One Saturday afternoon in January this year I watched a few minutes of an on-the-spot livestream by a well-known independent video-journalist who was reporting on the weekly protest in support of Palestine and Hamas outside the Houses of Parliament. Chants of ‘from the river to the sea’ and ‘intifada, intifada’ are in the air with lots of Palestinian flags. Large numbers of the Muslim protesters and supporters go about with their faces covered. Earlier there had been a territory-establishing mass public prayer and some trouble but the police managed to contain it. Such are the things we have had to put up with in Britain since that infamous day in October 2023.
I hadn’t meant to start this piece in this way but when something is shoved under your nose you can’t always ignore it. What these protestors are calling for is nothing less than the obliteration of the state of Israel and therefore the genocide of the Jews or, at least, their removal from the land they see as Palestine and their return to being a diaspora people. That is what Hamas exists for now, having initially been allowed to grow by the Israelis to counter the Soviet-inspired Palestine Liberation Organisation and Fatah. It is an Islamic fundamentalist terrorist organisation which takes its instruction on its relationship to Jews from the Koran - kill them wherever you find them.
The murderous Hamas attack of 7th October 2023 and the subsequent supportive demonstrations opened the eyes of many in Britain and in other European countries to the true nature of what we have allowed to take root among us. The claim the demonstrators make is that the Jews are settlers in Palestine and the Israeli government is a colonial regime suppressing indigenous peoples despite the copious archaeological and documentary evidence that Jews have been there for 4,000 years. We read in the Bible histories of Joseph going to Egypt, of the Israelites multiplying there and being enslaved, of the Exodus led by Moses, the arrival in Canaan via Mount Sinai, The Kingdom of Judah and Israel, the First Temple of Solomon, the conquest by Nebuchadnezzar and the exile to Babylon, the return and the Second Temple before its eventual destruction by the Romans in the Jewish-Roman War around AD 70 followed by the slaughter, exile and re-enslavement of Jews around AD 135. The Province of Judea was renamed Syria-Palaestina by the Romans. That much is historical record.
I’m not going to go further down that alley in this essay, but, if ‘settlers and colonisers’ is the game the Muslim protesters and their supporters wish to play then so are these Muslims in my country. If they wish to play the indigenous peoples game, well, we British will play that too.
Before going any further we need to decide what indigenous means and that’s not altogether an easy question. With flora and fauna, it’s relatively straight forward. They exist in defined terrains and climates. It’s quite tricky with respect to homo sapiens because the accepted theory is that we originated in Africa and we have migrated outwards from there, spreading throughout the Middle East, into Asia and Northwards into Europe. It is accepted too that we are a single species despite many obviously different physical characteristics between and within the different races. It is known that European and Asian people carry traces of Neanderthal DNA which others do not and the Neanderthals, who existed in the land now known as Britain, were a different species of hominid. People of Oceania carry Denisovan DNA that Europeans and Asians do not.
Mankind’s rise has taken place during the Quaternary Ice Age which began about 2.6 million years ago. The ice has advanced and receded many times and it is only during the warm interglacial periods that many parts of Northern Europe were open to human habitation. There are traces of a human presence in the British Isles in the form of footprints and hand tools found at Happisburgh in Norfolk which are nearly a million years old; the oldest hominid remains so far found in Britain are about half a million years old. The glacial sequences of the Quaternary Ice Age have meant that Britain will have been abandoned by humans for long periods; it was not until the end of the last glacial period about 11,700 years ago that numbers of North-West European hunter-gatherers made their way into the peninsula that was to become the British Isles. Rising sea-levels due to the melting ice and a tsunami caused by a geological cataclysm known as the Storegga Slide created the islands about 8,000 years ago. Since then, people wishing to come here have had to cross the North Sea or the English Channel.
There was an identifiable bell-beaker culture in Britain from about 5,000 years ago although Stonehenge is thought to be older and the Ness of Brodgar in the Orkney Isles older still. This was overlain by Celtic migrations from Western and Central Europe from about 900 BC although there is some disagreement among archaeologists about exactly when and how they began to arrive. During the Iron Age, the Isles were known to the ancient Greeks as Albion and there is much evidence of trade with the Mediterranean lands. By the time of Julius Caesar’s first Roman incursion in 55 BC the islands were peopled with a network of alternately warring or confederated Brythonic Celtic tribes who loosely referred to themselves as Priteni, the name given to them by the Greeks. The Romans converted it to Britanni and gave the main island the name Britannia. Later the Celtic inhabitants came to call it Prydein which it still is in the modern Welsh language with the spelling altered to Prydain.
The fleet of the Roman Emperor Claudius returned with conquest the aim in 43 AD and Britannia became a Roman province until 410 AD. There were rebellions over the Roman centuries, but it is at this time that most of the main island of Britain first became a united political entity with laws, a common money and a recognisable culture. The Romano-British had a sense of who they were. Left out at this stage were the tribes to the North of Hadrian’s wall such as the Caledonii, Selgovae and Damnonii whom the Romans had failed to conquer. They didn’t invade Ireland.
As Rome fell under attack by Germanic tribes, the legions left Britannia which was then exposed to the migrations and invasions of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes who came into conflict with the Romano-British but gradually Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were established from the fifth to the seventh centuries which became known as the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy. The record of the early part of this period is provided by the Romano-British monk Gildas in De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (On The Ruin and Conquest of Britain). Then came Vikings who got everywhere around the Isles and even established their own kingdom known as the Danelaw. followed by their French-speaking offshoots, the Normans in 1066 AD.
During this period the resurgence of Wessex under Alfred the Great had prevented a complete Viking takeover and laid the foundation for the creation of England. His grandson Athelstan united Wessex and Mercia and became the first King of England in 927 AD. Ten years later he fought the great battle of Brunanburh against the Northern Alliance of the Kingdom of Dublin and the Kingdoms of Alba and Strathclyde which were later to form Scotland. Although Athelstan won the battle which prevented the dissolution of the nascent England, he was unsuccessful in subduing the Northern Alliance, so Alba and Strathclyde remained independent. Athelstan had failed in his ambition to unite the island. The importance of this battle and its aftermath is such that it guaranteed the existence of two kingdoms on the Island of Britain - England and Scotland - for the next 760 years. Wales at this time was still a group of smaller kingdoms, Deheubarth, Powys and Gwynedd being the most influential among them.
Although the Danelaw had been defeated and subsumed into England the Danes never gave up on the idea that they should rule Britain and the invasion and conquest of Cnut the Great in 1016 AD established his North Sea Empire of England, Denmark, Norway and part of Sweden. However, it didn’t survive his death whereupon the crown reverted to an Anglo-Saxon King, Harold Harefoot, then it was briefly held by Cnut’s son Harthacnut before the Anglo-Saxon Edward “The Confessor” regained it. It was on his death in 1066 that Harold Hardrada of Norway and William, Duke of Normandy, pressed their claims over that of Harold Godwinson. Godwinson defeated Hardrada at Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire then had to march his army South to meet William at Hastings in the second highly significant battle in the history of Britain. He was killed and his army routed.
What followed was the complete subjugation of the Anglo-Saxons to their new Norman aristocracy and the establishment of feudalism, an idea later imported to Scotland by King David I of Scots, along with some Norman nobles. The basic ethnic makeup of Britain was complete: England composed of the remnants of a Romano-British population, Anglo-Saxons, Danish and Norwegian Vikings with a Norman ruling class; Scotland made up of ancient Britons, Anglo-Saxons, Scots, Picts, Vikings and Normans but it was the Scots who came from Ireland who gave the country its name. The essential difference between the two was that Scotland, despite incursions by a Roman army, had never been established as part of the Roman province of Britannia. Into the Scottish broth came minor admixtures of Balts, Flemish, Germans, French and Jews. The border between England and Scotland was fluid for centuries but it is interesting to note that a thousand years ago England (and Northumbria before it) extended up through The Eastern Scottish Borders to Edinburgh and the Lothians, at times almost as far West as Stirling.
After the arrival of the Normans, the Welsh Kings and Princes remained independent until the Plantagenet King Edward I made a determined and successful effort to conquer the country in the 13th Century. It was formally incorporated into the Kingdom of England under Henry VIII in the 16th Century
It is this broad history that gives rise to the claim of the political left that Britain is a nation of immigrants. In this context the term immigrant is anachronistic. They were invaders and conquerors; the term immigrant surely depends on there being a settled homogenous people living under a state powerful enough to control borders beyond which to ‘immigrate’. Besides, apart from the small Jewish element, all the other peoples were Christianised North-West Europeans who differed only in minor ways. Modern DNA research has found that the English are not as Anglo-Saxon as they think they are. There had been much intermixing with ancient Romano-Britons who did not all migrate Westwards to Wales and Cornwall, Northwards to Rheged or go to Brittany and the Normans did not arrive in enough numbers to significantly affect the genetic inheritance of the broad mass of the people. In this context it is astounding that there is alive today, and living in the same area in Somerset, a man with a direct genetic descent from the pre-Celtic 9,000-year-old bones of Cheddar Man. That is a connection to a time when Britain was a peninsula of the North-West European landmass. No, we are not a nation of immigrants.
This is an appropriate moment to consider what that otherwise untrustworthy organisation the United Nations says constitutes an indigenous people:
1. … (a) Tribal peoples in independent countries whose social, cultural
and economic conditions distinguish them from other sections of the
national community, and whose status is regulated wholly or partially by
their own customs or traditions or by special laws or regulations.
(b) Peoples in independent countries who are regarded as indigenous
on account of their descent from the populations which inhabited the
country, or a geographical region to which the country belongs, at the
time of conquest or colonisation or the establishment of present State
boundaries and who, irrespective of their legal status, retain some or all
of their own social, economic, cultural and political institutions.
2. Self-identification as indigenous or tribal shall be regarded as a
fundamental criterion for determining the groups to which the provisions
of this Convention apply.
3. Historical continuity with pre-invasion and/or pre-colonial societies
that developed on their territories.
4. Distinctiveness.
5. A determination to preserve, develop and transmit to future generations their ancestral territories and identity as peoples in accordance with their own cultural patterns, social institutions and legal system.
6. A strong link to territories and surrounding natural resources.
7. Distinct social, economic or political systems; and
8. Distinct language, culture and beliefs
All of which describes the peoples of the thousand-year-old Kingdoms of England and Scotland, but it is perhaps the Welsh, Cornish and those of Pictish and Ancient British descent among the Scots who have the claim to be the oldest indigenous people in the British Isles by these criteria. The Welsh have long cultural memories, and they have literature, some of it written in Duineddyn (modern Edinburgh) which predates anything written in English or its fore-runner, Anglo-Saxon.
As a way of thumbing the nose at those who would say that there are no indigenous Britons here’s a song from the Welsh language campaigner Dafydd Iwan. Sung in modern Welsh with English sub-titles it’s called ‘Yma O Hyd’ (We’re Still Here) and it harks back to 383 AD when Magnus Maximus (Macsen Wledig), A Celtiberian, was Emperor of the Western Roman Empire. Perhaps these are the true British whose name has been stolen.
It’s a stirring song and there are several renderings of it on YouTube but I think this is the only one with English sub-titles.
“In spite of everyone and everything, we’re still here”.
Their name for themselves is ‘Cymru’, pronounced ‘kumree’ which etymologically links to Cambria and Cumbria (the ‘Old North’ in Welsh history, Rheged and Ystrad Clud). Welsh, originally Waleas, is Anglo-Saxon and means ‘foreigner’. It is born also by William Wallace, William the Welshman, the Scottish hero with a Norman Christian name and an Anglo-Saxon surname.
Will our descendants need to adopt a similar anthem? Or will we fix things before we ourselves become a people in our own ancestral homeland who have need of ‘protected characteristics’?