It's a misnomer, an innocent one most likely, what they probably mean is "British citizen" or "resident of England".
To my mind the term English has, through semantic change, come to represent something other than its definition and its definition probably ought to change. It would make a lot of sense, at least to me, if the term English was defined as people from England.
I suppose the argument against this would be, my ethnicity is English, presumably yours is too? Everyone has an ethnicity, it is an intrinsic part of the human condition and evolution, some people even have two or more ethnicities. If English no longer means ethnicity, it begs the question, what is my ethnicity? Do I become ethnicityless? I would argue that this sort of thinking could lead to more explicit racialisation ie people just becoming White, like you see in America and I think that is a far worse path to go down.
I just write white on forms, I've never written English. No one has told me I'm wrong and to my knowledge it has never caused any one any offence. I would say thr term English excluding a large proportion of the English population who consider themselves to be English is a larger problem. But this ethnicity/race conversation is starting to sound similar to the sex/gender debate and that is a rabbit hole that goes deep and dark and I am happy to be blissful in my ignorance of it.
One thing I would ask of you mate, when you apply these rules or ideas against ethnic groups, please be mindful to apply them evenly across different peoples across the world, If I moved to Nigeria to work in the oil industry and qualified for Nigerian citizenship, I could also become an Igbo person, or perhaps move to China and become Han.
If you woke up in a hospital bed in a foreign land and didn't know how you got there and the doctor was shouting at you in broken English, "Kidney replacement for you! What ethnic group, sir! Please, you need kidney, we need to know where to ask!".
That would be between you and them, as far as I'm concerned you can join whatever people you wish as long as they will have you, it's not my business.
My gripe here is the double standard though, It pisses me off to be honest with you, and makes me more protective of the definition.
I find this all very interesting, I really do. Can someone help me. Born in Newcastle upon Tyne, white, the results of a DNA test show my ethnicity breakdown as Which bloody national team should I support?
Understand that completely. I guess it's a by-product of the empire and the commonwealth. We went overseas and brought overseas back with us. I can't say I'm particularly protective at all. I highly doubt my lineage remains true back to when Alfred was uniting the kingdom and all of its Anglo-Saxons. Besides, there's a lot of English dickheads out there who give us a bad name, what's one or two more When they come with a dedicated workforce that props up the likes of the NHS.
You're either a Pict or a Celt, wouldn't walk past the city walls in York after midnight if I were you.
I come across this a lot by the way, extrapolated it means immigration is a sort of punishment for the empire. If mass immigration is supposed to be a good thing, this argument isn't very convincing. Here's the thing though, the Irish, who are going through a similar process as other European countries at the minute, had no empire, and are coming under the same critique. Here's another insane way to view it, having lived in Ireland from 2013-2016, I can tell you the working class in Ireland have it better than the English working class in terms of living standards, which makes you think what was the point of empire if the people haven't been able to benefit for it? Furthermore, are the working classes of England, people with ancestry from fishing villages or small farming towns, responsible for empire?
I have no real thoughts on whether mass immigration is a good or a bad thing, other than it is a thing and it is probably both good and bad for a multitude of different reasons to a multitude of different types of people. Too big a thought for me. I wasn't suggesting it was a punishment as such, just that we travelled far and wide and we brought a lot of stuff, animate and inanimate, back with us. You can't think the Empire was meant to improve the lives of the working class? The ruling class of England care, to this day, as much for the working class of England as they do for the working class of any other country. Not at all.
So would you agree, if the working classes of England didn't benefit and were mostly used as fodder, they are also victims of the empire? And if mass immigration is to be viewed as a byproduct of the empire and the working class English oppose it, they're essentially being double-whammied? There is hell to pay like.
I'm just being daft really. It's not a term that's been used in my profession since at least the middle of the 20th century. The Romans used it to refer to people in the Rhine region and the name came from a group living the region of Marseille. It wasn't connected with people living in the British Isles until about the 17th century. People got all excited about it during the 18th century Celtic revival movement (Welsh separatism etc). Some people speak Celtic languages though, Welsh, Breton, Gaelic/Gallic, etc, which are all related. So maybe people who speak them should be called Celts, even though its not an accurate name, really.
