Are these people really British?

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In 1688, foreign strangers were arriving on British shores daily. The locals complained of despoilment of their environment. Londoners complained that French was everywhere, and not a word of English could be heard spoken! The French immigrants were denigrated either for being too poor, thus a drain on rate-paying parishioners, or too prosperous, at the expense of local merchants and business owners.

(Taken from Thou Savage Woman by Blessin Adams, great book!)

That sounds exactly like what I hear the media saying about immigrants now! So when the far right are making sure that Britain is for the British, shall they make sure we all trace our lineage back to the 1600s, and make sure no descendents of those awful French immigrants count as British?

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

Believe it or not.

"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."

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Oh that's interesting, I'm just about to start reading a book about the vikings and looks like I'll learn a lot 😅

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

It's not a direct quote, I paraphrased

The line about not hearing English was about very specific areas

Also, while I'm not a historian, from what I can see, locals took good pains to make sure that incomers knew their place and did not inconvenience the established pecking order.
I'm not sayiing this isright or wrong, just that it was quite different.

Arguably it has a meaning of you are talking about descent. If Scottish pirates had a lot of children in one area, you would probably describe their descendants as having pirate or Scottish pirate DNA. Ancestry would be a better term I guess. But the weirdos (usually in America) who talk about Viking as a white race are indeed odd.

I certainly can believe it. I would guess that it is likely an almshouse charity set up after the Huguenots arrived? So that would be the first half of the 18th century?

A charity has to stick by its charitable aims. If it was set up back in the 1700s to help Huguenots then it has to carry on doing just that.

Almshouse charities can last for a very long time. Perhaps the most well known one is The Charity of Sir Richard Whittington (yes - the Dick Whittington of panto fame).

This was set up on his death in 1423. The charity had an almshouse in London up until 1966 when it relocated to East Grinstead.

So, yes, I can well believe that there is still an almshouse for Huguenots!

I think it's interesting (really) to discuss differences like these on the margins within the British isles. I just think it's disingenuous to play this "well William the Conqueror came on a boat across the Channel so we're all immigrants really" card.

Ethnicity is race PLUS culture, in my view.

How childish. Is that the best defence you have for mass illegal immigration?

Oh, where did I say I was defending mass illegal migration?

Indeed. Chinese community in London. Jewish community in north London.

The Anglo-Saxons came her in small boats, from Europe.

It really isn't "only the Western world that's having this thrust upon us", and it certainly isn't the UK. Germany is the only Western democracy in the top 6 hosting countries; the UK is 16th. 68% of refugees or displaced persons are hosted in low or middle-income countries. 26% in least developed nations such as Chad. See https://www.unhcr.org/media/global-trends-2025-report for more of the depressing details.

Set up in the 1700s I believe.

To engage with OP's direct point, I'd say the Huguenots weren't British, but most of their descendants in their various host countries eventually became so. Some more quickly than others, depending on when they started intermarrying, primarily.

I think this is why cultural compatibility is very important - further away cultures intermarry less and therefore remain as "other" for much longer.

Ethnogenesis is an interesting subject.

I remember the Lenny Henry joke.
He got a white female member of the audience up on stage, and asked her
"Have you got any African in you ?"
"I don't think do. "
"Do you want some ?"

It isn't the unkowns Abdullah bin Zayed was really talking about here. He was talking about known radicals being allowed in and given safe harbour and how they are allowed to preach hatred and extremism, radicalizing our countries' citizens.

Very much Popper's Paradox of Tolerance.