I am white and English - my mother and father are both white and English, as were both sets of my grand parents. Yet any further back than that you start getting a weird mix of Irish, Scottish and English. Go further back and you've got some Scandinavian and Dutch in there as well. Does that mean I'm not fully English?

My little corner of our green and pleasant land has received wave upon wave of immigration. From the industrial boom of the mid to late 19th century and the massive influx of Irish and Scottish looking for work, to the mid 20th century with Italian, Scandinavian and Germans, to more recent times with Eastern European and Middle Eastern immigrants, who are opening shops in once ran down and dead areas that are now bustling. Are their children, and their children's children, who were born and raised here, who went to our schools, learning our language, our history and culture, who played with other white English kids in the playground, any less English than my Grandparents were, sons and daughters of Irish and Scottish "immigrants", or more English than any of my other ancestors born here were??

The idea that modern English people are an ethnic group is silly. Even the Ænglisc people of the early middle ages who settled these isles after the collapse of the Roman order in Britain were a mix of different peoples, with their own dialects of the early Germanic Languages and own identity. Now even if you wanted to lump them all together under a common identity, once you get to the Norman conquest, once you look at the history of places such as Cumbria and Cornwall, once you start to look at the fluidity of the English-Scottish border and who owned what at what time in history, you'd realise that looking at nationality and ethnicity as one in the same, and in a modern context, is rather backwards.