Are the British indigenous to Britain?

“A mongrel race” is how the British, and especially the English are labeled these days. Celt, Roman, Saxon, Viking, Norman are some of the names of the peoples who have made Britain their home over the past 3,000 years, with more groups stretching back further into antiquity.

But is this term accurate? Are the English nothing more than a ‘mongrel race’ as anti-English pressure groups like to make us believe? To find the answer you need look no further than the works of Bryan Sykes and Stephen Oppenheimer to discover the real genetichistory of the British people.

To put it simply, the bulk of the British population today can trace their ancestry back to late Upper Palaeolithic/ Mesolithic peoples who gradually migrated north from their home in northern Spain/ southern France after the glaciers melted at the end of the Ice Age. Britain before then did have a human presence, though its numbers were not large. Having said that, some of their genes do flow in the British today.

As Britain became ripe once again for human habitation, these early Mesolithic peoples arrived over land as Britain was still joined to mainland Europe at this time, about 10,000BC. (Their homeland was actually the Basque lands of today. The British and the Basques share a close ancestry).

The settlers moved quickly along the Atlantic coast to occupy the land as the glaciers retreated north. In his book (and series) ‘British Isles’ Alan Titchmarch says that most of the glaciers would have melted within fifty years, hence the land was exposed extremely fast. These post Ice Age settlers still constitute the majority of the British population today.

In his book ‘Origins of the British’, Stephen Oppenheimer says that 75% to 95% of the British population has an ancient Iberian (Spanish) ancestry. While the figures are higher for Wales than England (Llangefni, north Wales is 96% and Fakenham in Norfolk is 59%), he states that only 30% of gene types in England derive from north-west Europe. This means that the original, indigenous British population is still the dominant in the modern British of today.

Since the British have been in Britain since the last Ice Age it stands to reason that they should not be considered a “mongrel race”. Though other peoples have left their imprint on the British, especially in England, the British are still remarkably united.

Consider this: the Maoris of New Zealand, a Polynesian people, arrived in New Zealand about the year 1000AD. Everyone considers them to be an ‘indigenous’ people. However, the British have been in Britain for 10,000 years, yet people call them a race of immigrants, with the insinuation that they are not indigenous. This is completely wrong and shows a terrible double-standard.

The British are just as indigenous to Britain as the Maoris are to New Zealand. Why is this such a hard pill to swallow? Perhaps it is because the world today is incapable of viewing ‘white people’ as being indigenous to anything.

The British have an ancient connection to their land and this must be respected. Simply calling them ‘immigrants’ and ‘mongrels’ is both historically wrong and a dreadful insult. The British are just as indigenous to their land as the Aborigines are to Australia, the Maoris are to New Zealand and the Native American Indians are to North America.