To tea and crumpets. To Waterloo, Trafalgar and Dunkirk. To Vera Lynn, Beckham and the other Spice Girls. To Alec Guinness and the Lavender Hill Mob. To Alistair Sims in ‘Christmas Carol’ by Charles Dickens - who wrote it one dark and stormy night in the Midland Hotel, Manchester.
To Manx kippers on British Rail. To Liverpool and the Beatles and the Battle of Britain and to What We Want Is Watneys. To Lassies from Lancashire and the latest Test score and the Springboks and Tottenham Hotspur and Whipsnade Zoo and “Kiss Me Quick Under The Pier” and Butlins and Perinporth and Colonel Bloodnock and How Green Was My Valley and to whatever it is that Scotsmen wear under their kilts.
To a leg of New Zealand Lamb with real mint sauce, new potatoes and Yorkshire Pudding. Or to a good hot Indian curry…
To Kruger Park and Frobisher Bay and Waltzing Matilda and Daisy and a Bicycle Made For Two and double decker buses and the Piccadilly Line and Derbyshire and Brighton and the Channel Ferry and Knees Up Mrs. Brown and Cowes Week and Mick Jagger and Winston and Jamaican Farewell and good old Kafoozalem the Harlot of Jerusalem and the Bowmen of Agincourt and Oliver Cromwell and Laurence Olivier and Norman Wisdom and Tommy Cooper and Graham Norton and William Shakespeare and Elgar with Gilbert or Sullivan.
And to Princess Diana and Dylan Thomas and Robert Bruce and Beachcomber and Turner and Newcastle Brown Ale and Rowntrees Pastilles and Marks and Sparks and Miss Marples and steak and kidney pudding with chips and mushy peas and Babycham and I’ll have a port and lemon dearie please, I don’t mind if I do.
Cheers! Bottoms Up Alfie…..
There’ll always be an England. This happy place. This sceptred isle set in a silver sea. And there’ll always be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover. Just you wait and see.
So here’s to all things British. To England and Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland. To Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and to all the other countries of the British Commonwealth.
To our heritage. To our past and to our future. To Brits, Anglophiles and good people everywhere. There’s no place like home.

“Britishness,” which, as Mr. Kalb notes, is not easily defined, is under attack from above and below, within and without. The United Kingdom, under the plans of the current Labour government, is to be fully subjugated to the European Union. To be fair, no recent Tory government, and certainly not today’s Tories in opposition, has done anything effective to resist the Euroblob. The process is well-advanced; so well that it is now a criminal offence to sell groceries using English measures. Next to go will be the pound sterling; for all Blair’s dissembling, he and Chancellor Gordon Brown are committed to the Euro.

At the same time, the UK is being dismembered, as phony devolution fans separatist sentiment in Scotland and Wales, and corresponding resentment in England. Here, shortsighted socialist politicians have unleashed more than they reckoned for. Even the local independence movements are false: the Scottish National Party calls for independence from the UK only to submerge Scotland even deeper in the morass of EU bureaucracy, under which Scotsmen will be far less free than they are as British subjects. Cravenness over Northern Ireland shows the government will cut and run when it thinks it can get away with it rather than defend the right of the province’s majority who wish to be British to remain so.

To complete the work of destruction, Great Britain is to be killed culturally through floods, American-style, of unassimilable immigrants, mostly bogus “asylum-seekers,” whom the British are ordered to accept and, again American-style, prefer to themselves. Anyone who knows today’s London well knows that London is now no more English than New York City is American, a remarkable thing for a city that does not have such a “melting-pot” tradition. As goes London, so also go other cities all the way up to Aberdeen. Enoch Powell foretold the price Great Britain would pay for high immigration, and he was warning only against the limited Commonwealth immigration of the 1960s. The situation today is far worse than he could have imagined, and there is no will in the establishment to control it. Indeed, the Great and the Good seem mostly to be for it.

Re-education proceeds apace, as a story from today’s Scotsman attests: A survey commissioned by the Scottish Executive (Edinburgh’s new faux parliament) finds that 25% of Scots confess to having the odd “racist” thought (it doesn’t take much to qualify; referring to an ethnic restaurant as a “Paki” will do). In response, the Executive is spending 1 million pounds on a “One Scotland” campaign - the website is a blur of assorted Asian scripts, with a rather pathetic Gaelic line at the bottom, and a picture of smiling Chinese girls below a Saltire blowing in the wind - to get the Scots to confront the racist within, and rip the devil from their breasts. The slogan is “One Scotland, Many Cultures”; something tells me the cultural diversity they hail is not that between Highlander and Lowlander! The Labour ministress in charge, whose bloodless visage graces the Scotsman’s story, is named Curran. It seems Scotsmen are going to be made into better, more inclusive Scots by an Irishwoman. I fear her influence on the savages may be less beneficial than St. Columba’s was.

All may not be lost, though. Last Sunday approximately 400,000 people, countrymen and their sympathisers, converged on London to protest - peacefully - the government’s chronic mishandling of countryside issues, including hunting, so there is resistance yet to some of this idiocy. As with America, however, if immigration is not controlled soon, “Britishness” will soon be of no more than historical interest. HRS

As much as I too love many of myriad things about the former Empire that William lists in his post above, I must say that I think the Commonwealth is part of the problem for today’s Britain. I believe William also mentions “corrupt African nations” in another of his comments - the Commonwealth is almost nothing but such countries (whether in anglophone Africa, West Indies, or elsewhere). Why don’t Brits cut themselves loose from the wreck rather than praise this failed experiment in post-colonialism?

Britishness does not come from merely living in or being born in England. I can trace my family heritage back hundreds of years and I am proud my English and European origin. It is not that I consider it superior to other cultures, simply that the English have and continue to achieve many great things and we should celebrate that fact. I believe Britishness could be integrated into Europe without destroying it. Unlike the current trend to demonize or deny the existence of this culture by politicians it should be preserved and respected as I respect the French, German and other European cultures. It seems that nearly every culture in Britain is given a near sacred standing except the English. These days it is about as socially acceptable to say you’re white, English and proud of it as it is to say you’re a raving Nazi. More immigrants should attempt to integrate themselves better, when in Rome do as the Romans do springs to mind. If I moved to a different country it’d be unrealistic for me to expect it to change for me, I would change for it and still not “lose my culture”.
I think Britishness can be defined; I have black friends who are much more British than some of my others. It is an attitude, a way of life and a state of mind (and seemingly also involves drinking lots of tea).
Some people seem very xenophobic about Europe; I hardly think France and Germany are planning on having us all speak French or German anytime soon. The same goes for this anti-EU rubbish passed off as fact in “news” papers like The Sun. EU regulations against bent bananas, toys for pigs and others spring to mind. The funny thing is people seem to believe this outlandish rubbish. To the previous post from Howard, it isn’t a criminal offence to sell groceries using English measures, just that they must have metric measures displayed as well. We are bound to Europe by geography and by culture, get over it then get with it.

HexJam

“Britishness does not come from merely living in or being born in England.”

HexJam’s comment starts off well.

By the end, however, it strays into confusion. What HexJam doesn’t appear to get is that there’s unavoidably a significant genetic component to national characteristics. (Let not the word “unavoidably” here be taken to mean that that’s regrettable. It’s a matter for rejoicing, as far as those of us who value true “diversity” in the world are concerned. Marxists of all stripes, such as Harvard “Professor” Noël Ignatiev, detest it of course, and dream of strangling every manifestation of it to death.)

VFR conducted an informal poll some time ago which asked whether the populations of China and Europe could have been completely exchanged one for the other two thousand five hundred years ago, say, and still have everything else in the subsequent histories and cultures of both places come out the same — that is, the transplanted European races living in China produce the same China which the Chinese actually produced, and the transplanted Chinese races living in Europe produce the Europe we all know. The answer to the poll question is of course no, and not only is it no but there are very few among the governing élites who can say honestly that they believe it is yes. They have ulterior motives for forcing the current immigration disasters on the North-American and European nations.

Does any of this mean we have to strive for perfect racial purity as a national policy? No. It does mean that selfish, wicked, or incompetent élites are blamable if they deliberately promote the diametrically-opposite policy of incompatible immigration on a scale so massive as to actually alter the ethnocultural character of the nation against the wishes of its original people. There’s a very big difference between an American citizen having every right to bring his Chinese, Pakistani-Moslem, African-Bantu, or what-have-you, bride home to live in this country and become an American citizen, on the one hand, and on the other, what’s actually been going on — the attempted transformation, literally, of the race of this country, Canada, and Europe from what it was to something totally different.