Are these people really British?

Telescopic Philanthropy is brilliant and exactly right. Along with the phrase 'luxury beliefs', which is very apt.

The UK has some unusual migration patterns which don't always include neighbours because we were a naval country.

We didn't leave the UK to our neighbours did we?

The assumption this was a purely one way traffic is mightly naive. More unusual perhaps but definitely not the same as other countries.

I think a good historian could take this quote to pieces.

Just a couple of problems:
In 1688, Britain did not exist.
How can anyone say that not a word of English could be heard in London?

I know what you mean about hostility to foreigners, but the quote reads to me like journalistic hype concealed as academic history.

Viking isn't an ethnicity, despite what we've been told for ever and a day. It was a trade, like a pirate.

I am descended from these French immigrants in fact but have always considered myself British.

White English isn't at all identifiable. Arguable it's less identifiable than white British because it requires a distinct difference from white Welsh and white Scottish. I know people like to talk about "the Celtic nations" as opposed to the Anglo-Saxon English, and it's true that Scottish DNA tends to contain more viking and Celtic traces proportionally than southern English DNA. But actually there's no clear way of drawing a distinction. The vikings and Celts for instance went all over the place in the past. And more recently there's been constant movement backwards and forwards.

By your argument, I'm mixed race because I'm part Scottish and part English, let alone the people with Huguenot descent.

But the Scottish and English and Welsh are very clearly distinct in other ways. A Scot with South-Asian heritage is different to an Englishman with South-Asoan heritage. So there is obviously something else going on other than very reductive conversations about race.

You are right op, no one liked it back then and no one likes it now.

Yeah, Britain has always had immigration but not in such huge numbers over such a short period of time as in recent years. That’s the difference.

"I should think it’s extremely rare that someone is 100 percent British or English."

I'm not so sure that I would agree with you. Even taking your example of the Huguenots, I believe that around 50,000 arrived over the course of 30 years.

Back then the population of England & Wales was around 6 million. So that is less than 1% of the population coming to the country over the course of 30 years. They settled in a relatively limited geographical area.

I would suggest that this 1% of the population would likely not have any big influence at all.

Having an interest in genealogy I have traced a number of families back to the late 1700s and some even earlier than that to the late 1600s. What I can say is that everybody was born in this country.

Outside of major port cities (such as Liverpool or London) then I would suggest that it was very rare indeed for it not to be the case that "someone is 100 percent British or English."

There is supported housing for people of huguenot ancestry which still exists today only for people of huguenot ancestry.

Believe it or not.

Same and this stems back to when I worked at KCC in the 90's.

You want someone to say out loud that French culture is more compatible with British culture than, say, Somali culture?

Okay.

French culture is more compatible with British culture than Somali culture.

I'm someone who is genetically mixed, more recently than 1688, from people from several different continents. I find it quite sweet when people start trying to say they're also mixed because their ancestors were Anglos AND Saxons.

Gut check test: on the basis of this mixed ancestry everyone is falling themselves over to claim because they had a few Huguenot lines, would you join a support group or apply for a special internship that was targeted at minority races?

Or would you recognise that "white English" (or whichever country) is actually a stable and identifiable ethnic group?

It's socially acceptable and you get kudos to say we're all immigrants in the first case, but not in the second. Interesting.

There's a big Ukrainian population in Manchester which dates back well before 1900.

Also see various Italian settlers to the UK.

I'm sure there are many such communities.

Well we have to play little guessing games as to what people's motives are for starting threads.

I'll leave you all to play happy families whilst I go to work.

We're all a mix. So far as I know, I'm mostly Saxon, which is German invaders. I'm also a bit French. To be honest, I could be just about anything. So are most of us. I'm proud of what I am and someone with a completely different heritage has every right to be proud of what THEY are. Celebrate yourself!

"It's amazing how much leftist discourse is just them pretending not to understand things, thus making discourse impossible."

I think I could post this on 99% of Mumsnet posts on immigration!

The French are our neighbours. Immigration hundreds of years ago was from neighbouring countries. There were no cheap international flights. There were no people smugglers advertising globally on TikTok. It’s not the same and you know it.

I think the figure I saw researching it is something like 20% of the UK population have some sort of Huguenot ancestry. I forget the exact figure but it's high.

It doesn't actually show up on her ancestry DNA profile as being of french ancestry.

The way DNA tests work means this will be the case for many. Indeed the way Ancestry profiles now is the migration will show up as distinctly British anyway because there's been so many generations since then - the sheer number of Huguenots mixing with older British ancestral patterns over years makes identifiable as different to french ancestral patterns.

Ancestry seems to reliability only show up stuff as far back as the 1800s and even then because of the way it works, many people who had immigrant ancestry since then may not have it show up in their DNA anyway because theyve simply not inherited that portion of DNA.

So taking a DNA test wouldn't show someone up as having no immigration in their background. You'd still need to do a paper trace. And that's only really reliable as far back as the 1860s in many cases (the UK started official compulsory birth, marriage and death certs before most places and this was later in Ireland/Northern Ireland and Scotland than England and Wales).

The Independence of Ireland also complicates matters. My Irish Ancestry is technically British as it's before the first world war...