After decades of the incessant drip drip drip of Daily Mail little england bile, it was a wonderful surprise to cast my eye across Patrick Collins headline, Ignore this vile abuse, Kelly is a true Brit. And when I got round to reading the article it was every bit as cheering as the headline itself. The vile abuse that Collins refers to derived from a one Andrew Brons, a leading light in the British National Party, who we learn, chalked up nearly 10% of the vote in the Yorkshire and Humber Region, thus earning this arch racist Europhobe a lucrative seat as an MEP.

We also learn from Collins that Brons is a former member of the openly neo Nazi National Socialist Movement. Remember that lot. We went to war against them sixty years ago under the supposed rationale of stopping Britain becoming part of the Nazi fascist empire. A little ironic then that just sixty years on, nearly a million British voters put their little cross next to a party that rather thinks that Hitler and his thugs were basically OK.

Having established the political pedigree of Mr Brons, Collins turns his attention to the vile abuse that is the expected norm of the BNP. Brons argues that Kelly Holmes cannot be regarded as a fully fledged Briton because of her Jamaican born farther. Brons argues, I don’t accept the term Black British or Asian British. Britons are the indigenous peoples of these isles. Even if there were such a thing as indigenous Britons, Brons argument would be repellent. We live in an increasingly global community and Brons and his fascist ilk had better get used to the fact. But the real fact of the matter is there is no such thing as an indigenous Briton. Everyone on this island is a product of centuries of immigration; wave after wave after wave. The earliest immigrants, generally termed by historians as Beaker people, arrived some one thousand years before the Romans and were travellers from the Rhine Basin in central Europe in what we now refer to as Germany. Then of course there was the Celtic invasionwhose origin might be loosely termed Mediterranean but whose truer origin might be closer to Africa or even India. Now wouldn’t that be upsetting to Mr Brons and Co?

Those early migrations, occurring over centuries, are presumably what the BNP refer to as indigenous Britons but what then of the successive waves of Romans (Italians), Vikings ( Danes and Norwegians), Angles, Saxons and Jutes all of whom might be loosely regarded as Germanic and of course the late arrivals, the Normans (French), who when the matter is investigated were themselves originally from Viking territory. Add to this the more recent arrivals of the Huguenots, The Jews and the Irish and countless other souls seeking a quiet place to lay down their hat, and it is easy to discard any notion of being purely British. We are a truly mongrel nation in the same way that the population of the United States is made up of a myriad of nationalities.

More recent arrivals to Britain from Asia the Caribbean and Africa are simply a continuation of our immigrant past. My advice to Brons and his brain-dead party is to avoid at all cost exploring their own family trees because they might not like what they find.

For a thorough and entertaining account of Britain’s immigrant history I can firmly recommend Robert Winder’s, Bloody Foreigners. I an even prepared to donate a copy to Mr Brons should he care to expand his horizons a little.