We Are The English

“Bravery of the devil-may-care variety is not peculiar to the English. Where we differ from other peoples is in our natural capacity for laughing at ourselves. The patriotic employer who embellished the firm’s air-raid shelter with a placard saying “God Save The King – and us” was expressing a typically English attitude to life.

And this is an attitude that in the days to come will stand us in good stead. Whatever other noises will assail our ears, it is safe to predict that the sound of English laughter will not cease to echo around the world”

“It would be wrong to underestimate the enemy… The English national character has a flaw of putting tradition above all, retaining for as long as possible what might have been right some decades before. But it is possible that in an emergency the British would be capable of letting everything go and becoming surprisingly modern…The British are capable of a complete transformation when thinking that their country is in imminent danger, and ...they are at their most formidable in that situation”.

“ I never set eyes on him [Nelson], for which I am both sorry and glad, for to be sure I should like to have seen him, but then, all the men in our ship who have seen him are such soft toads, they have done nothing but blast their eyes and cry ever since he was killed. God bless you! Chaps that fought like the devil sit down and cry like a wench”.

“The homogeneity of England, so profound and embracing that counties and the regions make it a hobby to discover their differences and assert their peculiarities; the continuity of England, which has brought this unity and this homogeneity about by the slow alchemy of centuries…From this continuous life of a united people in their island home springs, as from the soil of England, all that is peculiar in the gifts and the achievements of the English nation, its laws, its literature, its freedom, its self-discipline."

"“I find the word British harder and harder to use – we English tend to deride ourselves far too easily because we’ve lost so much confidence, because we lost so much of our own sense of identity, which had been subsumed in this forced Imperial identity which I obviously hate. But we were at the same time, both a brave and a steadfast people, and we shared an aim, a condition, a political aspiration if you like, which was shown immediately in the 1945 General Election, and then one of the greatest governments of British history….I love England, and when I’m abroad I genuinely feel homesick…I’ve always loved my country, but not the flags and drums and trumpets and billowing Union Jacks and busby soldiers and the monarchy and the pomp and circumstance and all that, but the real – something about our people that I come from and therefore respond to”

Taken from his last interview with Melvyn Bragg in 1994 shortly before dying of cancer.

john “Two Jags Prescott” A fat Welsh Politician backing us to the hilt as normal.

“The English are potentially very aggressive, very violent. We have used this propensity to violence to subjugate Ireland, Wales and Scotland. Then we used it in Europe and with our empire, so I think what you have within the UK is three small nations…who’ve been over the centuries under the cosh of the English. Those small nations have inevitably sought expression by a very explicit idea of nationhood. You have this very dominant other nation, England, 10 times bigger than the others, which is self-confident and therefore has not needed to be so explicit about its expression. I think as we move into this new century, people’s sense of Englishness will become more articulated and that’s partly because of the mirror that devolution provides us with and because we are becoming more European at the same”

another one of our beloved leaders once again behind us 100%

“Straw’s claim that the English were an innately aggressive people was not only tactless, as it was profoundly ahistorical, pandering as it did to the myth that the Scots and Welsh had been the victims of an English empire rather than partners in a British one”

"Our history shows England awakes late to defend freedom, but always awakes in the end….Political correctness is strangling the irreverent spirit of scepticism towards pomp, authority and expertise that has created the delightful humour of the English people. "

“Multiculturalism is an authoritarian, anti-human outlook. True political progress requires not recognition but action, not respect but questioning, not the invocation of the Thought Police but the forging of common bonds and collective struggles.”

Taken from his article “Against Multiculturalism” featured in New Humanist magazine

“Braveheart is pure Australian shite…William Wallace was a spy, a thief, a blackmailer – a c**t basically. And people are swallowing it. It’s part of a new Scottish racism, which I loath – this thing that everything horrible is English. It’s conducted by the great unread and the conceited w***ers at the SNP, those dreary little pr**ks in Parliament who rely on bigotry for support”

Scottish Comedian

“Two single figures whom I saw from the carriage window epitomised for me what Churchill really meant to ordinary people: first on the flat roof of a small house a man standing at attention in his RAF uniform, saluting: and then in a field , some hundred yards away from the track, a simple farmer stopping work and standing, head bowed and cap in hand.”

Sir Winston Chuchill’s wartime Private Secretary describing his journey with Churchill’ coffin to his final resting place at Bladon in Oxfordshire

"Show me a true patriot, and I will show you a lover not merely of his own country, but of all mankind. Show me a spurious patriot, a bombastic fire-eater, and I will show you a rascal. Show me a man who loves other countries equally with his own, and I will show you a man entirely deficient in a sense of proportion. But show me a man who respects the rights of all nations, while ready to defend the rights of his own against them all, and I will show you a man who is both a nationalist and an internationalist".

“The Battle of Britain was twenty-three years ago and the world has forgotten it. Those young men, so many of whom I new, flew up into the air and died for us and all we believed….What did they die for? I suppose for them selves and what they believed was England. It was England then – just for a few brave months…The peace which we are enduring is not worth their deaths.

England has become a third rate power, economically and morally. We are vulgarized by American values. America, which didn’t even know war on its own ground, is now dictating our policies and patronizing our values.

We are now beset by the “clever ones”, all the cheap frightened people who can see nothing but defeat and who have no pride, no knowledge of the past, no reverence for our lovely heritage…Perhaps, just perhaps – someone will rise up and say, “That isn’t good enough.” There is still the basic English character to hold on to, But is there? I am old now..I despise the young, who see no quality in our great past and who spit, with phoney left-wing disdain, on all that we, as arace, have contributed to the living world…I say a grateful goodbye to those foolish, gallant young men who made it possible for me to be alive today to write these sentimental words”

“Something stirs deep in the blood of the English. The whole notion [of devolution] stimulates, and offends their atavistic sense of fair play and decency..If there is writing on Hadrian’s Wall it reads that the English should leave Scotland to its own devices.. The new English Nation that must be forged must… be one as free as possible from the meaningless trappings of sentiment. The new English will be first and foremost a mercantile people, whose relations with the world are those primarily of a business partner…The English have every reason to believe that this can be a prosperous and constructive future in which England is a force for good, modernation and sanity, and in which the English state serves first and foremost the interests of the English people.”

““These are not theoretical problems. They are alive and real, a ticking time bomb under the British constitution…The signs of an emerging English consciousness are all around us. Try to ignore this English consciousness or bottle it up and it will turn into a more dangerous English nationalism that can threaten the future of the United Kingdom”

“There was a time when pop music wouldn’t have been able to explain what being English was all about, but that’s changed now. If you draw a line from the Kinks in the sixties, through the Jam and the Smiths, to Blur in the nineties, it would define this thing called Englishness as well as anything."

"Arm yourselves, and be ye men of valour, and be in readiness for the conflict; for it is better for us to perish in battle than to look upon the outrage of our nation and our altar."

Churchill in his first broadcast as Prime Minister to the British people on the BBC - May 19, 1940, London.

"I don’t like the English. One at a time, I don’t mind them. I’ve loved some of them. It’s their collective persona I can’t warm to: the lumpen and louty, coarse, unsubtle, beady-eyed, beefy-bummed herd of England."

"The shire is based on rural England and not any other country in the world. The toponymy of the shire’ is a parody of that of rural England, in much the same sense are its inhabitants: they go together and are meant to. after all the book is English, and by an Englishman."

"I travelled among unknown men, in lands beyond the sea; nor England! did I know till then what love I bore to thee."

"From the towns all inns have been driven; from the villages most….change your hearts or you will lose your inns and you will deserve to have lost them. But when you have lost your inns drown your empty selves for you will have lost the last of England."

"I'm an extremely patriotic person, one of the most patriotic you will ever meet. I live here, the only time i went out of the country and didn't pay tax was when I was on a 10-month tour, so it was a six-week absence for tax reasons. Every other year of my life I've paid my full tax. I've travelled the world and I absolutely know that England is the place that I want to be."

"The real weakness of England lies, not in incomplete armaments or unfortified coasts, not in the poverty that creeps through sunless lanes, or the drunkenness that brawls in loathsome courts, but simply in the fact that her ideals are emotional and not intellectual."

"Yes, England - the country that dare not speak its name. In England we have this dreadful inhibition about talking about ourselves. England is a historic country which has shaped the world we are in. It is arguably the very origins of modernity. That is something we should celebrate, not be ashamed of."

"laws they made in the witan, the laws of flaying and fine - common, loppage and pannage, the theft and the track of kine, statues of tun and of market for the fish and the malt and the meal, the tax on the bramber packhorse and the tax on the hastings keel....behind the feet of the legions and before the normans' ire, rudely but greatly begat they the bones of state and of shire: rudely but deeply they laboured, and their labour stands till now, if we trace on our ancient headlands the twist of their eight-ox plough."

"Attend, all ye who list to hear our noble England's praise; I tell of the thrice-noble deeds she wrought in ancient days."

"Chesterton's "the secret people" was first published in 1907 in a magazine called the Neolith. Its "secret" Englishmen can be imagined as a group of Anglo-Saxon men seated in an unrenovated pub: slow but steadfast, unschooled but instinctively wise. These representatives of native common sense have sat there, silently drinking their undoubtedly real ale while the centuries have unfolded outside and sometimes come crashing in through the door. They have seen the comings and goings of sundry invaders, and gained nothing through a long succession of rulers - from Norman barons to the triumphant puritans of the civil war. Some may have put down their glasses and wandered off to fight with Nelson at Trafalgar ("dying like lions to keep ourselves in chains"). In general, however, these English natives have not responded enthusiastically to those who have tried to rally them to the defence of their own interests: "a few men talked of freedom, while England talked of ale.""

"For England in 991 was the first nation-state. It wasn't a modern state, of course, but it did have representative institutions, it was ordered, it was united and, above all, it was rich."

"Saint George shalt called bee, Saint George of mery England, the sign of victoree."

"St George he was for England, and before he killed the dragon, he drank a pint of English ale, out of English flagon, for though he fast right readily, in hair-shirt or in mail, it isn't safe to give him cakes, unless you give him ale."

“In this country [England] it is thought well to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others. "

“The English never yield, and though driven back and thrown into confusion, they always return to the fight, thirsting for vengeance as long as they have breath for life”

“When he stands like an ox in the furrow with his sullen eyes set on your own, and grumbles 'this is not fair dealing' my son, leave the Saxon alone”

“The trouble with the English is they never see the writing on the wall, until they have their backs to it”

How superbly brave is the Englishman in the presence of the awfulest forms of danger and death; and how abject in the presence of any and all forms of hereditary rank.

“This England never did, nor never shall, lie at the proud foot of a conqueror.”

”White, self-hating liberals and greed-head conservatives who claim to care for the "civil rights" of black and third world people, discard the working class of their own people on the garbage heap of history. When they are finished with their own they shall surely turn on others.Those who care for their own kind first are not practicing "hate" but kindness, which is the very root of the word.”

winston churchill – paris september 1936

“We must recognise that we have a great inheritance in our possession,
which represents the prolonged achievement of the centuries; that there is not one of our simple uncounted rights today for which better men than we are have not died on the scaffold or the battlefield. We have not only a great treasure; we have a great cause. Are we taking every measure within our power to defend that cause?

"Our ancestors took this land. They took it and made it and held it. We do not give up what our ancestors gave us. They came across the sea and they fought here, and they built here and they're buried here. This is our land, mixed with our blood, strengthened with our bone. Ours!"

Essentially English history did not start with the Romans or the Normans. It was the Anglo-Saxons who created the monarchy and culture we still have today….Everything that is wonderful and useful in England, from the language to the constitution, is traceable to them”

'birdie' bowers - who died lying next to robert falcon scott in the antarctic

"I love my country, and trust that I shall not be found wanting when the day comes to act. That dear old country - Iwonder if a fraction of it's inhabitants appreciate it's worth, or does it require a probation of long absences to show one that that little island is the best, the very best place on God's earth".

"We have not journeyed all this way across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies, because we are made of sugar candy."

“The English beer is best in all Europe and it was necessary to drink two or three pots of beer during our parley: for no kind of business is transacted in England without the intervention of pots of beer.”

It is the English practice of all others that is characteristically stupid, in that it leads to unnecessary drinking; for a meeting of friends on the common ground of a public-house is invariably celebrated by their drinking together, and, as a rule, an end cannot be put to the celebration till each man has acquitted himself by paying for ‘drinks round’ - and therefore the larger the party the larger the number of drinks taken, and probably all of them except the first quite unnecessary, either for the quenching of thirst or the celebration of a happy meeting.