To think that all Brits are a bit muxed ip?

[PrincessFiorimonde]

What is a 'Brit'? Can you find one who's not a originally a Celt (=probably north European), an Anglo-Saxon (=German/Danish), or a Viking (=Scandinavian), plus or minus Norman (=French by way of Scandinavia), with maybe a touch of Huguenot (=French/Dutch/Belgian) or a bit of Irish (they did move around a lot)?

And that's even before we've done the Roman heritage bit (=Italian, plus all kinds of people embraced by the Roman empire, including eastern Europeans and north Africans).

Meanwhile, with the opening up of empires since at least the 1600s, people from Asia, Africa, the Americas and even latterly Australasia have also settled in Britain.

Going back a bit further, it's widely accepted that we (=all humans) originally
came out of Africa. So we Brits have that in our genes too.

That being so, why are some people in Britain so unwelcoming to 'foreigners'? We all have a bit of 'foreign' in us. And in fact it's pretty well impossible to say which bits of our DNA came from where.

I remember a program where they did heritage tests on people and told them what nationalities their ancestors were. There were bnp people etc on it who insisted they were British/English and they weren't. Very satisfying to watch.

As far as I'm concerned I'm 100% British because it says just that on my passport, It doesn't matter about my DNA to me.

I'm never unwelcoming to any individual who moves to this Country, lots of my fellow Brits would look at me and assume I'm all for Immigration but, I'm not.

I believe the mass Immigration in recent years has had a destabilising effect on the labour market, allowing for downward pressure to be maintained on wages and standards in employment, it saddens me to see so many unemployed young people

Waiting tobe That was a great programme! Remember there was a bloke who desperately wanted to be Viking but he turned out to be French ?!

why are some people in Britain so unwelcoming to 'foreigners'?

Probably the same reason some people in are so unwelcoming to foreigners. Because they are twats. It has fuck all to do with being "British"

yes, Soup - I mean, take Australia - 222 years of white people here and they think they own the place! Get really angry with the "boat people" and immigrants coming in and "taking our jobs" (although to be fair, what's going on just now in the mines in WA is a bit off), forgetting that many of them are fairly recent immigrants themselves.

DH is particularly noisome over this issue - and yet his father was an immigrant (from Ireland). Annoys me rigid especially as I am a very recent immigrant! But apparently that "doesn't count" because I am white and can speak the lingo.
Racism by any other name...

wasn't that programme called 'mongrel nation'(??) hosted by eddie izzard?

i remember watching it, very interesting stuff.

I'd LOVE to know my DNA! As far as I know, most of my family, that I am aware of, are all from Lancashire apart from my maternal Grandfather and his family who were from Liverpool. I'd be really excited to think that I had heritage from another country!

I don't personally know anyone who is unwelcoming to foreigners. We are an incredibly tolerant nation actually, hence the wildly and wonderfully cultural 'mux ip' in our cities.

Where there is hostility to foreigners IMO it usually has more to do with culture than genetic heritage. Large-scale movements of one culture into another often provokes a fear of being culturally 'taken over': when lots of Brits were buying houses in France the locals resented the incomers. The same happens when a rural area becomes suddenly fashionable and lots of city people move in.

It is far less about race than it is about culture.

YABU... It's geography. If you're born in a British town or have opted to become a British citizen after being born elsewhere, you're British. Almost every civilisation today has complex historical roots due to various migrations. Xenophobia is common to many cultures.

Agree with proudandscary, ohthehugejubilee, aker and others.

On the whole British people have been tolerant of incomers. The trouble comes when everyone is in competition for jobs and resources such as education, housing, healthcare etc like now. Even then most people resort to the British tradition of grumbling instead of organising pogroms.

Incidentally, where were you born and where do you live now? Have you not noticed that in comparison to some other nations Britain comes way down the list for shocking hostility to incomers?

I think all this British is a bit mixed up/mongrel race etc really bizarre. All cultures are multicultural. There isn't a 'pure' culture somewhere else. We are no more mixed up than anybody else.

The whole idea that 'Norman' DNA is somehow pure and different to 'Viking' DNA... Where do you think the Normans came from? Who do you think invaded them?

The vast majority of people who live in the UK are carrying the DNA of the hunter gatherers who lived in Britain in the Mesolithic. There has not been vast genetic change just because some other groups have settled here. Yes, Celtic culture came over from the continent but that doesn't mean that vast numbers of Celts actually moved to Britain. It is a bit like Chicken Tikka Masala being Britain's favourite dish. It doesn't actually mean we all have Indian DNA just because we like something from Indian culture.

If you live in East Anglia then you do have a higher chance of having some kind of Anglo Saxon/Viking DNA, but even there, most people are still carrying that mesolithic DNA brought here by people as the Ice Age ended.

I was born in Britain (London) and have always lived here (currently in south coast England). I'm sure that many other countries also express intolerance about 'incomers'. But as I've not lived in any other country except for the UK, this is not something I have experienced first hand.

I wrote the OP because I was a bit fed up after someone going on to me yesterday about 'foreigners'. My paternal ancestry is English/Irish and I have a white face. However, my maternal ancestry is Asian/south European, and many members of my family (including my brother) have a darker complexion than I do and so experience a rather more, ermm, varied reaction from people.

I'd love think that everyone here is on an equal footing.

Vashti, no of course I don't think there is a difference between 'Normans' and 'Vikings' (especially as the 'Normans' were ethnically originally 'Vikings'). That was rather the point of my OP, but perhaps I didn't express it well enough.

Well everyone here should be on an equal footing in terms of racism being wrong, and that to be culturally English should have absolutely nothing to do with how long your ancestors have lived here and so on.

But I don't see how bringing DNA helps that. It is the case the most people in the UK have ancestry connected to the Island of thousands of years. But so what? They're not going to individually go and have DNA tests to show that, and it is culture now that matters. I doubt many of us are going to go out and spear a deer this afternoon.

In terms of ancestry that people know of from documents, most people are descended from the poor so will not have documents beyond a few hundred years at best. So can't trace back their named ancestors anyway, unless they are William Windsor of course...

Princess, yes sorry, I was being a bit irritated by the whole idea (which is a common one); I didn't mean to be so harsh on your whole OP!

I think you'd be hard pressed to find a country that doesn't express intolerance about incomers tbh.
These things do tend to be shown up when times are harder, so the recession may have made people feel more comfortable about airing their unpleasant views, as they feel they can justify them with the economic situation.

It always amazes me to hear about people in relatively 'new' countries such as Australia/USA complaining about immigration when by and large they're all fairly recent immigrants themselves, but it's no less daft than the Europeans - we all travelled here at some point! I appear to be 100% British, with nothing interesting in the last few hundred years of the family tree, but who knows? My gran did always claim we had ancestors off the wrecked Spanish armada! naughty sailors seducing the local nurses apparently :)

So yeah, what Soup said.

My DH was surprised to learn that he had a German gt gt grandfather. We're in Suffolk and prior to that he'd always assumed he was 'just' English. His cousin had traced their grandma's family back to the 1480s and they all lived within 15 miles of where we live now. (His lot don't move far!)

My lot are all a proper mix but mostly mums family have Indian, English, Irish.

I too get annoyed when idiots go on about foreigners, but I assume thats not just a British thing though.

Even if were the case that we were a 'mongrel race' it would be rather optimistic to think that this would make us all less racist. People use the idea that we have been invaded at various times to make out that we carry the DNA of Europe's best warriors which they then use to justify our 'natural' skills in running empires, carrying out football hooliganism and angrily telling other, less warrior filled people what to do.

So whatever story you want to tell about the past, people will still find some way of justifying racism with it.

I agree that not everyone in Britain is an equal footing in many terms, not just skin colour. That is part of the current problem with hostility to foreigners wrt competition for resources.

Presumably, like me, if anyone expresses a racist or ignorant comment you pull them up on it unless it is one of the thankfully rare occasions where it would be physically dangerous to do so rather than just awkward or unpleasant.

But you don't have to have lived in other countries to notice that in some of them racial and cultural intolerance and violence are far bigger problems than in Britain.

Euro 2012 in Ukraine and Poland should be interesting for all the wrong reasons.