1. The Indigenous English
2. Recent Migration
The discussion below is largely about the interpretation of history. See the final section for political implications.
2. Recent Migration
The discussion below is largely about the interpretation of history. See the final section for political implications.
1. The Indigenous English
Most of the pre-twentieth century population of England were derived from ancestors who had lived in England since the ice age.
Until the latter part of the twentieth century the English were a surprisingly homogeneous group of people with little mixing with foreign peoples. The majority of the ancestors of most English people were people who settled the British Isles after the last Ice Age. These first settlers who occupied Britain as the ice retreated probably came from Northern Spain. This is evident from genetic studies for instance:
In Origins of the British (2006), Stephen Oppenheimer states:
"By far the majority of male gene types in the British Isles derive from Iberia (Spain and Portugal), ranging from a low of 59% in Fakenham, Norfolk to highs of 96% in Llangefni, north Wales and 93% Castlerea, Ireland. On average only 30% of gene types in England derive from north-west Europe. Even without dating the earlier waves of north-west European immigration, this invalidates the Anglo-Saxon wipeout theory…
…75-95% of British Isles (genetic) matches derive from Iberia...Ireland, coastal Wales, and central and west-coast Scotland are almost entirely made up from Iberian founders, while the rest of the non-English parts of the British Isles have similarly high rates. England has rather lower rates of Iberian types with marked heterogeneity, but no English sample has less than 58% of Iberian samples… (pages 375 and 378)
Indigenous English males are descended primarily from the earliest Palaeolithic peoples thought to have recolonised western Europe after the end of the last major glaciation some 25-15 thousand years ago. The genetic makeup of English males differs significantly from that of either Scandinavians (vikings) or Germanic peoples (Anglo-Saxons). Both Capelli et al (2003) and Weale et al.(2002) found that central east England had received a large amount of migration from the Netherlands. Weale et al had the academic misfortune to study this area of England as representative of the “English” and probably mistakenly concluded that over 50% of the English male genome had arrived in AD 500 as Saxon invaders"
It is possible to study the origins of English females by analysing what is known as “mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA)”. Mitochondrial DNA is a special type of genetic material that occurs in the cytoplasm of the ovum and is passed on to both male and female children by the mother. A recent study by Topf et al (2006) confirms the findings of Capelli etal (2003) and shows that English mtDNA is largely due to the original, post glacial, population of the British Isles, and is not the result of Anglo-Saxon invaders. The mtDNA results are consistent with the idea that a significant proportion of the indigenous English originated in a group of people who lived in “Doggerland”, a lowland area that is now the English Channel and North Sea, having moved there from nearby ice free areas. These people occupied England, the Netherlands and Scandinavia as the ice retreated and sea levels rose. In England they mixed with the Iberian derived peoples.
The simple fact is that the indigenous English have ancestors who have lived in England since it became habitable. This is strikingly confirmed by “Cheddar Man”. In 1903 a skeleton was found in the Cheddar Caves in Somerset and this has recently been dated at 9000 years old. Astonishingly the mtDNA from the skeleton was closely related to the mtDNA of people living in the West Country today! (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/htmlContent.jhtml?html=/archive/1997/03/08/nched08.html).
In contradiction to this reality British writers are fond of quoting the idea that the English have always been a “mongrel breed”. Here is a recent declaration of this belief:
"Britain is indeed a multi-ethnic society and has for centuries been what one writer after another has called a mongrel breed.” (British Council Annual Lecture Royal Gallery, Palace of Westminister, London Thursday 28 June 2001 “Who do they think we are? Being British”)
Why this belief has been so commonplace is mysterious – perhaps it originated in the need for the Norman invaders to claim that they were no different from previous occupiers or from the people as a whole. What better way to answer Englishmen who rejected the Norman invasion or German monarchs than to say that there is no such thing as an Englishman? On the other hand it might be the pride that English people take in being different that has created the myth, for instance an English person might say “I am half French” but really mean that one of their four grandparents was French.
The British Anglo-Saxon-Viking extermination myth, the myth that the invading "English" wiped out the indigenous population, is almost unique in Western Europe, why would an invader kill off all the slaves that they needed to work their land? The French and Irish don't believe that the Vikings replaced the indigenous population and the northern Europeans see changes in the territory ruled by Jutes, Angles etc as political events, not genocides. The extermination myth is not borne out by the genetic evidence or common sense and is obviously a complex piece of political propaganda that has become widely accepted.
It is racist to give the homogeneity of the pre-twentieth century English excessive political weight but it is even more racist to deny the existence of an indigenous people. There is no doubt that the modern English are now indeed a “mongrel breed” but this has only happened in the past sixty years.
A Note on the English language
The way that the boundaries of the "English" counties in England overlap the presumed genetic contribution from the post ice-age population that migrated from the East suggests that the origins of Anglo-Saxon lie in Doggerland rather than in the invasion of Britain by the Anglo-Saxons. The island that is now the Dogger Bank was only finally inundated by the sea in about 5000 BC. The fact that most English place names in the East and South East have Anglo-Saxon roots suggests that people in the East and South East of England probably spoke a language that was far closer to Anglo Saxon than to Welsh. Linguists are slowly coming round to the idea that early Anglo-Saxon-like languages were spoken in North West Europe, including East/South East England for a very long time. There were close connections between the peoples of Eastern England and those of the Netherlands, Belgium, N.Germany and Southern Denmark that seem to have been particularly strong in the Roman and immediately post-roman period (See for example Is it necessary to assume an apartheid-like social structure in Early Anglo-Saxon England?). These close connections suggest a closeness of culture and language.
Doggerland in 8000 BC (courtesy Wikimedia)
Capelli et al.. A Y chromosome census of the British Isles. Current Biology, 13, 979 - 984, (2003). http://www.familytreedna.com/pdf/capelli2_CB.pdf .
Topf, A., Gilbert, M.T.P., Dumbacher, J.P. And Hoelzel, A.R. (2005). Tracing the phylogeography of human populations in Britain based on 4th-11th century mtDNA genotypes. Molecular Biology and Evolution. Volume 23, Number 1, January 2006 , pp. 152-161(10) . http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/msj013v1.pdf
Weale et al.(2002), (‘Y Chromosome Evidence for Anglo-Saxon Mass Migration’, Molecular Biology and Evolution, 2002, vol. 19, pp.1008-21 )
Invisible Britons: the view from linguistics* Richard Coates University of Sussex http://www.sussex.ac.uk/linguistics/documents/rc_britons.pdf
2. The Recent English
Currently about 8-9% of the population of England is foreign born, and about 18% are ethnic minorities.
Over the past century the turmoil in Europe, the end of the British Empire and most importantly, government policy, have resulted in large movements of people into England. Most of the migration into the UK has been migration into England and 7.5% of the population of the UK is now born abroad. This amounts to about 8-9% of the population of England. (see: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/uk/05/born_abroad/html/overview.stm ).
The number of second generation immigrants is much higher. Twenty five percent of children in Britain are second generation (with immigrant parents). (http://news.migrationwatch.org.uk/2007/08/immigration-div.html ).
Britain received a wave of about 450,000 European immigrants in the immediate post war period. http://www.ekg.gp.bw.schule.de/projekte/immigration/britain_past.htm. Modern rates of immigration are far higher and more people now enter the UK each year than the entire post-war influx.
In more recent times there has been a deliberate policy of inward migration into England. In particular the Labour Government used migration to fuel an asset boom which was used to increase the indebtedness of every English household (See Immigration, house prices and boom economics). This deliberate policy of inward migration, including the wholesale granting of residence to foreign students, led to immigration on a truly epic scale of at least 550,000 per annum, of which two thirds were not from the EU, with around 350,000 leaving of which the majority were originally from the EU. (See Office for National Statistics - but note that the government has no exit count of visitors so the true influx is unknown).
In 2001 about 11.8% of the population of the UK was classified as “ethnic minorities”. (Commission for Racial Equality figures http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/Documents/Race/General%20advice%20and%20information/CRE%20factfile2%20ethnic%20minorities%20in%20Britain.pdf). If this trend has continued then in 2008 about 18% of the population are from ethnic minorities.
More recently there have been large movements of people from Eastern Europe to the UK. Most of these people have moved to England. A recent report by the IPPR (Institute for Public Policy Research) suggests that about 600-700,000 of these migrants have become resident in 2004-2008 (out of a total of about 1 million)
If you found this article interesting link to it, tweet it (TinyURL http://tinyurl.com/ajqyb5j ), and tell your friends! Not many people know about these facts.
Warning: the English are the current population. old and new, don't get all nostalgic for the palaeolithic. Your neighbour whose parents may have been Indian is as much a victim of population mismanagement as you, we are in it together looking forwards. If you want to vent your anger about this overpopulating of England vent it on Blair and Brown, the chief architects of this policy (See Immigration, House Prices and Boom Economics which briefly explains how Labour effectively reduced the amount of land per head of the population in exchange for a temporary asset boom - swapping your children's land for cash - and the hope of extra votes).
POLITICAL THOUGHTS click here to see the whole POLITICAL THOUGHTS magazine POLITICAL THOUGHTS!
First published 12/6/12
Most of the pre-twentieth century population of England were derived from ancestors who had lived in England since the ice age.
Until the latter part of the twentieth century the English were a surprisingly homogeneous group of people with little mixing with foreign peoples. The majority of the ancestors of most English people were people who settled the British Isles after the last Ice Age. These first settlers who occupied Britain as the ice retreated probably came from Northern Spain. This is evident from genetic studies for instance:
In Origins of the British (2006), Stephen Oppenheimer states:
"By far the majority of male gene types in the British Isles derive from Iberia (Spain and Portugal), ranging from a low of 59% in Fakenham, Norfolk to highs of 96% in Llangefni, north Wales and 93% Castlerea, Ireland. On average only 30% of gene types in England derive from north-west Europe. Even without dating the earlier waves of north-west European immigration, this invalidates the Anglo-Saxon wipeout theory…
…75-95% of British Isles (genetic) matches derive from Iberia...Ireland, coastal Wales, and central and west-coast Scotland are almost entirely made up from Iberian founders, while the rest of the non-English parts of the British Isles have similarly high rates. England has rather lower rates of Iberian types with marked heterogeneity, but no English sample has less than 58% of Iberian samples… (pages 375 and 378)
Indigenous English males are descended primarily from the earliest Palaeolithic peoples thought to have recolonised western Europe after the end of the last major glaciation some 25-15 thousand years ago. The genetic makeup of English males differs significantly from that of either Scandinavians (vikings) or Germanic peoples (Anglo-Saxons). Both Capelli et al (2003) and Weale et al.(2002) found that central east England had received a large amount of migration from the Netherlands. Weale et al had the academic misfortune to study this area of England as representative of the “English” and probably mistakenly concluded that over 50% of the English male genome had arrived in AD 500 as Saxon invaders"
It is possible to study the origins of English females by analysing what is known as “mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA)”. Mitochondrial DNA is a special type of genetic material that occurs in the cytoplasm of the ovum and is passed on to both male and female children by the mother. A recent study by Topf et al (2006) confirms the findings of Capelli etal (2003) and shows that English mtDNA is largely due to the original, post glacial, population of the British Isles, and is not the result of Anglo-Saxon invaders. The mtDNA results are consistent with the idea that a significant proportion of the indigenous English originated in a group of people who lived in “Doggerland”, a lowland area that is now the English Channel and North Sea, having moved there from nearby ice free areas. These people occupied England, the Netherlands and Scandinavia as the ice retreated and sea levels rose. In England they mixed with the Iberian derived peoples.
The simple fact is that the indigenous English have ancestors who have lived in England since it became habitable. This is strikingly confirmed by “Cheddar Man”. In 1903 a skeleton was found in the Cheddar Caves in Somerset and this has recently been dated at 9000 years old. Astonishingly the mtDNA from the skeleton was closely related to the mtDNA of people living in the West Country today! (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/htmlContent.jhtml?html=/archive/1997/03/08/nched08.html).
In contradiction to this reality British writers are fond of quoting the idea that the English have always been a “mongrel breed”. Here is a recent declaration of this belief:
"Britain is indeed a multi-ethnic society and has for centuries been what one writer after another has called a mongrel breed.” (British Council Annual Lecture Royal Gallery, Palace of Westminister, London Thursday 28 June 2001 “Who do they think we are? Being British”)
Why this belief has been so commonplace is mysterious – perhaps it originated in the need for the Norman invaders to claim that they were no different from previous occupiers or from the people as a whole. What better way to answer Englishmen who rejected the Norman invasion or German monarchs than to say that there is no such thing as an Englishman? On the other hand it might be the pride that English people take in being different that has created the myth, for instance an English person might say “I am half French” but really mean that one of their four grandparents was French.
The British Anglo-Saxon-Viking extermination myth, the myth that the invading "English" wiped out the indigenous population, is almost unique in Western Europe, why would an invader kill off all the slaves that they needed to work their land? The French and Irish don't believe that the Vikings replaced the indigenous population and the northern Europeans see changes in the territory ruled by Jutes, Angles etc as political events, not genocides. The extermination myth is not borne out by the genetic evidence or common sense and is obviously a complex piece of political propaganda that has become widely accepted.
It is racist to give the homogeneity of the pre-twentieth century English excessive political weight but it is even more racist to deny the existence of an indigenous people. There is no doubt that the modern English are now indeed a “mongrel breed” but this has only happened in the past sixty years.
A Note on the English language
The way that the boundaries of the "English" counties in England overlap the presumed genetic contribution from the post ice-age population that migrated from the East suggests that the origins of Anglo-Saxon lie in Doggerland rather than in the invasion of Britain by the Anglo-Saxons. The island that is now the Dogger Bank was only finally inundated by the sea in about 5000 BC. The fact that most English place names in the East and South East have Anglo-Saxon roots suggests that people in the East and South East of England probably spoke a language that was far closer to Anglo Saxon than to Welsh. Linguists are slowly coming round to the idea that early Anglo-Saxon-like languages were spoken in North West Europe, including East/South East England for a very long time. There were close connections between the peoples of Eastern England and those of the Netherlands, Belgium, N.Germany and Southern Denmark that seem to have been particularly strong in the Roman and immediately post-roman period (See for example Is it necessary to assume an apartheid-like social structure in Early Anglo-Saxon England?). These close connections suggest a closeness of culture and language.
Capelli et al.. A Y chromosome census of the British Isles. Current Biology, 13, 979 - 984, (2003). http://www.familytreedna.com/pdf/capelli2_CB.pdf .
Topf, A., Gilbert, M.T.P., Dumbacher, J.P. And Hoelzel, A.R. (2005). Tracing the phylogeography of human populations in Britain based on 4th-11th century mtDNA genotypes. Molecular Biology and Evolution. Volume 23, Number 1, January 2006 , pp. 152-161(10) . http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/msj013v1.pdf
Weale et al.(2002), (‘Y Chromosome Evidence for Anglo-Saxon Mass Migration’, Molecular Biology and Evolution, 2002, vol. 19, pp.1008-21 )
Invisible Britons: the view from linguistics* Richard Coates University of Sussex http://www.sussex.ac.uk/linguistics/documents/rc_britons.pdf
2. The Recent English
Currently about 8-9% of the population of England is foreign born, and about 18% are ethnic minorities.
Over the past century the turmoil in Europe, the end of the British Empire and most importantly, government policy, have resulted in large movements of people into England. Most of the migration into the UK has been migration into England and 7.5% of the population of the UK is now born abroad. This amounts to about 8-9% of the population of England. (see: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/uk/05/born_abroad/html/overview.stm ).
The number of second generation immigrants is much higher. Twenty five percent of children in Britain are second generation (with immigrant parents). (http://news.migrationwatch.org.uk/2007/08/immigration-div.html ).
Britain received a wave of about 450,000 European immigrants in the immediate post war period. http://www.ekg.gp.bw.schule.de/projekte/immigration/britain_past.htm. Modern rates of immigration are far higher and more people now enter the UK each year than the entire post-war influx.
In more recent times there has been a deliberate policy of inward migration into England. In particular the Labour Government used migration to fuel an asset boom which was used to increase the indebtedness of every English household (See Immigration, house prices and boom economics). This deliberate policy of inward migration, including the wholesale granting of residence to foreign students, led to immigration on a truly epic scale of at least 550,000 per annum, of which two thirds were not from the EU, with around 350,000 leaving of which the majority were originally from the EU. (See Office for National Statistics - but note that the government has no exit count of visitors so the true influx is unknown).
In 2001 about 11.8% of the population of the UK was classified as “ethnic minorities”. (Commission for Racial Equality figures http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/Documents/Race/General%20advice%20and%20information/CRE%20factfile2%20ethnic%20minorities%20in%20Britain.pdf). If this trend has continued then in 2008 about 18% of the population are from ethnic minorities.
More recently there have been large movements of people from Eastern Europe to the UK. Most of these people have moved to England. A recent report by the IPPR (Institute for Public Policy Research) suggests that about 600-700,000 of these migrants have become resident in 2004-2008 (out of a total of about 1 million)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7371180.stm
The most extraordinary feature of this recent boost in the UK population is that it is exactly the wrong policy at this time in our history. (See Global warming: what do we do now?). Responsible governments should be reducing the population to avoid massive casualties amongst our grandchildren.
The most extraordinary feature of this recent boost in the UK population is that it is exactly the wrong policy at this time in our history. (See Global warming: what do we do now?). Responsible governments should be reducing the population to avoid massive casualties amongst our grandchildren.
Emigration
The net loss of British Nationals through emigration amounts to about a 100,000 per year in recent years. (Brits Abroad: Mapping the scale and nature of British emigration http://www.ippr.org.uk/publicationsandreports/publication.asp?id=509 )
Incidentally, if you are anti-immigration you have a democratic tool,
just never vote Labour again, Labour set up the current mass migration
in 1997 - just look at the migration graphs.
If you found this article interesting link to it, tweet it (TinyURL http://tinyurl.com/ajqyb5j ), and tell your friends! Not many people know about these facts.
Future projections
Warning: the English are the current population. old and new, don't get all nostalgic for the palaeolithic. Your neighbour whose parents may have been Indian is as much a victim of population mismanagement as you, we are in it together looking forwards. If you want to vent your anger about this overpopulating of England vent it on Blair and Brown, the chief architects of this policy (See Immigration, House Prices and Boom Economics which briefly explains how Labour effectively reduced the amount of land per head of the population in exchange for a temporary asset boom - swapping your children's land for cash - and the hope of extra votes).
POLITICAL THOUGHTS click here to see the whole POLITICAL THOUGHTS magazine POLITICAL THOUGHTS!
First published 12/6/12
Comments
This from 2001- Tory that would be lynched we're he to utter such things to the Red Tories.
http://www.ety.com/HRP/race/newbattleofbritain.htm
LBC Radio last evening James Whale show.
"Ethnic MINORITIES will have a very signifcant effect on the 2010 general election"
POPULATION 80 MILLION PLUS FOR SURE THEY WILL!
Britain a Nation of Immigrants?- Rubbish!
We are bamboozled by apologists who try to pretend that ‘Britain is a nation of immigrants”. This the opposite of the truth: for a thousand years, Britain was one of the most homogeneous populations in the world – a fabulous heritage thoughtlessly squandered by the ‘diversity’ saboteurs. In an article in the Spectator, Oxford professor David Coleman, comprehensively debunks the “Britain is a Nation of Immigrants” myth. Read and download.
http://www.saxonsawake.org.uk/
It did not.
As a consequence, since then more than 300,000 foreign and Commonwealth men have taken advantage of this loophole.