Tim Haydon
David Cameron and Daniel Hannam: The UK is a Traditionally Civic Nation. Not
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Written by Tim Heydon
How ironic that David Cameron should celebrate London as the ‘most diverse city in the world’, whilst paying tribute to the Israeli athletes who were murdered by the Palestinian terror group Black September in the Munich Olympic games.
After all, the Israelis were murdered because to the Palestinians they represented the colonisers who are robbing them of their homelands, much as the colonisers of London are robbing the English of theirs.
The Israelis of course, thought and continue to think of Israel as their homeland and their birthright by virtue of God’s will and their prior possession in ancient times.
The irony of it all – murders brought about by conflicting claims of two ethnic groups to a territory each think of as theirs by ancient right – being remembered by a British leader through celebrating the loss to the people he is supposed to represent of their ancient homeland – would be amusing were it not be so sickeningly tragic.
Destruction of Territorial Rights is the Way to go? But it is Human Nature to Remember One's Roots....
But perhaps Cameron thinks that the destruction of territorial rights is the way to go and that it would work in Palestine/Israel as he apparently thinks it is working in Britain.
You can't Stamp Out the Territorial Imperative
Only, this juvenile utopia isn’t actually coming about here, is it? Our country is being dismembered, Balkanised, as the various ethnicities, who are far from ‘blending’ as the Daily Telegraph puts it, carve out de facto exclusive territories for themselves in London and in the ancient land of our ancestors as whole, thanks to Cameron and his ilk. London may be diverse, but one ethnic group which is becoming increasingly rare in it is the native British who are fleeing from it if they can possibly manage it.
Overprivilege + Cosmopolitanism + Progressivism = Treachery
Cameron though probably lives too much in his deracinated, wealthy, privileged, cosmopolitan bubble to notice – or care. Thanks to him and those like him, how long will it be before we see the kind of armed conflicts in Britain which are such a feature of the multiethnic middle east? Twenty years? Thirty?
David Hannam MEP: The UK is traditionally Civic in Character
David Hannam is just as misguided as Cameron in his way. In the Daily Mail, he claims that the Union Flags flying across the country during the Olympics are ‘totems of a shared loyalty that supercedes ancestral ties’.
Wherever our parents were born, he tells us (he personally was born in Peru of Irish Catholic, ie probably Nationalist anti-British parents), we can be patriotic Britons merely by signing up to a set of common values. The United Kingdom, unlike many of its continental neighbours, has traditionally had a civic rather than a racial concept of nationhood, he says.
The Empire was Civic but the United Kingdom wasn’t
You are wrong Mr Hannam. The British Empire was predicated on what might be called a civic basis, but the United Kingdom never was. The reality, whatever the officlal propaganda, was that the British conceived of the Empire as being their possession, not something they were part of. They ruled the inhabitants of this Empire but never considered them to be on a par in any way with the inhabitants of their native islands, certainly not on a par in their affections, unless the were from the White Dominions. That is the unvarnished truth of the matter.
It is Racial, Cultural and Religious Identity that creates lasting Nations.
The English, the Scots, the Northern Irish, the Welsh - they were racially almost identical and were just different enough culturally and religiously (as T S Eliot pointed out) to create interest and creative tension without being disruptive. The Irish went their own way because as Roman Catholic Celts they felt distinct enough racially, culturally and religiously to want to.
The White Empire fought for us, the Rest fought for Themselves.
When many from the Empire fought in the two world wars, some, especially from the white Dominions were fighting out of loyalty to the Empire, yes. But mostly they fought for it because they saw it as upholding civilisation and decent standards in their own lands against a foe who regarded most of them as expendable untermensch. The British were their 'sweet boyish masters' as Santayanna put it but they did not fight for Britain and the British as such.
It’s a pity Hannam who is an intelligent man doesn’t appear to be able to appreciate these distinctions, but one supposes this is because he is handicapped by biases arising from his background .
The Native British created their Standards, not the other Way Around
If Britain was a decent, civilised place in the past, Hannam and the others ought to ask themselves why this was. It wasn’t first and foremost because it was a creedal or propositional nation; a civic nation which did not care about religion or ethnicity as Hannam tells us. It was because it was racially, culturally and religiously one of, if not the most homogenous on earth, and specifically Christian in character. It had been free from serious invasion for a millennium. Even the Normans were closely related to the inhabitants of Britain in every important respect. It was this homogeneity and these characteristics which allowed the creation of the decency and success Hannam finds so admirable, not the other way around.
The idea that one can reverse this homogeneity and these characteristics overnight in just about every particular and that the country will flourish as before, is the purest fantasy, Mr Hannam.
