This wilfully contrived synonymy between the terms 'England' and 'Britain' - I have never heard of any official repudiation to such usage? - are further represented by the use of the 'Anglo-' hybrid phrases [phrases such as Anglo-Irish, Anglo-French, Anglo-American, Anglo-Saxon] which gives England its continuing Imperial dominance over the minority nations within what one may have thought, naïvely, was a legally constituted multinational State... called 'Britain'! It is impossible to listen to any documentary on any war during "the British Crown years" of this island's history - from either side of the great divides! - which does not give the false impression that it was the 'Island of England' - or just England itself? - that was at war rather than the multinational British State!
The television fund-raising promotion [November 1999] for the Royal British Legion is even presented against the background of the English patriotic song, "Jerusalem"! It is this continuing inertia of English Imperialism that is repugnant to the minority nations of the British State - particularly the Cornish! - and it is, perhaps, ironic, that recent British television programmes commemorating "The Anglo-Boer War" (1899-1902), depicts that war as the beginning of the end of the British Empire. President Kruger was of the opinion that "If they must belong to England, then a price will be paid that will stagger humanity".
The basis for identifying this phenomenum as 'the inertia of English Imperialism' is because despite a range of historical periods - not least, that of the 'British' myth of 1707 - which recognises the existence of the Cornish, Welsh, Scottish and English peoples, there has been a sustained promotion of the Island of England. In 1497, when the Cornish rose twice in rebellion and Polydore Vergil was commissioned by the king, Henry VII, to compose a history of England, [see quote within Cornish Nation {Home Office - 2} page], the Venetian ambassador to the court, Andreas Trevasino, was considered to be the originator of "A Relationship of the Island of England".
It would be quite a valid point to challenge the 'Covert Coercion' title of this website page since it is obvious, when viewed as a subject and in retrospect, that the process has been overt or, to put it into modern parlance, transparent. I would argue that in the past that the politics of dominion compelled the observer to agree to disagree and, for reasons of personal well-being, to acquiesce under duress. I would also argue that such occasions, as they arose, were put down to ignorance and considered at the time to be innocuous. I presume, also, that in most cases that such non-English observers as there were, had their own quisling-like political agendas.
Consider the naïve acquiescence of the Cornish people to the insidious effects of using non-Cornish postcodes [zipcodes] over the past thirty years. Postcodes which 'innocuously?' compel the Cornish to advertise to the world that Cornwall is a part of England (sic). Postcodes are used by innumerable commercial companies as a location reference. Such usage effectively makes the use of 'Cornwall', redundant as a form of territorial location. Because of this 'innocuous' agenda there are many Cornish addresses which are stored on company computers as being located as of 'Plymouth' [England] or 'Exeter' [England]. How many Cornish people feel suitably incensed about this form of cultural genocide to complain? Because of the postcode, their mail will always arrive so it is dismissed with just a - oh! what the hell?
The Island of England concept is quite clearly a policy of political and cultural genocide which insidiously acts upon one's own concepts of territory, history and identity. It surreptitiously supplants the existence of Cornwall's Celtic identity with an English identity in a way that is morally reprehensible. In Cornwall we are being officially denied access to our own history and, as a consequence, denied the means to protect ourselves against this inertia of English Imperial propaganda and misinformation. It is a manipulative process and one which has, undoubtedly, created the Cornish Paradox. How, indeed, is it possible to perceive of a de jure Cornish existence where this is subsumed within, for example, a volume entitled "South West England - 3,500 BC - AD 600" (1964)? Surely, given the period under consideration, the focus of the book should have been "South West Britain"? It is only at the very end of the period under review that any concept of England could even begin to be entertained. The existence of the Cornovii, on the other hand, are recorded as early as the first century. The author, a University lecturer, is also well aware that the Cornish dispute any definition of SW England which includes Cornwall.
Another University lecturer (the names are irrelevant), ten years earlier, wrote a volume on "Historical Geography". The preoccupation was obviously an Imperial promotion of 'the English' when he queries the movement of peoples in Britain prior to the Roman period:
"Did the earliest Celtic speakers in England speak Goidelic and were they swept right out of Britain by later invaders speaking Brythonic or did the Goidelic speakers migrate to Ireland by sea and so by-pass Britain?"The subtlety of the subliminal message being conveyed was made somewhat clearer in an earlier passage following an examination of the last Celtic migration, the Belgae, into Britain, circa 75-50 BC, -
"...These cultures show contact with Teutonic groups... There may even have been some intermixture with Teutonic groups, and with the Belgae may have arrived our first 'English' ancestors..."A little later in considering the extent of the Anglo-Saxon settlement - some five to ten centuries later - he concludes:
"They were numerous enough to introduce their tongue throughout all but the three small and isolated western districts of the island and to maintain it against the influence of the speech of all later comers. It was in fact the Anglo-Saxons who made us 'English'."
The following extracts from a publication entitled "The Heritage of Britain" (1975)show further examples of chronologically inaccurate or ambiguous geo-political manipulative text which, from where I stand, promotes one concept [England] at the expense of another [Britain] and, of course, within that.... Cornwall.
"The Metal Age produced a race of wealthy chieftains in Britain... An exuberant and beautiful art developed... under the patronage of chieftains. These were the fierce warriors who confronted Julius Ceasar when he invaded England in 55BC."Very soon, within a consideration of the change from hunter-gathering people to subsistence farming, circa 3500-300 BC, due to new migrations from the continent it is observed -
"No one will ever know why the first farmers embarked on the dangerous journey to Britain, but their arrival in the south of England brought about one of the greatest changes in the history of the island."A bit further on in the text is -
"In southern Britain, the well-drained chalk and limestone hills proved to be exceptionally fertile."Over the page, Stonehenge is described as -
"...the ruins of one of Britain's first and in some ways most impressive cathedrals."whilst a little further on, in considering how the stones got to the site, we find -
"Some experts believe that they were carried to southern England by ice and flood waters during an Ice Age."
The misrepresentative use of geo-political terms such as 'Wessex' in the following extracts provides a 5000 years continuity of existence for Wessex when, in truth, such an existence only lasted from about AD 688 to AD 1066. England, as a geo-political entity, came about as a direct result of the growth of Wessex. Other such references exist but not highlighted because this exercise is simply looking at the synonymy between 'England' and 'Britain' and their derivatives
"On Normanton Down, near Stonehenge, Wessex tribesmen erected this round barrow over the remains of their leader about 3500 years ago... ...The dead ruler was a member of the Wessex people, warrior aristocrats with contacts as far afield as Brittany, Ireland and Northern Ireland... The Wessex people brought the rich metal resources of Britain under their control... Their homeland on the Wiltshire Downs was ideally situated for trade... Northwards lay the shores of the Bristol Channel... Southwards, they were within easy reach of the English Channel... In this way the Wessex chieftains could exchange the grain, wool and hides produced by their peasant subjects for the precious metals of Ireland, Cornwall, Wales and Northern England ... their mastery of metal, made the Wessex people the master craftsmen of their age."
A rare example of a Celtic existence!
"The Celts, a warrior people, spread across much of Europe by 5th and 4th centuries BC. Many established themselves in well-defended hill-forts in the south and west of England ... When Julius Ceasar came to Britain in 55 BC."
The previously referred to "Wessex people", and an earlier apparent pre-occupation with the Anglo-Saxons, provide examples of the covert attempts at asphyxiating the strengths, even the existence, of an earlier Celtic, or British, culture. This pre-occupation manifests itself in many forms whether this is, as instanced on a recent Nick Ross BBC2 television forum on highly paid company 'Fat-Cats' [Dec 1999], where one of the official panel of 'experts' made the comment: "The Dutch are envious of our Anglo-Saxon formula". Whatever that obnoxious sentiment might mean? Similarly, in responding to the Prime Minister's report from the recent Helsinki Conference [Dec 1999], the opposition leader, William Hague, makes a reference to an "Anglo-French" meeting. The recent re-showing of the BBC2 documentary "Meet the Ancestors" [18th Dec 1999] gives a clear example of the Anglo-obsession when there is a proposal to build a garage adjacent to a bungalow over a known ancient burial site.
The site, at Winterbourne Gunner, Wiltshire and just north of Salisbury, was depicted, alternatively as a fifth-century graveyard or an 'Anglo-Saxon' cemetery and the presenter - quite objectively - asks a very pertinent question of an 'expert' as to what makes it an 'Anglo-Saxon' graveyard. It seems that the answer is the alignment of the graves to a nearby ancient site [in this case a bronze-age barrow] and an example of an axe-head found in one of the graves which, apparently, was not Anglo-Saxon but probably owned by a Frankish mercenary. The 'expert' also conceded that the majority of the burials were more likely to be native Britons rather than Anglo-Saxons. At the time the bungalow was constructed, another grave revealed the remains of a sword which was explained, during the programme, that pagan Anglo-Saxon warriors had their weapons buried with them. Does this imply that the Britons during this period of confusion and conflict did not?
The feet of the excavated skeleton were taken to another 'expert' who showed conclusively - based on bone-structure - that they came from a native Briton and not an Anglo-Saxon. Carbon-dating of the bones gave a date range of AD340 to AD550 but peaking in the first half of the fifth-century and confirming the identity of a native Briton. The point of all this is to say that the programmed failed to explain why the burial site was considered as 'Anglo-Saxon' when the majority of available evidence - as discussed, or implied, within the programme - seems to indicate that it was, in fact, a 'British' burial site with a few later additions of what may, or may not be, Anglo-Saxon burials. The factor of A-S preoccupation was in the relentless desire of the presenter to relate all this fifth-century non-A-S evidence to a pictorial representation of what an Anglo-Saxon village may have looked like at this period. A period, surely, which must pre-date the impending period of conflict between native Celtic Britons and the Germanic invaders?
Whilst our Celtic cousins in Wales and Scotland have been able to anticipate the end-game and have taken steps to protect their identity, the Cornish have been cursed with an administrative hierarchy which is constrained by English urban values and run by individuals, rarely Cornish, who have no more than an itinerant interest in the place they just happen to work or, supposedly, represent. Its rush, in the recent past, to defer to the politics of dominion rather than put 'Cornwall First' have enabled the progressive development of the merging of The Duchy of Cornwall with the English county of Devonshire. Its failed policy of 'Cornwall Last' has been replaced - temporarily? - with a policy of 'Cornwall Now!'
Its refusal over the years to obtain specifically Cornish statistics from the ten-yearly censuses has been a significant factor in that administration's inability to properly analyse the full extent of the abuse of Cornish Rights - now denied to us within the very protocols from Europe which were designed to help us. A failure at the end of the 1980s, to pursue a policy which would have restricted the excessive house-building programme, or to pursue a call for a Minister for Cornwall saw the Government increase the house-building quota. It should be noted that all this was matched by the official opposition [Labour] proposing to set up an experimental super-county which comprised Devonshire and Cornwall The recent establishment for a Minister for the South West (of England) reinforces the continuing progression towards a Devonwall region, or, as proposed by Fawcett in 1919, the Devon Province.
In 1982, the then Industy Minister Norman Lamont, rejected the concept of a Devonwall region by saying that it would not realise any additional cash help from the Government. Less than ten years later we read of Government sources telling the people of the Duchy of Cornwall and the English county of Devonshire to "get its act together if it wishes to achieve any financial grants".
Whilst it has been understood that there is ongoing pressure to submerge various Cornish administrations within a Devonwall alignment, such covert coercion has not always been in evidence. Another example, however, was offered by Cornwall's Fire Chief at the beginning of 1998 when he was justifying proposals to merge the Cornish Fire Service with the English county of Devonshire. He was reported in the West Briton newspaper as saying, "We should not underestimate the head of steam that has built up in government for going down this route."
This 'head of steam' has again manifested itself, at the end of 1999, in two unsubtle ways. The Fire Service has just gone down the road of 'Americanisation' with new style shirts which can be either black or red. The Duchy opted for black [a Cornish colour] and the English county of Devonshire opted for red [an English colour]. When the shirts were issued - yes! you've guessed - the shirts were all red. The rumour within the Duchy is, that the Cornish Fire Chief ignored the wishes of his own Brigade members and went for the red because "They did not want to be seen to be awkward."
[I would welcome any information on the new shirt colour distribution throughout the British Fire Service?] The story does not stop there: The Cornish Brigade has always been known, as stated on its badge, as the "Cornwall Fire Brigade" but the new uniform has emblazoned upon it "Cornwall County Fire Brigade"!
The 'Devonwalling' of various Cornish administrations started with the Cornish Constabulary, in 1967, and many organisations have followed including British Telecom, Cornwall Chambers of Commerce, our Ambulance Service and the various Public Utilities. The most recent to be submerged will be the Cornish Magistrates Courts and the Cornish Probation Service and there is sufficient anecdotal evidence to show that these are being submerged under the high-level threat of "If you don't sort it - we will!" Why don't these evil, and gutless, people respect our Cornish Identity and our Territorial Integrity and defend it against such external interference? Have they been deliberately imported to top Cornish posts in order to facilitate this policy of Cornish Genocide?
The Cornish, like our Brythonic cousins of Wales and Brittany, must stand on their own and develop the necessary Cornish institutions or else be recorded in history with contempt. Just because a business correspondent in a provincial English newspaper says, bizarrely:
"The reality is that people upcountry - and, more importantly, those in Whitehall - regard Devon and Cornwall as one unit"does not mean that we, ourselves, should deny our own history and heritage. A similar mindless deference to 'English values' was in evidence back in the early 1970s when a proposal to give a linguistically Cornish name to one of the new District Councils (Caradon) was challenged because "The people in Bradford would not know what it meant." We are not responsible for English ignorance. God, for our sins, inflicted the inertia of English Imperialism upon us but the Duchy has, nevertheless, endured this far. We now have the vision of Europe to inspire us towards a truly Cornish autonomy and future.
The following letter was sent to Prime Minister, Tony Blair, as part of additional material to a petition. Whilst the Prime Minister's office did send an acknowledgement, there have been no other communications from any of the recipients!?
