What does it mean to you to be English?

[gez]

“Instigator”? Not really. As I’ve mentioned already, slavery has existed as long as civilisation.
In the case of English involvement, we took the transatlantic trade from the Portuguese. The slaves we transported were captured by fellow Africans and sold to us, as against sent via the Sahara route.

So no, NOT instigators.
We’re the English prime movers, oh definitely, though if you look at the numbers of slaves transported overland in Africa, they’re also obscene.

I’ll happily re highlight the banning of slavery within the British Empire.
Especially when compared to the US, who not only continued until their civil war, but then found a way around its banning with the use of indentured servitude, which is basically slavery by another name.

What a lovely race humans are.

Instigators of the African trans atlantic slave trade I meant. Sure they weren't the only ones, and one can quibble about who the very first were (the Portuguese), but England was an avid and significant contributor. That's all I meant to say.

 

[gez]

But what is often forgotten is that up to June 1941, Stalin and Hitler were best friends, and agreed to carve up most of eastern Europe between them.

As opposed to most of the UK cabinet that wanted to treat with Hitler you mean? Nations can hardly be critisized for attempting to remain out of a war. Hell the Americans only joined because they were forced to by Japan. They'd never have entered the war in Europe otherwise.

 

[herb]

It is however the name of the island which contains the nations of Wales, Scotland and England...

My memory is poor these days but was the 'Great Britain' merely to differentiate it from French Brittany which was necessary when the KIng was French/British. It should be Greater Britain, like Greater London or Greater Manchester.

 

[gez]

This. Not a single one of us would be able to go back very far to discover that we are descended from waves of immigrants from all around the globe. Around one in five white Britons will have black African ancestry. The geneticist Steve Jones is particularly good at teasing this sort of stuff out.

One in five Britons has black ancestor • PET

A study of census figures has shown that about one in five white British people has a direct black ancestor. The well-known Professor Steve Jones, an academic geneticist at University College London, said that Afro-Carribean people had lived in Britain for so long that they were now part of the...

www.progress.org.uk

I did an Ancestry DNA test, so I know where I come from . None of it very surprising given my parents. i.e. Mostly mid England and Iberian Peninsular, with significant amount of North Western mainland Europe and a small amount of Scandy (from the same parentage as the mid England). .

 

[palacefan]

I have a totally different view on what being English means between the immediate post war years and now--- going from optimism and the feeling that made in England meant something good to continual decline !

Class system headed by the royals and having to salute less than bright army officers who served their role on the basis that daddy sent them to a fee playing school.

Politicians elected to serve a political party rather than the country. Boris Kuntface Johnson, Food banks, Liz Truss and all similar shelf stackers.

Ashamed of our past and being alive when people from other countries were labelled coons, wogs etc.

On the plus side Beano and Dandy, Eagle comic -Wimbledon Tennis and Bonfire night. Being told by the refined Mrs Painter who lived down our road that she was putting horse manure on her rhubarb and being mortified when my old man told her that we used custard. .

That might not be funny now but was to a child when England was far less grumpy than it is now.

 

[herb]

I had to laugh when the GBNews team who emphasize Tory Englishness found out that according to their recently commissioned survey of watchers most were intending to vote Labour, by a significant margin. I wonder if Farage or Mogg will address this.

 

[Pravda]

I have a totally different view on what being English means between the immediate post war years and now--- going from optimism and the feeling that made in England meant something good to continual decline !

Class system headed by the royals and having to salute less than bright army officers who served their role on the basis that daddy sent them to a fee playing school.

Politicians elected to serve a political party rather than the country. Boris Kuntface Johnson, Food banks, Liz Truss and all similar shelf stackers.

Ashamed of our past and being alive when people from other countries were labelled coons, wogs etc.

On the plus side Beano and Dandy, Eagle comic -Wimbledon Tennis and Bonfire night. Being told by the refined Mrs Painter who lived down our road that she was putting horse manure on her rhubarb and being mortified when my old man told her that we used custard. .

That might not be funny now but was to a child when England was far less grumpy than it is now.

I'll never eat rhubarb quite the same again

 

[Bob McC]

Deliberate misinterpretation?
Doesn't really deserve a response.

Of course it does. We need to know the extent of your bigotry.

 

[richardg]

£1.40 in Tesco.
Not much difference.

But it's more than 1.80, more like 2.20 to 2.50 now. I buy a 24 case at Dover periodically.

 

[Bob McC]

You can only work with the material you are given…

 

[richardg]

I was very disappointed when I finally learned that Heinz wasn't a British company. Such was the ubiquitous nature of Heinz Baked Beans when I was a child. Even though I never liked them myself (baked beans I mean).

I was suprised but delighted to hear the Americans don't really eat them. It's just us chumps.

 

[Yank]

I was suprised but delighted to hear the Americans don't really eat them. It's just us chumps.

We do eat beans, just not in the same form.

 

[Finnegan]

No papers, I saw this in my own county of residence in the UK.
Non-contributants, those that want to change the UK to the same as the very country they departed, first in the queue for hand outs, extremists, no desire to fit in, etc.
Sorry, it's real, don't like it, don't want it. Those who do like it, you can have it.

I guess we do spend millions on the civil list. And let’s not get started on the Panama Papers.

 

[richardg]

We do eat beans, just not in the same form.

I realise that. I have watched Blazing Saddles.

 

[Mick P]

I guess we do spend millions on the civil list. And let’s not get started on the Panama Papers.

Very well said, if anyone dislikes this country, they have the total freedom to emigrate. Of course, they nearly all stay put and squawk

 

[tones]

There is of course no doubting the USA's impact on the outcome of WWII, but the Soviets were every bit as equal in their contribution to that end. In fact militarily there is a strong argument that they did more to win the war than the rest of the Alies put together: they covered more phsycial ground over a shorter time than the rest did and got to Berlin first. (and paid a far higher price in terms of losses - both military and civilian).
Could WWII have been won without Soviet involvement (assuming they had remained neutral and Hitler never attacked them)? Sure of course, it would have just taken a hell of a lot longer. Plus the result would have been the same if the USSR were involved but the USA never entered Europe, Hitler would still have been defeated eventually. The USSR ultimately just had far too much capacity of manpower to bring to bear and because of it would have ultimately been able to halt Hitlers advance and then outproduce them in weapons with their factories safely out of reach.

As Gilbert and Sullivan would have put it, "of this there is no reas'nable doubt, no possible reason or shadow of doubt, no possible doubt whatever". Something like 75-80% of all German casualties were incurred on the eastern front.

Hitler made two major errors, either of which would individually have eventually killed him, but he obligingly made both - he attacked the Soviet Union and he declared war on the USA, when he didn't need to.

 

[richardg]

I think I have come up with the best word of how it feels to be English for me: disappointing.

 

[tones]

I've always found it odd when forms etc list Great Britain as a choice. It doesn't exisit as any kind of meaningful entitiy alone. The name of our country is "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland", or United Kingdom or UK for short. There is neither a country or a nation called Great Britain. People only call themselves British (I suspect) because Ukaydian or UKian etc are awkward, in the same way that citizens of the USA don't relate to themselves as Usaians.

Yukkkian?

 

[tones]

You’re quite right.
Sorry, I hadn’t meant to say it quite that way.
What I intended to say was that we stopped the Germans invading the UK. Clearly we didn’t stop them elsewhere, that was the Russians.

Hitler had a sneaking admiration for the British, whom he saw as sort-of fellow Aryans. He fully expected them to see sense and declare a separate peace with Germany, so that he could get on with Lebensraum. He took very little interest in Operation Seelöwe, and when Goering's Luftwaffe failed to deliver the all-important air supremacy essential for any invasion, he went back to his plans of Russia.

 

[Finnegan]

Mick, I have to confess it’s very disconcerting to find myself seeing eye to eye more and more with you these days. I’m not sure if that says more about you or me.