In our dining room we have a false fireplace and chimneybreast. Blocking the top of the fireplace (to prevent curious rabbits getting behind the false wall and necessitating knocking it down) is a readers digest atlas of the British Isles from the early 1960s. I spent many hours skimming through the pages of the book when I acquired it as a teenager, and it wasn't just putting off doing my homework. I found the book interesting for two main reasons, firstly because all the maps in it pre-date the building of the motorway network, and secondly because the atlas gives the meanings and origins of the names of all the towns and villages in the country. For example Manchester is Brittonic for 'Place on the breast shaped hills' and Harrogate (where I'm originally from) is Anglo-Saxon or Norse for 'grey hill pasture'.
What the atlas reveals is the many linguistic origins for place names in this country, and what that means is that this country has been subject to many influxes of alien communities coming here to settle and bringing their cultures and customs. We have - amongst others - Romans, Angles & Saxons, Vikings, Celts and Normans colouring our history as well as the Britons who were here originally. Although these cultures immigrated by way of invasion over time they became fully integrated with the Britons and the combined resources of all these cultures has made Britain what it is today.
And Britain isn't the only country to be founded on a base of immigration. The US and Australia among other countries have – at their modern historical root – European settlers moving to these 'new worlds' because they were unhappy or unwelcome in their homelands. These countries, more than ours, were founded on a basis of economic, political and religious migration. Exactly the reasons many people want to come into the UK today.
Maybe the underlying memory of what happened in these countries contributes to our suspicion of immigrants today. We suspect that immigrant communities want to take over our island and annex it to whichever country they originate from. Maybe we fear the loss of our national identity and our cultures will disappear out of memory and we will be assimilated into an inter-national, amalgamated bland conglomerate of ideas that lacks any definition or spark of individuality. But that's nothing we need to fear from immigrants, they don't come here in sufficient numbers to have that kind of effect. Rather if we wish to defend our Britishness we should defend our culture from the growing inevitability of Americanisation. It is American culture that is dissolving our own; more and more this country models itself – politically and sociologically – on what crosses the Atlantic. It's more likely that we'd start celebrating Independence Day on 4th July rather than 26th January – which is when India celebrates it. Western culture has done far more damage to other heritages than they are currently threatening to do to ours. Across the globe the traditional skills of indigenous tribes are facing a creeping death by Western lifestyles. They have a lot more to lose than we can even imagine, and we moan about this vague idea we have that immigration will somehow make us 'un-British,'
On the whole the people who have immigrated to the UK are from countries that were formally part of the British Empire. It makes sense that if you were going to emigrate you'd go to a country you know something about, and across Europe you find that immigrant communities are largely made up of former colonies of those respective countries. The way we used our Empire was to our gain; we used it for cheap labour, cheap resources and forced a British way of live onto the native populations. Given that we have used these countries, does allowing them to live and work here go some small way to making reparations for the way we treated them? Could it be a sort of informal apology for our past wrongs?
But is it our culture we're trying to defend? Britain – and England in particular - has never really valued its heritage. History is a peripheral subject at school and most people don't see it as important. Shakespeare, Morris dancing and swan upping are English culture. Everyone knows the Scots wear kilts, but can anyone tell me what the English national dress is? Not only have we allowed our own customs to perish, but we tried our best to suppress Scottish, Irish and Welsh culture as we dominated them. We are fairly unique in this country in having no traditional mythology. The legends we have of King Arthur, Robin Hood and King Alfred the Great are based on real people and real events – albeit twisted by the art of the storyteller – and what stories we do have about faeries and trolls mostly come from the Celtic tradition. JRR Tolkein once said that one of the reasons he wrote Lord of the Rings was to try to give Britain it's own mythology. Well, if it's not our culture we're trying to defend what is it? I've been looking at a few different online forums whilst preparing this blog, and the most tangible thing people are defending is this block of land and all its wealth. Here there are some valid arguments about limiting the amount of immigration we allow to take place. The UK is a small island and it is already densely populated, in practical terms we can only allow a certain amount of people here before we start running out of space. There already is a housing crisis, the health and education systems are struggling, the roads are overcrowded and there are many other difficult issues facing this country. But we need to be careful, immigration is only one small part of the cause of these problems. Reading some of the forum posts – and some of the more sensationalist newspapers – you could get the impression that we've previously lived in some kind of utopia. Some of the posts are borderline xenophobic, and some are out and out, straight down the line, no beating about the bush wide open for all to see racist. Whatever reason we may have for supporting or opposing immigration we must make sure it doesn't get bogged down in racist arguments. This is a point I can't stress enough. The kind of un-informed erroneous finger-pointing comments that professes to be fact plays right into the hands of those on the right wing of politics. It allows them a foothold in the minds of normally reasonable people and gives them a credibility they do not deserve.
Just to finish this rather long blog, I'll leave you with the words of St. Paul – "In that new creation there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, slave nor free man, but Christ is everything and is in all of us." (Colossians 3:11)
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