There are two Windrush Scandals, the real one and other marketed by the
Enemy Within. The last one to happen was when the
Empire Windrush was on her way back from
Yokohama
with men returning from Korea. She caught fire then sank in the Mediterranean, taking a
friend's other kitbag with it. He was en route to Alexandria. It is fair to say
that the first
lifeboats away were
carrying the women and children on board
[ the Birkenhead
Drill ]
and the
ship's
cat. His kit bag is now 140 fathoms down in the Med. That is the real
scandal, unseaworthy ships.
The other
one, the
alleged Windrush Scandal was
invented by the Enemy Within,
the Hard Left, by
Subversives of one sort or another. It is based on
the fact that Windrush did a run from the West Indies to Tilbury in England, a
major London port on the Thames in 1948 with a
cargo of blacks, who were legal
immigrants. It is an excuse to import more of them, to cause
Ethnic Fouling followed by
Genocide and the destruction of
Western Civilization.
The Labour Party was once the party of the honest
Working Classes. It got them the votes that put
them into power. The Labour politicians decided they
wanted votes from Third World aliens, with
finance coming from rich Jews, especially
Zionist crazies. This led them to incite immigration
from Africa and the Middle East.
Pakistanis are very effective at Vote Rigging.
One of these legal incomers was Vince Reid,
a black bully and liar. He liked beating his wife because she was English. He
was also a Racist full of hate, one who told black
students that Homosexuality is a disease
imported into the West Indies by White Men. He was
inciting racial hatred,
a criminal offence under the
Race Relations
Act 1976. Of course he was allowed to get away with it because the
Act was passed by racists who also hate England. The college covered up
the truth because he was their
show Nigger; drinking with the boss helped too. Was he
typical of Third World imports? If you even ask the question you are guilty of
Thoughtcrime.
Empire Windrush ex Wiki HMT Empire Windrush, originally MV Monte Rosa,
was a passenger liner and
cruise ship launched in Germany in 1930. She was owned and operated by
the German shipping line
Hamburg Süd in the 1930's under the name Monte Rosa. During
World War II she was operated by the
German navy as a
troopship. At the end of the war, she was taken by the United Kingdom
Government as a
prize of war and renamed the Empire Windrush. In British service,
she continued to be used as a troopship until March 1954, when the vessel
caught fire and sank in the
Mediterranean Sea with the loss of four crew.
Empire Windrush brought one of the first large groups of postwar
West Indian immigrants to the United Kingdom, carrying 1,027 passengers
and two
stowaways on a voyage from
Jamaica
to London
in 1948.[1][2]
802 of these passengers gave their last country of residence as somewhere in
the Caribbean: of these, 693 intended to settle in the United Kingdom.[1]
British Caribbean people who came to the United Kingdom in the period
after World War II, including those who came on later ships, are sometimes
referred to as the
Windrush generation.
Background and
description
Empire Windrush, under the name MV Monte Rosa, was the last
of five almost identical
Monte-class passenger ships (in German) that were built by
Blohm & Voss in
Hamburg
between 1924 and 1931 for
Hamburg Süd (Hamburg South American Steam Shipping Company).
During the 1920s, Hamburg Süd believed there would be a lucrative
business in carrying German immigrants to South America (see
German Argentine). The first two ships (MV Monte Sarmiento
and MV Monte Olivia) were built for that purpose with single-class
passenger accommodation of 1,150 in cabins and 1,350 in dormitories. In the
event, the immigrant trade was less than expected and the two ships were
repurposed as
cruise ships, operating in Northern European waters, the Mediterranean
and around South America.[3]
This proved to be a great success. Until then, cruise holidays had been
the preserve of the rich. But by providing modestly priced cruises, Hamburg
Süd was able to profitably cater to a large new clientele.[3]
Another ship was commissioned to cater for the demand – the MV
Monte Cervantes. However, she struck an uncharted rock and sank
after only two years in service. Despite this, Hamburg Süd remained
confident in the design and quickly ordered two more ships, the MV
Monte Pascoal and the MV Monte Rosa;[3]Monte Rosa was launched on 13 December 1930.[4]
The five Monte-class vessels were
diesel-poweredmotor
ships, with four 1,436
hp four-stroke diesel engines driving two propellers. At the time, the
use of diesel engines was highly unusual in ships of this size, which would
have been typically
steam-powered. The first two to be launched Monte Sarmiento and
Monte Olivia were in fact the first large diesel-powered passenger
ships to see service with a German operator.[5]
The use of diesel engines reflected the experience Blohm & Voss had gained
by building diesel-powered
U-boats during
World War I.[3]
The ships' top speed was 14 knots (26 km/h) (around half the speed of the
large trans-Atlantic ocean liners of the era) but this was considered
adequate for both the immigrant and cruise business.[3]
Monte Rosa was 500 ft 3 in (152.48 m) long, with a beam of 65 ft
7 in (19.99 m). She had a depth of 37 ft 8 in (11.48 m). The ship was
assessed at 13,882 GRT,
7,788 NRT.
Postwar British
service
In 1946, Monte Rosa was assigned to the British
Ministry of Transport and converted into a troopship.
By this time, she was the only survivor of the five Monte-class ships.
Monte Cervantes sank near
Tierra del Fuego in 1930. Two ships were sunk in
Kiel harbour
by separate wartime air-raids, Monte Sarmiento in February 1942 and
Monte Olivia in April 1945.[22].
Monte Pascoal was damaged at by an air-raid on
Wilhelmshaven in February 1944. In 1946, she was filled with
chemical bombs and scuttled by the British in the
Skagerrak.[22][23]
Later service
In May 1949, Empire Windrush was on a voyage from Gibraltar to
Port Said when a fire broke out on board. Four ships were put on standby to
assist if the ship had to be abandoned. Although the passengers were placed
in the
lifeboats, they were not launched and the ship was subsequently towed
back to Gibraltar.[39]
On 7 February 1953, around 200 miles (320 km) south of the
Nicobar Islands, Windrush sighted a small cargo ship, the
Holchu, adrift and sent out a general warning. Holchu was later
boarded by the crew of a British cargo ship, the Ranee, alerted by
Windrush's warning. They found no trace of the five crew and the vessel
was towed to
Colombo.[43]Holchu was carrying a cargo of rice and was in good condition aside
from a broken mast. Adequate supplies of food, water and fuel were found,
and a meal had been prepared in the ship's galley.[44]
The fate of Holchu's crew remains unknown and the incident is cited
in several works on
Ufology
and the
Bermuda Triangle.[45][46][47]
In June 1953, Windrush was one of the ships that took part in the
Fleet review that marked the
Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.[48]
However, the voyage was plagued with engine breakdowns and other defects,
including a fire after the departure from Hong Kong.[49]
It took 10 weeks to reach Port Said, from where the ship sailed for the last
time.[50]
On board were 222 crew and 1,276 passengers, including military personnel
and some women and children, dependents of some of the military personnel.[51]
At around 6:15 am on Sunday March 28, there was a sudden explosion and
fierce fire in the engine room that killed the
third engineer, two other members of the engine-room crew and the
first electrician; a fifth crew member in the engine room and one in the
boiler room, both
greasers, managed to escape.[52]
The ship quickly lost all electrical power as the four main
electrical generators were located in the burning engine room; the
backup generator was started, but problems with the main circuit breaker
made its power unusable.[52]
The ship did not have a
sprinkler system. The
chief
officer heard the explosion from the ship's bridge and assembled the
ship's firefighting squad, who happened to be on deck at the time doing
routine work. However they were only able to fight the fire for a few
minutes before the loss of electrical power stopped the water pumps that fed
their fire hoses. The
second engineer was able to enter the engine room by wearing a
smoke
hood, but was unable to close a watertight door that might have
contained the fire, due to a lack of electrical power. Attempts to close all
watertight doors using the controls on the bridge had also failed.[52]
At 6:23 am, the first distress calls were transmitted; further SOS calls
used the emergency radio transmitter as electrical power had been lost. The
order was given to wake the passengers and crew and assemble them at their
emergency stations, but the ship's public address system was not working,
nor were its
air
and
steam whistles, so the order had to be transmitted by word of mouth. At
6:45 am, all attempts to fight the fire were halted and the order was given
to launch the lifeboats, with the first ones away
carrying the women and children on board[52][51]
and the
ship's
cat.[53]
While the ship's 22 lifeboats could accommodate all on board, thick smoke
and the lack of electrical power prevented many of them from being launched.
Each set of lifeboat
davits
accommodated two lifeboats and without electrical power, raising the wire
ropes to lower the second boat was an arduous and slow task. With fire
spreading rapidly, the order was given to drop the remaining boats into the
sea.[52]
Many of the crew and troops on board abandoned the ship by climbing down
ladders or ropes and jumping into the sea.[52]
However, they were quickly picked up by Windrush's lifeboats and also by a
boat from the first rescue ship, which reached the scene at 7.00 am.[52][51]
The ships responding to Windrush's distress call were the Dutch ship
MV Mentor, the British
P&O
Cargo liner
MV Socotra, the Norwegian ship
SS Hemsefjell and the Italian ships
SS Taigete and
SS Helschell.[54][55]
A Royal Air Force
Avro Shackleton from
224 Squadron assisted in the rescue.[56]
The last person to leave Windrush was the chief officer at 7:30 am.[51]
All the passengers were saved and the only fatalities were the four crew
killed in the engine room.[50]
The rescue vessels took the passengers and crew to
Algiers,
where they were cared for by the
French Red Cross and the
French Army. They were taken to
Gibraltar by the aircraft carrier
HMS Triumph,, and from there returned to the United Kingdom by
air.
Around 26 hours after Empire Windrush had been abandoned, she was
reached by
HMS Saintes of the
Royal
Navy's Mediterranean Fleet 100km northwest of Algiers. The fire was
still burning fiercely more than a day after it started, but a party from
Saintes managed to get on board and attach a tow cable. At about midday,
Saintes began to tow the ship to Gibraltar, at a speed of around 3.5
knots (6.5 km/h), but Empire Windrush sank in the early hours of the
following morning, Tuesday, 30 March 1954,[52]
after having been towed a distance of only around 16 kilometres (8.6 nmi).
The wreck lies at a depth of around 2,600 metres (8,500 ft).[57]
As well as those who were wrongly deported, an unknown number were
wrongly detained, lost their jobs or homes, or were denied benefits or
medical care to which they were entitled.[3]
A number of long-term UK residents were wrongly refused re-entry to the UK,
and a larger number were threatened with immediate deportation by the Home
Office.
The scandal came to public attention as a result of a campaign mounted by
Caribbean diplomats to the UK, British parliamentarians and charities, and
an extended series of articles in
The Guardian newspaper.[10]
Origin of the term
In 2012
Theresa May, who was the
Conservative
Home Secretary at the time, introduced the Hostile Environment Policy
with remarks including that: "The aim is to create, here in Britain, a
really hostile environment for illegal immigrants".[1]
In May 2007
Liam
Byrne, who was the
Labour
immigration minister at the time, referred to a "hostile environment" in
an announcement of a consultation document: "We are trying to create a much
more hostile environment in this country if you are here illegally".[10]
Policy
In October 2013 May stated, "we will extend the number of non-suspensive
appeals so that, where there is no risk of serious and irreversible harm, we
can deport first and hear appeals later".[11][12]
The policy includes the removal of homeless
citizens of other
European Union countries.[2][13][14]
Additionally, through the implementation of the
Immigration Act 2014 and Immigration Act 2016, the policy includes
requirements for landlords, the
NHS, charities, community interest companies and banks to carry out ID
checks.[15][16][17][18][19][20][21]
The policy also implemented a more complicated application process to get
'leave to remain' based on the principle of 'deport first, appeal later',
whilst encouraging voluntary deportation though strategies including
"Go Home" vans as part of "Operation Vaken", as well as adverts in
newspapers, shops, and charity and faith buildings used by ethnic
minorities.[22][23][24][25]
In 2018 the Home Office lost 75% of their appeals against applicants for
refugee status who challenged rejections by the Home Office.[26]
Sonya Sceats, the chief executive of Freedom from Torture, said:
Long drawn-out legal processes are traumatic for anyone, let alone
those who have fled persecution. Having an impartial judge accept that
you are at risk of torture or death if you are forced back, only to have
this challenged all over again by the Home Office before yet another
appeal panel, can have devastating consequences ... important questions
must be asked about the necessity for, and humanity of, these appeals.[26]
A 2018 governmental review revealed the Home Office had tried to deport
at least 300 highly skilled migrants (including teachers, doctors, lawyers,
engineers and IT professionals) under the 322(5) provision, at least 87
successfully. This mostly affected people who had lived in the UK for more
than 10 years and have children born in the UK. Many were given only 14 days
to leave the UK and were made ineligible to apply for visas to return. The
review found that 65% of 322(5) decisions were overturned by an upper
tribunal and 45% of applicants for judicial review were successful (28% of
judicial reviews find in favour of the defendant). Additionally the review
found that 32% of "complex cases" were wrongly decided.[27]
The immigration lawyer and campaigner Colin Yeo described the effect of
the policy as: "the creation of an illegal underclass of foreign, mainly
ethnic minority workers and families who are highly vulnerable to
exploitation and who have no access to the social and welfare safety net."[35]
In February 2018 Members of Parliament called for a review of the policy.[36][37]
In December 2018, it emerged that enforcement of the "hostile
environment" policy in one part of the UK government – the Home Office – was
dooming to failure initiatives championed and funded by other parts of the
UK government.[38][39]
Police
Out of the 45 UK territorial police forces, over half acknowledged
handing over the details of migrant victims and witnesses of crimes to the
Home Office for immigration enforcement, while only 3 denied doing so.[40]
Several cases of victims of serious crimes, including rape, being
arrested upon reporting the crime have been uncovered.[41][42]
Step Up Migrant Women Campaign, a coalition of dozens of organisations
working with migrant victims of domestic abuse, was formed in response to
this trend.[43]
Amid criticisms, the
National Police Chiefs’ Council issued a guidance in December 2018 which
declares that "the fundamental principle must be for the police to first and
foremost treat [the person reporting a crime] as a victim" and advises
against systematic checking of victims' immigration status for the purpose
of sharing that information with immigration enforcement. In addition, while
the guidance states that, upon discovering irregular immigration status, "it
is wholly appropriate that the officer in the case should contact
immigration enforcement at the appropriate juncture", it does posit that no
enforcement action beyond information-sharing should be taken by police
outside of safeguarding concerns.[44][45]
The practice is thought to lead to the under-reporting of crime against
undocumented people in the UK due to a fear of arrest and deportation of the
victims......................
5 days ago ... It was commissioned after the
Guardian's reporting on the government's “hostile environment” immigration
policy led to the exposure of the ...
The Windrush Myth Explained by The
Spectator
Seventy-five years ago today perhaps the most famous ship in British
history arrived at this island. A new nation was born, and with it, a
new founding myth.
The story begins in the last few weeks of the second world war, when
British troops advancing on Kiel in the very north of Germany captured a
ship called the Monte Rosa.
Built in Hamburg in 1930, after the Nazi takeover in 1933 the Monte
Rosa had been used in the ‘Strength Through Joy’ workers’ holiday
programme; later it became a troopship for the invasion of Norway, where
it remained until 1945, when the vessel was transferred to help with the
tragic rescue of Germans escaping from East Prussia.
Most historians, who are always happy to tell you that old
national histories are all 19th-century creations, seem
reluctant to take on myths still in formation
Now in British hands, it had in January 1947 been rechristened, like
other captured German ships, with names taken from tributaries of the
Thames – and so the Monte Rosa became the Empire Windrush.
Barely noted in its lifetime – it sank off the coast of Algeria in 1954
– this ship is in the 21st century more commemorated than HMS Victory,
Brunel’s SS Great Britain or the Mary Rose (probably
only the Titanic is more famous).
Today its voyage is marked on coins
issued by the Royal Mint, while the Imperial
War Museum has even called it ‘one of the most foundational moments
in British history’. Schools up and down the country will spend the day
celebrating the Windrush’s journey from Jamaica to England.
Running through much of this commemoration is the narrative that the
Windrush generation – the name given to the first wave of West Indian
immigrants after the war – were answering a call for help from the
mother country. The story of the Windrush is now commemorated
by Laura Serrant’s poem, You
Called… and We Came. The National Windrush Monument at Waterloo
Station, unveiled last year, features the words of that poem, with the
lines:
‘Remember… you called.
Remember… you called
YOU. Called.
Remember, it was us, who came.’
Even London schools have been emailing parents to commemorate those
‘answering the call from the British government to work in the NHS, on
public transport and in the Post Office’. It is the story of the
post-war imperial subjects who answered the appeal of the mother
country.
And yet… it’s not quite true.
The Windrush began its historic journey from Kingston to
Tilbury on 24 May 1948, with several hundred West Indian men and one
stowaway woman. Also on board were a group of Poles who had
circumnavigated the globe during the war, some of these survivors having
escaped from Siberia to India, onto Palestine and then Mexico. The
ship’s operator had expected to leave Jamaica under capacity and so
offered passage at half price; many local men took the opportunity.
Far from calling them, the British government was alarmed by the
news. A Privy Council memo sent to the Colonial Office on 15 June stated
that the government should not help the migrants: ‘Otherwise there might
be a real danger that successful efforts to secure adequate conditions
of these men on arrival might actually encourage a further influx.’
Colonial Secretary Arthur Creech Jones replied: ‘These people have
British passports and they must be allowed to land.’ But, he added
confidently: ‘They won’t last one winter in England.’ Indeed, Britain
had recently endured
some very harsh winters.
The Ministry of Labour was also unhappy about the arrival of the
Jamaican men, minister George Isaacs warning that if they attempted to
find work in areas of serious unemployment ‘there will be trouble
eventually’. He said: ‘The arrival of these substantial numbers of men
under no organised arrangement is bound to result in considerable
difficulty and disappointment. I hope no encouragement will be given to
others to follow their example.’
Soon afterwards, 11 concerned Labour MPs wrote to Prime Minister
Clement Attlee stating that the government should ‘by legislation if
necessary, control immigration in the political, social, economic and
fiscal interests of our people… In our opinion such legislation or
administration action would be almost universally approved by our
people.’ The letter was sent on 22 June; that same day the Windrush arrived
at Tilbury.
Many [ sic ] West Indians had fought heroically during the war, and many
soldiers and airmen had been stationed in England, defending the island
from slavery. They had experienced friendship and warmth from some
English people, and hostility from others. After their sacrifices,
Jamaicans perhaps felt they had every right to work in England.
The Windrush passengers, including several RAF veterans,
were unaware of the apprehension facing them, nor that HMS Sheffield had
been sent to monitor the liner, with orders to send it back if any
passengers made trouble. None of them did. Many felt enormous joy at
visiting England, a feeling described by one passenger, the calypso
singer Lord Kitchener – real name Aldwyn Roberts – who wrote ‘London is
the Place for Me’ onboard.
He later recalled: ‘The feeling I had to know that I’m going to touch
the soil of the mother country, that was the feeling I had. You know how
it is when a child, you hear about your mother country, and you know
that you’re going to touch the soil of the mother country, you know what
feeling is that? And I can’t describe it.’
Meanwhile, Attlee replied to his worried backbenchers on 5 July: ‘I
think it would be a great mistake to take the emigration of this
Jamaican party to the United Kingdom too seriously.’
Creech Jones was also sanguine, stating that: ‘I do not think that a
similar mass movement will take place again because the transport is
unlikely to be available, though we shall be faced with a steady
trickle, which, however, can be dealt with without undue difficulty.’
The Windrush passengers had no idea
that they were at the forefront of the biggest social change in British
history; nor could any of Britain’s political leaders know how large and
significant immigration would become. At the time, these imperial
subjects were dwarfed in number by the 200,000 or so Europeans who had
arrived since Hitler took power, mostly Poles, but also German and
Austrian Jews (there were also over 15,000 former enemy prisoners of
war). Yet Britain still had quite a small foreign-born population –
something that was to drastically change.
Britain’s first wave of mass immigration came about through a series
of unintended actions. The Dominions were in the process of formalising
their nation status, and in 1946 Canada passed a citizenship law,
enacted on 1 January 1947. Previously, all Canadian nationals were de
facto British citizens, but the new ruling forced Britain to clarify
exactly which Commonwealth subjects were allowed to live here. The
resulting 1948 Nationality Act allowed entry to the British mainland for
those ‘who hold a UK passport or a passport issued by the Government of
the United Kingdom’.
Although the law introduced a liberal immigration policy for the next
14 years, it was, according to historian Randall Hansen, ‘never intended
to sanction a mass migration of new Commonwealth citizens to the United
Kingdom’ and ‘nowhere in parliamentary debate, the Press, or private
papers was the possibility that substantial numbers could exercise their
right to reside permanently in the UK discussed’. It was badly drafted,
naive about the numbers who might move, and set off a migration chain
that soon caused public unease.
In 1949 a further 39 Jamaicans came over, and in 1951 some 1,500 West
Indians arrived, but Caribbean immigration really sped up from the
mid-50s. They were soon joined, and outnumbered, by arrivals from South
Asia, until successive governments passed immigration laws which by the
early 1970s had shut the doors.
The multicultural society was born, but it was with the election of
Tony Blair in 1997 and a much larger second wave of immigration – still
ongoing – that the Windrush came to become the totemic moment
in our history.
Writing last year, Lin Manuel summarised the modern narrative as
follows:
‘Following the second world war, shattered by the Blitz and
bereft of laborers, Britain invited its West Indian colonial
subjects to the imperial motherland to help the country rebuild. The
first group arrived in England from Jamaica aboard HMT Empire
Windrush in 1948, and have been making invaluable contributions
ever since, despite confronting constant racism and discrimination
since their arrival.’
‘Civil servants from the Colonial Office were
dispatched to the Caribbean to orchestrate campaigns explaining
that jobs in the UK were scarce, conditions were poor (rationing
remained in place until 1954 for food, furniture, fuel and
clothing), and immigrants could not be guaranteed employment or
housing (of which there was a chronic shortage).’
Neither was there a post-war labour shortage, as is often claimed,
but a labour surplus. Between 1946 and 1960 almost 2 million people left
the country, emigration encouraged by the government with subsided
travel to Australia – at £10, a third of what the Windrush passengers
paid. ‘Even with mass emigration, unemployment
rates remained stable’, he writes.
While there were some wartime labour shortages, addressed by small
numbers of colonial volunteers, ‘this has come to be conflated with
post-war economic migration’ and the ‘direct recruitment’ schemes by
various public sector bodies:
‘In 1955, the government of Barbados created
a scheme in which the London Transport Executive and later the
British Transport Commission, the British Hotels and Restaurants
Association, and the Regional Hospital Boards, could recruit workers
directly from the island to help alleviate
widespread unemployment and social unrest. Jamaica and Trinidad
soon joined the scheme. At the same time, the NHS made provision for
young women from the Commonwealth to train in the UK as nurses.
‘Both initiatives accounted for only a small proportion of total
Caribbean immigration. Between 1956 and 1960, the Barbados
sponsorship scheme recruited 3,680 people – less than 5 per cent
of over 86,000 to arrive in Britain in this period. A
1961 commons speech notes that there were a total of 6,365
immigrant student nurses in the NHS out of a total of 55,000. Even
if we presume they were all from the West Indies, they would account
for less than 10 per cent of total net migration from the region in
that year alone, or 4.7 per cent of that in the preceding five-year
period.’
Or as the
Runnymede Trust puts it, ‘Concerned with rising unemployment in
Barbados, the Barbadian government eventually approached London
Transport to set up a more formal arrangement for recruitment. In 1956,
London Transport became the first organisation to operate a scheme
recruiting staff directly from the Caribbean.’
The Windrush was not mentioned in early depictions of
Caribbean migration, and Manuel suggests that it rose to prominence with
the Brixton riots and the subsequent need to create a more welcoming
national narrative. Then came Blair, whose vision of a modern Britain
was proudly multicultural; a series of Windrush documentaries
in 1998 focused on the ship’s journey, which all fitted well with New
Labour’s dream of a diverse, inclusive and modern country. That same
year Brixton Oval was renamed Windrush Square.
Manuel writes that:
‘Today, for the descendants of the Afro-Caribbean immigrants of
the 1950s and 60s, the Windrush story has become a kind of
etiological narrative: a story that helps to explain who they are,
where they came from, and where they are now. It provides them with
an important role in the country’s story.
‘For the modern Blairite establishment, Windrush represents a
definitive break with tradition: the point at which traditional,
ethnically homogeneous, monocultural “imperial” Britain ended, and
the new multiethnic and multicultural Britain began to take shape,
and is almost always deployed in “official” capacities to act as the
sine qua non-exemplar of why modern Britain owes its existence to
“diversity”.’
There is a certain amount of well-intentioned inclusive myth-making
in this story, and from a historical point of view the idea that ‘diversity
built Britain’, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, is
bizarre. Until 1952 Britain was the richest country in Europe, after
which we massively fell behind our continental rivals – so if diversity
did ‘build’ the country, it didn’t do a great job. Despite this most
historians, who are always happy to tell you that old national histories
are all 19th-century creations, seem reluctant to take on myths still in
formation.
Strangely, the modern national origin myth has a slight echo of the
original founding story of England. In the traditional myth, the first
‘English’ arrived on this island after a native king called Vortigern
invited over three boatloads of Jutes to work in sub-Roman Britain’s
thriving security industry. Supposedly in AD 430 or 449 he asked these
Germanic warriors to come and protect his country from the Picts, and according
to legend Vortigern also fell in love with a Jutish girl and offered
them the Isle of Thanet if he could win her heart.
Historians have tended to dismiss this story, since its narrative, of
two brothers with alliterative names – Hengist and Horsa – arriving in
three boats is very common to many other ancient tales. They’re too
tropey to be plausible.
And though most historians believe the characters involved to be
mythical, I’ve never read any doubting the fact that the Britons invited
the Jutes in the first place. Perhaps it’s plausible because, as many
know, the colonisation of Ireland begins with an Irish chieftain asking
a Norman baron to intervene (which was obviously a great idea). Yet, if
you were a local warlord struggling in the chaos of Dark Ages Britain,
would you really think it wise to invite over loads of Germans, the same
sort of people who most threatened the western Empire? That would be
insane, surely.
Isn’t it more likely that the Germans just turned up, and that after
they had become numerically dominant, constructed a myth in which the
native Britons invited them over, and so giving them a greater
entitlement to the land? You called, and we came. Maybe, maybe not – but
it’s interesting to see a national origin myth being constructed in our
very lifetime.
This article first appeared
on Ed West’s Wrong Side of History Substack.