The globalist war on Englishness

I see the tosserati is suddenly keen on Englishness. Having spent years fanning themselves with a copy of the Guardian every time a ‘gammon’ with an England tattoo walked by, now they’re saying Englishness is for everyone. Just last summer, during Operation Raise the Colours, they were wheezing into paper bags at the sight of oiks hoisting up the St George’s Cross. Now they’re churning out pious columns saying Englishness is a fab, inclusive identity and everyone should want a piece of it.

The cause of their Damascene embrace of Englishness is Suella Braverman. The Tory turned Reform politician has enraged the identitarian elites by saying she doesn’t feel English. She’s a Brit, sure, but she thinks Englishness is more ethnic than civic, a gift more of heritage than migration. ‘How dare you identify as non-English?!’, cry the people who think a 6”4 fella can identify as a lesbian.

Braverman’s rejection of Englishness is racism, they say. She’s implying non-whites like her can’t be English, they wail. I’ve heard it all now. So it’s racist to not feel English but it’s also racist to feel super-English? It’s racist to demur from Englishness but it’s also racist to smother your town in the St George’s Cross and sob ‘En-ger-land!’ into your pint when Harry Kane scores? All of it is ‘dog-whistle racism’, apparently: both the riff raff wrapping themselves in the England flag and the brown lady saying ‘I’m not English’.

Here’s the thing: this isn’t a contradictory position. Arrogant, hubristic cant that proves the smug set really does fancy itself judge, jury and executioner of what constitutes Englishness, sure. But contradictory, no. In fact, Braverman’s spurning of Englishness horrifies them for the exact same reason that the working class’s passionate embrace of Englishness does: because what both sides are essentially saying is that Englishness is a real, concrete, historic thing that the credentialled classes can’t just ‘redefine’ or ‘expand’ or ‘queer’ like they do with everything else. Our rulers fear Englishness because it sits stubbornly beyond the jealous grip of their cultural power.

Kemi Badenoch reignited the Englishness debate with a dig at Braverman in her party conference speech this week. She described Reform UK as a party so morally lost it would ‘debate whether my mixed-race children are English’. This is a rare red herring from Badenoch. No serious player in Reform would deny her kids are English. Their father was head boy at Ampleforth and their mum is leader of the Conservative Party: that’s about as English as it gets. Outside of the Tolkien right with its wet dreams of a shirtless Rupert Lowe vanquishing ‘the browns’, no normal person denies that Kemi and her family are Brits.

Yet Braverman is raising an important question: if anyone can be English, doesn’t that make Englishness meaningless? When an identity becomes too fluid, surely it dies? Like Braverman, I don’t identify as English. I don’t have a drop of English blood in my body and my family have been here for five minutes historically speaking. I tick White Irish on medical documents and census forms. It would be mental – not to mention rude – if I was to turn to some lad whose ancestors fought at Agincourt and say: ‘I’m as English as you, mate.’

But the identitarians fume against this ‘narrow’ definition of Englishness. They rage against the idea that Englishness is ‘the property’ of some mythical ‘pure Englishman’. What they mean is they can’t believe the temerity of ordinary people – and ‘plebs’ at that – who would dare to ringfence an identity from their frenzied intellectual overhauling. Who would dare to say this is ours not yours. Who would refuse to let them fuck up Englishness just as they have sex, gender and all the other identities they’ve hollowed out in accordance with their crackpot ideologies.

Every other national identity on these isles has surrendered to the juggernaut of globalism. Scottishness, courtesy of the SNP, now means little more than wanking over the EU flag while shrieking ‘Transwomen are women!’. Welshness still has some proud, sensible adherents, but if Plaid Cymru gets its way it will just be another limping, dumb species of anti-English Euro-federalism. As for Irishness – God help us. To be Irish now is to hate the Jewish State and bow and scrape before the Brussels oligarchy. All nationalisms, in an irony too large to comprehend, tug their forelocks to their globalist masters. All, that is, except Englishness.

England is holding out. The English working classes cleave to their flags. They gather on their beaches and say ‘Stop the boats’. They voted for Brexit, the most savage kick in the eye globalism has received. And now many of them insist that Englishness is a rooted, ancient thing, not a costume you can pull on after being here a few years. It’s not racism that motors this supposedly ‘narrow’ definition of Englishness – it’s resistance. They are withstanding with all their might the top-down pressure to surrender this identity too to the globalist crusade, and in the process to surrender their very sense of self, of collective power, of peoplehood.

‘Are you saying Bukayo Saka isn’t English?!’, cry the elites whose identitarian lunacy meets resistance at the borders of Englishness. Oh give it a rest. I’ve never met an Englishman or an Englishwoman who doesn’t love Saka and cheer with delight when he plays. The clinging to Englishness is not bigotry – it’s insurgency. Even I, a mutt Mick, can see that. I might not be English but I will more than happily wave the English flag, the last remaining symbol of resistance against the technocracy’s choking culture of conformism and anti-democracy. ‘This precious stone set in the silver sea’ – they can’t have it.