England

Test your knowledge of English county towns.

Some poor bugger did a great job decorating his car with a very professional looking England paint-job, only for the England team to replay his faith with abject failure.

So now he's backing Ghana.

Me to as it happens. Well, Ghana and Germany.

Today the Daily Mail and Sun both reveal that Wayne Rooney booked a holiday to Barbados two days before England were knocked out of the World Cup by Germany.

I'm prepared to give Rooney the benefit of the doubt (after all he can afford the cancellation fee) but the timing of this holiday doesn't demonstrate much ambition or belief on his part, and many fans will begrudge him the holiday at his £5M Barbados mansion that is beyond most of our wildest dreams.

I am reminded of the quote from BBC Radio 5 Live's Alan Green that I published a couple of days ago:

"I hope the players are embarrassed and slink away in misery. And in economy class. But I fear they'll just jet off to Barbados, and it will all be a vague memory to them in a few weeks - unless the English public remind them. They should be booed onto the pitch at the friendly against Hungary in August."

Rooney's lack of tact is nothing compared to what the Sun and Mail are reporting that Ashley Cole has done. For this Ashley Cole should never again don an England shirt.

Ashley Cole launched a foul-mouthed rant about England and its 'people' days before flying out to the World Cup to play football for his country.

The message - which read 'I hate England and the f***ing people - was sent to friends from the Chelsea defender's Blackberry shortly before he boarded a flight to England's pre-World Cup training camp in Austria.

The 29-year-old posted it as his status message - alongside a picture of him sunbathing topless - allowing all those designated as his friends to see it.

Now I accept that the Sun and Mail aren't always the most reputable of journals, but if this is true then - as a Chelsea supporter - I don't even want this maggot of a man in a Chelsea shirt bearing one lion, let alone an England shirt bearing three.

Writing in the Guardian, Gary Younge makes a similar point to the one I made yesterday:

For, when England's national team ceases to exist as a viable entity – as it did at the weekend – the nation and, to some extent, its national identity goes with it. Most of the flags that have been brandished these last few weeks will now disappear. When the final whistle blew in Bloemfontein, the ref called time on a 90-minute nation. The flag of St George that was flying over Downing Street on Sunday was replaced by a union flag on Monday morning.

This is what I wrote:

It's not football that our woeful team have deprived us of, many of us will continue to watch and enjoy the World Cup out of a love of football; nor have they deprived very many of us of the prospect of being world champions, for very few of us ever entertained that prospect. No, what our England team have denied us is the opportunity to revel in a national celebration (Downing Street has already replaced the Cross of St George with the Union flag, and as I type England flags across the length and breadth of England are being packed away until next time). Rugby Union and Cricket have been known to unite the nation in patriotic outbursts of Englishry, but it is the unrivalled popularity of football that makes it so important for the movement towards a popular English nationalism. Our team's abject failure is a political set-back for England.

Sadly, ridiculously, pathetically even, I do feel that our team's exit from the World Cup has deprived us - we English - of something more than football. It has deprived us of national camaraderie and the chance to 'wave your flag' without prejudice. It's really only during the World Cup or St George's Day that it's acceptable to fly the Cross of St George, do so at any other time and so-called progressives will judge you to be a racist or, worse, a chav.

So the flags will be squirreled away into the cupboard under the stairs and the Guardian's writers will return to writing articles about the need to reclaim the flag of England from the far-right and, in equal measure, to writing judgemental articles about the motives or class of those that do fly the flag outside the socially accepted dates for doing so. Back to square one. A decent England performance might have moved the nation beyond this apparently intractable cultural stalemate, but alas it was not to be and CEP calls to keep the flags flying will fall on deaf ears or will be ignored by a political class who really would much prefer that England flags were in the cupboard under the stairs.

When I heard that the FA had amended Fabio Capello's contract to commit him to England until Euro 2012, I had a premonition that I would be sat here now typing the word 'why?'

The England team's World Cup performances under Capello has brought shame to the nation. I can't soft-soap it, they are a national embarrassment and an international laughing stock. There are no positives that we can take from South Africa 2010. We played poorly in every game, and yet persisted with the same boring and unpopular system; not one of our supposedly world-class players shone and set the World Cup alight; and the team failed in what should be their primary purpose, to entertain the watching public and make us proud.

When Capello substituted Defoe for Emile Heskey , you could almost feel the whole of England let out a collective national groan. What the fucketty-fuck was Capello doing; was the Italian a fifth columnist? Heskey cannot even get a game for Aston Villa and in my opinion there's no way that he should even be in the England squad, let alone selected ahead of Villa's far more youthful and exciting Gabriel Agbonlahor and Ashley Young. And why, when Heskey has scored 7 goals in 62 England games and Peter Crouch has scored 21 goals in 40 games, was he who could not score in a whore-house given the nod ahead of England's lanky goal-scoring machine? It seemed obvious to me that Wayne Rooney was out of sorts, and by half-time I was screaming for him to be taken off and replaced by Crouch (Defoe and Crouch being a more proven striking partnership). I appreciate that it's a big call for a manager to bring off a player of Rooney's calibre and iconic status, even if he is under performing (in which case why not put Crouch on in place of Defoe and drop Rooney back into the hole alongside Gerrard, with Barry, Lampard and Milner across the middle?), but that is the type of big decision that Capello is paid £5M a year to take, and didn't.

Our other substitutes were equally uninspiring. Joe Cole is an inventive if erratic little player but he's coming back from injury and hasn't been playing well for Chelsea. He should not have traveled to South Africa. Sean Wright-Phillips was brought on at 87 minutes, presumably to inject the pace that England lacked after the substituting of Defoe and the exclusion of Walcott, Young and Agbonlahor, but it was too late to make any difference. At the end of the day - to use the time-honoured footballing idiom - all the Wright-Phillips, Walcotts, Agbonlahors, Youngs and Crouches under the sun probably would not have helped England. We lost the game in the centre of midfield, which was overstretched by the inability of a striking partnership that could not hold the ball (throughout the campaign the ball just seemed to bounce off Rooney), and through the inept pairing of Terry with Upson in the centre of defence. To give them their dues both Upson and Terry gave 100% - it was Upson who rose like a salmon to head the goal that temporarily galvanised the England team - but it is a pairing that did not work and was not given any protection by a disjointed England midfield, and that is a failure of management.

I didn't expect us to win the World Cup, I didn't even expect us to get to the semi-finals. However, I did expect us to play with the passion that every England fan expects from their team in order that we could give ourselves the best possible chance of progressing as far as possible in the competition. Some of the missing passion was evident in the last two games but it was a passion rendered worthless by incoherent tactics and, seemingly, a complete absence of footballing intelligence.

When we failed to top the weakest group, with a performance against Algeria that was the most dismal competitive match that I have ever watched an England team play, we ensured that our route to the semi-final would be as difficult as possible: Germany and Argentina instead of Ghana and Uruguay. Various players and ex-players popped up on our TV screens to say that [at the end of the day] "in order to win the World Cup you have to beat the World's best teams", so it really didn't matter that we had come second. These players and pundits clearly do not understand what the World Cup means to the watching public. We want England to progress as far as possible, we don't want to go out in the last sixteen on the basis that we have to go out sooner or later so it may as well be sooner. We want to participate in the greatest sporting festival on the planet for as long as possible for the pure entertainment of being a part of it, to give our team the chance to lift us and to revel in the joy of flying our politically incorrect flag and celebrating our Englishness. Because for the English each England matchday during the World Cup is an English national day (we alone amongst the competing nations have no public holiday on our national day), an opportunity for a collective, national, celebration of Englishness. It is this nationalistic aspect to England's participation in the World Cup, rather than a hatred of football, that leads Julie Birchill to pray for our elimination and Bruce Anderson to muse upon the end of the Union.

It's not football that our woeful team have deprived us of, many of us will continue to watch and enjoy the World Cup out of a love of football; nor have they deprived very many of us of the prospect of being world champions, for very few of us ever entertained that prospect. No, what our England team have denied us is the opportunity to revel in a national celebration (Downing Street has already replaced the Cross of St George with the Union flag, and as I type England flags across the length and breadth of England are being packed away until next time). Rugby Union and Cricket have been known to unite the nation in patriotic outbursts of Englishry, but it is the unrivalled popularity of football that makes it so important for the movement towards a popular English nationalism. Our team's abject failure is a political set-back for England.

It's impossible for me to articulate the anger I felt when I heard Fabio Capello offer the opinion that "we played well" but I'm sure that millions like me will have felt their blood boil. If he truely believes that we played well, then Capello must be the only man on the planet who does. He has to go because England deserves better, and longer, at the World Cup.

If he doesn't go then, as BBC Radio 5 Live's Alan Green suggests, England should be booed onto the pitch the next time they play at Wembley:

"I hope the players are embarrassed and slink away in misery. And in economy class. But I fear they'll just jet off to Barbados, and it will all be a vague memory to them in a few weeks - unless the English public remind them. They should be booed onto the pitch at the friendly against Hungary in August."

Recommended Further Reading: Alfie, two WAGS and Fabio..... (Waking Hereward)

Raise the Flag is an England fans' initiative dreamt up and organised by Mark Perryman and Hugh Tisdale, co-founders of Philosophy Football supported and funded by the Football Association.

In October '97 Mark was at the fateful 0-0 draw in Rome which secured England's automatic qualification for France '98. As kick off approached, missiles thrown at the England end, with the Italian riot police running amok, the home fans created a huge Italian flag with thousands holding up red, white and green cards. This gave Mark an idea...

With Hugh providing the design template the pair approached the FA who despite initial misgivings backed the proposal wholeheartedly. The first 'Raise the Flag' (as it became known) was at England vs Saudi Arabia, June 1998 on t he eve of France '98. We've done 'Raise the Flag' at every England game since and it has become a new England tradition.

The pictures here are of the latest, and biggest, Raise the Flag. A t-shirt on every one of Wembley's 90,000 seats to create two huge St George Cross's, lasting not just the 90 seconds of 'God Save the Queen' but the entire 90 minutes of the game.

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.
Photography by Simon Green

England Icon (away) T-shirt , as worn by the team of helpers available from Philosophy Football.

In 1949 William Haley wrote the following:

England is sick; sick of a wasting fever; with deep political roots. Nothing can be done sraightforwardly; committees confer endlessly; the individual who wants to do anything is swamped in a sea of formalities, forms and other papers. The press is trivial, mean-spirited; Parliament is just a lot of Party hacks; government endlessly consults the Trades Union Congress before it makes up its mind.

How depressing that the only change in sixty years is a drift from trades unions to focus groups.

The Edmonton Journal carries an interesting account of the England victory as it was enjoyed by drinkers at my old watering-hole, Elephant and Castle on Whyte.

Typically though the Canucks just don't get it.

On this day the people rejoicing were not Brits, they were English. You can bet your bottom loonie that that the majority of Scots would have been honouring the Auld Alliance and supporting France. And as for the Welsh, well, they would rather die than see England win the World Cup.

Peter Preston, writing at Comment is Free, sums up:

So it came to pass that, yet again, the standard, slightly self-serving lecture on Britishness was duly shredded and scattered all over a foreign field (called the Stade de France). "This is a proud day for the country," said our sort-of elected leader: but he could only clamber aboard such a patriotic podium because Scotland had fallen off it already. And, in truth, there was no way of disguising what had actually happened. Not a Welsh moment or a Scottish moment, but an English moment that - in the winding way of these islands - had somehow morphed into another National Moment.

There he goes again with the 'the country' routine.

	Fall in the North Saskatchewan, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
	Autumn in the Otter Valley, Budleigh Salterton, Devon, England

Same week different continents. Conclusion: Colder in Canada and much more autumnal.

Happy Canadian Thanksgiving.

Over the past few years it has become fashionable to describe England as a 'mongrel nation'. I don't know when, or by whom, the phrase was coined but it seems to have been popularised by Eddie Izzard. There are many English people that find the word 'Mongrel' objectionable and offensive when used to describe England. Certainly it is something that tends to stir strong emotions and opinions, which is why I will be interested to hear your comments on this article sent to me by an anonymous author.

The definition of mongrel in my dictionary goes thus –

Mongrel – n. animal (esp. dog) of mixed breed. Adj. Of mixed origin or character

To me this definition implies an admixture where no particular trait or feature prevails, and a multiplicity of elements and forces, many of them unknown, has been at work. It’s opposite is often held to be ‘pure’. This article is emphatically not to be read as a claim that the English are a ‘pure race’. All I intend to do is ask (and, I hope, answer) two questions – “Just how ‘mongrel’ are the English?” and “Why is the term applied so frequently to the English?”

Few people in the modern world would ever make a claim that their nation is somehow racially ‘pure’. And yet by the same token few would be willing to dispense with their historical identity. The use of the word mongrel in relation to an entire nation of people implies that their characteristics are not only not fixed, but are easily mutable, and have been frequently changed over time. In recent years the word has often applied to the English by commentators and not a few English people themsleves in a way which would have been uncommon just a few decades ago. The implication is that the English are not an ‘historical’ people, and do not have characteristics of their own but have an identity that is simply an amalgam of elements taken from the identities of other people. In the context of the doctrine of multiculturalism, these elements are provided by the supposed ‘waves’ of immigration to which England has been subject throughout her history. The English themselves certainly began as migrants, originally moving to late Roman Britain in dribs and drabs to be employed in the defence of this far-flung outpost of the empire, but as that empire collapsed and as its inheritors became increasingly fractious the peoples of Southern Denmark, Northern Germany and the Frisian Islands began to move in increasing numbers across the North Sea, drawn by employment as mercenaries and the hope of acquiring land. These peoples, though known as Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians were essentially the same – Germanic people who shared the same language, customs and religion. Tribal identities were not strong amongst the early English and by the time of the Venerable Bede (b. 672 or 3, died 735) the idea of an English people was well established, and strengthened over the ensuing centuries. This identity was firmly in the mind of King Alfred when he signed a treaty of peace with the leader of the Danish invaders Guthrum –

“This is the peace that King Alfred and King Guthrum, and the witan of all the English nation, and all the people that are in East Anglia, have all ordained and with oaths confirmed...”

The Danes originated from the same areas of North-West Europe as the Angles, Saxons and Jutes (both the lands of the Angles and the Jutes are wholly or in part contiguous with the territory of Denmark), and began to settle in England in the 870s. Their similarity to the English was such that in the BBC documentary programme Blood of the Vikings it was so difficult for researchers to distinguish the genetic characteristics of Anglo-Saxons from Danes that it was decided to treat them as being the same. Perhaps more importantly, however, is the cultural similarity between these near cousins; they spoke a language so similar that an Englishman and a Dane could probably conduct business without the aid of an interpreter, and the area settled by the Danes seems to be free of those marks of inter-ethnic conflict we nowadays associate with ‘ethnic cleansing’. Modern place-names in the area of the Danelaw are often an amalgam of English and Danish elements, suggesting that the boundaries between the two peoples were so flimsy that they quickly lost their meaning. Certainly they lost their meaning politically when in 937 King Aethelstan defeated a coalition of anti-English forces (including some Danes from within England) at Brunanburgh and united the various English states into the single nation-state of England.

By 1066 the Normans could see few distinctions amongst the English as they cast a covetous gaze over an England politically unified and culturally homogenous, and prepared for what would later be billed as the first great ‘wave’ of immigration in English history. But in the Normans we again are not really dealing with a distinctive group of people, at least not in racial terms. Many Saxons were settled in what would become Normandy in the later stages of the Roman Empire for the very same reason that they were settled in Britain – as hired mercenaries to protect the coast from raiders. These people, amongst others, were still in Normandy when the ‘Northmen’ settled the area and gave it its name. The Normans were themselves Danes, and although they took on the language and many of the customs and social traits of their French neighbours, they also retained many of the traits of their ancestors.

When William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy, landed in Kent he brought with him at the most 8,400 men, 3,900 of who were Bretons and Flemish. The Bretons and the Flemish would likely have returned home after the successful conquest of England, as indeed would many of the Normans themselves who had families, land and employment in Normandy and beyond. Other Normans would certainly have come over to England in the wake of the Conqueror, but altogether the Normans were unlikely to have formed a large group within England, which at the time of the invasion had a population estimated at 1.1 million. However, the Normans were to have an effect on the political and social structure disproportionate to their numbers for the simple reason that they held all the reins of power. They formed a new elite, choosing to remove the native English aristocracy, but penetrated little into the great mass of Anglo-Saxons who surrounded them. In time they came to adopt the tongue of those they ruled, as well as their system of legal customs (which became known as the common law) and the system of administrative boundaries, renaming them counties instead of shires.

1066 and its aftermath saw the last significant immigration into England until the mass immigration of the 1950s onwards. It is significant largely because of its political and social impact rather than because of any great change in the composition or culture of the English. In the 17th Century a small number of Huguenots (possibly 50,000) entered England, which then had a population of about 4 million. Many Huguenots did not stay in England but moved on to her North American colonies, a pattern of movement that would be repeated later in England’s history. Flemish weavers and Dutch millers migrated to England in small numbers, but quickly disappeared into the enveloping English milieu that surrounded them, the only evidence that they were ever really here is the result only of careful research by local historians.

In the 19th century the largest migrations into England since the Danelaw took place. This was the movement of Irish to escape the potato famine and look for work in England’s burgeoning industries. It is thought that upwards of 750,000 Irish came to England, whose population at that time numbered about 30 million. A smaller number of east European Jews (about 120,000) also came to England at around the same time.

Danes, Normans, Huguenots, Irish and Jews all emerged from Europe, bringing with them values, and even customs, they shared with the native English. They found a strong, vibrant English culture which, in the space of only two or three generations, consumed them with hardly a nod at their existance. The historical ‘waves’ of immigration, then, were spread over a period of 800 years, and taking the best estimates of total numbers of immigrants, it is unlikely that the annual immigration into England throughout that period amounted to more than a fraction of a percent of the total population. Is it any surprise then that the immigrants rapidly vanished, through anglicisation and marriage, and that there is little that is tangible left beyond a few material monuments, such as Huguenot churches in London to mark their passage into Englishness? Ultimately the course of the English nation was hardly deflected by their presence.

Modern research, including DNA testing shows that the population of England is not that different from what it was in 1066. It is still clearly English – largely genetically, and almost completely culturally. So why, for the English, the sobriquet ‘mongrel’?

The answer is simply the unprecendented immigration into England that has occurred since the Second World War - truly a ‘wave’. Such high levels of migration into a country inevitably leads the native peoples to question whether or not they can continue to have a discrete existence as an homogenous people tied to a homeland. The English are now presented with a situation that is not in their national collective experience – a large, indigestible mass of people from very different cultures living amongst them. The English might respond to this by insisting that they are an ancient people, tied by ancient bonds not only to each other but to the land in which they live. Such a response would immediately place the future of mass immigration, and the doctrine of multiculturalism it has created, in jeopardy. In order to defuse any assertion that an ancient culture and national identity is being undermined it is important to show that that identity doesn’t really exist, or at least that it is easily shaped from the borrowings and leavings of other peoples’ cultures. If everything is in flux, is nothing but mix-‘n’-match, then what does it matter if the current manifestation of a common identity is abandoned for something new? In order to justify waves of immigration today it must be shown that there always have been ‘waves’ of immigration in the past, and that these have only been beneficial, because are we not a proud and accomplished people today?

But what if the ‘waves’ of immigration never happened? What if England’s achievements came about, not because of diversity, but because of her cultural homogeneity…?