Best Of

"Suella Braverman
I will never be truly English: here is why"

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/02/26/i-will-never-be-truly-english-here-is-why-suella-braverman/

Suella calls herself British Asian in that article, apparently only descendants of Normans and Saxons and at a push Romano British and Vikings who settled here can be English is the basis of her argument

It's just crazy, I have no idea how recently my ancestors came to this island as I know little about our heritage (there is a rumour one great grandparent had the last name schwartz changed to Black, but I have no confirmation), so how am I meant to know if my ancestry is suitably Norman/Saxon/Romano British/Viking?

I have English, Welsh, Scots and Scots-Irish ancestors, albeit some from the British diaspora in the Antipodes. Can I be English by her definition? Or is my blood too diluted by those perfidious Celts?

tbf in my experience it's not uncommon for people born in England to parents with Asian or African roots to consider themselves British and not English. I haven't read the article, but if she is also saying that others with a similar background can't be English she is wrong, but she is entitled to feel that way about herself.

But if HYUFD's summary is correct and she talks about 'descendants of Romano British' then she is off her trolley.

She says, "For Englishness to mean something substantial, it must be rooted in ancestry, heritage, and, yes, ethnicity – not just residence or fluency. [...] I don’t feel English because I have no generational ties to English soil, no ancestral stories tied to the towns or villages of this land."

Nor do a buttload of white english people (depending on how far we define 'generational'), not to the extent they can prove it without deeper family research. Are we sure how many will be left? A great many, to be sure, but a lot less than she probably thinks.

Yes 'I don't feel English' is fine. But 'For Englishness to mean something it must be rooted in ancestry, heritage, and, yes, ethnicity' is a load of bollocks. At the end of the day everyone has mixed ancestry.

And the things that are most identifiably English are either not dependent in those things at all - eg having an English accent, or being a fan of the England football team. Or in the case of 'heritage' aren't really 'English' historically - Stonehenge and the royal family.

Here's a poll from 2021
https://www.britishfuture.org/english-identity-open-football-unites/

"Three quarters (77%) of white people in England agree that ‘Being English is open to people of different ethnic backgrounds who identify as English.’ Just 14% feel that ‘Only people who are white count as truly English.’ Two-thirds (68%) of ethnic minority citizens agree that being English is open to people of all backgrounds, while 19% feel that English identity is the preserve of white people."

You just go to a supermarket and push a shopping trolley round, aiming to catch the feet of all the other customers. Everyone who says ‘sorry’ when you crush or scrape their foot is English.

...

Dumber than a bag of rare earth minerals...

@faisalislam
NEW:

What if the EU retaliates?

Trump: “They can’t. They can try, but they can’t… the numbers can never equal us… they can retaliate , but it cannot be a successful retaliation, because we just go cold turkey we dont buy any more and if that happens, we win”.

I hope the EU responds or at least stands up to him

Britain is your team, not the EU.

To be frank, I increasingly feel I don't have a team.

Take the aid/defence decision as one example. I can see it is good politics and has gone down well with you eminently sensible chaps on here. We probably need lots more decisions in this vein to blunt the appeal of Reform and the deranged fools the other side of the Atlantic.

And, if push came to shove, I'd fight for UK against an enemy.

Yet I would like to live in a society that was prepared to tighten our own belts at a time when money is needed, not remove it from the sorts of programmes that save and improve lives so remarkably cheaply (even if you factor in waste within the development field).

Most specifically, I think many of the more wealthy citizens of UK have utterly lost our way, threatening to up sticks and move to somewhere that will better indulge our selfish desire to keep more of our own wealth, rather than recognising the almost unquantifiable value we all get from living in probably the most prosperous, safe and free society that has existed in human history, which our taxes help sustain.