Been thinking about the English Defence League people who burnt down a mosque recently.

All they want is a homeland, this EDL lot. England. They want to defend England.

A pure England. A land of the Angles. A truly English place. Who would deny anybody’s human right to a homeland? Let them have it, I say.

According to their website ‘The EDL believes that English Culture has the right to exist and prosper in England.’ [their caps. I won’t go into the EDL grammar right now]

They are also concerned about people who want to ‘impose non-English cultures on the English people in their own land.’

In order to make sure that this ‘New England’ is both racially and ideologically pure, the EDL supporters who live there will restrict themselves to that which is strictly ‘Anglo’.

The Angles were a Germanic people who settled in Britain in the post-Roman period. Therefore their homeland, where the Angles actually come from, is therefore Angeln, in Schleswig-Holstein, on the Jutland Peninsula. However, because there are so many Germans already there this may be problematic.

‘East Anglia’ seems logical at first, but so much of this area was reclaimed by Dutch engineers that they can’t really have that. So I’m suggesting a section of Kent, although because they will not be using modern English it won’t sound exactly like that, especially the vowel sound.

The language they will speak in this ‘New England’ is the primitive Germanic English of the Angles: of course they won’t be allowed proper numbers (which are Arabic), nor words of a Greek, Latin, Norman French origin, nor loan words from other ‘non English’ languages. This will reduce their potential vocabulary by around 80-90%.

They won’t be allowed the Saint George’s Cross, sadly, as Saint George is also patron Saint of Catalonia, Portugal and Bulgaria plus George was Palestinian and therefore possibly wouldn’t get on too well with EDL as a result.

For their homeland to be fully authentically ‘English’, a lot of things will have to go: no cups of tea, which comes from India and Sri Lanka; no fish and chips either because fish and chips was invented by French Huguenot and Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Nor chicken tikka masala either. Lager wasn’t invented but they could have beer and mead and they are allowed roast beef, but no roast potatoes because potatoes are foreign.

The current Royal Family comes from all over Europe, so they can’t have the Queen any more, and Parliament comes from a French word so that’s out. The Angles worshipped a range of gods so God Save The Queen is a no no. Sadly the Angles have left little in terms of art, literature, and architecture because they assimilated with other tribes, and then the more technologically-advanced Normans basically took over their remaining lands. We know from archeological evidence that they lived in wattle and daub structures, none of which survive.

The good news is that they will be allowed to keep their misspelt tattoos – Anglo Saxon tribes were heavily tattooed – and they will be allowed simple wooden ships. But in general when it comes it comes to defence of New England the picture is bleak: they will be allowed hand-held weapons but not much more because all the really capable military hardware came much later on.

So…a doomed land of terrible food, where people with bad tattoos can use limited vocabulary and live in huts whilst being laughed at by other more civilised people. A genetic cul-de-sac.

Not Looking for New England? Then stop burning down mosques. Tell your friends and colleagues not to burn down mosques. And if you know anyone who may be tempted to think EDL could usefully stand for anything other than English Disco Lovers, remind them that pretty much everything you like about this damp lump of rock in the middle of the Atlantic comes from our relationship with things outside it, and that its successful future will be based on people getting on with each other – not an invented ideological war, between what you’ve been told ‘England’ means and what you’ve been told ‘Islam’ means and the erroneous belief that they are somehow mutually incompatible.

The bigger words may need explaining.