No, You Can’t Learn to Be English

Historian Robert Tombs has campaigned commendably against the Woke-washing of British history by the anti-white cultural revolutionaries of Black Lives Matter. So why is he so determined to retroactively deprive the English of their distinct identity?

At the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation’s Now & England conference, Tombs said that being English has nothing to do with ancestry. Citing the time he saw girls in hijabs reciting Rudyard Kipling and singing God Save the King at the Michaela Community School, Tombs insisted “becoming English is actually quite possible if you want to do it and if you’re encouraged to do it and indeed required to do it”. Rather than take the audience’s groans and heckles as a cause for reflection, Tombs doubled down in the Telegraph last week. “Can you teach people to be English (of whatever flavour) or must it be inherited?” he asks, before concluding, “I stick to my answer: we learn it.”

“I should explain that my intellectual sins had been to praise Katharine Birbalsingh (invariably though inadequately described as “Britain’s strictest headmistress”) and to have commented that to see little girls in headscarves reciting Kipling and singing the national anthem showed that “becoming English was possible”, on the condition that it was encouraged, taught, and indeed required.

Whereas being British is a “primarily legal and political” identity, Tombs writes, England is a “culture nation” of “shared history, customs and emotions”.

From whom do these customs come? To whom does this history belong? Who feels these emotions intuitively? Such questions are “laughable” to Tombs. “For centuries,” he writes, “Englishness revolved round institutions – the Kingdom, the Church, the Common Law and the inherited rights of “free-born Englishmen.” Who founded and populated these institutions? Did the first Englishman encounter the Ozymandian ruins of Canterbury Cathedral, like Charlton Heston dropping to his knees before a submerged Statue of Liberty?

The opening lines, and indeed the title, of Tombs’ The English and Their History, identifies a “people who took the name ‘English,’ set up an English kingdom, and subsequently named their country England, and those who have lived there after them and thought of themselves as members of an English nation”. The concept of an English people predates the Norman Conquest by two centuries, and the nation being named England by a century. The Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People bound the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes together as one English people, with a shared language and heritage, in 731 AD. Ed West notes in The Diversity Delusion that 90% of the population of 1927 could trace their ancestry directly back to 927, when Æthelstan conquered the last Viking settlement in York and became King of all England. A people precede the culture, history, and institutions attributed to them. The prefix “English” or “British” before culture, history, or values denotes a distinct people to whom all these things belong. To say that a people is generated and defined by their products creates a paradox.

Nations formed from peoples throughout antiquity. As Larry Siedentop explained, the city states of Greece and Rome were aggregations of families, who intermarried to form tribes, and worshiped shared ancestors. These ancestors were buried in the soil, in the foundations of the state. Soil from a previous settlement would be transported and buried in a new one, to keep continuity. States would boast about hosting relics from prior civilisations. Constantinople recovered the Trojan Palladium from sacked Rome, to prove it was heir to the Empire. Offerings were made, rituals performed, and libations poured to honour the shared ancestors, heroes, and gods of each tribe. Patriotism meant honouring the sacrifices made by patrilineal ancestors to build and sustain the state. If the state fell to enemy forces, it was believed that its citizens had disgraced their ancestors and been abandoned by their gods.

“The city that emerged was thus a confederation of cults, an association superimposed on other associations, all modelled on the family and its worship. The ancient city was not an association of individuals… If we wanted to give an exact definition of a citizen, we should say that it was a man who had the religion of the city.” (p.21-23)

Nations have always been collections of families: comprised of named and irreplaceable individuals, each responsible for shaping the culture, history, and heritage of their distinct people. These “little platoons” — Burke’s term for the households that act as “the germ of public affections” — are each links in the great chain of civilisation. Nation, derived from the Latin natio, refers to people with a common ancestry. The civitas (political nexus) and economy of ancient states relied upon the oikos (households) and ethnos (distinct people). To be an individual was to be an idiot: a stateless “private person”. The chain is broken when we become deracinated individuals, or when new platoons are imported who do not marry into the tribe and serve as custodians for its culture. Nations discontinue when you substitute one people for another.

England can trace its families back better than any other nation, thanks to our ancestors’ impeccable record-keeping. In England, arranged and cousin marriages were uncommon. Men and women wedded older and for love more often than in other societies. They lived in nuclear units, apart from the extended clan and kinship networks of Asia and Africa. Inheritance was customary, though not required by common law. Children would often disperse after adolescence, working as hired labour or founding new farms across the country. This discouraged incest, encouraged an entrepreneurial spirit, and extended the remit of moral consideration from kin to complete strangers. A spontaneous high-trust social order emerged, laying the foundations for free markets. The industrial revolution rests upon centuries of cultural givens, unique to Christian England. Hence why historian Alan Macfarlane concludes that the individualism that Tombs takes for granted is actually the English version of tribalism. Liberalism emerged in England thanks to our geography, climate, family structure, and Christian faith.

“The highly developed and individualistic market society was one which would lead to unusual affluence, distributed widely over the population. It was a situation of very considerable social mobility, based on wealth rather than blood, and with few strong and permanent barriers between occupational groups, town and country, and social strata. The strong sense of individualism was likely to be found embedded in the laws in the concept of individual rights and independence and liberty of thought and religion.” (p.165)

This pioneering spirit was exported to the frontiers of Australia and North America. Max Weber identified Anglo Protestantism as the key ingredient of America’s industriousness: the doctrine of revealing one’s predestined portion of God’s grace through the fruits of one’s labour. Puritan settlers were not shorn of moral priors upon descending the gangplank of the Mayflower. Matthew Arnold wrote in Culture and Anarchy that “The British Constitution, its checks, and its prime virtues, are for Englishmen. We may extend them to others out of love and kindness; but we find no real divine law written on our hearts constraining us so to extend them.” This echoes Joseph de Maistre’s observation: that the fundamentals of political constitutions exist as parochial sentiments before being codified as written laws. This is why the “truths” of the Declaration of Independence were “self-evident” to America’s founding fathers: they were all Christian Englishmen. The civic associations imported from England, as observed by de Tocqueville on his tour of America, raised generations to revere the Constitution and its rights. It was the unique family structure, legal tradition, and religion of England that made its colonies uniquely peaceful and prosperous.

This understanding of identity as inherited and immutable divides older self-identified conservatives and the young rightwingers at Now & England. To them, Tombs’ push to turn English identity into a set of civic platitudes, capable of incorporating immigrants and their children, is indistinguishable from a trans activist insisting that men can identify as women. Matt Goodwin, writing about this emerging divide for Policy Exchange, explains how our lived experience of record legal migration and unilateral multiculturalism has made concerns about identity and culture as salient for we Zoomers as the battle for Thatcherite capitalism against Soviet socialism was for Tombs’ generation.

“the realignment that is still reshaping British politics today is one that, in broad terms, has seen the ‘cultural axis’ in politics (national belonging versus universal liberalism) become just as important, if not more so, as the ‘economic axis’ (markets versus the state).”

Born after the Blair years, we have only known an ethnically heterogeneous and increasingly dangerous UK. We have no frame of reference for what Britain was like before mass migration. We did not enjoy the high-trust, homogenous society that Tombs grew up in. To have our concerns dismissed as absurd or racist just causes Gen Z to resent our elders. To have our identity reduced to a poetry recital is insulting.

Not only are we irritated by Tombs’ category error: we are pessimistic about the prospect of integration altogether. When the half-English children of immigrants are bragging about dispossessing us of our country at Glastonbury, or calling to topple Clive of India’s statue, what hope is there of assimilating millions more who have no ancestral roots here? Tombs’ attempt to layer a thin English cultural identity atop the deeply held religious convictions of Muslims is seen as a doomed enterprise by the young Englishmen who have to live with the consequences of this multicultural experiment.

“Is this “multiculturalism”?” Tombs asks. “I can’t see how.”

“Progressives would reject it as ‘monoculturalism’, as it involves inculcating a common English culture: poetry certainly, and also Shakespeare, the classics, history, mathematics, science, and indeed as many as possible of the educational riches that those same progressives reject as ‘colonialist’.”

Oh, but it is. Tombs is confused because he treats Islam as one among many options on a civilisational buffet. He hopes to compartmentalise competing moral doctrines, containing them to mere clothing choices or dietary preferences. This is a liberal distinction, and one which the Islamic world does not recognise. As Tom Holland observes in Dominion, the term “religion” was invented by English protestants to distinguish the “inner relationship of a believer to the divine” from the secular spheres of “the rest of society: from government, or trade, or law.” Due to unexamined liberal suppositions, Tombs seems to have disconnected the wearing of the hijab with the values imparted onto the girls by their parents and inherited culture.

The sight of the hijab, niqab, and burqa on Britain’s streets is not “fairly trivial”, as Tombs wrote in the Daily Mail. Islamic tradition treats women as perennial temptresses who invite sexual violence upon themselves unless they cover their hair and skin. This includes the children Tombs saw at the Michaela School, given child marriage is permissible in Islam. Under sharia law, women’s testimony is worth only half that of a man’s. Whereas Christ compelled His followers not to cast stones lest they themselves are without sin, Muhammad introduced stoning as the penalty for apostasy and adultery upon arriving in Medina.

We don’t treat women that way in Britain. We never have. Tacitus noted how Germanic tribes, who later comprised the genetic stock of Anglo-Saxons, consulted women on tribal political matters, and entrusted them to uphold morals and manners. This informed our common law tradition, which gave a wife rights to inherit a third of her husband’s estate. English women could own freehold land, whereas women in other peasant societies were necessary to the household economy but legally and culturally subordinate to men. The average age of women at marriage in England was twenty in the Middle Ages, and twenty-five in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. These traditions are encoded in our literature: from Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, to the courtship rituals in Bleak House and Austen’s novels. They are particular to the traditions and sensibilities of the English. Tess of the d’Urbervilles is not a tragedy in the Islamic world.

The hijab is not an innocuous costume: it is an oppressive garb which represents the growth of a parallel, incompatible moral system in our country. It is incompatible with the Christian belief in the inviolable dignity of the innocent human person, regardless of race or sex (John 13:34-35; Matthew 22:36-40; Galatians 3:28). This Christianity is inextricable from English identity. Christian communities existed in every kingdom by 660 AD. Alfred the Great’s Doom Book, titled after Leviticus 19, combined Saxon law with the Ten Commandments, and laid the foundations for Common Law. Blackstone’s formulation, stating it is better that ten guilty men go unpunished than an innocent man be unjustly persecuted, is based on the ratio proposed by Abraham for God to spare Sodom and Gomorrah. There is no England without Christianity, and a majority of the public agree that Islam is incompatible with our traditions.

Demographic momentum will continue to manufacture democratic consent for Islam in politics. Muhammad is the most common name for newborns in England. Britain’s population grows by 1% every year, exclusively through immigration. A third of children born in England and Wales in 2024 were to immigrant mothers. India, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Bangladesh were among the top five nations of origin; with Iraq entering the top ten for the first time. By 2063, Britain will be minority white British, and 20% Muslim. White British children are already a minority in a quarter of schools.

Due to a process that Ayaan Hirsi Ali calls “cocooning” — insulating themselves from secular liberal capitalism by “withdrawing into self-enclosed (and increasingly self-governing) enclaves” — British-born Muslims are more radical than new migrants. According to polling from the Henry Jackson Society, only one in four British Muslims believe Hamas committed murder and rape in Israel on October 7; 52% want to criminalise depictions of their Prophet Muhammad; and 32% support Islam becoming Britain’s national religion, and the nationwide enforcement of Sharia law. These opinions were most common among British-born, university educated Muslims aged 18-34.

These sectarian beliefs are entrenched by high rates of cousin marriage: with between 46-60% of Pakistanis in Bradford marrying a cousin (over 90% in some clans). 80% of marriages worldwide, throughout history, have been consanguineous. The practice remains ubiquitous throughout the Muslim world: with high rates in Syria, Iran (30-39%), Sudan, Afghanistan (40-49%), Qatar, Saudi Arabia (50-59%), Pakistan (65%), and Kuwait (68%). England is an anomaly: with the first Archbishop of Canterbury, Saint Augustine prohibiting the practice in 597 AD, on the orders of Pope Gregory I. The ban was not ratified by the Catholic Church until the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215; and was repealed by Henry VIII following the English Reformation, so that he could marry Jane Seymour. But English peasants continued to form nuclear family units for centuries.

The children of consanguineous marriages have higher rates of congenital birth defects, lower average IQs, and lower impulse control. It isn’t their fault that their parents are relatives; but populating a society with the products of cousin marriage produces a very different social order than England’s. Cousin marriage entrenches a clannish loyalty which makes individualism inconceivable. Describing the theory-of-mind in Islamic honour culture, Ayaan wrote:

“Within Islam, fitna—strife or disagreement—was therefore seen as fundamentally destructive. Dissent was a form of betrayal; heresy as well. These individualistic impulses had to be suppressed to preserve the unity of the larger community. Those who wonder at the ferocity of Islamic punishments for dissent fail to grasp the threat that skepticism and critical thinking were believed to pose.

In a clan setting, shameful behavior constitutes a betrayal of the bloodline. In the wider Islamic setting, heresy constitutes a comparable threat, as does outright unbelief—apostasy—both of which are punishable by death. Those who betray the faith must be weeded out to maintain the integrity of the ummah…

The effect was to perpetuate tribal norms by freezing them in place as holy writ.”

Tombs knows how banning cousin marriage produced England’s individualistic culture, because he suggested we reintroduce the ban to curb Islamic sectarianism at Now & England. How can he recognise the hereditary roots of our culture, and the impact of parentage on one’s ability to identify with it, and then deny that being English has anything to do with ancestry? When the ethnic enclaves, euphemised as “communities”, in Britain’s major cities practice cousin marriage at rates comparable to their homelands, what hope is there for integration?

No matter how misty Tombs’ eyes get at Muslim girls reading Kipling, they are not assimilating. This is a growing intergenerational problem. Islam cannot be accommodated under the umbrella of liberal pluralism. If we replace England’s Christian ethos, and the people to whom our traditions are most intuitive, then our country will become unrecognisable.

Yet Tombs still insists we redefine our identity to encompass its antonyms. “We have a very clear choice”, Tombs writes. “Either we do everything possible to make them and their eventual descendants part of our nation. Or we treat them as perpetual outsiders, ‘ethnic minorities’ in a tribalised England.” Who does Tombs present as an exemplar of assimilation? Priti Patel, who is apparently on par with Winston Churchill. The same Priti Patel who, while Home Secretary, administered the largest unwanted waves of net migration in British history. The same Priti Patel who proposed Indian diasporas be leveraged as “living bridges” to advantage the Modi government. If Tombs thinks that’s “gratitude”, I would hate to see what spite looks like.

Tombs treats our culture as what Michael Oakeshott called “technical knowledge”: something to be taught from textbooks by institutions, like an instruction manual for converting anyone from anywhere into Englishmen via the rote learning of our literature and history. Instead, traditions are a form of “practical knowledge”: living wisdom, passed on from parent to child, to inculcate a sense of belonging that becomes second nature. Why is the burden of compromise placed solely on the English? Is Tombs willing to tell the children of immigrants who show no inclination to integrate that they must leave? Because if not, he offers only a toothless appeasement of hostile tribal minorities and their alien moralities — a surrender, with minimal friction.

While Tombs denied his support for multiculturalism in the Telegraph, just days later in the Mail he described the decline in Britain’s drinking culture, due to an increase in the Muslim population, as “a welcome kind of multiculturalism”. This is another example of Tombs being inattentive to the consequences of cultural change, and undermining the givens upon which his liberal individualism rests. In Revolt of the Elites, Christopher Lasch explains the importance of “third places” in cultivating social trust. Pubs, parks, and coffee shops facilitate conversation and encourage social consideration. Moral concern is taught to be extended to others sharing the same public space. These customs inculcate a conscience — an “inner voice” and respect for public property that isn’t common in third-world honour cultures, where the locus of morality is confined to that which advantages the family, clan, or ethnic in-group. This is why social disruption — casual littering, playing music aloud, or using speakerphone on public transport — has increased alongside non-Western migration. Ducks and geese are stolen from ponds because, to the rest of the world, there is no public space: just “home” and “wilderness”. Ayaan attributes this to a fatalism inherent to Islam: a lack of interest in long-term planning: “when this life is seen as transitory and the next is the only one that matters. Why pick up trash, why discipline your children, when none of those acts is stored up for any type of reward?”

Estranged from the world beyond their doorstep, native Brits forfeit the cities and shelter in their home. This compounds the falling social trust that Robert Putnam warned, at the turn of the century, was the inevitable consequence of increased diversity. Pubs, clubs, and mixed-sex spaces are abandoned and closed, because alcohol, music, and dancing are Haram for Britain’s new inhabitants. While Tombs thinks a decrease in drinking will bring utilitarian social benefits, he fails to see how we don’t get the same high-trust, small-state society that Britain once enjoyed, and that he takes for granted, without the park, the pub, and the social customs that govern them. More importantly: you don’t get the same civilisation by replacing the people who frequent them.

“It’s obvious to all but the most prejudiced eye that by mingling cultures we often enrich life for everyone”, Tombs writes. Thousands of grooming gang victims would disagree. Due to his age and wealth, Tombs experiences multiculturalism as a broadening of culinary horizons, rather than a competition of moral doctrines and social customs. He still speaks as if we are about to embark on this unprecedented demographic experiment, rather than being in the middle of it. The downsides are not hypothetical. But in distant, leafy, homogenous areas like Cambridgeshire, the likes of Tombs can pen op-eds littered with luxury beliefs about the inevitability of integration and how delicious authentic Indian curries are, without encountering the costs befalling the rest of us. When was the last time that Robert Tombs applied for a job? Boarded public transport? Walked through Peckham, Poplar, Lewisham, Brixton, Bradford, or Luton? I’d wager years ago, if ever. All of these activities are markedly worse since Tombs was a young man, and are inescapable indignities suffered daily by those not fortunate enough to go to Durham and Cambridge universities.

It is from this comfortable position that Tombs can indulge in the fantasy that “Every baby is born with a blank mind, even if its pedigree predates the Conqueror.” This isn’t true. Tombs has already conceded that cousin marriage impairs a person’s ability to break from the clannish morality of their inherited culture. Intelligence, personality traits, and even political alignment are largely inherited from our parents.

Blank slate anthropology is an assumption baked into all branches of Enlightenment politics. It presupposes a latent egalitarian nature beneath superficial cultural, economic, and geographical differences; and seeks to rationally devise a universal moral and political system befitting all mankind. These doctrines were pruned back to a binary of liberalism or socialism after the Second World War. “Open” societies were prescribed as the guarantor that “Never Again” would the guard towers of Auschwitz be erected. Expressing a preference for, or recognising differences between, a given people, history, or culture was equated with praise for Adolf Hitler. Israeli-American author Yoram Hazony observed how this anti-fascist zeal confined left- and right-wing politics to differing flavours of liberal materialism during the Cold War. While Tombs has been “joking with friends about being a Lefty”, he unwittingly shares their belief that a man from Mogadishu can be made indistinguishable from a man from Manchester by means of education and employment. He seeks only to conserve liberalism, not a people and the culture, history, and heritage they possess.

When pressed, this premise falls apart. If babies are blank slates, is there a period between birth and first professing their love of the Bard where they are stateless? Can a child with two English parents be taught igbo, wear an isiagu, and one day expect to be accepted as being indistinguishable from native Nigerians? Or is this redefinition of our identity, to be as inoffensive and fungible as paying taxes and playing cricket, only an obligation for the English? Are those who have never set foot on the British Isles, but revere the rule of law and democracy, more English than Oliver Cromwell or Henry VIII?

Of course not. This is not a cause for racial bigotry. We all have friends from other heritages. However, we must recognise ethnicity exists, that peoples are distinct entities, and that intractable ethno-cultural prejudices will prevent many people from ever integrating into our national tribe.

Tombs’ essay is intellectually flawed, his rendition of English identity is conceptually thin, and his remedy to rising immigrant sectarianism is inadequate. The solution is simple: rediscover and assert our identity, without concession or confusion, and repel those who reject it. Just as if Israel ceased to be majority Jewish it would cease to be, when England becomes minority Anglo-Saxon and Christian then the English will become stateless. Only the latter scenario is celebrated. We can revive Christianity among our kinsmen — indeed, this is already underway among my generation. But we cannot teach a whole other people to treat our traditions as if they were their own, especially not within one generation.

Tombs didn’t say which Kipling poem those headscarved girls were reciting, but I suggest they read “The Beginnings” for a preview of what happens when the English are denied their identity. If things continue as they are, then English culture and Islam will race along parallel tracks before a fatal collision. Best to hit the brakes and change course, while we can. That requires us to recognise that, no, you cannot learn to be English.