Robert Tombs answers this question in the affirmative. “Being English is not a matter of your ancestry,” he writes, but I think he left an important word out.
Had he written “… not only a matter…,” I’d agree without demurring. As it is, I have reservations.
Still, it’s wrong to accuse Prof. Tombs of being a defender of multiculturalism, as some of his detractors apparently do. On the contrary, his point that “to see little girls in headscarves reciting Kipling and singing the national anthem showed that becoming English was possible” says exactly the opposite.
It’s certainly better than to see such girls reciting the Koran and singing “from the river to the sea”. But that example still doesn’t constitute an argument. Not by itself.
Still, Prof. Tombs isn’t a champion of multi-culti subversion. He doesn’t want those little girls to grow up in the culture of their forebears. He wants them to become English and he thinks it’s possible, given the proper motivation and encouragement.
I’m not so sure, not completely. The other day I watched an old Peter Ustinov show, and he described himself as “a foreigner, although one who feels more at home in England than anywhere else in the world.”
Now, Ustinov’s genetic inputs were a hodgepodge of ethnicity: Russian, German, French, Jewish, Ethiopian – and I’m sure I’ve left a few out. He was also fluent in several languages and lived and worked all over Europe and the US.
Yet he was born in London, grew up in England and English culture, and his mother tongue was unquestionably English. However, he recognised that he was still a number or two short of winning what Cecil Rhodes called “first prize in the lottery of life”.
Prof. Tombs correctly draws a distinction between British and English: “The United Kingdom is technically a ‘state nation’. England is a ‘culture nation’, based on shared history, customs and emotions. Without these, the UK is an empty shell.”
All of these can, he writes, be learned by immigrants, provided they make an effort to integrate and eventually assimilate. And we must help them do so: “We have a very clear choice. Either we do everything possible to make them and their eventual descendants part of our nation. Or we treat them as perpetual outsiders, ‘ethnic minorities’ in a tribalised England.”
All true. The question is: Can a fully integrated and assimilated Afghani or, to take another purely random example, Russian become English, in the same sense in which my wife Penelope is English?
Much as I dislike clichés, this boils down to the old argument about nature and nurture. There is no question that English culture can be learned and adopted, and I could name at least one Russian who has made a fair fist of it. But that’s not all there is to it.
Penelope and her whole family look English, or, as my former advertising colleagues. who associated Englishness with ‘poshness’ and therefore quantified it, used to say, very English. Granted, not every Englishman born and bred boasts the same appearance, but that doesn’t negate the observation that a stereotypical English look exists.
Hence dozens of English generations leave a genetic imprint on a person’s physique. But is it just physique? Surely, there exist many innate character traits that are uniquely English?
Is there really no genetic component to being English? Is it true that one’s ancestry plays no role in a nation’s “shared history, culture and emotions”?
“Every baby is born with a blank mind,” writes Prof. Tombs, which may be true. But the same baby’s DNA is far from blank. It has been encoded over millennia by hundreds of generations.
I think those genes transmit at least some cultural and spiritual traits, but this may be ignorance speaking. I’m no expert in genetics. Neither, for that matter, is Prof. Tombs, but I’d be interested to hear what such scientists have to say.
If I were privileged to have a conversation with Prof. Tombs, I’d ask him a question or two. Such as, imagine that a boy is born to a family in which every male member has been a soldier, going back to 1066. What are the chances of that boy choosing the same line of work?
Certainly not 100 per cent. But they have to be higher than the same boy growing up a pacifist.
Let’s skew this hypothetical example in Prof. Tomb’s favour. Suppose that boy was adopted at birth and grew up in a family not imbued with martial mores. I’d suggest, without being able to prove it, that, even if he’d be less likely to become a soldier, he’d be no more likely to become a pacifist.
Or take another example. Penelope grew up some 10 miles from the sea, and most Englishmen are within 50 miles. That may be why the English are a nation of mariners, sea travellers, naval tars, pirates, explorers, colonisers.
Every English person I’ve ever met, including all members of my family, goes weak-kneed at the sight of a vast expanse of salty water. I, on the other hand, grew up some 400 miles from the nearest sea, which I first saw when I was 20 years old.
As a result, I quite like the sea, but it doesn’t hold any mystical fascination for me. I much prefer rivers and lakes, the water features I grew up with.
This, though I dare say I’m as assimilated as one can get. I meet all of Prof. Tombs’s criteria: knowing English history, following English customs and even having English emotions. In an exercise of hubris, I may even feel that I write English as well as Prof. Tombs.
In fact, my good friend, an Anglican priest and a proud Englishman, once said that I’m more English than he is, in that I showed more emotional restraint.
He meant it is a compliment, which is how I took it. But, though we both acknowledge that stereotypical English behaviour exists, we are both aware that there is more to Englishness than that, some ineffable quality that he possesses and I don’t.
I have to disagree with Prof. Tombs when he writes: “We have no single religion …”. England is traditionally a Christian country, and has been since AD 597. That’s long enough for Christianity to have become a universal formative force of English character, regardless of how many people have abandoned it.
If he means we have no single confession of Christianity, he is almost right, although, unlike most Western countries, England has an established confession, one to which my good friend has devoted his whole life.
But by that criterion, no national character exists anywhere in the West – no Western country has a single (or any other) religion any longer. “For centuries,” he adds, “Englishness revolved round institutions – the Kingdom, the Church, the Common Law and the inherited rights of ‘free-born Englishmen’.”
Yes, but what if an Englishman is ill-advisedly a republican, an atheist and a proponent of the Roman Law? I’d maintain that, “in spite of all temptations”, he remains an Englishman, if a deracinated one.
All of this is conjecture on my part, something I sense but can’t prove. However, Prof. Tombs’s assertions are also open to debate, or at least sensible discussion.
The rest of his article makes an indisputable case, to me even a self-evident one. Whether or not Englishness can be learned, writes Prof. Tombs, it can certainly be unlearned, and what passes for our intellectual elite is busily trying to indoctrinate both children and adults in that spirit.
He lists all the usual culprits, “from the National Trust via the Museums Association to the Church of England”, with, I’m sure, schools, universities and mass media in between. They are busily working towards denigrating what’s left of Englishness, destroying social and cultural cohesion in the process.
If I wanted to show off the extent to which I’m assimilated, I’d call those reprobates ‘jammy buggers’. As it is, I’ll call them deliberate and perfidious subversives, and I think Prof. Tombs would agree. Alas, I can’t quite repay the courtesy by accepting that ancestry plays no part in Englishness.