Please, sir, can I have my country back?

Sun, 23 Dec 2007 22:52:13 +0100

Yes, I am British and proud of it. More to the point, I am white, British and proud of both facts. You see, I am a Celt, and whilst the indigeneity of Celts to the island of the Briton goes back only say three millennia, I think that's good enough.

However, there are moves afoot to make me feel inferior, guilty and ashamed. Welcome to the land of Political Correctness, where "positive discrimination" rules the day and if one's skin is a certain colour, one is discriminated against, no matter that this is one's country and one has every right to expect one's due.

I have every sympathy with people who come in from abroad, seeking to partake in our prosperity, when theirs is lacking; I don't even deny that the English (as distinct from the British) have been complete cads when tooling up in other countries and claiming them for the empire, especially when the aborigines of those countries have quite reasonably stood up in defence of what's theirs. But that has no relevance now - not at all, despite what the politically gliberal would have one believe. You see, as it goes, I don't derive any profit from the sugar plantations of Jamaica despite there being slaves used at the behest of the English owners of these plantations. It is also quite unreasonable, I would say, that I should be held responsible for the slave-trade, especially by representatives of a people who enslave others right to this very day. And why am I held over a barrel by some negro-on-the-make with the full complicity of my government when nobody acknowledges the part the negroes themselves play in the slave trade? When people bang on about "black history month" or the abolition of the slave trade, or the trampling of other people by the "poor, opwessed negro" who's wiley enough to manipulate feelings of guilt in the ruling- and Guardian-reading-classes, who's remembering the name of Mulai Ismail, whose corsairs pillaged whole families from the Cornish coast to work as slaves building mosques in his native Morocco? Who's remembering his barbarity, as he entertained himself by setting his slaves' hair on fire and delighted as they danced in agony trying to find relief? And lest we forget, we were the ones who abolished slavery in Britain - it still goes on in Africa. And Asia and the middle-east.

I don't begrudge people their heritage. Everyone should know who they are, and part of who they are is where they came from. But I have the same right; I want to celebrate my Britishness - my British (and indeed Celtic) traditions. And that is one reason why I want my country back.

Comments

Witchcraft and the Briton

Please, sir, can I have my country back?