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Yes

Sarcasm? No mate - take a history lesson or two. You could start with those fine men at the Battle of Britain.

It was sarcastic, by simple virtue of how it was phrased.

Now, enough of this utter nonsense.

Either you are an Englishman who has no respect for his heritage or you are not an Englishman - and just out to cause upset.

Whichever the case, there is little point in continuing this, so I'm off for my lunch and afternoon nap.

Toodle-oo

It?s all a government plot in cohorts with the media to suppress the masses. Religion use to do the job but now it is fear. Rumours that people will lose their jobs, the country overtaken by immigrants, Muslim fundamentalists, terror plots, unlimited rice pudding, ECT. Fear, used by the Bush government every effectively in the early 2000?s.

The government (with the media) need to keep a balance between installing enough fear into the population to keep them worried but at the same time not to push them over the edge. Hence, you have the public face of government saying immigration is good and the behind the scenes ?make people fear for their wellbeing?.

So what is British? Maybe going down the pub on a Saturday night, getting pissed, and buying a curry or kebab. Oh, curries and kebabs are not British!

My advice, take anything the media say with a pinch of salt. Think for yourself and don't let the government and media do it for you. They are all out for a headline and to get your custom. They will sell their own dead mother to the devil for a story.

Would tell Ian Wright to his face that he isn?t English?

Problem is, it's all very fine and dandy to trot out the usual "we were all immigrants once" argument that inevitably arises whenever immigration is discussed here, and to cite the Roman, Jute, Celt, Viking and whatever other flavour immigrant you like as examples.

The great difference between then and now though is that back then, the British Isles were very sparesly populated. It was a wild frontier and there was plenty of room for all.

Even after the Second World War, when the initial waves of Caribbean, African and Indo-Pakistani immigrants arrived, the UK population was a lot smaller than it is today.

Now though, the small island nation that is the UK is becoming increasingly overcrowded - towns are swallowing up what remains of the countryside in order to accommodate an ever-growing population, and things like the health and education systems are creaking under the strain in a lot of places.

I think that's what many people worry about most nowadays when it comes to immigration - simple ignorant bigotry based on skin colour much is less of a factor than it once was (in any case, most immigrants these days are "white"). It's more a question of people realising that the immigration free-for-all can't go on unchecked because it's quite simply unsustainable and there just isn't room for (say) 100 million people - because that's the way things are headed in the long term if immigration (coupled with natural population growth) continues like it is.

- Eric

People who fled their homes during the second world war settled in the UK. They still have their own cultural identity, traditions and language, but two generations on and their children and grandchildren are British. As Jacques was trying to suggest, the Battle of Britain wasn't just won by English Tommies, but by Poles and Czechs, Canadians and Aussies, Kiwis and Indians, South Africans and French, West Indians and Palestinian Jews.

There were other people who stayed on here after the war too---German and Italian POWs, who were ostensibly the enemy for a while. But two generations on, and their children and grandchildren are British---and their family history is important to them.

If our own people could see past the colour issue, perhaps young British Muslims wouldn't be angry enough to fall for the lies of the preachers of hate; if the workshy in our sink estates didn't fear that the east Europeans were coming coming to claim the benefits our idle class sees as its birthright then maybe there wouldn't be such friction.

I'm not a huge fan of Greek cuisine, but that doesn't make me hate Greek people. Why should a different language, religion or colour engender an unthinking hatred? People are people---they have their faults and their strengths. No nation has a monopoly on goodness, or evil.

What gets me about these polls is quite often people will say, "We don't have enough resources to deal with our own people, let alone outsiders." Who are our own people? Sharing a land of birth and a language doesn't make someone my friend, my ally, my bloodbrother. I treat people as I find them---respect those worthy of respect, despise those who have no respect for others.

Defend your countrymen all you wish---but in some cases you are defending the indefensible. A Polish plumber, a Lithuanian fruitpicker, a Trinidadian rail worker is more worthy of respect than a Briton with eight kids who has never worked and never intends to because he doesn't feel he needs to when we are picking up the tab for him.

My first and last comment on this thread.

Quite right - an excellent post.
This immigration thing has been engineered to cause trouble, the immigrants are just pawns in the big game. If they want to live here then let 'em, though what a lot of your Eastern Europeans are doing is actually funding their own families still in their original countries with wages and benefits from here, which isn't good and a bit cheeky to say the least. The problem is that many seem to make a beeline for Britain not cos they envisage this as the promised land but to milk our system, they're not coming here for the beneficial cost of living....
I can't see my future being here in my homeland for a variety of reasons, the influx of immigrants isn't high on my list of reasons, there are many other things that make me think I'd be better off elsewhere - which would then make me an immigrant!

Steve R wrote:

> The People that fought in the Crusades, established the first
> Parliament, went to far off lands and brought back spuds and
> tobacco, defeated the Armada, defeated Napoleon, won two World
> Wars.


I don't usually get into this sort of debate, but as an amateur student of history (and as an ex immigration officer - for ten years 30 years ago!)

1. We did some appalling things in the Crusades - when the crusaders got to Jerusalem they herded the Jews and Muslims into their temples and burned them alive - until then relations between Muslims and Christians had been amicable - the present animosity dates from that time. Bush didn't know this when he spoke of a "crusade" after 9/11.

2. Spuds good - tobacco bad.

3. We didn't defeat the Armada - the weather did.

4. We only defeated Napoleon at Waterloo because of the last minute intervention of the Prussian Marshall Blucher - we'd have lost if he hadn't turned up.

5. We only won the two World Wars because the Americans intervened at the last moment both times. This is why we still have to kowtow to the Americans to this day.

Every country writes its history to suit its purposes.

Anyway, I'm going back to the Promotions forum now !happy!

What possessed you to think I listed those historical events as being proud achievements?

I was merely describing the People that occupied this country at the time of all those events, over many centuries, and thereby illustrating the fact that that People had remained constant and distinct over almost a millennium.