Wherefore Lineage Indeed?

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Jane brought my attention to a piece on the front of today's Guardian newspaper regarding the intended funding of very-right-leaning 'think'-tanks across Europe, including some in the UK, by the US government. One principal beneficiary in the UK would be the 878 group, which includes such luminaries of the UK far-right as Jacob Rees-Mogg and Toby Young; having amongst its advisors Dr. Radomir Tylecoat, former Rees-Mogg special advisor. The central tenet of this 'non-partisan' group of 'thinkers' seems to be more of the usual right-wing fare: '"...focus[ed] on advancing fundamental freedoms."'. Exactly what are these 'fundamental freedoms' supposed to be, one may ask?

On past reckoning the kind of people involved in this kind of organisation would seem to espouse a very partial and partisan idea of 'freedom'; that of the freedom to exploit privilege, contacts and insider information to pecuniary gain. That of the freedom to tout half-truths and outright lies freely in the execution of their aims. That of a distortion of British history in the service of a false lineage of possession and privilege. The former springs ultimately from the latter: the 878 group takes its name from the year that Alfred The Great defeated the Danes, heralding, as far as this group of historicist twerps is concerned, the founding point of our 'ancient culture'.

The group's main aim, apart from the self-funding of their lifestyles to the exclusion of the hoi-polloi, is that tired old right-wing trope: immigration, & of migration in general where it doesn't apply to them; and frankly exercising outright xenophobia towards 'others'. Sorry, guys: if you claim family heritage that is in any way Anglo-Saxon, or Norman, or later still, Huguenot, I'm duty bound to point out that you are all descended from immigrants, so you should, by your own self-proclaimed Weltanschauung self-exclude yourselves and go back to wherever it was you bloody came from.

If you can demonstrate a heritage that is provably Celtic, you might have a somewhat better claim on being 'British', as the term derives from the old Welsh Y Brython; the original [relatively] modern inhabitants of England & Wales. As Rees-Mogg's double barrelled appellation suggests, he's a bit of a mongrel himself: Rees from the Old Welsh and Mogg from the Old English. So which half of your lineage are you going to disown as foreign, Jacob, old boy? If you were to do the decent thing, you'd support the Celtic Nation as First Inhabitants, and stop carping on about things of which you seem to know little, let alone truly care about. Or are you still sore that it was a King of England of Welsh [the Tudors of Penmynydd of Ynys Môn] heritage that kicked Catholicism into touch for so many years hence?

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