According to the disgraced former home secretary Suella Braverman, born Sue-Ellen, after J.R. Ewing’s alcoholic wife in the hit TV show Dallas, I am definitely not English. In a Telegraph article she says of herself, “I will never be truly English”, but by her definition, neither will I.
Braverman, a politician promoted well beyond her ability, asserts that one has to pass through five or six generations in order to be English. With her parents being of Indian heritage, via Mauritius and Kenya, being born here, in Harrow, cannot count. She is and always will be a foreigner. Me too, in that case. But this mad woman gets even madder.
“For Englishness to mean something substantial, it must be rooted in ancestry, heritage, and, yes, ethnicity – not just residence or fluency,” she adds. But then it gets more sinister. “If we are to defend Judeo-Christian civilisation”. Now that, from a person who isn’t white, is all about white supremacism”. Far right wingnuts, like Fascist Steve Bannon, bang on about this all the time.
The Judeo-Christian bit is even more bonkers because that has more to do with us being “God’s children” and not English, Welsh or Scottish. It’s almost as if she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. But here is the absolute highlight, or is it lowlight, of her Telegraph piece:
Now, more than ever, we must define what it is we are fighting for
to preserve something, we must first define it.
To preserve British values and English culture, we need clarity, not denial
have allowed what once made England distinctive to be diluted, denigrated, and demonised. Now, more than ever, we must define what it is we are fighting for
Hang on, Sue-Ellen: you’ve already said you are categorically not English, so who is ‘we’? You’re making my head ache, love. It’s either a form of self-loathing or you are an idiot. Could it be both?
If an actual paid-up fascist, like Stephen Yaxley-Lennon who calls himself Tommy Robinson comes up with something like this, you know where he is coming from. When a loud-mouth halfwit who, incredibly, held one of the great offices of state in Britain, it’s a little more weird and disturbing.
While I have some reservations about the term multiculturalism in the way some people talk about it – an issue for another day, perhaps? – I am entirely comfortable with our multi-ethnic and multicolour country and as a secularist I don’t much care where anyone is from, nor what religion that believe in, so long as they gain no special privileges and we all live under the exact same laws.
I see Braverman’s contribution to the debate as being a continuation of the culture wars the far right has employed for many years. They, rather than the people they condemn, are the people who seek to divide us and that, I feel, is the whole point of what she is saying.
Even though Braverman, and her fellow travellers on the far right of British politics, does not regard people like me or people like her as truly English, I really don’t care. I consider myself as English, having been born in England and lived here all my life. I am proud of my Dutch and Norwegian heritage and even if I wasn’t, what could I do about it? It’s there in my blood, my heritage, my DNA.
If this wretched here today, gone tomorrow politician doesn’t regard herself English, that’s really her problem, not mine. And if she really doesn’t feel English, no one is making her stay. Apparently, Rwanda is very nice this time of year.
