An Apology on Behalf of the White-English Council of Great Britain

“This is a truly barbaric act that has no basis in Islam and we condemn this unreservedly. Our thoughts are with the victim and his family. We understand the victim is a serving member of the Armed Forces. Muslims have long served in this country’s Armed Forces, proudly and with honour.”

When in May this year, the Muslim Council of Great Britain issued this apology for the murder of Lee Rigby on behalf of all British Islam, I remembered that many years ago, my brother and I found this apology issued by the lesser known ‘White-English Council of Great Britain’. I dug it out again recently and publish the text below.
The horrific images of torture from Basra are in danger of giving the whole White-English community a bad image in the eyes of all of the people in this country and around the world. Therefore, as community spokespeople, we would like to use this moment to apologise unreservedly on behalf of our community.

The White-English are a peace loving culture. Despite the recent wars in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Iraq; the selling of weapons to the murderous Indonesian and Sri Lankan governments; the attempt by certain members of the community to launch, and the tacit collusion of the community leaders with, the failed coup in Equatorial Guinea, the word ‘crusade’ to the vast majority of White-English people means simply the struggle for truth and righteousness. It was only a small minority who used it as an excuse for the atrocities committed in 1096 and for the subsequent nine and a quarter centuries.

We can assure the rest of the world that the White-English are a tolerant people and that the vicious racism expressed in the appalling riots of Oldham, Bradford and Burnley, or by certain football fans, the ‘bad apples’ of the police force or by the editors and journalists of the mainstream media, are in fact the views of an extremist minority. We will continue to fight against this brand of fundamentalism which goes against the progressive minded culture of our people. There are now, for instance, fewer White-English people who consider homophobia acceptable in public. Perhaps soon it will be possible in our culture for public figures outside of the entertainment industry to be openly gay.

Although recent newspaper articles in the White-English press on ‘binge drinking’ accompanied almost exclusively by photos of drunk women, may have seemed like a backlash against female emancipation, we have launched an inquiry and can reassure you that these articles were purely concerned for women’s health. Women in our culture are deeply respected and we must apologise unreservedly for those minority who wrongly assume it is part of White-England’s tradition to post pictures of photoshopped, scantily clad models near the front of supposed newspapers. Our proud history of gender-equality has been undermined by those fundamentalists who have burned women as witches, denied women the right to own property, to receive an education, to work in certain professions or to vote in elections; by those who have enforced oppressive sexualities, and sadistically sexually tortured the mentally-ill in the name of medicine and science; and by the idea, held by some in our community, that only women of a certain age and appearance can read the news; or by certain people within the White-English entertainment industry who insist that the only possible female storyline is about finding a man. If prosecutions for rape among the White-English are rare, and the conviction rates rarer, ‘no’ now means ‘no’ most of the time.

The current obsession with ASBOs, ‘neighbours from hell’, identity cards, surveillance and restrictions on the freedom to protest are at odds with the White-English tradition of caring for each other and a flourishing literary tradition in favour of free speech and the free dialogue of diverse discourses. The public burnings, drownings, floggings, hangings, press-ganging, torture, slave-trading, brutal imperialism, collusion with and setting up of tyrannical dictatorships, detentions without trial, manifestly unjust trade policies, the sale of charity wristbands, extraordinary rendition, refusal of entry and subsequent demonization of persecuted refugees and the naked hypocrisy of sending secret service operatives to extract information from prisoners at Guantanamo Bay whilst at the same time ‘demanding back our British nationals’, all in fact go against the fine history of equality and tolerance in this green and pleasant land. The fact that now no immigrant or person of colour is expected to deny their home culture, grovel to the establishment, or to justify through endless apologies their cultural heritage or their continued presence as members of this nation, is, we feel, indicative of White-England’s noble and distinguished culture, of which we can all feel justly proud.

The White-English Council of Great Britain.

Postscript

We are sadly aware that people have been referring to some of the sacred texts of our culture and trying to argue that for instance,

“Rule Britannia,
Britannia rule the waves”; or

“wider and wider may her bounds be set
God that made thee mighty make thee mightier yet”

are religious justifications of imperial conquest based on a supposed birthright of innate superiority. Or that, when White-English people sing hopefully,

“long to reign over us” they are really asking for the continuation of a feudal class dominance. We can say categorically at this point that these lines are taken out of context.