SuperCharles 🍊

"If you have to say it, it probably isn't true", @Sargon_of_Akkad wrote, across five paragraphs spent saying it. Englishness is a classic social construct. The Angles, Saxons, Britons, Danes and Normans came here speaking different languages and spent centuries killing one another. In 1002, in England, Æthelred ordered all the Danish men in his kingdom killed; in Oxford, Danish families ran into St Frideswide's church for refuge, and the church went up in flames and had to be rebuilt. Shortly afterwards a Dane, Cnut, took the English throne. In 1069, in the north, William's army ravaged the land from the Humber to the Tees, killing men, women and children and burning the crops. None of these people woke up one morning no longer Danish, Saxon or Briton and suddenly English by blood. They became English the way everyone since has: by living here long enough for the name to stick to them. Treating that as a fixed truth of nature, like the sun, is stupid. "The tribe decides if you belong", he says. And it did. For 70 years the white English majority, the largest group in the country, voted in Labour and Tory governments, and those governments let in immigrants from the Empire and from all over the world, in full view of everyone. I'm pretty sure Benjamin's circus of clowns will answer: but they keep saying there's too much immigration. "Too much immigration" covers everything from no immigrants at all, to fewer, to the same people in different numbers, and election after election the majority picked the parties that kept the door open. The tribe has ruled on Englishness too. In 2025, in England, YouGov surveyed white adults born in the UK. 84% said someone can be English whatever their ethnicity, and only 10% said you have to be white. Add English family heritage on top of being white and the figure drops to 9%. Benjamin's rule is backed by about one white English person in ten. The other nine have already decided who belongs here, and if Benjamin doesn't like it, tough: the tribe he claims to speak for has thrown his rule out. English is an ethnicity and a national identity at once. Anyone born and raised in England who lives the life of its people and shares its culture is English, and can be English and something else at the same time, which is exactly what England was before it even had the name. So how does Benjamin think it happened: on the day "England" came into being, the Britons, the Danes and the Saxons all got together and agreed to give up who they were?