a story line of comfort that stops them from looking closely at what actually is happing in the new communities. There may be little attempt at integration, no desire, and an inordinate pervasive link to maintain old cultural connection and habits within the new communities that ignore the reality of being in a new ‘home’?

Not wanting to challenge attitudes of PC has on many occasions filtered down to local councils and stifles debate, resulting in the raising of such dangerous action as not allowing the flying of the English flag, or not celebrating Christmas or changing the word Christmas to ‘holiday’ etc to avoid upsetting / disturbing / offending the newer nationals.

So today we have a crisis on out hands, how do we recover, reconnect and foster the Englishness of England. It is no use relying on the clichéd strap line of the country being multi racial as if those sentiment said often enough will forestall any fracturing of the social structure. This is England and on a English population numerical basis it should demand that if it offers succour and a space at the table to immigrants, that certain responsibility are to be taken on board, fundamentally to be prepared to adopt England with all that it might imply including its language, culture and way of life. Resources should be applied to insure that the opportunity for active integration takes place; failure to do so will inevitably result in an ultimate clash of cultures and a fracturing of the euphemistic multi racial society.

Is it now no wonder that we do not know who these new people would be likely to bat for when it comes to their innings?


P 4.7.05

Suicide Bombers

Suicide Bombers.

A recent comment by an MP Ms Tonge seemed to elicit some ire from certain quarters. Her comment was to the effect that if she had been in the position of the Palestinian people, having their land stolen off them, being virtually incarcerated, killed and subjugated by a vastly superior force for the past 20 years then she may have considered being a suicide bomber as a course of action. This parallels a similar comment made by the prime ministers wife last year for which she was also castigated. The fact is that the problem of Israel and Palestine was created by the Americans and Britain after the war as it was partitioned 1948 with the annexation of Palestinian land, exacerbated with the 6 day war and the more recent Israeli Wall. Despite UN mandates, Israeli state illegal actions still continue and are blithely ignored by the west.

How can anyone in the comfort of the security of an English home understand or feel the tremendous pressure of occupation and experience the killing of their family members, destruction of their property, social order and infrastructure, over a long period of time and say that they would mildly accept it. For hells sake get real, when it gets to a fight and there is nothing to lose you fight with anything you have got and anyway you can.

The simpletons that castigate the action of suicide bombers must think that all conflict can be resolved peacefully; history shows that they cannot. Had the Euro members (Britain) been a bit more up front in the Balkans etc then the genocides that occurred may have been stopped.

No mealy-mouthed platitudes or condemnations can stop Israel or the suicide bombers. The conflict is not a just one and gentlemanly conduct does not apply and of course suicide bombing is very efficient, cost effective and physiologically startling. Descending to this stage one is not fighting an enemy at distance with laser guided missile, crushing homes with tanks, shooting unarmed civilian at a distance, it is up close and personal. This conflict is supported with the most effective of weapons and near impossible to fight – Ideology.

Comfortable civilised people do not like to think of killing, they do not ever see themselves in a positions were they could or might have to kill face to face, yet kill they do, all the time, by default, at a distance and it does not disturb them too much. The longer that pubic opinion in the west allows inequalities to prosper and corrupt dictatorial regimes to destroy their own country or infect others, the opportunity is created for extreme deadly actions to arise. The lack of corrective action in the face of what is not right allows extreme acts to materialise in frustration. It is useless to use the argument that such extremism like suicide bombing isn’t fair and that innocent people get killed, the sad reality is that violence works were discussion fails, it takes time but when people have been satiated with the waste of deaths only then are they prepared to make amends.


This was written in Jan 2004 prior to the recent fateful London attack, it is repeated here and parallels an article that was in the Guardian on 13.7.05 “We rock the boat” by a trainee journalist D.A. Others have also made observations into the nature of such violent deliberate acts, I am not sure any of it can help understanding the questions raised.
For me organised deaths are not acceptable. I hope and pray for a more peaceful world but it has to be laboured for, yet in many the human condition seems to be at variance with greater sensitivity.

P. 15.7.5

Righteous Anger 7.7.05

Righteous Anger 7.7.05

It is always a shock to know that simple but terrifying acts can turn lives upside down in the passing of a moment. It never is easy to comprehend immediately just what has happened but our autonomic everyday systems kick the body into motion to run, turn and hide, deny, cry or rage as the events sink in. There has been many such occasion, some natural, which have to be accepted, others not natural but are of our own making like attempts of mass murder, corporate mass deaths or war. That the event happens on our own doorstep in the safety of our known environment at a time unsuspected is part of the power of the shock together with the actual death and destruction wrought for all to see. Although the county has had a taste of similar experiences, those days were to some extent of a time when the events were of a known quality and with an element of organised pre event warnings. People knew the name and face of the antagonist and the form of their attacks, this did not make actual events any easier to forestall but they could be put in a context of why and who.

Now we have a different antagonist, one that does not want to be known or understood and has adopted a form of violent expression that is of a different order of complexity from what has gone before. It is not the scale of the acts that that punches us, even though scale is not a measure that should make an event any greater or lesser than another for the number of individuals caught up in the acts but it is the targets and multiplicity of it that causes us to be rocked back.

The complexity of our social system relies on an expectation of peaceful normality, an understanding of things being reliable, of problems having solution, of knowing the who, what, where, when, of everyday life and of having a sense of being in control. Yet the event of Bhopal, 9-11, Beslan, Bali, Madrid, and now London has raised some unpleasant questions and ones that are not resolvable with conclusive answers. We could start by asking just who or what is the antagonist? There may be no obvious link between these location and acts, as one may be seen a corporate act, another geopolitical localised act and the others labelled as the result of possibly known named terrorist.

There is an assumption that known and concerted action is being taken to curtail the antagonists activities, however what is being done seems to be on the point of affecting the free social systems of our countries with little impact on the ability of the antagonist to perform. Is this because we do not really know the antagonists name, do not understand its cause, or do not recognise the hydra born within the very fabric of modern social cultures. Whatever the impetus of such acts, the immediate energy of the aftermath goes into finding the who and creating a target that can be got at and extract vengeance or justice in the emotion of righteousness however missed placed. This though looses the honesty of action, as there is no such thing as righteous anger unless it is an all encompassing search for the causes, is not protected by self interest subterfuge, is seen to be in place on a world stage with straight political actions and in this current context is it an obnoxious process to ask what have we done to deserve this adversity and does it help our understanding to adopt a righteousness anger?

Can it be that somehow we have created a sub culture that is being played out on a world’s platform that has been squeezed out of the west’s modernity, one that is born out of curable raging poverty or dogmatic ideological jealousy and hate? A culture in which it all too easy to find vehicles for creating destruction, one that dose not have a core focus but is multi facetted, one that can change as the pressures are imposed on it to control it and one that has been allowed into our midst without recourse to active integration fogged by overt injudicious enforced PC.

If the antagonist have no one ideology, no single controlling faction, no asset stakehold and are acting out of a repulsion of what it sees as organised structures being against it or misguided religious zeal, it is going to be very difficult to control similar acts in the future as there is no core enemy to focus on. The antagonist may well turn out to be home grown, if so how do we stop more of them taking the same destructive path? In a modern society it is all to easy to cause disruption and actual damage, so to eliminate the causes the focus should be on reassessing what sort of society we are creating and what benefits does it bestow on its people so they have no need to wish to see its destruction.

Taking a much broader and harder security line does little to identify potential antagonist, the harder society is squeezed with security the faster it will loose any democracy and alienate the less socially involved people. For example it may be common in some element of the community to send their elder children off to a foreign country for extra curricular educational activity (finishing schools?) and they have a right of return no matter how long they have stayed away. Assuming the recent antagonist where British and took this path, would it be acceptable to stop such excursions or deny them access back into the country if it was known that they were undertaking educational training that professed violent political actions or the use of munitions?

The responsibility of the attacked is to defend itself and non combatants and forcibly stop any more, in doing so it has to show that force will be used and be prepared to go beyond just isolating the immediate antagonist that have used a societies own openness and freedom against its self. In addition it has to shift the aptitude of the breeding ground of the antagonist so that it cannot develop with such impunity. In this we have to be aware that the anger felt at being attacked does not have to be righteous for defensive action to be taken but it dose require an examination of the social order that has allowed such acts to be perpetrated.

It is one thing to know the external enemy but it is indiscernible when it is within us.


Renot 7.7.05 FIED

Road Pricing Tax

Road Pricing Tax.

The recent announcement by the transport secretary - A. Darling to the effect that he wants an open discussion on the re- aligning of the current vehicle road tax to road tax pricing should raise much concern. The intention is to trail new technology using gps to track and charge road users by the mile, at a cost of 2p to £1.30+ per mile, with the aim of reducing traffic congestion.

The unappealing aspects of this idea are that it provides the state again with too much uncontrolled power of information on the movement people and a distinct lack of confidence in the trust and ability of the government to develop a fair delivery mechanism. The presumption that it will reduce traffic congestion is a ridicules idea. That it will be revenue neutral is risible and it behoves people to have a healthy distrust of the governments professed desires.

The form of the current social mobility stricture and what is possible for the foreseeable future, does not suggest that people will want to travel any less than now; or indeed will people be able to substitute for more economically accessible mobile transport to their place of employment or social activities. It has been commented on before, that in order to reduce traffic on the road and to make it less attractive to use the roads yet cater for people and goods movement, other forms of mass transport has to be developed and current ones substantially improved. That the various governments have not really tackled this situation means that the cost has seen to be always been too high, contributing to the current public transport shortfall.

I have the inclination that the desire to reduce traffic flows by the use of a mileage charge has nothing to do with the need to switch traffic from the road to other forms of transport and reduce congestion BUT has more to do with the long term strategy of increasing AND securing the revenues taken from transports private and commercial users.

It is very likely that in looking at the next 20 years the volume of road transport will change due to the cost of fuel that will cause a slight reduction in private vehicle use. This is what the government would currently want however there is a counter balance in that it is unlikely that social and work demand will change to allow people to reduce their travel requirement and this means that those that can economically afford to have their own private transport will continue to do so while squeezing out others. As the population is forecasted to expand, in the medium term, there will be more vehicle movement on the road not less. However in the drawing up of the proposal for ‘road charging’ it is decidedly likely that the strategist will have factored in the one inescapable issue, that oil and its derivative will be reducing and the current form of tax revenue stream will have to be switched.

Although duel fuel vehicle (petrol/gas) are still in the development acceptable phase, it is dubious that these will form the bases of a mass transport shift. Hydrogen fuel cells are also unlikely to make a great leap forward in the short term but if either of these did, the access to the fuel consumed can be controlled and so taxed as now. Unfortunately the power unit that could make the popular running is electrical and as it stands a recharge can be done via a domestic supply with the subsequent revenue flowing to the a private supplier and not controlled for a revenue stream by the UK treasury.

It is this lack of future control over the ability to raise revenue from petroleum usage for vehicles that is driving the governments “discussion” for road pricing and not the need to assist the reduction of traffic congestion.

The suggestion that the road pricing will be revenue neutral must be considered a complete fallacy. Leaving aside the technicality of actually monitoring the proposed different road cost structure imposed on different types of roads, the mechanics of collecting the revenue from 30+million vehicles users and a simple calculation will show the preposterous nature of the argument that the scheme will be revenue neutral.

Take an average driver doing 12k miles pa (with most vehicles in the urban city areas there are not many doing less than this) assume that the vehicle achieves 30 mpg, over the period of a year it will cost at £0.85ppl some £1,545 to fuel. Assume that the tax take with vat and fuel duty is 73%c of this sum and add in the road tax of £170 means that the revenue paid is £1,298 pa.
This equates to a mileage cost of 0.108 pence per mile. Now if as is indicated that the initial mileage charge will be £0.02p to £1.30, the minimum charge may therefore have to be £0.10p to recouped the revenue cost (revenue neutral) or alternatively if half of the mileage is on motorways, the travel tax bill is likely to be 6000miles x £1.30 + 6000miles x £0.10p = total £8,400.

Play with the figure anyway you like but the essential pressure is that the least financial able will be priced of the roads. If just 10% of road users drop out, this will cause a large fall in tax revenue that will have to be extracted elsewhere.

With the initial proposed road pricing on any vehicle, the treasury gain a lot of revenue and the revenue stream is secured no matter what form of power motivator is used, size or type of vehicle. It is not in the government interest to force too many vehicles off the roads too quickly for fear of the lost of fuel revenue but it does see as essential to safeguard the revenue stream when there is an eventually natural decline in the petroleum usage.

If the government were serious in their intent to reduce traffic pollution and congestion there are a number of ways to achieve it but each has a central and political cost implication that no government would want to take on board. Why not: -

Abolish road tax for two wheeled motorised vehicles.
All private electric cars & bikes to be free of all tax.
Substantially reduce road tax for cars of –1000cc and length of 6ft.
Encourage a shift in the working peak start and finish times.
Develop electric / hydrogen monorail network over or adjacent to motorways.
Have a variable fuel tax based on the size on engine linked to an annual MOT verification of mile-odometer reading. (A much simpler and quicker way to achieve the changed revenue stream)
HGV’s to be given incentives to transport goods only overnight.
Stop HGV’s from using middle lanes on hills.
Have a varied slower or faster speed limit
Open up the motorways ‘hard shoulder’ to light traffic use.


But then the idea is not to solve congestion or pollution, it is all about keeping traffic moving on the roads and making it pay. To make this scheme effective it will affect ALL roads.

Finally: why should northern counties pay for the affluent overheated south? Can any one really believe that a government will give up all road tax and fuel revenue in favour of a solely road price structure?
To use a pun, vote with your feet and say NO!





P. FIED 7.6.05