Tim Lees

Lucy White says Britain has always been White, always Christian and always culturally homogeneous. All three claims are false bigoted bullshit aimed at the gullible and at dumb ignorant racists. Britain’s earliest modern inhabitants came from elsewhere. DNA analysis by the Natural History Museum and UCL suggests Cheddar Man, our oldest near-complete skeleton, had dark skin and blue eyes, and that pale skin arrived in Britain much later. In Roman York, around one in ten people buried in the Yorkshire Museum’s collections were of likely African descent. One emperor, Septimius Severus, was born in Libya and died in York. Henry VIII’s royal trumpeter, John Blanke, was African, and Henry paid for his wedding clothes. Christianity began in the Middle East and arrived here under Rome, after centuries of pagan belief. Pagan Anglo-Saxons and Vikings followed, and England had to be converted again from 597. One of the earliest identifiable Christians in York, the woman known as the Ivory Bangle Lady, had North African ancestry. Jewish communities lived here from 1070 until their expulsion in 1290, and returned in 1656. Today, the 2021 census found that fewer than half of people in England and Wales describe themselves as Christian. As for cultural homogeneity, Britain is a union of four nations, with several languages still spoken and a history shaped by Celts, Romans, Saxons, Vikings and Normans. For centuries after 1066 the English court spoke French. Protestants and Catholics fought over this country’s soul for generations. Homogeneous is about the last word any historian would choose. Lucy White is the British representative of the Save Europe Act, which campaigns for “remigration” and to protect what it calls the “ethnocultural continuity” of Europe. The European Commission refused to register it as a citizens’ initiative because it would amount to discrimination on grounds of race and ethnic origin. If you can convince enough gullible politically and historically illiterate people that Britain has always been one race, one faith and one culture, then millions of British citizens begin to look like a mistake that needs correcting. The real history is far more interesting, and it belongs to all of us. Britain has always been made by people arriving, mixing and changing what it means to be British. Rewriting that history to serve a political project is pure #propaganda, and it deserves to be called out.