What is English Identity? Does England Exist?

Some people are saying the English have no identity or culture of their own. Others are trying to ban the term "Anglo-Saxon" from academic discourse. Why is England under attack?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
What is englishness? What does it mean to be English?
What counts as English culture? What does English identity actually mean.
If you've ever argued with a left wing person, you've
probably experienced this line of questioning where they try to
deconstruct how very identity, question if we even exist, and
undermine the idea of identity itself, particularly for the English people.

(00:24):
Well it's happening again and it's been in the news.
In an interview on Sky News on the twentieth of September,
the Conservative MP Robert Jenrik argued that English identity is
just as important as Scottish and Welsh identity and ought
to be celebrated as such. But the interviewer, Matt Barbett,

(00:48):
who grew up in Wales and whose surname is common
in North Wales, so I presume him to be a Welshman,
challenge the MP to define what English identity is. What
do you mean by English identity? And I think it
is incredibly important that just the Scottish and Welsh leaders
speak up for their distinct national identities. So do English

(01:09):
politicians interrupt you there? Sorry? Jenric responded quite rightly that
we should be ensuring that we don't lose English identity
through mass migration, but he didn't really answer the question
of what English identity is. He said correctly that it
is the distinct history of our country and that it

(01:30):
is the culture of our nation, both true, but he
never used the term ethnicity. The English are an ethnic group.
The word nation comes from Latin Natio and was originally
a synonym for ethnos. Barbert's deconstructionist approach to our ethnic
identity comes from a far left, anti white ideological tool kit.

(01:52):
They ask you to define your ethnic identity, to condense
it into a SoundBite, and if you give an example
of a tangible peace es of cultural heritage, whether architecture, music, food, folk, dance, whatever,
they will give an example of a person who doesn't
like that thing, and then I'll ask if that person
is English. Their ultimate goal is to undermine the idea

(02:16):
that the English exists as a people distinct from any other.
In reality, English culture is defined by whatever ethnically English
people do, and English ethnicity is determined by heritage. If
you descend from the medieval English people and were inculturated
among their descendants in England, then you are ethnically and

(02:40):
culturally English. Stephen Bush, the immigrant descended associate editor and
columnist at The Financial Times, formerly a writer for The Guardian,
commented on this matter on x recently, saying that the
English identity is just the default identity of the remaining
eight four percent of British people after you subtract the

(03:03):
Scots and the Welsh. Bush himself is of mixed Jewish
and Coloured ancestry and led the Commission on Racial Inclusivity
in the Jewish Community for the Board of Deputies of
British Jews. He has pushed for British Jews to be
more inclusive of black and Misrachi Jews. He said in
another tweet that he can trace his ancestry in Britain

(03:26):
back for centuries. Presumably he means to the communities of
British Jews who arrived in Britain since Cromwell let them
back in from sixteen fifty six onwards. The oldest synagogue
in England wasn't set up until the eighteenth century, but
maybe centuries is a miscalculation by Bush, as his grasp
of history evidently isn't very strong. In the same tweet,

(03:48):
he claimed that England is not one thousand years old. However,
you define it. This is incorrect. England was first united
under one crown in nine twenty seven AD, which is
one thousand and ninety seven years ago. So England as
a nation state is over one thousand years old. But England,

(04:08):
that is the land of the English people, the ethnic
group called English, is much older than that state. It
was still England when there were multiple English kingdoms within it.
The English were first defined as a native ethnic group
in Britain by the venerable Bede in seven thirty one AD,
that's one thousand, two hundred and ninety three years ago. However,

(04:31):
their ancestors, the Angles on the continent, are first described
by the Roman historian Tacitus, who called them the Angli
nine hundred and twenty six years ago in ninety eight
a d. And we cannot imagine that these people did
not exist before the Romans learned about them. Not only
do we have these written sources, making us one of

(04:54):
the most historically well attested extent ethnic groups on Earth
today with a proven pedigree, which is the envy of
many so called indigenous peoples around the world, but we
also have scientific evidence for the history of our ethnic
group and its continuity. A study of ancient Anglo Saxon
DNAE published in twenty twenty two by Gretzinger and colleagues

(05:17):
showed that there is significant genetic continuity among the English
ethnic group from their inception to the present day. Post
Roman Britain was beset by Germanic invaders from Denmark and
Germany in the fifth century. They replaced approximately eighty percent
of the population of the eastern side of Britain what's
now eastern England, and then they spread westwards across the island,

(05:39):
mixing with the natives in the process, who themselves adopted
the incoming culture. The Britons gave up speaking Celtic and
worshiping Jesus so that they could speak Old English and
worship the god Woden instead. The archaeological record includes one
man of entirely native Celtic British ancestry who was buried
in the context of a high status pagan Germanic barrow,

(06:03):
showing that the natives not only became English, but were
able to achieve high status within the Germanic English culture
that was coming in. Another ancient pagan barrow including animal sacrifices,
was found at Oakington, just outside Cambridge, and it contained
a man who was sixty percent native British and forty
percent Germanic invader. And this mix sixty forty is the

(06:28):
exact same as the average Englishman today, even though the
term English did not yet exist when the man was buried.
The paper estimates that modern English people take between a
quarter and half twenty five percent to forty seven percent
of their ancestry from the Germanic invaders of the fifth century.

(06:48):
But these people weren't Anglo Saxons yet. The terms English
and Anglo Saxon were always synonyms and always referred to
us English its first recorded as a name for us
All in seven point thirty one by Bede, and Anglo
Saxon comes a bit later, when King Alfred the Great,
formerly just King of the West Saxons and Wessex, captured

(07:10):
the Mercian Anglian territory of London in eight eighty six,
and so he was then known as Rex Anglo Saxonum,
the King of the Anglo Saxons, but both terms continued
to be used for the next two centuries. The tenth
century Charter of King Eadwig describes him as King of
the anglosu an abbreviation of Anglo Saxonum, and King Canute

(07:31):
sometimes used the title King of the Anglo Saxons as
recently as the eleventh century. After the Normans invaded in
the eleventh century, they always referred to the natives as Englis,
and in so doing recognized that we have a distinct
ethnic identity. So what percentage of our ancestry today comes

(07:51):
from the people who referred to themselves as English as
early as the eighth century and as Anglo Saxon as
early as the ninth century, Well a lot more than
forty percent. Nearly all of it, in fact, except for
a bit of French ancestry that came in in the
Middle Ages. The result is that while we are now
only about forty percent like the Angles and Saxons and

(08:12):
Dutes who arrived in the fifth century, we are almost
one hundred percent the same as the Middle and late
Anglo Saxons, who had already assimilated the native population of Britons,
and who defined us as the ethnic group we are
now the English. We never stopped referring to ourselves as English,
but the term Anglo Saxon had a period where it

(08:32):
wasn't very popular during the High Middle Ages, but the
word Anglo Saxon reappears along with a renewed interest in
the early English past in the mid sixteenth century, and
that was motivated by an awakening Protestant national consciousness seeking
to define itself in opposition to the Catholic South. So
for the last five hundred years, our English identity has

(08:54):
repeatedly relied on our Anglo Saxon origin to define itself.
Despite this, even our own right wing political leaders are
afraid to acknowledge our existence as an English ethnic group,
while the left only do so every now and then
so that they have an excuse to insult and to
fame us. The term Anglo Saxon is considered so dangerous

(09:15):
that two British universities have opted to stop using the
term in history and literature courses. In twenty twenty three,
Cambridge started to tell students in the course formerly titled
Anglo Saxon, Norse and Celtic Studies that Anglo Saxons did
not exist as a distinct ethnic group. In an effort
to make the course more anti racist and to undermine

(09:35):
myths of nationalism. They sought to stop using the term
as part of his aim to dismantle the basis of
the myths of nationalism. In August this year, the University
of Nottingham jumped on this bandwagon by removing the term
in an effort to what they say is decolonize the
curriculum in a course in English history in an English university.

(10:01):
Removing the words for the English ethnic group in this
context and denying their history isn't decolonization, its colonization. The
entire movement to ban the word Anglo Saxon was started
in twenty nineteen by far left extremist activists posing as
medieval historians. Mary Rambarin Olm and Eric Wade Olms said

(10:22):
in the Talk in twenty twenty that she wants to
burn down medieval studies, and in the same year she
appeared on a podcast called Drinking with Historians, where she
revealed that she is influenced by the Marxist, pan Africanist,
postcolonialist critical theorist France Fannon. To those young students of
medieval England, she recommends starting off with Kim F. Hall,

(10:46):
a black feminist and critical race theorist, most of whose
work is about early modern history and the slave trade,
and none is about Anglo Saxon England, and CEOSO recommends
Margo Hendrix, who is a Marxist professor of literature, also
nothing to do with medieval England. Evidently, the flimsy pretense
that they care about English history is transparent. Call them

(11:09):
what they are. They're communists, motivated by a pure racial
hatred of the English people. To quote Olm's hero Fannon,
he who is reluctant to recognize me opposes me. We
must recognize these people as avowed enemies of the English
ethnic group, seeking to sever us from our ancient roots

(11:31):
and thereby destroy us. Those speaking in defense of our
collective interests are treated like terrorists. I have been treated
like a terrorist. Our former colonies are writing our heroes
out of our history, and the bonds of blood and
history that bind us to the diaspora are being denied
in all academic institutions. We have no parliament of our
own in this country, like the Welsh and Scots do.

(11:54):
There are no charities anywhere in the world which serve
us as other ethnicities are served. The only charity which
was set up to assist disadvantaged English people, the Steadfast Trust,
was de registered in twenty fifteen after a well funded
attack by the mainstream media. Simply being an Englishman and
identifying openly as such today is practically a revolutionary act

(12:17):
and sets one on a collision path with the great
financial and political powers of the world. So be it.
I tell you, remain steadfast, Remain English. In the words
of the people of Sussex, we won't be drug. Keep
surviving the jive. I'll see you next time. Are you

(12:40):
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