Sue-Ellen Braverman, who calls herself Suella so as not to be confused with the TV character Sue-Ellen Ewing from the Dallas show (one for the teenagers), did not have far to fall from the gutter of politics to the sewer. And here she is boasting of her pride in being British, but acknowledging that she is not English despite being born in England, supporting the England football team (in the same way as I ‘support’ them, by watching them on telly), while expressing her love for Britain and its people. Yeah ,yeah, Sue-Ellen. We see you. You say you are not being racist by denying your own Englishness, but what you are really saying is that unless your Englishness is ‘pure’, you can’t be English, either, especially those pesky migrants, like your parents, love.
We are treading the same territory as Rupert Lowe’s Restore UK ‘party’, which exists for those who find Braverman’s new home Reform UK Party Ltd a little to woke and liberal. Lowe, you might recall, was interviewed by radio shock jock and all round knobhead Nick Ferrari (he can’t be English, then, with a name like that, unless he named himself after a motorcar), and refused numerous invitations to say whether King Brian was really English on the grounds that his old man, Prince Phillip, was actually born on the sunshine Greek holiday island of Corfu. Make no mistake, Braverman, an actual brown person for fuck’s sake, is being racist towards brown (and black) people.
On the basis of Sue-Ellen’s calculations, then, I cannot be English either. Much of the paternal side of my family hails from Norway, all of the maternal side from the Netherlands. Migrants who came here on boats. Granted, they all went on to work and never claimed a penny off the state by way of benefits, other than the state pension, but you can be sure that if Daniel Thomas, the fascist rabble-rouser had been around in those days who calls himself Danny Tomo (maybe his full name is a little too complex for some to understand?), he’d have been out on the North Sea with his dim-witted balaclava-wearing pals – the Burka Boys, I call them – trying to STOP THE BOATS! The English share of my DNA is in the low teens, and my surname could not be any less English, but I still regard myself as English. And that’s the point: nationality to me is a feeling as much as anything else.
But it’s not just King Brian and me who, by way of Sue-Ellen’s definition, can’t be considered to be English. How about Daniel Thomas’s best mate Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who calls himself Tommy Robinson? Stephen travels the world on an Irish passport through his Irish born mother. If the former leader of the so called English Defence League (EDL) can’t be considered to be English, then who can?
Go to one of those Genealogy websites and dig a little deeper and who knows what you might find? Horror upon horror! What if you find, some time in your dim and distant past that you have some foreigner in you? A foreign great grandfather, perhaps? Can you not be English, then, certainly not ‘pure’ English? And that takes us into very dangerous waters.
Adolf Hitler was very fond of racial purity and while I am not directly comparing any of today’s far right businessmen and women to one ball Adolf, this is not dissimilar territory. Rupert Lowe is calling for mass repatriation of millions of people who don’t fit his definition of Englishness. It is quite possible that as I am white, I may be able to cling on to my British passport, but who knows? If Rupe doesn’t consider the actual King to be properly English, what price the rest of us?
I say this in a jokey manner, but in truth there is nothing funny about it. I could not care about anyone’s colour, creed, religion, sexual preferences or anything else as long as everyone lives under the official law of the land, with no special privileges and entitlements. That’s how I feel about migrants, too, whoever they are.
If Sue-Ellen does not consider herself to be English, then that’s her lookout. I regard her as an idiot, a clown, an opportunistic, unprincipled buffoon. And those are her positive characteristics. It’s the shtick of Toytown fascists to hate and divide because that’s how they bring about fear and seek to gain power. She has nothing positive to say, in fact nothing of any merit at all.
I’m English, British, European, a citizen of the world. Disagree all you like but frankly I don’t care. I know who and what I am and that’s all that matters to me. Sue-Ellen is an idiot. Don’t be an idiot, too.
