As civil unrest seamlessly transitions into the establishment of a poundshop police state, Britain’s identity crisis is inescapable. We are at an infuriating stage in political discourse where every “community” interest may be acknowledged and pandered to except those of the English. Labour blather banal platitudes about British values, while continuing the Tory policy of unprecedented and unending mass migration. We are forced, in Matt Walsh fashion, to ask, “What is an Englishman?”

Britain is now a nation settled by immigrants, and a landmass in which “British values” are practised

Foreign Secretary David Lammy lent his indomitable intellect to this question in The Times last Sunday. He concluded that everyone is British except “the Far Right.” The headline suggests that Englishmen born here, with ancestral connections to their country going back centuries, are the ones who require “assimilating”. What this helpfully betrays is that, since Blair, both Labour and the Tories remade in their image have waged a revolutionary war to redefine British identity.

An exchange I had on GB News last week elucidates this point. Former Labour Minister and MEP, Siôn Simon, played defence for armed Muslim militias, who were wandering about on roundabouts, intimidating a Sky News journalist, and attacking a pub in Birmingham — leaving one patron with a lacerated liver. The perpetrators have yet to be charged. When the footage was played, proving I wasn’t lying, he pivoted in predictable fashion, from “It’s not happening”, to “It’s barely happening” — before finally settling on two-tier policing happening, and it being “a good thing”. 

But Simon’s attitude didn’t shock viewers as much as his denial that English people are a distinct ethnic group. When I delineated between the self-identified sides of the riots being Muslim and English, Simon bristled, stating “we the mainstream, normal, proper Britain don’t talk like that in this country.” It is “illegitimate,” even “racist,” to note any difference in the ethnic composition of crowds waving the St George’s cross versus those shouting “Allahu akbar” beneath the Palestine flag.

For Simon to both deny the existence of an ethnic group indigenous to Britain, and denounce me as anti-British, is consistent with his concept of Britain. Labour, and liberals in media and academia, have redefined Britain as an ideological project. In the mould of America since JFK, Britain is now a nation settled by immigrants, and a landmass in which “British values” are practised. Despite the geographically-particular prefix, those values are universal, liberal, pluralistic, tolerant, multicultural, and embodied by the institutions which espouse them. They are not the property or invention of a particular people. One need only buy into “British values” to be British.

This deprives the English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish of a claim to their own homeland. Even the Celtic nationalism of the SNP, Plaid Cymru, and Sinn Féin use progressive platitudes and a limitless admission of immigrants to provide regime-approved window dressing for their hatred of the English. The only time English ancestry is invoked is to beat us with a cudgel of unique and ahistorical guilt for racism, slavery, and Empire. (As David Lammy did when advocating reparations be extracted from British taxpayers.)

So, a man who has lived in Lagos all his life, but believes in freedom of private practice of religion and common law, is now more English than King John: born in England, but who required Magna Carta to constrain his tyrannical rule. This is absurd. We can recognise the Nigerian chap may well make a better neighbour, but that he is not because of this more “British” than someone whose ancestors were born here. Nor is this observation a moral judgement of our Nigerian friend. Even mass immigration critics feel the need to soften the definition of an “indigenous” person, for fear of being mislabelled a racist. But stating the fact that the English exist as a distinct people is not to say other ethnicities are inherently lesser. Only that Britain has a host population whose concerns should be addressed, because they have no other home to return to when conditions worsen.

However, such a suggestion that heritage plays an involuntary part in shaping a person’s identity elicits an antibody reaction from Labour. This is because of an a priori commitment to an anthropology of fundamental human sameness. They believe in a natural egalitarianism, before superficial cultural differences and Tory cuts pried us apart. If only the rest of the world were allowed to make contact with the material abundance and secular liberalism of “British values”, then the scales would fall from the eyes of even the most ardent Jihaddean. All third-world migrants are just potential Britons, who have yet to realise the self-evident truth of the Enlightenment.

This is why doctrinaire, illiberal Muslims can be allies of the Labour project, while the “Far Right” cannot. Regressive attitudes about women and gays are regarded not as irreconcilable cultural differences, but as ignorance remedied by education and social housing.  Referring to various ethnic or religious groups as “communities” is an admission that they are siloed into segregated enclaves, with parallel legal systems and cultural norms. They have representatives who must be met and treated with, like nations-within-a-nation. Thus Labour can tolerate sectarianism, feeling good about themselves for respecting a “community”, while also believing in the ineluctable power of “British values” to dissolve any tribal priors from their deprived homelands. This is a tolerable state of affairs, because they’re in the process of adding all the ingredients before hitting blend. We are on the precipice of being one large glass of undifferentiated, infinitely interchangeable human biomass; of returning to the hypothetical state of nature which predated civilisation. 

The only thing stopping this is the one group not given “community” status: the English “Far Right”. The lack of definition for Far Right is purposeful. Those using it hope the listener substitutes the term for “Nazi”, and allows their intolerable policies to inherit the dwindling legitimacy of the post-War consensus. But what “Far Right” really describes are English people who still dare to be cognisant of themselves as an ethnic group, with an ancestral tie to the land that is stronger than that of any newcomer. When they say “Far Right”, they mean the indigenous populations of the British Isles who refuse to have their identities liquidated by liberal egalitarianism. 

They feel entitled to radically redefine British identity, to rob the English of an ancestral claim to their homeland

This is an affront to the revolutionary redefinition of Britain as a purely ideological project. This is why Lammy writes that the Far Right “has forgotten about what it means to be English: the north star of our values is tolerance and our beautiful country is held together by a constellation of values it has rejected.” He sees nothing wrong with telling people whose familial connection to Britain predates his by a millennia that they are the ones who must assimilate. Those forced to live with the undesirable costs and crimes caused by mass immigration are not a constituency with valid concerns, or even a constituency at all, but rather an enemy guilty of provoking the “potential Britons.” Labour herds them into a politicised pig-pen because it makes their concerns easier to demonise and dismiss. Pointing out cultural differences indigestible by the liberal blender warrants you be censored, imprisoned for wrongthink, and your expressed wishes ignored in successive elections.

Former EHRC head and Sky News presenter Trevor Phillips went as far as gaslighting the public, stating that an ethnically and culturally homogenous Britain “never existed.” We are to suppose that Britain was an uninhabited wilderness before the Windrush showed up. He calls those protesting the legal and financial privileges afforded to foreign “communities” at their expense, “thickos and sickos”, “a few hundred lubricated thugs”, and “a mix of football hooligans, bored teens, inebriates and professional agitators”. He says Nigel Farage “belong[s] in the eighth circle of Hell”, for “enabling of the EDL’s politics is in some ways worse than the conduct of the out-and-out racists.” Phillips desires to deprive native Brits of an example to point to, within living memory, which demonstrates that mass immigration was, as Andrew Neather said, designed to “rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.” Without it, they are disarmed of arguments against mass immigration, multiculturalism, and the DEI agenda.

Both Lammy and Phillips are British by birthplace and citizenship. I am not taking that away from them. But it is insulting that they feel entitled to radically redefine British identity, to rob the English of an ancestral claim to their homeland. Not Lammy, nor Phillips, nor Simon, nor Labour can lay claim to what comprises an identity which has existed in, and built, this country for more than a millennia before them. I fear the violence will continue for as long as their hubris prohibits the concerns of indigenous Englishmen to go unheard.