quote:
By a programme produced by the English no doubt?
As usual everything is never enough for you lot. First a corrupt scientist says the Irish have always been there - as have Welsh and Scots. This statement, since it is a lie, has to have been motivated by politics. Why? Because it subverts the notion of British nations as a mix of various influences - except the English of course, which was precisely the intention. There was no information about how the tests were conducted - was it based on male lines or mitochondrial genetic material? - or how they arrived at a conclusion curiously at one with recent historical interpretations of the Catholic church and IRA (you know, the Ancient Irish Tribes baloney, which takes disparate inhabitants over three thousand years and makes Irishmen of them all, even though the modern Irish did not get there until around the 2nd or 3rd century AD).
Scots play this game too, albeit to less effect, with the supposedly Ancient Highland Culture invented less than two hundred years ago (mostly by the English). The Picts were not Scots. They were not British either. They were Iberians - dark. Today so are most Scots as a result of interbreeding. Then there is the fact that Scotland really only begins at the Highland Line, since after Athelstan land up to that point was wholly English and/or Anglo-Norman up to and long after the Norman invasion of England (see Oman), to the extent that so-called Scots-Irish don't really exist except in American fantasies because the people expelled from the border lands - both sides - were largely English anyway.
So far we've mentioned English and Anglo-Norman influences (coloured light brown on Bradley's map of English terrirtory, to indicate a difference which doesn't appear north of the border, and a people who incidentally account for more than half the so-called 'clans') and the Iberian Picts. We haven't even mentioned the Scandinavians - who are surely more English than the English genetically speaking. Still no brown bits on nice Dr Bradley's map of Scotland though. And yet we are told these people have 'always been there'. A few years back a BBC 'Meet the Ancestors' investigation induced stuttering incoherence in its genial presenter when its own survey revealed Scotland's closest genetic match to be southern England.
We can say techniques have still to be perfected of course. Or we can say, as someone with knowledge of the politics of Trinity College Dublin might well, that one should never take these pronouncements on trust.
As it is Rudgley's conclusions were half-hearted and all but endorsed the celtic fairy-tale, which is even more nonsensical when you get to Cornwall, whose 'proud' and 'independent' spirit will doubtless continue to clamour for the political freedom fat English and european taxpayer subsidies have made such a winner among the 'fiercely independent' warrior tribes north of the border.
Rudgely's criticism is half-hearted. But then from someone who proclaims himself a 'Londoner, southerner, Briton and European' one cannot be surprised. Once the English love of homeland was a match for any other nation in in Europe. The records prove it. Now, somehow, a skinny, hollow-chested anthroplogist mincing about in warpaint seems to say so much more about what we have become. That we surrender ourselves to such liars! The celts - real or imagined - had nothing to fear from Rudgley. He was, sadly, the very model of a modern Englishman.
