So what's British?

BRITAIN'S BRITISH? REALLY? WELL BLOW ME....

I read a tweet a couple of days ago saying "UKIP are the only chance Britain has of remaining British". Now, to be fair, you do get to see some really stupid statements being made on Twitter, and much amusement can be derived from many of them, but I can't make up my mind how much this guy is funny stupid, and how much plain disturbing. Because, and maybe I'm the one who's missing something here, I'm not sure how Britain could be anything other than British. It kind of goes together doesn't it?

Of course this being a kipper he's trying to make some daft point about immigration. Or maybe it was 'islamification', that well known made-up scaremongers terminology. It was hard to see in what context he was ranting, but then context, like facts and evidence, doesn't seem to mean much to kippers. They seem to have their own little fixed ideas ('ideas' may be an overly complimentary term) which no amount of reality will alter. So all the recent conclusive evidence demonstrating that immigration has been positive for the UK is presumably some kind of plot in the eyes of people like this.

Which may mean that this person imagines he's making some kind of sense in coming out with this meaningless statement. For a start Britain is a geographic, rather than political, entity. The UK is the political state, comprised of three countries and a colony. So quite how Britain could be anything other than British is beyond me. Even if the UK was to break up, or become part of a larger state, Britain would remain Britain, and anything and anyone in Britain could be reasonably described as British. Being ruled from London never prevented Ireland remaining Irish, did it? Despite the best efforts of the likes of Cromwell and Churchill Irish national identity remained strong.

So what exactly can 'remaining British' actually mean to this man? Is there something beyond geography which marks out something, or someone, as distinctly 'British'? It's hard to think of there being much in common between Bob Crow and Norman Tebbit, Mary Beard and Cheryl Cole, Mo Farah and Elton John, Kirsty Wark and E L James, but they are all indisputably one thing and that's British. Because they live in Britain. I'd find it depressing to think I would ever be thought of having much in common with Nigel Farage, but we both live in, on, the same island and that makes us both British.

I'm a Scot, but have spent most of my adult life living in England. My move south took place in 1979, shortly after the first general election win for Thatcher. I watched coverage of that event back in Scotland, but saw out all subsequent election nights in England. Until 2010, when I had the chance to be back home once again. And received a powerful reminder of just how different a country Scotland is from England, at least in political terms.

The BBC Scotland coverage was a very different animal to what I'd become used to. For a start there were four main parties represented in the debates and discussions. Then, as the results came through, the tally on the screen would flip between the numbers for Scottish seats, and those for the UK as a whole. And the stories those figures told were hugely different, as they have been since the eighties when the savagery of Thatcherite policies effectively destroyed Tory support north of the border, culminating in the total wipeout of their Westminster representation in '97. As for UKIP.... they remain the sixth party in Scotland, have yet to hold on to a deposit in either Westminster or Holyrood elections, and are little more than a bad smell in the corner of the room. I recall reading that, in the 2011 Holyrood election, all the Scottish UKIP candidates put together scraped fewer votes across the whole country than the independent Margo MacDonald received in just the Lothian Region.

So Scotland is not England. It has always maintained it's own legal system, it has very different cultural traditions and sees itself as a country apart, within the UK. But it is as British as England, or Wales, because it is part of the same island. All three countries have changed dramatically over the centuries, but this was Britain when the Romans arrived, and that cannot be altered.

That it is populated by mongrels alters this fact not one jot. The waves of immigration to these islands are too numerous to mention. Perhaps the Romans were the first to be properly documented, but that certainly didn't mean we had an Italian influx. For any Roman occupying forces were as polyglot as the French Foreign Legion. There were men, and women, from all over Europe, the Near East and North Africa. Many integrated with the locals and remained once the empire receded. In the following centuries there were Germanic tribes, Scandinavians, and, of course, the Normans (most Scots forget, or don't even know, that Robert the Bruce came from a Norman family). Although there were no further major invasions this island developed trading links all over the world, which led to lpopulation movements in both directions. The impact of the slave trade should not be forgotten either, with many people of African original being brought here forcibly. On a more cheerful note, let us not forget that Britain has a long history of providing sanctuary for political refugees, saving lives from the possibility of torture and death.

So @DuncanGray (for it was he who was the 'genius' behind my opening sentence), what were you really trying to say? Just what is this 'British' you speak of, if it is not a simple adjective referring to the fact of being from, in, part of, Britain? How can being part of the EU stop Britain from being British? Have the French become less French or the Italians less Italian? Is it the immigration which dilutes the number of inhabitants actually born on this island? Why should that matter, given the constant changes in origins reflected above? The gene pool is strengthened by variety, not inbreeding (as our royal family appears to demonstrate).

Or is there something else at work here? That's the trouble with proto-fascist parties, there's always the whiff of racism working somewhere in the background. Any time spent following a few UKIP supporters on Twitter, or listening to the idiocies of Godfrey Bloom, will soon show you that. How much of this 'British' malarky is a hankering for a non existent golden age when white, straight males knew they were better than the rest (nobody appears to have told our current government that the world has moved on)?

I'm only surmising of course, but you have to wonder....