Who are the British? Or are they at all?

Nigel Farage (left), comic Al Murray (centre) & Thanet South winner, Conservative Craig Mackinley

During last night’s General Election coverage – with the Scottish National Party effectively wiping out the other three parties in Scotland, Labour just-about holding the North of England and the Conservatives (except in London) dominating the South – someone on BBC TV talked about a three-colour layered cake of a nation. Yellow at the top, red in the middle and blue at the bottom.

The line between red and blue is somewhat skewed by Wales being red, but it is a fairly good image.

The constituency result of the 2015 Election

I think to people outside the UK – particularly to people who have always referred to the UK as “England” – the extent to which the UK is and always has been a hotchpotch has never been realised.

My blog yesterday headed Maybe the Scottish Nationalists should move the border south into England? was about nationality.

Five years ago – in November 2010 – I wrote a blog headed The British have always been a violent race 

That was about what the people on the island of Britain – England, Scotland, Wales – were arguably like, not about the individual nations.

There were a couple of interesting comments about that November 2010 blog – one made in June 2013 and one made in October 2014 – and, yesterday, an unknown (to me) person called Dean replied to both of those comments. Below I reprint the comments and Dean’s responses as an interesting insight into some people’s thinking, which is perhaps relevant in view of the strong support the UK Independence Party got in yesterday’s election.

I have to say I think some of Dean’s facts are a tad suspect – and I think he confuses “British” with “English” – but his views are interesting.

The Union flag without the Scottish St Andrew element in it

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COMMENT BY RONNIE (June 2013)

I think all Germanic countries are more violent than Southern European countries. It’s strange because they tend to be richer and more successful than the Southern European countries. There is a big drinking culture and that only makes things worse. England is worse than other Germanic countries like Germany and Holland when it comes to violent behaviour. There is a big difference here between working class and middle class people. The working classes are often undereducated and this leads to poverty, child pregnancy, unemployment which in turn leads to frustration and violence.

RESPONSE TO THAT COMMENT BY DEAN (May 2015)

England is not a Germanic country in the very least… England is a pre-Celtic origin country. Germanic invaders had little impact there unlike the myth usually tell us… Germanics like Dutch or German are cold with the outsider but gregarious with their family and close friends…They are direct, can appear rude as being too direct but are in reality very honest and civilized people, who rarely will fight. They have respect for human beings and love to discuss like civilized humans.

Britons like to cheat… They are polite, which means they always will show you fake acceptance… but they do nothing else but backstab you… The Brits are not direct people… and that can grow a big bad enviroment… People don’t really know how to communicate in England… so every frustration comes in form of physical aggression. Brits love to fight and have no sense of human aesthetics or style.

Dutch, Germans, Swedish, Danish, Norwegians, etc – true Germanic people – are very civilized people. They can be colder but once you get to know them well they will accept you and they will be honest to you; they have sense of human aesthetics; they like to appreciate human life and love to look good.

Britons are animals. They don’t care about people but only about their own instincts.

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COMMENT BY ALAN (October 2014)

Britain is made up of 3 countries: England, Scotland and Wales. The Scottish and Welsh are Celtic and the English are Germanic. The Welsh are the native Britons, the Scottish are Gaels and Picts from Ireland and the English are Anglo-Saxons. Britain has always been a violent place, its culture is based on violence.

RESPONSE TO THAT COMMENT BY DEAN (May 2015)

English origins aren’t Germanic. English look the same as Irish or Scottish. The Anglo-Saxon impact in England was tiny. Most English roots (as much as 80%) come from pre-Germanic/pre-Celtic inhabitants, which were of neolithic origin.

That’s why there are so few natural blonde and Nordic/Germanic looking people in England or the UK compared to Scandinavia, Holland or Germany. Most Brits have dark hair, pale skin and hazel eyes and their stature is mediocre at best.

Maybe the Scottish Nationalists should move the border south into England?

Nicola Sturgeon: the UK party leader who is most trusted by English voters

There is a General Election in the UK today.

Last night, I overheard a conversation at St Pancras station.

“Why do you vote for the Conservative Party?” one man said.

“I could never vote for the Labour Party,” said the other man, “because socialism isn’t a political philosophy; it’s a religion. You have to believe that, if you follow the true path and all the rules of the religion, then all the wrongs of the world will be solved like the wave of a magic wand.”

“But,” said the first man, “Labour is not a socialist party any more.”

Who knows what the result of the Election will be?

The polls say a hung Parliament.

Personally, I suspect there will have to be a second Election this year.

I have jokingly said to people in the last week that, if the SNP had put up candidates in England, there would have been a landslide for them, given that the SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon is (according to polls) by far the most trusted party leader among English voters.

Welcome to Scotland – but maybe the border might move?

But, in all seriousness, I do idly wonder what would have happened if the SNP had put up candidates in Berwick-upon-Tweed, Carlisle and Newcastle.

In 2008, an apparently very well conducted ITV poll showed that a large majority of people living in Berwick-upon-Tweed wanted the town to be in Scotland not England.

When I was there a few years ago, the streets had Scottish banks, Scottish gas, Scottish electricity and the predominant currency used in shops seemed to be Scottish not English bank notes.

Admittedly there is ‘a bit of previous’ with Berwick see-sawing between the two countries in the past.

Danelaw and Northumberland held power in 878

But my local optician, a clear-sighted man, comes from Carlisle and he told me there was quite strong support – even if only theoretical – for Carlisle too being in Scotland not England.

With Newcastle and Geordieland in general, it would be more interesting. That area is almost defiantly proud of its separateness from the English South and it could be argued it is far closer culturally to Scotland than to Anglo-Saxon England.

Historically, in Britain, the north was Scandinavian; the south was Anglo-Saxon German. Although the Normans too, of course, were Scandinavian.

Northumberland originally stretched from Edinburgh down through Newcastle and south of Durham. The Danelaw took in a very large swathe of what is now England.

King Canute’s watery domains in 1016-1035 included England

There has been an awful lot of talk about how the Labour Party could come second in this election and still gain power – with SNP support. There has been almost nothing about what would happen if you removed Scotland from the figures entirely.

As I understand it, if Scotland gained independence, the Labour Party would never again be likely to get power in what was left of the UK because, by removing Scotland’s 59 seats, Labour’s voting numbers would be scuppered.

There is an interesting scenario that the Labour Party would have to woo the SNP to gain and maintain power but, in thus gaining power, it would destroy itself.

Meanwhile, for no particular reason, here on YouTube is the result of the 1992 General Election vote in Greenwich. Comedian Malcolm Hardee stood in the election solely to get a free mailout publicising himself and his Up The Creek Club to 10,000 people which would normally have cost him over £3,000 in postage alone. All he did was lose his £500 deposit.

He is standing behind the right shoulder of the Electoral Officer who announces the result.

Is this why the British government does not like amiable Scots comic Del Strain?

I managed to photograph Del Strain by Royalty Mews in Soho yesterday. I felt some elation at this triumph.

“Are you a Scottish National Party supporter now, or still Labour?” I asked Del Strain yesterday.

“I’m at the stage now,” he told me immediately, “where the rotted corpse of the three or four party system has gone.”

“Well,” I suggested, “there’s only going to be one party in Scotland after the General Election.”

“The SNP is part of the problem, not the solution,” Del told me. “How about we have a society where, before you become an MP, you have to wear a lie detector to take public decisions? I don’t care if, at the weekend, you’re into dominatrixes or crystal meth or taking ecstacy… I don’t care so long as, when you come to work at 9.00am on a Monday morning, you’re all biscuits and gravy and non-corruptible.

“We need revolution, we need change, we need radical men to form this country into the next generation. We need to be world leaders, we need to make stuff, not just people who work for minimum bloody wage and Tescos, watching The Great British Bake Off while our children won’t have a National Health Service and will be aspiring to have teeth in a few years.”

“So it’s you and Tommy Sheridan against the world?” I asked.

“I would let Tommy run the country.”

“Free crystal meth for everyone?” I suggested.

“No. Don’t do meth,” said Del. “Meth’s a bad drug. It was invented by the US military so they could kill for longer in Vietnam. It’s a very horrible drug.”

“Everything was invented by the US military,” I said. “LSD was invented by the US military, wasn’t it?”

“That’s right. And the internet and false flag attacks.”

John Lewis store in Oxford Street, London (Photograph by Martin Addison)

“But you surely can’t want Communism?” I asked. “The only place where Communism has ever worked is John Lewis and Israel – and Israel’s been at war since 1948, so that doesn’t really count.”

“Well,” said Del, “we live in a world now where neo-liberals have actually become Fascists. They’re the Thought Police. See me? If it’s 1936 in Spain, I’d be fighting Franco. If I was in Warsaw in 1943, I’d have stood tooth & nail with those brave Jewish people against the Nazis. But, at the same time, right now I understand the plight of the Palestinians. And I can say Muslim extremists blah blah blah and that’s OK, but the minute I say anything about Netanyahu or Israel, I’m ‘anti-Semitic’. There seems to be a whole lot of double standards and people trying to censor stuff that shouldn’t be censored. There’s dark forces at work here, John.”

“But,” I said, “there’s a difference between being anti-Israeli and ant-Jewish.”

“It’s not being anti-Israeli,” replied Del. “It’s being anti-Zionist, cos they’re extremists… Jew, Arab, Catholic, Protestant, black, white, it’s all bogus. It’s all just labels to have us all at each others throats and divide and conquer. There’s only one battle and that’s the battle between good and evil and rich and poor and that’s all over the world. The rest is just semantics.”

“Have you met Naom Chomsky?” I asked.

“No. I’ve met (punk rockers) Mick Jones and Joe Strummer, but I’ve never met Chomsky. There must be something to commemorate Joe Strummer better than an underpass at Paddington where people urinate. I would have him on Nelson’s Column. I would have Clash lyrics in the national curriculum for all children to liven them up.”

“So when are you becoming an MP?” I asked. “Comedians are standing in elections now.”

“I wouldn’t like to be an MP,” said Del. “Apparently I’m undesirable. They wouldn’t even let me in the Houses of Parliament during the War on Welfare or into a Select Committee on Palestine with George Galloway. I was invited to both and I got to the gate and I was told I was ‘an undesirable’.”

Del Strain in Trafalgar Square with Parliament behind him

“Did George Galloway invite you there?”

“Yes. He wanted me to speak, man.”

“So why did they stop you going in?”

“I dunno. I presume it was because of my criminal convictions. They had a list of people who had been invited, but they must go and do a police records check before you arrive and it just had ‘Undesirable’ next to my name.”

“But terrorists are being invited to the Commons to speak all the time,” I said.

“Yes,” said Del. “You’ve got Gerry Adams. Martin McGuinness for godsake! But I’m telling you it happened to me twice – ‘Undesirable’. Twice. Last year. And I was one of the main set-ups: me, Francesca Martinez and Rick and Caro from War on Welfare; we were the ones who got the ball rolling. That got 120,000 signatures to the Select Committee.”

“Your criminal record is not for anything political, though,” I said.

“Not at all,” agreed Del. “And there’s no extreme violence on it either.”

“There isn’t?” I asked.

“The trick with extreme violence,” laughed Del, “is Don’t get caught.”

“It’s just drugs, then,” I said.

“Well, intent to supply, concerning supply, importation…”

“That’s surely OK,” I said. “It’s perfectly politically clean.”

“But I was, for a couple of weeks, every day, sending Tweets to the Conservative Party and David Cameron and George Osborne telling them a few facts about the nest of paedophiles that was running the country. So maybe it was something to do with that. Free speech, John! We gotta use it while it’s still here!

“They wouldn’t let me in. ‘Undesirable’. I couldn’t even go to Disneyworld with my kid, because of felonies. The Americans are shit hot on stuff like that. They’re just paranoid. It’s not even the drugs. They just see the words ‘felony’ and ‘British passport holder’ and, because of that guy with the shoe bomb, they just changed everything. It’s a paranoid world we live in.”

Why liars and the tsunami of history may yet lead to bloody civil war in Europe and Scottish independence

In 1985 I was on holiday in Uzbekistan.

Opposite our hotel, a new block was being built and its skeleton was showing massive cracks in the concrete. I asked an architect why this was.

“They are using the wrong type of concrete,” he told me. “The decision on which type of concrete to use in the building was made centrally in Moscow. They have a very cold climate in Moscow. This is Uzbekistan. We are in the middle of a scorching hot desert. They are using the wrong type of concrete because those are the decisions made by the bureaucrats in Moscow.”

The Soviet Union was partly an organisational disaster because it made centralised decisions for a nation which stretched from Uzbekistan and the Balkans in the west to Siberia and Mongolia in the east.

In 1991, Yugoslavia disintegrated, largely because, like the Soviet Union, it was a fake country with such disparate constituent parts that it never made a sensible whole. It just never held together as a single country because it was not a single country.

The UK joined the European Economic Community in 1973 and I remember the 1975 referendum in which English politicians Edward Heath, Harold Wilson and other pro-Europeans lied through their teeth and claimed we had joined an economic union which no-one had any intention of making a political union. The referendum was said to be about joining an economic Common Market.

The European Economic Community then became the European Union in 1993 and Eastern European countries joined after the fall of the Soviet Union. Turkey is likely to join, if it can get over its habit of routinely torturing people (or even if it doesn’t). There is even talk of Uzbekistan joining – a ‘partnership and co-operation agreement’ came into force in 1999.

So we have the ludicrous spectre of a new Soviet-style Union with a centralised bureaucracy increasingly making decisions on the same basis for towns and cities from icy cold Aberdeen (I was partly brought up there in a council estate on a hill, so don’t talk to me about cold) to the baking hot deserts of western Asia (I’ve been there).

And, give me a break, Scottish culture bears no relation to Balkan, Turkish or Uzbek culture, let alone Italian culture.

In Scotland yesterday, at the time of writing, the governing SNP (Scottish National Party) appears to have won a decisive victory in elections for the Scottish Parliament, possibly helped by the fact the opposition Labour Party seems to have mostly attacked not the SNP, but the Conservative Party which is virtually non-existent in Scotland. It would be as if Britain, at the start of World War Two, had decided to concentrate on waging war against Italy instead of Germany.

Presumably this own-goal disaster of a strategy was masterminded from London – another example of why centralised control is a bad idea.

Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond has said he will introduce a referendum on Scottish independence in the next Scottish Parliament.

I used to think Scottish independence was a ridiculous idea because Scotland is not economically large enough to be independent but I have changed my mind because of the European Union.

Clearly I do not think we should be in the European Union but there seems to be no practical way to get out of it.

If Scotland were to separate from the United Kingdom and become an independent country, then financially it would gain massively from being a small country within the European Union – I worked in Ireland in the 1990s and saw the massive financial benefits that country had reaped and was still reaping from Europe.

If Scotland became independent I do not know what would happen in Wales but there is some likelihood that it would move towards independence from England (for – whisper it quietly – it is in the United Kingdom not as a separate country but as a principality of England).

Instead of one country (the UK) being part of the EU, there would be three countries with three votes but the same outlook on almost all issues – an outlook shared by the island of Ireland (which is going to unify eventually, however it happens).

Quite what happens to Britain’s ‘voice within Europe’ and to the British Armed Forces at this point, I can’t even begin to get my head round. But we may yet live in interesting times as I cannot see a vastly enlarged European Union lasting very long without a Soviet style acrimonious break-up or a Yugoslavian type civil war.

Edward Heath, the lying cunt who took us into Europe may yet be the British leader who created a very bloody civil war within Europe.

We can’t escape the tsunami of history.