Whatever the whys and wherefores of that latter speculation, people have always migrated to and colonised Britain; and the Brythons and Gaels are no more ‘original’ to Britain than the Anglo-Saxons. Also, many modern historians refute the idea that the Anglo-Saxons committed genocide in the regions they conquered. But even if there was widespread slaughter, which is disputed, it’s also unimaginable that the victors didn’t take their spoil, i.e. that they didn’t take British women to be their wives or concubines, and that rapes didn’t take place. Therefore, interbreeding will have happened.

The Brythons, Gaels and Picts are the original people of these islands – ‘Celtic’ is a cultural term applied to them since the nineteenth century as a ‘Not English’ catch-all.

Hardly any Anglo-Saxons ‘interbred’ with Britons, they caused a racial holocaust, like they did to the Danes a few centuries later.

Indeed but Cornish nationalism and the Cornish nation were also of an inconvenient size and did not fit New labours plans. This resulted in the predictable attacks on Cornish aspirations as ‘nationalistic’, ‘isolationist’ and as wanting to ‘cut Cornwall off’.

I’ve said it before but … New Labour had bugger all to do with elective devolution in Wales and Scotland. The foundations of the Scottish settlement were agreed under John Smith’s leadership and the process of reaffirming the policy in Wales was already well underway by the time of Smith’s death. What of Gordon Brown? Well, there’s a big difference between writing about devolution as a policy wonk/signing bits of paper in opposition and the real deal. There was and there remains a serious disconnect between the New Labour project and the devolution project and Gordon Brown has proved temperamentally incapable of bridging it.

If you read an account of devolution by a Welsh commentator as opposed to the usual London tripe you would probably see such phrases/buzz words as the quango state, quangocracy, bonfire of the quangos, Peter Walker, David Hunt, John Redwood, William Hague, colonial governor generals, old Labour fiefdoms, one-partyism, new politics, democratic accountability, rebranding, inclusivity (Ron’s favourite word – the real ‘I’ word of the Welsh debate), Welsh solutions to Welsh problems … . Usually missing from the London narrative is any reference to the desire to reform a pre-existing devolved settlement. As a result much of the English electorate is under the mistaken impression that we were starting out with a blank piece of paper in 1997 and the English somehow got left off the page.

Back to Thatcher and the miners for the moment … The miners stood proxy for industrial Britain and its problems. London’s answer? Send in the bully boys – the Met and MI5. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not claiming that Wales and Scotland suffered more than parts of England but Wales and Scotland had the means to take power away from an over-powerful centre. There was a general indifference to the civil rights of miners back in 1980s and now people are puzzled as to why the Met has such a wide definition of the ‘enemy within’.

Britologywatch outlines the argument of socialist cohesion as espoused by the centrist wing of the Labour party. But let’s look at the record: Labour had never held power for more than one term and a bit; Labour could be out of power for large periods of up to 18 years; Labour heartlands suffered all the disadvantages of a one-partyism – cronyism, corruption and atrophy; Britain remained in the grip of a public school-attending Ox-bridge elite. Time to do things differently …