Qualifying for an Identity

If you had British parents (eg. native British parents) and grew up in Britain, you probably consider yourself British. But how many facts do you know about Britain and its history?

• Who was the second king of England?

• Who invented the Spinning Jenny?

• Who was monarch in 1782?

• Which parts of England are renowned for tin mining?

• What were the Wars of the Roses all about?

• Which present-day counties did historical Mercia cover?

• What was the middle tier of the post-war tripartite education system called?

• Who was the first Poet Laureate?

• When did Jack Straw abolish the Law Lords?

• Where did Philip Larkin famously live?

• How many elections did Churchill win?

You might well have been born here and be of British parentage, yet know the answers to none of those questions… Some people would say this makes you less British than an immigrant who does know the answers.

I don’t know exactly who those people are, but presumably they exist because it has been proposed that British citizenship be granted to newcomers based on how much they know of Britain’s culture, law and history.

Sometimes, when a working-class person gets rowdy about foreigners, you will see liberals using the same rationale against him: being uneducated, he probably knows little about Britain’s history, yet he has the temerity to believe himself more British than Abdul who arrived last year!

Likewise, when a “gammon” talks about Brexit, the Guardian reader will leap into gear, noting that Brexiteers are “ignorant” and “low-information”, whereas Jovunga, in Britain on a scholarship at Oxford no less, is clearly the very opposite. Despite hailing from some obscure African country that we don’t need to know about, Jovunga had to pass a general knowledge test about British culture. So can the gammon really claim to be more British than Jovunga…?

With all of this, the assumption is that, for some reason, knowing about something justifies your being given access to it. This does not follow. It is even more absurd when the “knowledge” amounts to a list of factoids. These, shorn of context, amount to mere trivia. A foreigner could know all of the factoids I listed above, yet not know Britain at all.

Indeed, one can know Britain very well without knowing a single one of those factoids. While such knowledge is advantageous in some contexts and doubtless grants a level of perception unexperienced by the layman, it is far from a necessity for knowing one’s country, and certainly for being of one’s country. There is great affectation in pretending, as progressives do, that an official certification equals an organic reality, and therefore that any absence of the certificate negates the reality. All of this is absurd - just another of the spanners that liars will throw into natural works.

Tedious general knowledge quizzes aside, they have other citizenship tests for newcomers wishing to call themselves British.

For a while they tried talking about “British values”, and used this to assert that migrants embody these values better than a lot of natives do. But there were problems with this. Nobody could define what these “British values” were. Then it became increasingly difficult to reconcile this requirement with multiculturalism; you can’t celebrate diversity while requiring people to adopt any particular values. Then there was the problem that it became increasingly obvious that many migrants really don’t adopt British culture at all, making the claim that they adopt so-called “British values” even more absurd.

So the goal posts were shifted. Migrants were as British as us, or even more British than us, not because of values or culture but because of sheer effort to earn “the right” to Britain. They contributed to Britain, either monetarily or in sweat, while we natives sat around not doing the jobs these wonderful brown people were willing to do. So identity becomes like a moronic reality TV show where the contestants have to overcome certain challenges in order to win the prize.

For example, Badunga risked his life on a hazardous journey across sea in order to reach Britain. By contrast, I was merely born here. I’ve done nothing to earn the identity. No effort, no risk, so why any reward? Surely I should have to “prove” myself somehow, before I am able to call myself British, while Badunga having braved the seas should feel himself absolutely entitled to the identity? Maybe there should be officials on the beach at Dover handing out British citizenship to the plucky swimmers who make it on to the sand, while so-called “natives” with ancestry going back a thousand years should gaze in awe at their new betters. Ah, but now we are just veering into the paranoid realms of far-flung reality…

Another example. Mbungu has lived here for 10 years and paid tax consistently during that time! Whereas you, filthy racist NEET, have never paid tax. So who is more useful to Britain, more committed to Britain, more responsible to Britain, and really… more British? The native NEET, or the much-loved Mbungu?

I needn’t invoke some imaginary Guardian journalist. I have had these exact conversations - or rather, insults - from a millionaire “British Asian”, a decade ago. Outraged that I supported UKIP but was on the dole at the time, he kept reminding me that he paid a lot of tax - “enough to pay the welfare cheques of many UKIP supporters”. The implication was not only that I was a hypocrite and pathetic, but that I was less useful to Britain than he was, and therefore not only had some nerve objecting to mass immigration, but in some sense was less British than him.

I think, when citizenship or belonging or identity are contingent upon such factors, something has gone very wrong. It seems to go with the culture of the Baby Boomer generation that one’s worth is judged by one’s “success” in life (income). Extending this, one’s national identity is contingent upon being useful to some or other economy. As a welfare claimant I was equally un-taxpaying in all nations, so presumably I “belonged” nowhere at all, nowhere in the world to call my homeland - but, if I began paying tax in Kenya, well, then I would be a Kenyan!

Of course we can mock the extremes of this - in truth, no liberal would ever claim that I am Kenyan, nor make the sacred Kenyan identity “buyable” with something as mundane as tax contributions - but the reality is bad. In Western countries, we have been taught to loathe the idea of identity deriving from immutable traits, so instead we focus on mutable traits, things that people can learn, or emulate or adopt. The result is that our identities are now “up for grabs”.

In late 2018, I sat in a beergarden in Berlin with a German friend. At a nearby table were two young professional women. During a lull in our own conversation, my friend listened to these women chatting away. I noted myself that they sounded sophisticated, intelligent, worldly… though I didn’t speak German so had no idea really. Then my friend turned to me and whispered that the two women were speaking absolutely perfect Hochdeutsch - but they were discussing their jobs at a Jewish organisation and possible sabbaticals they could take to Israel. They were Jews, but had received the best of German education and culture and as a result, out-competed the Germans at speaking the highest form of their own language. Meantime, young Germans increasingly speak ghetto dialects absorbed from rap music.

We see a similar thing in Britain and America with Jews and with Asians. While our own working-class sink into the under-class, and the middle-class sink into the working-class, and the upper-class sink into pale brown irrelevance… our societies are increasingly dominated by people just like that interlocutor of mine from 10 years ago: high-achieving Indians. They preach egalitarianism to us while steadily out-competing and out-performing us in our own countries. Almost always, they are of the Brahmin caste and have the stereotypical loathing for lower castes, and they redirect that vicious snobbery towards the white middle and working-class of their adopted country, but with an additional racial animus into the bargain… yet still preach egalitarianism to us!

It is really an egalitarianism of the high IQ. They want Western (white) countries flooded with high IQ people like themselves, and justify this with talk of higher taxes being paid, more businesses being created, more money being generated, more prosperity all round, and so on. The dishonesties here are many. In truth they don’t want “high IQ people”, they want more of their own ethnic group, and only that. In truth, they don’t really believe that prosperity is the only thing that matters; they just want us to believe that. As for their claim to be somehow more British than native NEETs because they are more useful to the British economy, it is dishonest because they don’t really care about economics (nobody does), but also because, demonstrably, they don’t feel British - even after paying all this precious tax into the British economy.

But most disgusting of all is the suggestion that they can qualify for British identity through tax contributions, and therefore that any native Brit must do the same or else be “stateless”. This at once cheapens the identity and our sacred right to it.

The truth is, you are British because of your genes. There is no test, no hurdle, no obstacle course that you need to pass in order to “qualify”. It is innate. It is immutable. You’ve either got it or you haven’t.

This does not mean that you should languish in poverty or self-pity or complacency. You should toil to become the best you can be. Commitment and effort are virtuous. Achievement is admirable. But these are entirely separate things from identity. Identity is not a reward, so no effort can attain it.

Nobody can ever take away what you are on the basis of some arbitrary test, and it is simply grotesque to suggest that you qualify for your birthright only when you enter a certain tax bracket.

Such things would have been inscrutable to our ancestors, and they should be the same to us.

You might have no money. You might have achieved little in life. Maybe you are content with that, or maybe it bothers you, but in any case it has no bearing on your right to what your ancestors bequeathed to you. The same is true if you are an heir to millions, who never did anything to “earn” that wealth. It is ancestry, not achievements or trinkets, that make us the heirs to this land.

So I would say to you, whoever you are, if you have the ancestry:

You are British. This landmass lives in you, its rhythms and tones breathe in you, the landscape and the attitudes are reflected in you, because you are one more instance of the Eternal Animal. You are an individual and unique and there will never be another one of you, but you are of this people.

This place created you and you would not be yourself - the person you know - were it any other way. You might well have learned this or that from other places, but it was Britain that made you. It is an ancient story and you will never know most of it, and you don’t need to; you just need to be aware of it, and of your responsibility to it.

Maybe you feel deeply attached to this ancient thing, or ambivalent towards it and sometimes distant from it, sometimes a stranger to it even. Perhaps sometimes you hate it, or always love it, or don’t know what you feel. Often the deepest connections are troubled and turbulent - yet they endure, and endure - sometimes best when left alone.

So many forces today ask you to feel no attachment, or even to feel embarrassment at the idea of being attached to “a rock your parents happened to fuck on”. Yet those forces offer you only tricks and trinkets in place of this eternal thing they ask you to give up. And the foreigners who smugly tell you they’re as British as you… secretly they seethe with rage at the effortless claim you enjoy to this thing that they can never have, and can never be, and can never destroy.

You are of Britain. You cannot earn it, and you cannot relinquish it - and any attempt to would be a lie. Having dramatically severed yourself from the eternal story, you would eventually find it regenerating deep within you all over again.

That is what eternal things do.