Who do you think you are?
William Ainsworth, three pints into his Friday night quota, announced to no one in particular that he was applying for an Irish passport. The information sidled around the knots of drinkers without anyone showing interest until it reached those standing closest to the fire. They fancied themselves as
philosophers and savants, above the level of the other men gathered in the bar of the village pub.
‘Why?’ Jeremiah asked, a man given more to nosiness than to intellectual curiosity.
‘I’m getting ready for leaving the EU. With an Irish passport I’ll be able to work for the EU Commission in Brussels.’
‘Why would they need a tractor driver?’
‘I am licensed to cull deer as well, and I can do badgers,’ William answered.
‘You can’t talk the Brussels language,’ Jeremiah pointed out. ‘And they drive on the wrong side of the road. You’d kill them all in your first week.’
His side-kick, Billy Blackwood, having had a few moments to organise the words for his point butted in, ‘you aren’t Irish, at least you never showed any sign of it and your family has lived here for three generations. How can you be Irish now?’
‘I met an Irish family on the back road to Evesham, just beyond Church Lench. They were looking for directions to Holyhead. Polite they were, the woman was smart looking and the driver thanked me. I liked the look of them. They could vouch for me,’ William said.
‘Did you get their names and address?’ Billy asked him.
‘No, but I’d know that car again if I saw it.’
Citizenship has been a hot topic in the village since the Referendum, before William grew concerned about which citizenship he can claim to build a bright future for himself.
Discussion around the issue has focussed on who can claim to own ‘our country’ and how we earn the right to talk about ‘our country and our way of life being under threat from too many of those coming in’. How do we decide how many of ‘those coming in’ will be ‘a threat to our way of life’? What way of life are we talking about?
How does anyone decide who belongs? In the village, it is easy – your family has been here for four generations and you were born here. Extra points are awarded if your birth was a home delivery rather than in that new hospital in Redditch.
The Anglo Saxons told the Vikings to sod off because they were here first, the prior occupancy argument.
The Romans argued they belonged because they could knock the stuffing out of anyone who stood in their way, the brute force argument. This argument was reinforced when they built a wall across the top of the country and anyone north of the wall did not qualify for anything. DTrump likes this Roman idea of building a wall to keep our unwelcome outsiders.
The Normans poked out Harold’s eye on the basis that family connections and a stronger army gave them a pressing claim. The Plantagenets, Tudors and various German families trooped into our history to offer proof of belongingness based on severed heads, deceit, strategic marriages, better alliances or bribing more people than the other side bought.
Arguments in the pub were more confusing on the topic of ‘our English way of life’. The most widely recognised picture was one that hankered back to the days of longbows, beating back marauding Welsh cattle thieves, Robin of Loxley, sinking the Armada, winning two world wars, the building of the railways and family holidays fruit picking around Evesham.
A more sophisticated version included ballet in London, music at Glyndebourne, Shakespeare in Stratford, the landed aristocracy bestowing beneficence on the peasantry and supremacy of the Anglican Church. The proponent of these fanciful descriptions of ‘our country’ were put forward by the village in-comer who is a librarian at the new library in Birmingham, a place that few from the village will even think of visiting.
Accounts of ‘ordinary people from inner cities’ being interviewed on TV about ‘the danger to our way of life’ were misquoted in the pub and totally rejected as horrific misrepresentations of what it meant to be British. Martin Crookshank said he once went to an inner city, he thinks it was Birmingham. He said the people he met looked like him but never went to work, did not speak proper English like he did, were scruffy and dirty and kept their houses in such a poor state that he would not let his pigs live in them never mind a person from another country. The drinkers in the pub were unsure if he was in favour of people coming in or if he wanted cleaner places to keep his pigs.
One thing is clear. We fear for William if he is given an Irish passport and drives his tractor around Brussels for the EU Commission. He will be an in-comer there and will threaten the way of life enjoyed by the Brussels people. To escape William, many of them will want to come here to live and they will be a threat to our way of life and the argument will start all over again.
Hopefully the Irish Passport Office will want a stronger argument for citizenship than, “I helped a nice Irish family find their way when they were lost near Church Lench”.
