BNP and 'British Pride'

Some months ago the British National Party ran a website trying to demonstrate links between their ideology and the Christian Faith. It ended up as a series of headings. The story Jesus Christ told of the Good Samaritan makes nonsense of any such attempt to bring these two belief systems together. Equally striking are the frequent references in the Old Testament to the need to be kind to aliens. (So if they land, and 'want to see our leader', it's good ethics to be kind to them: don't be put off by 'The War of the Worlds' - the book, the picture, or the remake!)

More recently I stumbled across a BNP website called 'British Pride', which tries to make the link between their party's beliefs and what might be called British heritage. I was rather put off by the comment 'British history is no longer taught in schools', because I know from my own teaching experience and from my continuing reading of what goes on in schools that this is untrue. What is true is that far less history is taught in schools than it used to be, so that getting a balance becomes ever more difficult.

However, reading further I discovered that the BNP were confronting the fact that we are, historically, a nation of immigrants. They mention the DNA evidence that points to the stability of the population for thousands of years, and that therefore 'we', the white ones that is, are not Anglo-Saxons or even Celts but people who have been here since the dawn of time, as it were. If so, it is certainly very striking. But the website draws the wrong inference. What this demonstrates is that our history has always been heavily influenced by immigrants, the Celts and the Anglo-Saxons for instance, who made a cultural contribution out of all proportion to the much larger aboriginal population. So in a very real sense we have always been a nation of immigrants.

As any teacher knows, you can create instant hostility in the classroom by telling children to divide themselves into those with blue eyes and those with brown (and instant alienation for those who don't fit into either of those two categories.) Tribes and nations had their place in history, but are not an ideal survival mechanism in a world of weapons of mass destruction and of climate change.