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 A refutation of User:Lord Loxley 

As soon as my ban expires, I shall revert the English people page to that which had been agreed by a consensus of editors, though I hope that someone else does so sooner. In the meantime, I shall attempt to address each of the issues raised by User:Lord Loxley's in his ""revisions"".

In the ""related ethnic groups"" section you have included Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes, but excluded Welsh. This makes no sense, and it had been agreed by all editors that the Welsh are among the closest ethnic groups to the English, as anyone familiar with those two peoples knows. Your argument appears to be that the Welsh should not be included because they are English - as a result of the 1536 legislation that annexed Wales to the English kingdom. I can only assume that you have no idea what ethnicity actually means, and I suggest you read the article about it. In short, ethnicity has nothing whatsoever to do with legislation, and the mere annexation of Wales to England did not extinguish Welsh ethnic identity. But you don't need to take my word for it, just look at the Welsh people page. And nor, incidentally, is ethnicity dependent on race or genetics. You have accused me of being a racist, but it is you who are the racist by insisting that ethnicity is defined by race. As for Danes and Norwegians, their inclusion is arguable (though not so much the Swedes - very few of them settled in England). The agreed consensus prior to your unilateral intervention was that no Continental ethnic groups would be included, on the grounds that the inhabitants of the British Isles are much, much closer to each other in terms of culture, history, and language than any groups from mainland Europe. Again, this fact is obvious to anyone who knows them. As a Canadian, it is possible that you may have been ignorant of this. If you are not familiar with a subject, it is probably a good idea not to make edits to its page.

Further down the article you have inserted a sentence saying that the Tudors are the chief representative of the English kingdom. This is not only false, it is also completely irrelevant.

Still further down you have completely mangled the section dealing with the Norman Conquest and its effects. You have deliberately suppressed the historical fact that the English became a conquered nation, and inserted irrelevant descriptions of coats of arms. You then suddenly lurch into a (false) description of Neolithic Britain and Gaul, as if this was in any way relevant to the Norman Conquest. You then mention the Roman Empire and one of its short-lived breakaway states, jumping straight to Offa and Charlemagne, desperate to clutch at any sort of straw that will lend support, however flimsy, to your own preconceived notion that no distinction should be made between the English and the French (despite the obvious fact that these two peoples have a very different language, culture, and ethnic identity). Your mention of the consolidation of kingdoms around capitals such as Winchester and Paris is also completely irrelevant, and your suggestion that the English Channel has been the main focus of English cultural development is demonstrably wrong - the North Sea has been just as important, usually more so.

Moving further down still, you have inserted a whole new section entitled ""Royalty"", and it is here that you expose the full extent of your total misunderstanding of (a) what the article is about, and (b) the English people. English identity is not based on coats of arms as symbols. If you want evidence of this, look at the World Cup, being played in Germany as we speak. The English fans, almost to a man, carry the flag of St. George, and only very rarely the Union Jack. They never, ever carry the royal coat of arms in any form. Being Canadian, I suspect that you have received a rather distorted view of the English through Holywood depictions and the like. The vast majority of English people would laugh in the face of the sort of mediavalist aristocratic fantasy that you are espousing. You then go on to claim that all Englishmen are actually descended from royalty! This is patent nonsense, and once again exposes your own royalist fantasies. The medieval French-speaking monarchy deliberately did not interbreed with its English-speaking subjects. Now, I'm not saying that no genetic material from earlier monarchs exists in the modern English population, but that is not the point. Statistically, every single person on earth might be descended from Julius Caesar, or anyone else you care to name who lived long enough ago. Oh, and French is most definitely not a lingua franca used among Englishmen - we don't need one, because we've already got English. Indeed, English people in general have been notoriously bad at learning foreign languages. And all that guff ab