Sorry Nick

In the heat of the moment I did Nick Griffin a grave injustice yesterday. I suggested that his party might like to adopt the slogan ‘An Anglo-Saxon England for the Anglo-Saxons’. Having read History at Cambridge, Nick will know that the Anglo-Saxons themselves were a bunch of kraut immigrants coming here to sponge off the welfare state. So rather than re-organising the country into the seven Anglo-Saxon kingdoms established when the Romans left we should return the country to the 20 indigenous British tribes - the Iceni, Belgae, Dubunni etc - who lived here before and during the Roman occupation.
I think Nick’s party lacks its leader’s historical expertise, though, when it claims on its web-site: ‘On current demographic trends, we, the native British people, will be an ethnic minority in our own country within sixty years’. I’m afraid they’ve been a minority for the last 1,500 years, ever since those invading Saxons arrived with their innate sense of rhythm and enormous john thomases to seduce our women and produce a nation of half-breeds. There is of course an area of the UK where ‘indigenous folk’ are still a majority. So here’s your new slogan Nick: ‘British jobs for Welsh workers’. Should go down a bomb with the slope-skulls who support you.

P.S. A final word from someone far more eloquent than I, Daniel Defoe:

‘I am far from thinking it is a satire upon the English nation to tell them they are derived from all the nations under heaven—that is, from several nations. Nor is it meant to undervalue the original of the English, for we see no reason to like them the worse, being the relics of Romans, Danes, Saxons, and Normans, than we should have done if they had remained Britons; that is, than if they had been all Welshmen. But the intent of the satire is pointed at the vanity of those who talk of their antiquity and value themselves upon their pedigree, their ancient families, and being true-born; whereas it is impossible we should be true-born, and if we could, should have lost by the bargain.

‘ These are the heroes that …       
rail at new-come foreigners so much,
       Forgetting that themselves are all derived
       From the most scoundrel race that ever lived;
       A horrid crowd of rambling thieves and drones,
       Who ransacked kingdoms and dispeopled towns,
       The Pict and painted Briton, treacherous Scot,
       By hunger, theft, and rapine hither brought;
       Norwegian pirates, buccaneering Danes,
       Whose red-haired offspring everywhere remains,
       Who, joined with Norman-French, compound the breed
       From whence your true-born Englishmen proceed. …

  ‘Thus from a mixture of all kinds began,
       That heterogeneous thing an Englishman;
       In eager rapes and furious lust begot,
       Betwixt a painted Briton and a Scot;
       Whose gendering offspring quickly learned to bow,
       And yoke their heifers to the Roman plough;
       From whence a mongrel half-bred race there came,
       With neither name nor nation, speech nor fame;’

Click here to read the whole of Defoe’s poem The True-Born Englishman.

Bossi by name, nazsty by nature

The campaign for the European election is under way. The poster pictured above, promoting the Northern League led by Margaret Beckett look-a-like Umbert Bossi, was the first to appear. It sent a shiver down my spine. At least in the UK the law prevents scum like the BNP peddling such obnoxious opinions so blatantly. Until comparatively recently Italy was much more relaxed about immigration than the UK: indeed it’s only now that a law is going through parliament making illegal immigration a crime. In other ways Italy has been ‘ahead’ of Britain. In England for most of my life ‘immigrant’ was a euphemism for a black or brown person. In Italy, despite the large numbers of poor souls who arrive by boat on her shores from Africa, the immigrant who bears the brunt of local prejudice is the Romanian or the Albanian. Not helped by the fact that one Italian word for gypsy ‘rom’ easily elides into ‘rumeno’, Romanian. The UK is of course catching up: Wisbech when I first lived in the Fens was inhabited by people who rarely ventured as far as King’s Lynn, 15 miles down the A47, and who had never seen a foreigner or non-white Englishman in the flesh. They had to vent their prejudice on the gypsies who turned up for seasonal work on the local farms, a large number of Fen pubs having ‘No Travellers’ notices displayed on their front doors. Now its market square is thronged with people from eastern Europe, and the locals don’t like it: ‘fucking immigrants’ are no longer just black people from Birmingham but the Poles and Lithuanians who work for local gangmasters at slave wages.
But Bossi is way ahead of the game. It’s not just blacks and eastern Europeans who are despised: it’s anyone hailing from south of the Po. ‘Roma ladra’, thieving Rome, is seen as the chief enemy, taking the North’s wealth to distribute to the ‘nigger’ inhabitants of Campania, Calabria and Sicily. And here of course we see the ultimate absurdity of the racist’s and xenophobe’s position. Following their logic one might well ask why Milan, a wealthy and prosperous city, should be compelled to inhabit the same province as the inhabitants of some impoverished village in its hinterland. And to push it even further why should the inhabitant of a prosperous Milanese district be made to inhabit the same comune, Milan, as those living in its slums?
One of the arguments employed by eurosceptics against the greater fiscal and political integration which might save us from declining into a collection of third world statelets is that economic conditions across the EU are too diverse. Do these prats think that economic conditions are - or ever were - homogenous across the UK. That London and the North-East are economically comparable? So now that Labour, Tory and LibDem MPs have been caught with their hands in the till and Nick Griffin’s opportunity has arisen, here’s a slogan: ‘An Anglo-Saxon England for the Anglo-Saxons’. Mercia for the Mercians, Northumbia for the Northumbrians. Bring back the miserable little squabbling Saxon kingdoms which shared Britain for half a millennium after the legions left!