The BBC, Mark Easton in particular, likes to dispel any idea that British people are British, that there is any such thing as a British identity….they tell us that we are a nation of immigrants…because of course it suits their narrative on immigration now, somehow, not sure how though, even if we were a nation of immigrants how could the UK carry on absorbing 300,000 new immigrants every year? The basic logistical difficulties alone would crush the country never mind the social and cultural problems that would ensue….are ensuing.
The BBC takes an entirely different slant on a DNA study of the population of Britain to that taken by the Telegraph…
Here is the relevant part of the Telegraph’s report…
Geneticist Professor Sir Walter Bodmer of Oxford University said: “What it shows is the extraordinary stability of the British population. Britain hasn’t changed much since 600AD.
“When we plotted the genetics on a map we got this fantastic parallel between areas and genetic similarity.
“It was an extraordinary result, one which was much more than I expected. We see areas like Devon and Cornwall where the difference lies directly on the boundary.”
Professor Mark Robinson, of Oxford University’s department of archaeology added: “The genetic make-up we see is really one of perhaps 1400 years ago.”
Here is the Telegraph’s line on the Celts…
The findings also showed that there is not a single ‘Celtic’ genetic group. In fact the Celtic parts of the UK (Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales and Cornwall) are among the most different from each other genetically.
That was it…literally a line whereas the BBC decided that that was to be the main thrust of their report…
DNA study shows Celts are not a unique genetic group
The BBC constantly tries to rewrite history and wipe out 1400 years of your cultural and social heritage, your national identity, in pursuit of their own multi-cultural and diversity based, pro-immigration agenda….which is one reason when they report on the cultural vandalism, the destruction of the Assyrian history by ISIS, which they tell us is so crucially important to the local’s identity, I always laugh at the BBC’s hypocrisy. Labour’s attempt to ethnically cleanse Britain of its native population doesn’t bother the BBC at all.
Interesting and logical. The English wanted to farm above all else and you can see this clearly on the Welsh borders. When good land ends the Welsh place names start.
I have always thought that numbers being small intermarriage was very likely. between Celt and Saxon. The better the land the more likely the intermarriage.
We are an Anglo Saxon Celtic people with a very distinct culture. We are old English or old Welsh and however much the bloody BBC and it’s liberal fantasists whine and lie we are as much a distinct people as any on this earth.
So F off BBC and let us be ourselves.
My ancestors in this land go back over endless generations and the river valley where we live is ours not some liberal fantasist to dispose of as he sees fit to anyone.
Who cares about London?. A Shithole it has always been .The Great Wen sucking the life out of Old England. Old William Cobbett had it’s measure back in the 1820s. Nothing has changed.
Still that Norman attitude towards us from our elites. How do you know if you are English? Go to Senlac Ridge at Battle and if you feel that day in November 1066 was the blackest of all then you know who you are and what people you come from.
So you don’t even approve of the Normans then?
What a load of simple minded, divisive crap. No wonder people are drifting away. I see that David Preiser contributes to “Is the BBC biased?”, but not here. Perhaps it’s his Norman ancestry.
What have Normans ever done for us?
What did we ever do for the Indians (and the Africans and America and most of the world with our democratic and legal systems, transport and communications infrastructures, not to mention language etc). A massive uparallelled positive contribution which the BBC choose to ignore time and again, preferring ‘The English owe the world for what they are and what they’ve got’ line every time, now even spinning the laughable myth (through its proxy lefty mouthpiece Mary Beard) that the Roman Empire was some multiculti egalitarian heaven.
Your views are pure BBC, pure unadulterated self-hating leftism.
Norman`s are really Norsemen , of Viking ancestry .
First line and last could have been structured to make an eloquent point.
Maybe ‘people’ are more deterred by the inability of some to disagree without resort to profanity?
Just a thought. Can’t prove it.
The notion of free forums being free of poor posts is of course an ideal only the most precious refugee would think it possible to escape to.
Might be the same as scatology and the supremely gifted.
Mozart comes to mind.
Britanny was occupied by the Cornish and Welsh thousands of years ago ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittany ) the population would genetically be similar to that of the UK. So any Norman armies would be genetically English. Since the number of the invaders of Norman origin were so small they would not register in the genetic profiles because of the similarity.
Glad I got up your nose. Don’t ever make the mistake of thinking I give a damn.
On a point that should interest the most blinkered of liberals- it was not until the Married Woman’s Property Act of 1882 that women in this country were given back the same rights as they lost under Norman rule.
It was a tyranny founded upon a conquest and it is idle to pretend otherwise. All. those greedy kings, queens .princes etc etc caring nothing for the ordinary folk of England and as despised as much as they despised us.
We won in the end by making them into good little Englishmen – for the most part .
Must have missed a few though
I strongly agree with you DaveS that the alienation of our elite from the man in the street has a very long history with its roots in the Norman conquest. This led to the creation of an upper class which looked upon itself as European rather than native, or at the very least admired cosmopolitanism and formed a layer of elitism which saw Englishness or Britishness as narrow and unexciting.
Not quite. Almost.
Up until the 19th and 20th centuries the Establishment was the same people, with little variation, as arrived on the boats with Guillaume le Batard, pony and spear in hand. This has changed since the industrial revolution but they are still pretty much the same people. You only need to watch the BBCs ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ to see that the Bien Pensants are the cavalry officers of the past.
It is only since the growth of Internationalism through the poison of Socialism that this class has started to fracture into pro and anti British groups. Previously, whether Lancaster or York, Whig or Tory, Protestant or Catholic they were all proudly British. Now, not so much.
The rise of the EU and the endless public pockets to be ransacked has shifted this even further so that now we have even ‘Tory’ PMs on the look out for the next, bigger tough to gobble at.
Only when their income is wholly reliant on the UK will this change back and it is up to the public to force this to happen. So it won’t, unfortunately.
But part of the reason why it was primed to be ‘anti British’ was because of a lack of confidence in Britishness which does go back to the Norman conquest. Many of the old aristocracy had French surnames, and they were proud of this. The Grand Tour was a prominent feature of the upbringing of the eighteenth century gentleman, as was a (probably never used) ability to speak European languages part of the set of accomplishments of the Georgian ‘lady’. There was an encouragement to look outside Britain for sophistication, and thus the seeding of the ‘grass over the wall’ mentality which sees every other ethnic group as more valid than our own.
Britishness is a tricky one as many in these Sceptred Isles see themselves as English or Welsh or Scots etc first. Britishness is an 18th Century construct, for the English at least. Prior to that it was a racial notion rather than a political reality and a secondary one at that, but it was still a real one.
I’ll grant you that the Plantagenets were mostly European rather than English but they ruled a continental kingdom which, at it’s largest stretched almost down to Spain and encompassed the Western half of what is now France. The need to secure these lands meant that they had to forge Continental alliances through marriage. That’s how we acquired Aquitaine. Richard the Lionheart may well have been a non-English speaker, having rarely set foot in the country, but he was still an English king and damn well proud of it. When he was slaughtering the wretched Muslims at Acre he may have been screaming in French but it was for England and the English that he fought.
By the 15th Century even the Plantagenets considered themselves solely English and it is hard to think of Henry V considering himself anything else – even if he was King of France in all but name by the time he died.
Ironically it was the Welsh Tudors who supplanted them but even they, within a few years, were calling themselves English. Can you really see Elizabeth I as anything but an English Queen, despite her heritage?
The idea that the Georgian lady was somehow ashamed of being British is crap. Tell that to the Duchess of Richmond or Lady Hamilton and they would damn your eyes, quite rightly, for the impertinence. Looking outside of the country is not the same as loving forigen ways over British ones. The Grand Tours were part of their education and they saw things that they could not see in England. Not better things, different things.
The Georgians, despite the Kings’ German heritage were British through and through, what, what and so was Queen Victoria. The people who forged the British Empire were not ashamed of their roots, not in the least and it is only after the fall of that Empire that such notions got any serious airings – because of the treacherous Socialists.
So no, the Establishment are racially British because to not count them as so is to include the Anglo-Saxons as damn foreigners. An accusation for which I would happily demand satisfaction for and if anything I’m a Dane.
Pistols at dawn sir? 😉
If I may be allowed to enlighten thee BBC.
It is worth drawing people’s attention to Cheddar Man.
Please see here:
https://www.google.co.uk/#q=cheddar+man
Between Weston-super-Mare and Wells, in the heart of Somerset is the village of Cheddar and in the nearby Mendip Hills is the spectacular limestone gorge.
In 1903 Britain’s oldest complete human skeleton was excavated from Gough’s cave in the gorge. The remains date back some 9,000 years and the individual male appears to have met a violent death.
In 1996 the first sequenced mitochondrial DNA of Cheddar Man was extracted from one of his molars. A similar extraction took place on a molar found not to far away and dating back a further 3,000 years to approximately 10,000 BC.
The examinations go into a higher level of mitochondrial DNA than I understand, but I do follow it. Apparently the strains relate to a grouping known as haplogroup U5, which is common in western and southern Europe, dating back some 50,000 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_U_(mtDNA)
In 1997 an experiment was conducted in nearby Cheddar village where 20 children from a school history class voluntarily gave saliva swab samples. One of the children got cold feet so the history teacher, Adrian Targett gave a sample.
Mr Targett proved to be a direct descendant of Cheddar man. If memory serves me right, at least three of the children had some form of link back to Cheddar man. They all live 4 miles away from where the skeletal remains were found.
On a persona level, a relative, two generations removed, did genealogical research into our family and found that we were descendants (along with thousands of others I may add) of Godwin, Earl of Wessex, whose impetuous son got the arrow in the eye at Senlac. If only he had paused to regroup after the battle at Stamford Bridge history might have been different.
Having spent time living in Wessex and the west country and looking at all the family names and local connections I have absolutely no doubt that Mr. Targett is not the exception but rather the norm.
But of course the BBC would rather import vacuous entities like the dreary Bonnie Greer who love to lecture the likes of me on what a mongrel I am
I have to say that I am never terribly impressed by these DNA surveys. I suspect that they tend to start off with their conclusions and take it from there. Since I have Welsh and English ancestry, along with ancestry from various parts of Scotland and a teeny bit from Northern Ireland, I am guessing that my own DNA would be a nightmare for any conscientious analyst.
What gets the alarm bells ringing here is the confident way that any Danish influence is dismissed for England. Apparently, the Danes just went home.
Well, it is recorded that Ethelred II ordered the killing of every Dane within his realm and that a massacre did ensue, but it is inconceivable that a Saxon king’s writ, even in what was then the only nation-state in Europe, extended so far as to achieve genocide. Besides, England was conquered outright (twice) by Danish kings, although only the second, Canute (or Cnut) actually ruled the country (after Ethelred’s massacre).
Even though Canute’s offspring proved a dynastic dead-end, Saxon England, in its last phase, retained a lot of Danish influences. The English army at Stamford Bridge and Hastings fought in the Danish way. More to the point, English is full of basic vocabulary with a Danish origin. Northern England overflows with place-names which are plainly of Danish origin.
Do we seriously think the Danes turned up, introduced the word “sky” into Anglo-Saxon, changed zillions of geographical names and then departed? How do the DNA scientists hope to differentiate between Viking colonists and those, also originating from Denmark, from earlier centuries?
I had a DNA analysis a couple of years ago and I have Saxon or possibly Danish ‘Viking’ ancestry – apparently the two can’t be distinguished, so I fit into the proven pattern and the chances are you are Anglo-Saxon too just like me. I was happy with the result. Get a test – take the guesswork out of it. Until you do all is mere romance, hope and guesswork and it doesn’t do to try to cause division.
I was born in the north-east of England and I was always astonished at how many there wanted to be Vikings. Then they get the test and they aren’t!
Didn’t the report say that in effect the Welsh and Scots in the overwhelming majority are Anglo-Saxon too except for some small pockets.
The reason they are indistinguishable is that the Danes, Angles, Seaxes and Jutes are in fact one people, originating (as far as we can reach back) in what is now southern Scandinavia and north western Germany. In fact one Danish origin myth identifies two brothers ( a common theme in Anglo-Saxon founding myths) Ang and Dang as progenitors of the Angles and Danes respectively
For further reading on origins of English peoples I suggest the works of Kathleen Herbert .
‘Peace-Weavers and Shield-Maidens: Women in Early English Society’
‘Looking for the Lost God of England’
But most especially the beautiful and moving
‘English Heroic Legends’
After reading it only the most ideologically dogmatic could not feel we are ‘a race worth saving’
I have often thought that the old North/South divide so beloved of politicians has it’s roots in the Danelaw or even the Wessex/Mercia split. It does, after all follow pretty much the same boundaries.
Excellent Alan; glad you brought this up. I was just having a little read before I head off to work. Have a look at the last paragraph for some appalling bias. This type of subjective and interpretivist writing would never be allowed in an academic paper. Pathetic.
The following quote is nothing more than repugnant pro-multicultural drivel:
“Most of us are happily free to choose the identities we want rather than have one forced upon us. And we can choose multiple identities – European, UK, British, Scottish, Nordic and Orcadian, say – and express them all at the same time if we want.
Meanwhile every one of us remains 100% human.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-31946436
“Most of us are happily free to choose the identities we want rather than have one forced upon us. And we can choose multiple identities – European, UK, British, Scottish, Nordic and Orcadian, say – and express them all at the same time if we want.
Meanwhile every one of us remains 100% human.”
Ok, so please rewrite this in a way that you feel to be less repungnant.
Manon
Have you done the little scientific exercise I set you yesterday on the global warming pause?
I’m keenly waiting your findings.
You won’t get it. I’m still waiting for an apology for pointing out his drivel about we would like to push Muslims into concentration camps. When his attention was drawn to the FACT than the Grand Mufi of Jerusalem was given the grand tour of concentration camps by the Nazis and his followers might well be more likely to so it to us,…………… Nothing. Push him into a truth and he vanishes. Looks like a troll, sounds like a troll, do not feed the troll, ignore him.
The first paragraph is pure X-Factor tripe.
The last sentence is just mawkishness.
It might be slightly less repugnant if the word “English” had been mentioned. Why do you think it was left out? As Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn once stated: “In order to destroy a people, you must destroy their past.”
Which I must confess to finding a tad repugnant, don’t you?
“Ok, so please rewrite this in a way that you feel to be less repungnant.”
How about jut omitting the lie? No we are not ‘free to choose our [ethnic] identity’. Could you ‘become’ Japanese? An Australian aborigine? Even, lets look closer to home, say a Turk?
Manonclaphamomnibus, your dazzling wit is inestimable. Thus, I’ll leave it to you to do an imaginary ‘rewrite’.
“We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population.
“It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fiancés whom they have never seen”.
Enoch Powell MP 1968
With every passing year his speech becomes more of a prophecy coming true. But still despite mountains of evidence the elite of this country deny that mass immigration has been a disaster for for us. They really are crackers. If it wasn’t so awful it would be interesting to watch a nation , a continent , committing mass suicide at the behest of its elites with hardly a wimper of protest . Of course any protest is drowned out in the UK by the BBC. Only lemmings are known to do this and even that is now suspected of being a BBC lie.
Far from being a nation of immigrants, Britain is actually the complete opposite: it is a nation of emigrants. For over 400 years people left this country and established new lands overseas. Often this emigration was enforced: the ‘surplus poor’ shipped to the West Indies to work in the sugar plantations; the convict colonies in Australia; children – sometimes intentionally mislabeled as orphans – sent to provide cheap farming labour in Canada in the 20th Century. It is precisely because of this emigration that over 200 million people worldwide are of British descent and that countries such as the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have the demographics and characteristics that they do.
Interesting. So presumably we shall all be leaving quite soon. Population problem over!
I wish you Beeboids and Britain-haters would all leave and leave this country to the decent people.
250,000 a year leaving.
Yes we are still emigrating.
We also moved Africans to the Caribbean and North America, and Indians to Africa, the Caribbean, and the islands of the Indian Ocean.
And now we are moving Africans and Indians to the UK. And Russians, Iraqis, Iranians, Egyptians, Chinese, Vietnamese, Brazilians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Colombians, Ethiopians…
Who’s this ‘we’?
I don’t know about your grandfather, but mine was being shoved up a chimney at the height of empire ( a Norman project)
Feel free to luxuriate in guilt ,but not on my behalf.
Good point Stewart. It’s not ‘we’ that caused and are causing the problems – it’s ‘them’ and always has been. Whether the Norman occupiers that came over with William the Bastard, the Germanic aristocracy of recent centuries or today’s rootless globalists, it’s them, them, them!
Mine was persuading those living in the Subcontinent that we were better running the place then they were. Based on how it had been run he wasn’t wrong.
The descendants of the Africans that were ‘moved’ to the USA two hundred years ago must be so glad that they were.
Otherwise they would be migrating back in droves to the hell hole that is the Africa of today.
Indeed this is an aspect of slavery that the guilt inducing Globalists like to ignore. The descendants of African slaves have benefited HUGELY from the suffering of their ancestors. Even those who landed up in South America or the Caribbean are still winners compared to the descendants of those left behind.
Liberia was set up as an African homeland for freed slaves about 200 years ago by President James Monroe. Its capital Monrovia was named after him.
Just what is Liberia famous for, apart from Ebola and being a ‘flag of convenience’ registration country for merchant shipping ?
Now then, just who sold the slaves to the slave traders in the first place ?
Does anyone reading the blogs on this site get the feeling that Al Beeb and its employees are visiting or monitoring this site?
The offer no criticism of the bias of Al Beeb, they disrupt and troll. In fact, in my humble opinion there are one or two ‘sockpuppets’ here and I think that you genuine bloggers know who I am referring to?
These Trolls have an office in New Broadcasting House , next to James Purnells .
Al Beeb reporting another ‘British’ woman arrested at Luton airport on suspicion of preparing terrorist attacks.
Bet she has plenty of Celtic , Anglo Saxon, Viking and Norman genes, and blood in her veins.
Yes, definitely a Briton, what.
Not in her veins, but on her hands perhaps, given half the chance.
She probably has read the BBCs drivel and decided to change her ” ethnicity ” into becoming British, unfortunately when she did this she forgot to leave her old ethnic beliefs and behaviour on the floor with the pile of ethnic garb, viz her full length black outfit with matching face mask. Nope, she kept all those things that remind her of her old ” ethnicity”, the religion, the hatred of anything outside the religion, the inability to live and let live in another’s country, The desire to turn her new “identity ” into a carbon copy of her old one, surly som misstalke eh bbc ?
My great uncle fought all the way through the last war for this country, and he was from Leipzig. His next door neighbour refused to fight and he was born in Suffolk.
As mentioned elsewhere Radio 4’s Inside Science is covering this topic.
I have to wonder if the presenter is actually listening to the professor. The item begins with the BBC’s own political spin, “we are all immigrants, let’s keep the inward flow going” then we get to hear the professor.
“The first thing that is important to say is that Caucasian individuals in the UK are pretty similar genetically, for example different from Caucasians from other European countries.”
So we appear to be a homogenous people with our own identity (and culture perhaps?). Not only that, until recent times, minor variations could be used to place individuals within ancient boundaries within the Kingdom.
Finally our professor finishes by saying that we are a mongrel nation, which is just what the presenter needs to puff up the BBC-approved ‘more the merrier’ line.
This is rather like a dog breeder saying that his ratting dog was a ‘mongrel’, taking the most suitable characteristic from various ‘pedigree’ sources, then someone else suggesting that cross-breeding with dogs with NO suitable ratting characteristics was OK because the result would still be ‘mongrel’.
Why is the BBC so determined to ‘prove’ that we are not and never have been a ‘people’ and that we have no culture, let alone one of value? The English language, parliamentary democracy? Not bad for ‘mongrels’.
“Why is the BBC so determined to ‘prove’ that we are not and never have been a ‘people’ and that we have no culture, let alone one of value? ”
As the major propaganda arm of the Globalist tendency this wish to destroy us.
“After the invasion by the Normans in 1066, the total number of Norman settlers was never more than 5% of the total population. The influx now is 25X any previous level and frequently from totally alien cultures, not from neighbouring territories and cultural cousins as previously.”
Prof. David Conway ‘A Nation of Immigrants?’
Never mind DNA and who stayed where and who came later , let’s imagine a new planet is discovered nearby , green and lush and beautiful. Able to keep one billion people fed ,clothed and warm , with space for all .
So we earthlings send rockets full of people to colonise the new planet , they go forth and multiply and create their own culture over time , maybe in decades , maybe much much longer .
We still send rockets full of people from Earth and the new planet gets full . More than the one billion live there . It now looks crowded . The people from the new planet don’t want any more earthling people arriving , the new planet is turning from a paradise to a hellhole .
And that’s just about the numbers , never mind anything about culture.
Now BBC, Gramscians, Polly , liberal/left , is there a moral obligation for the New Planet People to keep accepting earthlings forever on the basis that their ancestors were immigrants ?
Many immigrants can trace their descendents to a single boat, that turned up in London in 1948….
And it’s been downhill ever since.
Incidentally the SS Windrush was a nazi holiday cruise liner, the Monte Rosa. Good of them to keep the SS bit !
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Empire_Windrush