Rees-Mogg's "Mongrel" Argument

Conservative superstar Jacob Rees-Mogg has apparently discovered that the English people have ancestors. And from this quite unremarkable fact, he has manufactured a very bad argument that undermines those fighting against mass migration and multiculturalism.

In an edited video transcript published as an article in The Spectator, the former Tory cabinet minister declared: ‘The English are a mongrel people, not an Aryan master race.’

Now, don’t get me wrong. I agree with the central points of Rees-Mogg’s article; immigrants should assimilate, multiculturalism is old hat, and English civilisation should be lauded. However, he conflates citizenship, culture, and ancestry to the point that it seems he thinks a passport settles the question of identity.

Now, Jacob Rees-Mogg’s status is such that he is internationally recognised. As I said before, he’s a conservative superstar. That being the case, his arguments travel far beyond Westminster. When he drags the term ‘Aryan master race’ into a debate about national identity, apart from nearly breaching Godwin’s Law, he supplies a ready-made smear against people defending their own country, including those of us in Australia.

And, rest assured, we’ve had enough of those sorts of smears here already. Those of us who lead the opposition to mass migration and multiculturalism are called everything from Nazi to racist to xenophobe. Others are just ignored. In fact, Australia’s debate over mass migration and multiculturalism pretty much resembles a town hall meeting where the audience has been denied a microphone. The public is trying to get a message through, but the political class is responding as though its job is to correct the electorate. 

It’s normally a leftist thing to do, but Rees-Mogg’s contribution gives that approach a conservative accent. And it does so using a straw man argument. Defending an existing people does not require answering an allegation about racial purity. The case for preserving England does not depend on proving that no English ancestor ever crossed the Channel. The case for preserving Australia does not rely on notions of Germanic Aryan purity. 

A people acquires its character through the annals of time, with settlements, marriages, religious conversions, shifting political allegiances, language, and generations and generations of the grind of everyday life all culminating to produce something that becomes inherent and cultural. Discovering those earlier ingredients tells us how a people’s identity developed, but it does not negate the result.

The English language contains words from numerous other languages, but nobody responds to this by concluding that the English language does not exist, or that replacing it with other languages would somehow preserve its linguistic continuity. Yet that is the intellectual manoeuvre performed by Rees-Mogg on the very people who speak that language.

He cites the English forebears of the Romans, the Saxons, the Danes and the Normans as if a list of ancestral influences were a demolition notice of Englishness. But Rees-Mogg has history against him. By 731, the Venerable Bede had written his Ecclesiastical History of the English People. This was hundreds of years before the last Saxon King, Harold “the Great” Godwinson, now considered an Orthodox saint, was found dead on the battlefield, identified only by his fully-tattooed body, heralding the Norman Conquest.  

But the Norman Conquest does not provide a mandate for present-day immigration policy. Alfred the Great cannot sign off on the Home Office’s migration settings. William the Conqueror is an especially strange precedent for immigration by democratic consent. An account of how a nation was formed cannot inform a government how many immigrants it should admit within its borders. That decision requires consideration and discernment regarding infrastructure, employment availability, integration, and, most importantly, the wishes of the people of that nation. And I say "people," not "citizens," very specifically. 

Citizenship and national belonging are completely different things. They can overlap but are not interchangeable. The state may have the power to issue passports, but it does not have the power to manufacture an ancestral past for the nation.

Speaking of passports, Rees-Mogg rightly insists on assimilation, but he does so through the argument of confidence in the passport. If joining the culture is a demanding obligation, then issuing a government-approved booklet simply cannot ensure that any requirement of that obligation has been met. Shared loyalties grow through participation, example, institutions, and time. A government cannot stamp them into existence.

Rees-Mogg’s own argument depends on a nation that newcomers encounter and are expected to join. That nation must possess a character that is usually separate from whoever happens to arrive on its shores (unless, of course, they hail from a similar Anglosphere nation, which also proves a point). Otherwise, the demand to assimilate is utterly bereft of meaning.

The Australian application of all this is clear. Our culture grew principally from British foundations, carried and shaped by English, Scottish, Irish, and Welsh settlers and their descendants. The institutions underpinning the Australian nation, including parliamentary government, common law, the English language, and (even though it is now unfashionable to mention) Christianity, were central to our Anglo-Celtic inheritance. Going by Rees-Mogg’s argument, our Anglo-Celtic inheritance would make Australians a greater collection of ‘mongrels’ than the English. But what follows from that? It does not follow that there is any obligation to have soaring levels of mass migration. It does not impose any requirement to organise public life around permanent ethnic and cultural separation. A nation’s mixed origins, settled over centuries, do not oblige it to remain an ethno-cultural construction site forever.

The opposite view is multiculturalism, which is the disastrous notion that the state should treat the maintenance of separate identities as a public achievement and treat demands for a common national culture as an embarrassment. Our governments, both State and Federal, and of all political hues, are signed up to this agenda and celebrate growing ethnic and cultural divisions they are supposed to be managing.

What everyday people want, however, is a confident and forceful account of what would-be migrants are joining: a nation with an inherited culture, language, institutions, loyalties, and expectations. And we want the doors closed to those who would seek to change all of that. That means assimilation, which is now a very dirty word in multicultural Australia and amongst the political class. 

Part of the reason is that assimilation requires immigration levels compatible with the task. Politicians cannot promise integration while refusing to discuss the scale and speed of the changes they impose. Neither can they answer concerns about the strain on housing, public services, or social cohesion with a lecture about somebody’s Norman ancestors.

Australians have every right to demand an end to mass immigration and the replacement of multiculturalism with a policy of national integration. They need no certificate of ancestral purity to exercise democratic authority over their own country and its future. 

Rees-Mogg should understand this better than most. Conservatism begins with the recognition that an inheritance has value and that those entrusted with it owe something to those who come after them.

A nation possesses the right to endure as a recognisable nation. Its history explains that right. It does not dissolve it.

The proper conservative response is to defend our national inheritance and the people who carry it on. Rees-Mogg needs to put the straw man down and get on with the job.

“People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.”
– Edmund Burke