By the logic of Tominey's argument, players who opt not to play for England are not English as well, right?
I assume she's happy to confirm that the likes of Matty Cash (Pol), Callum Styles (Hun) and Tommy Smith (NZ) are no longer English, in addition to Folarin Balogun or Ravel Morrison, etc.
Or, alternatively, we could all agree that FIFA eligibility rules have nothing to do with what a national policy should be on immigration and citizenship - and stop dragging random footballers into political debates?
'The ethno-nationalists' arguments are self-defeating'
Tune in to today's Daily T where @CamillaTominey and @timothy_stanley discuss the riots and looting in France over the past few days and weigh up whether the UK is facing similar challenges...
👇 Let us know your thoughts below
🎧 Listen to the full episode now through the link in our bio
Remember: according to most of the British political establishment, a man who belonged to Jama'at (the group that murdered Ken Bigley), Tanzim (which was what the group called itself after declaring loyalty to Al-Qaeda / Bin Laden), and maybe its successor (the Islamic State in Iraq) can become just as British (or even English...) as you or me.
All he needs is to receive a passport from the British State; reside for long enough in the UK, and possibly pay a non-zero amount of tax🙄(or, of course, you can believe that words and actions mean something and that this guy should get the death penalty).
Who is this Reform UK Councillor and Where can I personally donate to his re-election fund?
"There is nothing racist about any ethnic or religious group wanting their own homeland" - NOTED👍
I can only thank the Home Secretary for putting on a full police escort for migrants who, by her own implication, are raping "nearly every woman" in the small boats. The only welcome they should receive is a deportation order back to country of origin.
theguardian.com/uk-news/2026…
This is long overdue and I hope all parties of the right adopt prison capacity expansion as policy.
bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ck9q…
“Repeat after me: what’s happening is not happening, what my eyes see does not exist, what makes my heart ache is an illusion, my homeland has not been torn away from me, my country has not been surrendered to foreigners who hate it, there is no Great Replacement." - Renaud Camus
Wrong. The English are so remarkably undivided as an ethnicity relative to the Brythonic/Celtic groups that I can only assume Mr. Rees-Mogg has failed to conduct even a basic level of research on the topic...
To those of you who say it’s DNA that makes you English, I would say this: You don’t know what you’re talking about. Our DNA is already mixed up. Have a look at your own DNA.
Dare I say, you want to take the beam out of your own eye before you take the mote out of the eye of others.
We English are not, and nor should we be seen as, some eugenically pure island race. We are a people who have values and culture and strengths and liberties.
People who join that should be incorporated in it and encouraged in it, rather than made to feel foreign. But I would say to those who come here and wish to maintain their culture, that they are making a grave mistake. They have come here because of the strength of Englishness.
They should join in with it and not hold themselves out as something separate. The condition for coming is to become English, to be part of this great enterprise, not to remain a foreigner in these lands.
✍️ Jacob Rees-Mogg
Article | spectator.com/article/the-en…
On average, an Englishman can trace ~70% of his DNA to before the first farmers and ~10-15% each of Anglo-Saxon and Norse. The English of 1927 were more than 90% the descendants of the English of 927. That is the basis of a legitimate claim to an ethnicity - even if Mr. Rees-Mogg chooses not to understand it (and to very unsubtly imply we are Nazis instead).
It's funny. I respect .@DavidBe31099196 and his thesis around the conditions necessary for civil war - but I've hitherto dismissed the prospect of anything like that in the UK just because of the general inertia of the British public. However, in history, things happen slowly then all at once.
Imagine telling the average person in 1910 that by the end of that decade the Habsburgs, Hohenzollerns and Romanovs will all have fallen with the Ottoman Empire not far behind them. The kind of barefaced disrespect shown by the British State here is the kind of thing in which it only takes one protest going slightly wrong - one more "I don't think you have, mate" - for unrest to spread far, and wide, and quickly.
For the avoidance of doubt, I don't want that. But the government has spent most of post-WW2 absorbing (and at times, encouraging) ever-greater numbers of unwanted migrants (legal and illegal). They have been told time and again - by polls and by the fact none of them can just admit to it as policy in their manifestos - that this has to stop. The fact they're dedicating ever greater proportions of available resources to providing *police escorts* for these arrivals is a provocation, and a stupid one at that. It tells voters that, no matter how peacefully or reasonably you put your case; no matter how often you tick the box of a least-worst candidate come election time, this will continue.
The English Language is not sufficient to describe the contempt I have for the British State at the moment.
Dan retweeted
They were taking the illegal men to Gosport
Gosport had a spontaneous protest
They are no longer taking the illegal men to Gosport.
What'd you learn?
No. We're not doing this anymore. Being British is about having ancestry from England or Wales or Scotland - as anyone familiar with the Laws in Wales Acts and the Act of Union will tell you. You do not get to crowbar yourself into my identity category, and nor does Mr. Sunak.
"If you're born and brought up in England and view it as home, what are you other than English?" - whatever your ethnic origin is.
The reality of "integration" or "assimilation" is that it *is* (and should be) incredibly hard. It is a polite but useless lie in this debate that "all an immigrant has to do is X or Y" and then they suddenly become one of us. It took the Huguenots about a century to integrate and they were very similar to their host population in many important respects.
I had the misfortune of going to a citizenship ceremony recently, and the person presiding over the whole thing trotted out the "fish and chips, pint in a pub, queueing" account of being British. I think she could see from my reaction how insulting that was - but what else could she say? She was in a room full of people who'd done their six years, and had been given a document saying they were British. Only two of those present (a person I was supporting and a young South Asian lass) treated it with any seriousness (i.e., dressed up formally for it), and I imagine they were equally insulted as I was to be lumped in with tracksuit-clad Afghans and Pakistanis who could barely (if at all) speak English.
The reality is that to integrate, you need to have a non-trivial amount in common with a modal individual from the host population. In reality, this translates to being either Atheist or Christian; speaking English at home; possessing an Anglicized (or Gaelicized) name; having an *undivided loyalty* to Britain to the point you would fight for it against your country of ethnic background; adhering to certain behaviours and customs and much more besides that.
The criticism might be that this is close-to-impossible to fulfill, but *it should be*. This is because it replaces the requirement that the immigrant's ancestors has shed the blood that mine have for this country. I have a great grandfather who fought in WW1 from 1915 to 1917 (when he was gassed at Passchendaele) and then was killed by the Luftwaffe in the Blitz of 1940. I think it is incredibly insulting for any immigrant to imagine they can lay equal claim to the country his deeds created. The test for them being able to do so should be almost impossible to pass, and in reality it is.
I was a very fortunate kid. My dad's GP surgery sat between the Dell and Hampshire's County Ground, so at weekends I could go to a game and get a lift home afterwards. It left me with a passion for both sports and a belief that sport opens a window onto who we are.
When I was growing up, the Tebbit test was a matter of intense debate. Which side did you cheer for at the cricket? For all the criticism it received, it was a test anyone could pass. If you supported England because you saw it as home, you were part of the team regardless of the colour of your skin. Born in Southampton, 10 year old me passed it without even knowing about it.
Giving the @MCCOfficial's Cowdrey Lecture on Thursday made me think about cricket's place in our national life and the current arguments about identity.
In Britain we've built the world's most successful multi-faith, multi-ethnic democracy. I was a beneficiary of it. Whatever issues people had with me as PM (and there was no shortage) my race and religion weren't among them. I could read a lesson at the King's coronation or light Diwali diyas on Downing Street with my daughters without controversy. Foreign leaders assumed these must be huge symbolic moments. For most Brits, they just weren't that big a deal.
But Britain's democratic achievement is now under strain. Some of the challenges are ones I've written about before, like Islamism, and the failure of governments, including the one I led, to adequately control immigration. But something else is going on - a risk that we start equating skin colour with nationality.
After I left office, a debate kicked off here on @X about whether I was English at all, because I was a "brown Hindu". During the election campaign I'd been shocked when footage was broadcast of someone calling me a "Paki." It was shocking precisely because it was so unusual. That kind of abuse had simply not been a feature of my political life. But the Englishness argument was stranger still. Call it the reverse Tebbit test. If you're not white, it no longer matters who you support at the cricket, because you can never be English. It's a test no non-white person can ever pass.
I have no truck with people who offend our sense of fairness and come here illegally; I spent half my premiership trying to deport them to Rwanda. I think the bar for legal migration should be high. It is entirely possible to want a radical reduction in immigration and a far more robust approach to integration, and still totally reject the attempt to turn Britishness into a DNA test.
If you're born and brought up in England and view it as home, what are you other than English? Denying people their Englishness or their Britishness because of the colour of their skin is a recipe for alienation and a two-tier society. How are children who hear this meant to feel?
Sport can play a small but significant role here. Cricket is played by nearly every major ethnic group in this country. Ask what my largely white rural constituents in the Dales and the British-Asian kids in Bradford have in common, and the answer is cricket. If cricket can produce England teams in which every kid can see themselves, the impact reaches far beyond the boundary.
As I write in @thetimes today, we must all be on the same side, cheering for the same team.
We cannot allow race to be reintroduced into our politics. We cannot allow Briton to be set against Briton.
Well it looks like Allister Heath and the Telegraph have got what they wanted. A Restore campaigner is now in hospital. The labelling of anyone as a Nazi or Fascist is not an empirical exercise in 99% of cases. Instead, the label is now target-designation applied to those whom the liberal-left believes are legitimate targets for violence and stochastic terrorism.
Oh, and I expect the "full force of the law" to be applied to SUTR here, .@ShabanaMahmood.
xitter.cf/RupertLowe10/status/21…
The only thing PISA 2026 is a measurement of is the effect of COVID-era education policy (which in most countries was insufficient and shambolic). A majority of test-takers here had their KS2 exams cancelled; so PISA and GCSEs are their first proper assessments in god knows how long. These factors also explain the GCSE failure rate spike of the last year or two.
Every three years the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, releases the results of international school tests sat by 15-year-olds all across the world. Anyone who cares about the young of today should be alarmed at this year’s scores bit.ly/4zXPj6g
UK 10-year Bond Yield (Friday Close): 5.135%
UK 10-year Bond Yield (Now): ~5.34%
If this group of clowns were a corporate board, I would triple-leverage short the shit out of their stock.
