No English Culture for England

'For our elites, the problem is not that English folk music is too ‘white,’ it’s that such a thing as England ever existed at all.'

From The European Conservative

By Sebastian Morello, PhD

For our elites, the problem is not that English folk music is too ‘white,’ it’s that such a thing as England ever existed at all.

Over the weekend, The Daily Telegraph published an article which revealed that almost “£1.5 million in taxpayer funding has been awarded to a research project that aims to ‘decolonise’ folk singing.” Such research is surprisingly typical within universities at least in one respect, namely that the funding is awarded on the grounds that the conclusion of the research is determined long before any research begins. Hence, in no way can this be understood as scholarship, but rather it possesses both the form and the content of propaganda, and for a particular kind of regime.

With their “fieldwork,” as they call it, the University of Sheffield-based researchers plan to show how English folk music—from the perspective of its themes, its performers, and its supporters—is plagued by what the researchers refer to as “white-centricity.” Having exposed the English folk music scene as a hotbed of “white-centricity,” perpetuating what the lead researcher calls “various notions of Englishness”—God forbid there might be something called ‘Englishness’ in England!—the team will embark on the practical steps required in the “process of decolonisation.” Who, exactly, is responsible for colonising English folk music is left ambiguous. (Were that brought to the fore, by analogy it would be necessary to say that Mongolians ‘colonised’ Mongolian throat singing, rather than just inventing it.)

As I say, this is not research. Its conclusion is predetermined. This is a case of taxpayers’ money given to finance propaganda for a regime the vast majority of taxpayers despise. Let us not forget that Labour will win in the forthcoming election not because they will get more votes, but because traditional Tory voters will not vote Conservative. The reason for this is that it is now widely understood that the parties competing for our votes are representatives of the same failing regime, and the people of the nation loath that regime. Both major parties love the regime; they merely disagree over who ought to hold power within it. That’s why an attack on English folk music can obtain funding from the State: because folk music is a phenomenon which is genuinely conservative, and thus undermining of the regime. 

In the 1960s, when the West was in the throes of cultural progressivism and the sexual revolution, people like Martin Carthy, Shirley Collins, and John Renbourn were travelling around the country and beyond to collect the old songs before they were all lost in the post-war spasms of what everyone then called ‘progress.’ These people certainly never thought of themselves as ‘conservative,’ but their labours touched the heart of the conservative enterprise, namely the securing of social and cultural anamnesis. 

Even before the folk revival began a decade or so after World War II, in East Anglia the farmworker Harry Fred Cox, the fisherman Sam Larner, and the carpenter Walter Pardon had managed to make recordings of the old rustic songs that they feared the next generation wouldn’t learn by heart. Hence, the entire folk movement has been one of national and cultural remembrance. Folk music is—and it remains—a backward looking, inherited, and thus a gifted form of musical storytelling. Folk music is, in essence, a profound affront to modernity. It is a form of music that roots a people, something that they can share, and it belongs to a particular culture; ultimately, it connects one with one’s ancestors, forming a conduit through time of ancestral knowledge and experience. 

One of the wonderful aspects of folk music as a genre is that every nation, and indeed every distinct people and region, has its own. I personally love the folk traditions of the world. Last week, I visited Budapest for the first time in nearly 20 years, this time to deliver a short address at a conference organised by the Danube Institute and sponsored by the University of Public Service. During my visit, I was deeply impressed by the folk expressions of nationhood on display. Hungarians seem to take pride in their traditional cuisine (and so they should), their national dress, and their folk music. 

On arrival at London Heathrow on my return journey, I was greeted by the morality propaganda of the regime under which the English are forced to live: a large image of an elderly Asian gentleman applying to himself lipstick and nail varnish, accompanied by the words “Who are you, when there are no labels?”; in the next room was a huge blown-up picture of a smiling black woman in a Tudor-era dress. Just imagine arriving in Johannesburg Airport to be greeted by a massive picture of a pale, blonde, grinning man dressed as a Zulu warrior. 

The great irony is, of course, that the English do not really care about race at all; racial identity only becomes an issue when elites start insisting that folk music is too white and the Tudors weren’t black enough. Meanwhile, we might reasonably wonder why no university research team seems concerned by the ‘black-centricity’ of reggae, for example, or what measures might be required to ‘decolonise’ it.

There is a reason why taxpayer funds must go to deconstructing and undermining the massive achievement that is the English folk music canon. It is the same reason why our politicians sneer at people who fly the St. George outside their homes, and why the closure of pubs throughout the land is promoted as positive for health, and why there is an ongoing attack on the countryside and fieldsports—the most recent innovation being that of characterising rural England as ‘racist,’ about which you can find countless articles by regime outlets with a quick Google search. In short, as far as our powerholders are concerned, the English are not allowed to have a culture of their own. And the rhetorical mechanisms themselves are clever, it must be said; perhaps the cleverest being the accusation that any concern that England’s culture may disappear due to unprecedented immigration and well-funded attacks on the national culture is itself a ‘racist’ concern.

The fact is, inasmuch as we are rooted, connected to our history, and communitarian, we cannot become the optimal units of interchangeable loci of production and consumption. We cannot be fully instrumentalised—moved about, sold, and bought—because so long as we have a culture, we will continue to have commitments that are extra-economical. In the modern political-economic paradigm, the uprooted and alienated migrant is the perfect unit of society. And the only thing better than a poor migrant is a wealthy one, who thus can function as the progressive consumer-producer par excellence. Hence, the English must have their culture taken away, and they must become uprooted, and insofar as our powerholders fail in effecting this social transformation, they will have helped at least by omission to slam the brakes on the forces of progress—which in their eyes would be an unforgivable sin.

In a time in history that seeks to turn everyone except the top 0.1% into slaves of some kind or another, extra-economical commitments must be stamped out, and this is especially so in a country as economically important as England. That, in short, is what we’re up against. Fortunately, I am not alone in hating our powerholders and their plan for the world, and that’s why after half a decade of torment under Labour, we will likely get Nigel Farage as our prime minister. That, of course, will not be sufficient to undo the ruination of the land I love, but it might suffice to slow it down.

Pictured: Part of a set of glass lantern slides of May Queen images believed to be from the early 1900s, possibly in the Cheshire area.