Historian Robert Tombs told the audience at the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation's Now & England event in Westminster that English identity has nothing to do with ancestry, and that “Of course you can learn to be English.”
Perhaps presuming all people can become as versed in the history and traditions of the indigenous peoples of the British Isles as they are, Boomer historians like Tombs have refashioned British and English identity into a curriculum that hypothetically anyone from anywhere can learn and come to call their own.
Not only is this a category error: it is a woeful understatement of the solutions required to dig ourselves out of the culture and demographic ditch that Oikophobic elites have put our country in with mass immigration and a multicultural appeasement strategy.
All nations, peoples, and cultures stem from identifiable lineages. As Larry Sidentop wrote, on the creation of ancient city-states from confederations of families and tribes, in Inventing the Individual:
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