The Frank Bruno Question

On polite lies and luxuries we can no longer afford

Defending the identity of the native British feels like trying to withstand the onslaught of a great, grimdark stalking machine that never relents or pauses. No sooner have the natives hunkered down again behind a hastily-built fortification than the titan’s shadow blocks the sun, and its scavenger creatures scurry out to dismantle your battlements once more.

The term “natives” has itself been deconstructed and “debunked” due to the admixture of other northern European groups. The next line of defence was “British” and “not British”, but the Act of Union meant everyone was classified as British in a bureaucratic sense, and that’s all that counts. We tried a universal “white”, but it encompassed people from Finland to Greece, Argentina to Bulgaria.

Time and again, we built a redoubt, made a definition, only for the managerial machine to trample it underfoot as wave after wave of foreigners flooded in.

In recent years, we built a new fortification of ethnic markers around the term “English”. Here, finally, was solid rock to build upon: an immutable characteristic that could not be manipulated or redefined. Just as men cannot become women, or vice versa.

As ever, the rusting hulk of the regime’s identity-destroying stalker has arrived and swiftly released its gnawing scavenger beetles. This time, the strategy focuses on recent pop culture memory rather than Norman invaders or Viking raiders.

The argument goes that, in the 1980s and 1990s, Britain had prominent ethnic minorities on the national stage, and nobody questioned their loyalty or “Britishness”. Typical examples include newsreader Trevor McDonald, footballer John Barnes, and Frank Bruno. You could also add Scary Spice Mel B, Craig Charles from Red Dwarf, and Denzel from Only Fools and Horses.

It would be a bit of a stretch to say that nobody made “racist” remarks about these people, they most certainly did. Likewise, many people at the time (such as my grandfather) didn’t regard them as British at all.

However, the regime mouthpieces are not wrong to argue that, by and large, these people were accepted and, indeed, quite popular. If hard, biological or ancestrally rooted definitions of Englishness are allowed to stand, they argue, then these popular personalities would be shut out, and from their position that is highly immoral and wicked.

Very few people argue that Frank Bruno isn’t British, but the problem is, if the United Kingdom were not constituted as a civic identity, what then would Frank Bruno be?

If we now accept that Frank Bruno is English because he’s a “national treasure”, then we open ourselves to abolishing the concept of English as an ethnic identity. What follows is that the ancient people of England become just another people, wandering as nomads without any claim beyond paperwork and managerial dictats.

It’s an ugly, tragic situation.

When Frank Bruno fought Mike Tyson in 1989, when Red Dwarf aired in the early 90s, Britain was 94.5% White. Go further back in time and that percentage only increases. Such extreme racial homogeneity meant that allowances could, and were, made for outliers.

Again, this is not to say that everyone thought John Barnes was English, they didn’t, but that as an issue it wasn’t politically charged because it didn’t need to be.

Polite lies, even a sense of noblesse oblige, were made because the core group seemed unassailable. Today’s argument (really a demand) is that the ambiguity of decades ago, when the natives were demographically secure, can be scaled up, all the way up, until the natives are replaced or rendered redundant.

The core group is now moving toward a fight-or-flight attitude, and the previously polite stances toward minorities can no longer be afforded precisely because the demographic shift has been so catastrophic and all-encompassing.

The cultural, racial and psychological prerequisites of “tolerance” have evaporated like morning mist. The king is now a pauper in his own castle, and the indulgences must end.

The classic sitcom Only Fools and Horses featured a secondary character named “Denzil” who was black. Denzil is an example of a black person from that era slipping under the radar in terms of racial awareness. He sat in the pub, cowered before his overbearing wife, and was dragged into Del Boy’s plotlines and capers. There was an ambiguity about his precise identity that was left unresolved, because it could be.

Today, the real-world Peckham where Only Fools and Horses was set is 60-70% non-White. People were “tolerant” of Denzil in the show - he was accepted, by and large. Yet that is precisely what has left ethnically English people in Peckham at perhaps a mere 20% of the population. The same pattern repeats itself across the entire country and has resulted in more people racing toward Englishness as an identitarian designation, like a drowning man reaching for a plank of wood.

The Matriarch's Panopticon

By necessity, it would exclude Denzil, Frank Bruno and John Barnes. The alternative is to relinquish any claim whatsoever upon the nation that bears our name.

In many respects, the British Government finds itself in a situation similar to the various Yugoslav regimes that emerged after that unfortunate country was created after World War I. To some extent, such an entity already existed since the Act of Union. What people unflatteringly call the “Yookay” is less rooted in native ethnicities than in a grand social experiment to create “something” tangible out of people from across the globe, abolishing the very idea of ethnic identity, at least for the natives.

No federation of ethnicities can be created if the political project denies core identities and the country’s ethnic composition remains in perpetual flux. If Peckham were regarded as, say, 90% English because the definition were changed, that would not reflect the reality of the place.

Similarly, if the term “English” becomes useless because it no longer describes an ethnic group, that does not change the material realities people live with every day. Fundamentally, it is a question of in-groups and out-groups; twiddling with how those groups are defined does not change the fact that groups exist! The last White family on a street full of Pakistanis is still going to be the last White family, even if it becomes illegal to say they’re the last English family.

Here, we come to the primary reason the concept of English is under attack: it’s awful optics for the regime in London to concede that places like Peckham are only 20% English, or that England as a whole is only 70% English, because it implies that other people are “merely foreign”.

Mass immigration has never been consented to or wanted in Britain. Yet, regime mouthpieces do have a point when they cynically deploy a popular minority figure from years gone by to bolster their arguments. Frank Bruno was not unpopular, but he also did not represent a wholesale demographic transformation of the country. He was “tolerated” because the core group felt no threat.

Now it is beginning to. We had the luxury of believing polite lies, and now we don’t.

The tragedy in all of this is that the “right-wing backlash” is accused of wanting to drag the country back to a past that never existed. In fact, it is the liberal/left centre who want to drag us back to a cultural settlement they destroyed.

The idealised, somewhat race-blind society they demand come into being, existed to an extent in the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s. It didn’t exist to the degree they claim - and they claim the past was racist anyway, but it is true that the majority didn’t mind John Barnes playing for England. They liked Denzil from Only Fools, and few people chafed at Scary Spice chirping Wannabe because she wasn’t fully English.

They had it, and they wrecked it.