Thousands of years ago this country did not have a population of well over 60m. How far are you going to keep going back, times change we do not play football with a pigs bladder and boots that go up to the ankle with shorts down to the knees anymore.So your point is to continue with the contemporary narrative of Britain as an ancient multi cultural country with unfettered immigration and everyone all just rubbing along?
Sorry I don't buy it because it's not true...........ignoring what happened 25,000 years ago Britain has long been a mono cultural country with emigration a far greater factor than immigration.
The wider Anglo Saxon world would not exist without British emigration...........a contribution which has much more significance, than focusing on a few thousand refugees here and there during the course of the last 500 years.[/QUOTE]
You are wrong. Refugees arriving in this country over the last 500 years total hundreds of thousands not just a few. You also ignore the fact that the indigenous population was far smaller hence the impact of the new arrivals far greater.
I agree that Britain gradually became more unified in the 17th Century after the dust had settled from the Protestant reformation and Scottish wars of independence. However, to suggest that we have a history of mono culturalism that embraced the centuries of social division, squalor and deprivation imposed by feudal law and its lasting malign and pernicious influence is to view our past through a particularly rosy royalist prism.
I agree that the wider Anglo Saxon world (and the British Empire) would not exist without British emigration, fuelled by aggressive, expansionist policies and wars. What is certain is that the emigration associated with all that aggression would have included recycled British citizens who were originally refugees to our shores. The wider Anglo Saxon world; is that a good thing?
I'm not suggesting that unfettered immigration is a good thing. What I am saying though is that things never stay the same; there is no long golden period when we were British and proud and all our citizens were happy and everything was fine and we were mono cultural; we have been and always will be in flux. I understand that hysterical headlines will always garner avid readers but come on, let's stop viewing the world in black and white.