The BNP and that het’rogenous thing

As the poem highlights below, that het’rogenous thing is none other than an Englishman.  Daniel Defoe, as early as 1701, provides a beautiful rebuttal of that most favourite of concepts among BNP supporters- “the indigenous of Britain”.  People of ‘other nationalities’, so they claim, are flooding the country, to the disadvantage of those who are true-born British. 

But who exactly, so the poem asks, is one of those?

Thus from a mixture of all kinds began,
That het’rogenous thing, an Englishman:
In eager rapes, and furious lust begot,
Betwixt a painted Britain and a Scot.
Whose gend’ring off-spring quickly learn’d to bow,
And yoke theirs heifers to the Roman Plough;
From whence a mongrel half-bred race there came,
With neither name, nor nation, speech nor fame.
In whose hot veins new mixtures quickly ran,
Infus’d betwixt a Saxon and a Dane…
A true-born Englishman’s a contradiction,
In speech an irony, in fact a fiction.

“Britain”, so the Chief Rabbi asserts “had been for so long a mix of races and cultural influences that it had never developed a narrow ethnic nationalism”.  The BNP seems to argue in favour of just such an ethnic nationalism. Sure, the rate of immigration is far faster and the ethnic diversity of Britain is far greater than before.  However, there is nothing essentially new about our situation, and there is nothing historically, genetically or socially pure about British people.

If this were all it takes to defeat the BNP- a small history lesson- then we should feel mightily satisfied with ourselves, followed by a quick pat on the back.  But it doesn’t.  I very much doubt anyone is having a narrow argument about genetics or social geography.  A BNP supporter could perfectly well accept that there are many different ingredients makes up the recipe of being British.  Yet, it would not affect one iota their belief that some people do not have those ingredients!  The above arguments alone do not touch on the psychological, philosophical or historical roots of their belief.

Oh well… one step at a time!