I went to see my friend Francesca Beard doing an evening of poetry about identity at the Battersea Arts Centre. It's called "Chinese Whispers" and it's on for a couple more nights and it's funny and heartwarming and Francesca is beautiful and will one day be my bride (when I have murdered her boyfriend. Damn, I'm using up my allowance on Streeting. Why didn't I think it through?), so pop along and see it if you like.
She is half Malaysian and half English and she asked the audience to put up our hands if we were born in this country, then to keep our hands up if both our parents were born in this country, then to keep our hands up if all our grandparents were born in this country. I was pretty sure they were up to this point, though I know that there is Welsh and Irish blood in me somewhere (Edwards and Hannan on my mother's side), but I think all of my parents' parents were born in England. Most people in the audience didn't have entirely British grandparents. Of course they didn't. This is a country of immigrants. That's what is great about it.
Francesca did a great poem (and I'm sure a true story) about a bloke pushing in in a queue and being told to get back in place by an Asian, who was then told by him to get back to her own country. The stupid fool is then rounded on by everyone else in the queue, all of whom have ostensibly "come" from somewhere else; Jamaicans, Indians, Australians.
My personal answer to this insult would be that if we send people back where they came from then we should follow it through. Starting with the people who say it. We should look down their family tree and if we find that they have, say, a French grandfather, we should cut off a quarter of that person and send it to France. A Polish great grandad and an Eskimo great grandma, an eighth of them to Poland and an eighth of them to Eskimovia.
I don't know how far it is reasonable to go back in the family. But at least twenty or thirty generations must be required to confirm oneself as completely English and thus worthy of living here by the "live where you come from" rule. Sure many of us might only lose a fingertip or an ear, but if you believe in the superiority of being English then it's important to get rid of any part of you that doesn't fit in. I think you'd find that most people would suddenly identify themselves as British to prevent the loss of a limb or two (and that would include the Scottish and Welsh nationalists). Maybe we'd suddenly have more people suddenly clamouring to claim they were European. Maybe that might save quite a few of us from being partially repatriated.
Though I wonder.
Go back 10 generations and there's over 1000 people who went into creating you. Would you be confident that all of them were born in Europe? I certainly wouldn't.
A barber once told me that I had hair that grew like an Asian's. Maybe that's just a coincidence, but it suggests to me that there's some fairly strong Asian prescence in my blood-line. And I for one am not prepared to send my hair back to Asia. I don't think Asia would want it, even though it is officially theirs under the "go where you came from" system.
If anyone had manged to remain purely English for the last twenty generations then their ancestors can't have got out much. In fact it could only have been done with an exceptionally large degree of inbreeding. Something that I'm not sure would be worth mouthing off about to such a degree.
