Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Oh Dear

"Music is an essential part of Western culture and British music dates back centuries. Pop music in particular has played an important role in British culture and the success of ‘Britpop’, which includes influences from several cultures, is an indicator of the multi-cultural nature of Britain today."

Sport also plays an important role in White British culture with many sports enjoying a rich history in the country. Football is the national sport and immensely popular with all ages. Tennis is also considered a national sport with the oldest and most prestigious competition in the World being held in Wimbledon."


Bury Metropolitan District Council explain "White British Culture" to ... who exactly ?

The British also enjoy home-made desserts such as apple pie, rhubarb crumble and bread and butter pudding. Britain is famous for fish and chips which dominate the take-away food sector with a ‘chippy’ on every corner. British cuisine has also been influenced by multi-cultural diversity and curry has become an integral part of British cuisine, so much so that, since the late 1990s, Chicken Tikka Masala has been commonly referred to as the “British national dish”


I try to avoid using four-letter Anglo-Saxon words. In this case, it's a pity. While I deprecate those commenters whose first reaction is to call for a rope and a lamp post every time they read something they don't like, for the perpetrator of this - probably not the actual writer, some poor ex-local paper journalist now doing council media relations - but the guy who commissioned this - not hanging, not quartering, not even drawing will suffice. Perhaps the treatment handed out by William the Bastard to the leading citizens of Alencon, after they shouted the 11th century equivalent of 'yer Mum!' will do.

"You all remember," said the Controller, in his strong deep voice, "you all remember, I suppose, that beautiful and inspired saying of Our Ford's: History is bunk. History," he repeated slowly, "is bunk."
He waved his hand; and it was as though, with an invisible feather wisk, he had brushed away a little dust, and the dust was Wessex, was Londinium, was Halidon Hill, was Agincourt and Crecy; some spider-webs, and they were Lincoln and Hastings and York and Worcester and Flanders and Alamein. Whisk. Whisk–and where was Matilda, where was Harold, where were Edwin and Morcar and Cromwell, Kitchener and Montgomery? Whisk–and those specks of antique dirt called Dalriada and Powys, Iona and the Heptarchy–all were gone. Whisk–the place where Ireland had been was empty. Whisk, the cathedrals; whisk, motte and bailey, cruck-frame and shieling, broch and pele tower, whisk, whisk, Beowulf and the Mabinogion. Whisk, Passion; whisk, Requiem; whisk, Symphony; whisk …


Flaying would be an acceptable fallback.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Chicken Tikka was, I think, first elevated to "national dish" status by the late lamented Robin Cook. Cook is now the very best type of multi-culturalist, the bastard's dead.

Perhaps of a surfeit of CTM

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/southern_counties/3559617.stm

Anonymous said...

In his admirable book “English Music” Peter Ackroyd explored the themes of history, culture and continuity.
He put the following words in the mouth of Daniel Defoe:

“To pallitate the shortness of our lives, and to compensate our brief term in this world, it is fit to have such an understanding of the times past that we may be considered to have dwelled in the same. In such a manner, answering the present with the past, we may live from the begining and in a sense be as old as our country itself”.

This means our sense of identity is created by our intimate relationship with the history of our nation. It was our ancestors, people like us; who fought enormous odds at Crecy, experienced the exhilarating freedom of reading Tyndale’s Bible for themselves, lit the Armada beacons, marched with Rifleman Harris and the 95th in the Peninsula, endured the bitter and brutal hardship of the early Industrial Revolution, forged the “Workshop of the World”, celebrated the Relief of Mafeking, created the NHS. These were our triumphs, our tragedies, of our people. It is only by such a consciousness that the covenant with those who have gone before, and those who will follow us, can be forged. And if there is no such covenant, to do our utmost to leave the country perhaps a little better than we found it, then we are living ephemeral lives in the present, which are completely meaningless. I am afraid we see this all round us at the moment.

History and culture are inextricably intertwined and it is also cultural continuity that enables us to “live from the begining and in a sense be as old as our country itself”. When I listen to the music of Byrd, Tallis, Purcell, Vaughan Williams, Britten, Jethro Tull, Badly Drawn Boy, June Tabor my ear detects similar qualities. I hear a gentle, wistful music, full of melody, thoughtful, at times earthy and lively, at times sad, distinctive, fully expressive of the land and the best qualities of its people. This is a great base on which to build, and I get the same sense from reading Thomas Hardy, the Dorset poet who recreated an historic Wessex out of his experience and imagination. And I ask myself can we not do the same for the indigenous peoples of these islands with all the materials at hand capable of being forged into a revived national consciousness?

Truly we have sold our birthright for a mess of potage, literally in the case of chicken tikka masala which the late lamented Robin Cook was pleased to describe as the national dish. Surrey Trading standards found that “Fifty-eight out of 102 chicken tikka masala samples contained “illegal and potentially dangerous” levels of colourants”(BBC). This is not a bad metaphor for the pernicious doctrine of multi-culturalism which the current Pope has accurately described as “turning one’s back upon one’s own”. When mass immigration/multi-culti advocates are asked what are the actual benefits of enrichment it never seens to get much further than curry. Black music as pumped out sounds to me discordant, mindless, repetitive and schizophrenic for the most part, certainly of little or no cultural worth. It really is a bit of a struggle to see “enrichment” in any positive light, try as one might.

In his other excellent book, “Albion”, Ackroyd lists approximately 200 writers, artists, composers and architects - English, Scots, Welsh and Irish - who have pretty much created our national high culture. The first on the list is the Venerable Bede whose “Ecclesisatical History of the English People” has been described as the founding document of the English nation, though thanks to our de-education system and the multi-culturalists who infest it I believe I am on firm ground in asserting that Bede is unknown to all but a relative handful. There are no candidates for outstanding cultural achievement on Ackroyd’s list who were born after 1945 though I would accept that such an exercise is inevitably subjective. But think on that for a moment! If mass immigration, multi-culti and diversity were so great should there not have been numerous stellar cultural contributions resulting from the “vibrant”, “heady” cultural mix the propagandists tell us is so wonderful? Shouldn’t cultural “fusion” be wowing us and knocking us dead left, right and centre? Phoney Snake Oil salesman Tony said a while back that Britain is undergoing a “cultural renaissance, never knowingly undersold on the hyperbole was Tone, but then he rather gave the game away by stating that the heart of the alleged Renaissance lay in the nation’s museums.
We cannot overcome this sterility, and put to rights the nihilistic despair of our young people, unless we heed the Pope’s advice and stop turning our back on our own history and culture, but turn back to it without delay!

http://www.bnp.org.uk/2007/12/23/is-the-bnp-racist/

Anonymous said...

Here's what Margaret "coffee and biccies" Hodge reckons is a great example of cultural fusion resulting in a "uniquely British" outcome, evidencing our "shared identity"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etvf4wUFzK0

The Regime's completely lost all touch with reality.

Anonymous said...

Your first paragraph reminded me of a recent article in the New Statesman: The British pop Establishment has shown a long-standing resistance to black musical influence.

Both writers exhibit a short term memory. There's a delicious irony in claiming Britpop music as being an exemplar of Britishness given that this segment of the culture, far more than any other, wears its multi-cultural influence on its sleeve. Britpop's influence from may immediately derive from sixties bands like the Beatles and the Kinks but they in turn derived from R&B. The idea that a band playing R&B or blues is resistant to black music is wilful ignorance.

Anonymous said...

'It is one of the most characteristic features of the English people that they are ready to disparage whatever is home growth, and to welcome what is foreign'

Words written in 1895 in a historical sketch of English national song by Baring Gould.

Taken from the notes of the CD Come Write Me Down by The Copper Family of Rottingdean

Anonymous said...

Farmer Boldwood - Ive been thinking about music recently. In popular music there are often debates about black influence, who gets credit etc. When I was a good little liberal I would hear debates about this on the radio in the pages of the NME etc

Now I realize the debate is couched in implicitly anti-white terms. The white contribution is assumed completely out of existence yet its done so universally that we dont even notice it. Im not talking about the music or performance itself.

Its routine when white performers who adopt black musical forms be criticised for taking black music and repackaging it for whites and/or the white audience for preferring a white singer than the original black. Somewhere on the net you probably find a similar debate about Duffy right now.

So Duffy or Elvis or whoever will get stick for copying black music but Chuck Berry & Hendrix used electric guitars. Who invented the guitar, the electric guitar? The microphone, the electric amp, discovered the principles of electricity in the first place, conceived, designed and built electric generators. Set up electricity grids etc etc etc Their work was issued on vinyl records, who invented them? Recording studios and so on. Without all this stuff modern popular music simply would not exist period.

In this context the black contribution falls away to a marginal percentage.

Dont expect to see this discussed in the pages of the NME...ever!