Primacy, Not Supremacy

You may not build a church in Saudi Arabia. The kingdom forbids every non-Muslim house of worship and bans the public practice of any faith but Islam. Article 12 of Iran's constitution makes one school of one branch of one religion the official faith of the state, and adds, for the avoidance of doubt, the arrangement will remain "eternally immutable".

Section 7 of Thailand's constitution requires the King to be a Buddhist. Article 48 of India's directs the state to stop people slaughtering cows. Section 4 of Denmark's puts the Lutheran clergy on the public payroll, and Section 6 obliges the King to sit in their pews.

The world shrugs.

Ambassadors attend the receptions, trade delegations sign the contracts, and no university in Britain has ever staged a teach-in on Danish supremacism.

Then an Englishman suggests the bishops should stay in the Lords, Christmas should stay on the calendar, and English should stay the language of the courts.

Within the hour he has been told he is defending so-called "white supremacy", the same phrase once reserved for foreign American thugs in hoods.

A phrase describing the top rung of a ladder of authority was first welded to a doctrine of racial contempt. It has since been stretched over the oldest and most ordinary habit of nations: putting their own inheritance first.

The stretch is a fraud.

Primacy is how a country works, in the way a keel is how a ship stays upright, and the English majority has every right to refuse the swap.

Supremacy Is An English Constitutional Term

Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy in 1534, recognising Henry VIII as supreme head of the Church of England and showing the Pope the door. Catholics disputed the claim, some of them on the scaffold.

Nobody, then or since, read it as a verdict on the relative worth of Tudor Englishmen and Italians.

Noah Webster's 1828 dictionary defined supremacy as the "highest authority or power", and chose as its examples the supremacy of the King of Great Britain and the supremacy of Parliament.

The Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution makes federal law "the supreme Law of the Land".

Air forces fight for air supremacy.

Under parliamentary sovereignty, Westminster can make or unmake any law, and no court may strike its statutes down.

None of these phrases passes judgement on human beings.

The supremacy of Parliament makes no claim about MPs being finer specimens than their voters, a proposition few voters would sign; it simply ranks Parliament's acts above everyone else's.

Supremacy names a position.

Whether anyone deserves the position, and on what grounds, requires a separate argument.

Primacy is gentler still. It means first in order or importance. The primacy of English in an English court, or of the Book of Common Prayer in an English cathedral, describes precedence and nothing more.

Van Evrie And Loaded Language From 1868

The compound phrase "white supremacy" earned its menace honestly. In 1868 the New York pamphleteer John H. Van Evrie reissued a book under the title White Supremacy and Negro Subordination, with a subtitle calling slavery the "normal condition" of Black Americans. The title does two jobs at once: one race on top, and another held underneath by design.

Oxford's learner's dictionary still defines the phrase as a belief in white superiority joined to an entitlement to control other races.

Jim Crow statutes segregated schools, railway carriages, and polling stations across the American South.

South Africa's 1983 constitution built a Tricameral Parliament with one chamber for white voters, one for Coloured voters, one for Indian voters, and none at all for the Black African majority.

From Statute To Staff Handbook

In 1970 Patricia Bidol idiotically defined racism as "prejudice plus institutional power", a formula which survives in diversity training as R = P + P. Oxford hair piece Jordan Scott took it apart in Analysis in 2022, arguing it fails both as an account of how people actually use the word and as a proposal to change it.

In 1997 Charles W. Mills published The Racial Contract, idiotically recasting so-called "white supremacy" as a "political system" rather than a set of beliefs. The era of great music was also filled with very stupid people in the humanities left bitter by their catastrophic defeat in the Science Wars.

All of these things are dumb. Their shameful dumbness is self-evident.

A "system" needs no believers, which is handy for anyone short of evidence.

Tema Okun's 1999 moronic essay, later printed in a 2001 workbook written with Kenneth Jones, lists the "characteristics of white supremacy culture".

The roll call includes perfectionism, a sense of urgency, defensiveness, worship of the written word, individualism, and objectivity. Officials at the Oregon Health Authority later cited the essay to explain why urgency itself counted as a white supremacy trait.

All of the things which have made humanity successful, but aren't found in Africa.

A public health body, in other words, discovered racism in the act of hurrying.

These were not bright people. At all.

The workbook concedes these traits turn up in everyone; non-whites included, and in organisations led entirely by them. A characteristic of "white supremacy" which needs neither white people nor supremacy has lost both its adjective and its noun. Only the accusation survives.

In 2020 the National Museum of African American History and Culture went further. Its "Talking About Race" portal carried a chart titled "Aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness and White Culture in the United States", adapted from a 1978 handbook by an idiot named Judith Katz.

1. It listed hard work, respect for authority, and "objective, rational linear thinking" as marks of "whiteness".
2. Under religion it offered "Christianity is the norm".
3. Under communication it offered "The King's English".

The museum withdrew the chart in July 2020 and apologised. Rightly so. It was shameful.

Anyone who has read a letter from an English council will be relieved to learn the King's English still frightens somebody.

The chart catalogued the ordinary habits of a majority culture: a default faith, a common tongue, the married family, punctuality, and written records. It took the primacy of those habits and relabelled it "supremacy".

Every Country On Earth Puts Something First

Run an eye across the world's constitutions and the pattern is impossible to miss. We can start with religious faith first as it makes the case without needing additional argument.

Or we could express it differently. Language, accent, and custom first:

• The Indian constitution guards the cow.
• Bhutan expects a civil servant to turn up in national dress.
• Ireland crowns a language most of its citizens do not speak over breakfast.
• Wales spends public money keeping Welsh on every road sign, and nobody in Cardiff Bay is accused of Celtic supremacism for it.

Each country, however, puts a particular faith, tongue, or people at the head of the queue, in writing, at the highest level of law.

France, a republic which considers itself the most rigorously neutral state on earth writes French into Article 2 of its constitution and bans conspicuous religious symbols in state schools.

Neutrality, French style, means everyone is equally obliged to be French.

A "British secularist" (whatever that means) who wants the bishops out of the Lords proposes the same trick: his own primacy installed in place of the Church's. Somebody's inheritance will come first.

The only live dispute is whose.

Riyadh Gets Warplanes, We Get Lectures

Article 1 of its Basic Law of Saudi Arabia declares an Arab Islamic state with the Qur'an and the Sunnah as its constitution. There is no church in the kingdom, no temple, and no synagogue, and a Christian guest worker who prays aloud in a public place is breaking the law.

Saudi law permits the death penalty for apostasy, blasphemy, and sorcery, and the usual method of execution remains the sword.

The kingdom put at least 356 people to death in 2025, a record.

One faith may worship in public and every other faith may not. This is supremacy in the full and literal sense, written into law and enforced with a blade.

Britain's response has been to sell Riyadh warplanes under the Al-Yamamah deal, the largest export contract in British history, and to wave through the Saudi sovereign wealth fund's purchase of Newcastle United in 2021. Nobody in the faculty lounge demands a cathedral in Jeddah.

The same "diversity" workshop which detects "white supremacy" in a primary school assembly rarely spares a slide for a kingdom where no parish church may stand.

A phrase which ignores a state run on the sword, and fires at a parish council for putting up a nativity scene, has stopped tracking rules. It now tracks targets, and that would be the... English majority.

Primacy Keeps Machinery Running

On 12th November 1996 a Saudi Boeing 747 and a Kazakh Ilyushin collided over Charkhi Dadri in India, killing all 349 people aboard both aircraft. The investigation found the Kazakh crew had misunderstood air traffic control, and recommended English language proficiency among its fixes.

The International Civil Aviation Organization went on to require operational English for pilots and controllers on international routes, with the first deadline in March 2008.

Global aviation runs on one language because the alternative leaves wreckage in fields.

Switzerland has four national languages, yet Article 70 of its constitution lets each canton choose its own official language and protect the traditional language of its territory. A tax office in Zürich answers in German, and nobody demands it reply in Romansh. Belgium fixed a language border in the early 1960s, carving the country into a Dutch-speaking north, a French-speaking south, and a sliver of German in the east, with bilingual Brussels wedged in the middle.

The arrangement is fractious, expensive, and still standing, precisely because each side knows which language its own town hall speaks.

• Courts need one language of record.
• Armies need one language of command, because a field order issued in four languages arrives in at least three of them too late.
• Shops, schools, and offices need common days of rest, which is why Israel's Basic Law fixes the Sabbath and the Jewish festivals while guaranteeing non-Jews their own days off.

A shared calendar, a shared law, and a shared tongue let strangers cooperate without negotiating the terms of every encounter from scratch.

Primacy is a feature, not a bug.

A country which refuses to put anything first ends up as a waiting room: fair to everyone and home to nobody.

England's Primacy Is Written Into Statute

England's settlement is no folk memory. It sits on the statute book.

In the 2021 census, 81.7% of residents of England and Wales gave their ethnic group as White, and 74.4% as White British. Christianity remains the largest religion in the country by a wide margin.

This is beautiful. It is wonderful. It is how things are meant to be in our country, according to our heritage and our continuity for our unique stormy isles.

Stating these facts describes a country. Nobody who reads the Act of Settlement aloud has confessed to anything.

The majority has rights, as the minority does.

It may wish to keep its parish churches, its Christian festivals, its common law, its own history in the classroom, and its language in public life. Continuity is a legitimate political good in its own right.

A majority need not prove harm before declining to dismantle its inheritance, any more than a family must prove harm before declining to sell the house.

Settling collective questions of this kind is precisely what democratic majorities exist to do.

Confession Fallacy: Is/Ought For Our Age

Picture Dave, at the bar of a Wetherspoons, offering four remarks over the course of an evening. Dave is our guy. The ordinary man on the bus.

The leap from the first sentence to the second is the old is–ought problem identified by David Hume: a fact about the past does not by itself prescribe the future.

Dave can describe England's history without demanding anything.

The leap from the first two sentences to the last two is worse because it treats a statement of fact, or an ordinary preference, as a signed confession of hidden creed.

Call it the confession fallacy.

A critic is entitled to ask Dave what he means. They are not entitled to decide the answer on Dave's behalf, write it on a placard, and march it past his house.

1. A foreigner Muslim (wrongly) believes paedophile Muhammad is the final prophet.
2. An English Christian (rightly) believes no one comes to the Father except through Christ.
3. A mistaken, stubborn Jew (wrongly) believes in a covenant with Israel which has already been explained by Paul a million times as fulfilled by Christ.

Each holds his own tradition to be true and the others mistaken.

None of these beliefs requires one to regard one's neighbour as a lesser human being.

Believing one's tradition deserves to come first is a world away from believing one's neighbour deserves to come second.

Losing A Vote Is Not Oppression

A minority group asks for something obscene, stupid, or anti-English, to become part of the nation's public institutions. The majority rightly declines, while affirming the group's freedom to believe and practise as it stupidly as it likes (which it would not be allowed to do elsewhere).

The refusal is then reclassified as proof of so-called "supremacy".

The argument about the proposal vanishes, and the majority finds itself in the dock for its character instead.

The purpose of the third step is to apply cheap feminine reputational pressure to extract a concession the proposal could never win on its merits. Moral blackmail is an ugly phrase, but it's an accurate one. The same disgusting, shameful nonsense found in a girls' high school, but somehow involving grown men.

A minority in England may argue, vote, organise, petition, and stand for Parliament. It enjoys the full protection of the law against unequal treatment.

It has no right to prevail merely because it is a minority, and the majority commits no wrong merely by outvoting it.

Minority status plus a rejected preference is presented as equalling oppression. The sum leaves out the only term which matters: evidence of a rule which treats citizens unequally. Without it, the complaint amounts to having lost an argument, which happens to everyone in a democracy sooner or later, and to the English rather often.

Some Cultures Are Better

South Africa offers the cleanest comparison. Because, frankly, any possible discussion about "multiculturalism" ends up where South Africa is. It's so ugly, no leftist will dare to bring it up because it destroys any "argument" they are attempting to make.

Under apartheid, a white minority of roughly one in ten held political supremacy, because the law shut everyone else out of the national franchise. Numbers had nothing to do with it.

Today the majority governs, isiZulu is the language most spoken at home, and African languages, customs, and history occupy a central place in public life under the 1996 Constitution.

If the cultural primacy of an African majority in South Africa is the legitimate expression of a democratic people, the cultural primacy of the English majority in England is too.

If one is supremacy, so is the other.

1. Article 41(2) of Pakistan's constitution bars any non-Muslim from the presidency, so a Christian citizen of Lahore is formally disqualified from the highest post in his own country.
2. Article 153 of Malaysia's reserves quotas in the civil service, scholarships, and business permits for Malays and other indigenous groups.
3. Saudi Arabia bans the public worship of every faith but one.

The test which acquits the Danish church convicts the Pakistani clause, and nobody's private thoughts need enter into it.

England passes comfortably.

A Hindu may become Prime Minister, and one did. A Muslim may lead the Opposition, sit on the bench, or command a regiment.

The only office tied to the Church is the one whose holder swears to defend it, much as the Danish King must belong to the Lutheran Church he heads.

Our culture is better.

Sorry We Won, Again And Again

"Supremacy" attached to a race or a faith inside leftist politics has a precise and damning meaning: rules which rank citizens by blood or creed. Van Evrie's book, the Jim Crow statutes, the Tricameral Parliament, and the Saudi ban on churches all exemplify it, and the evidence for each sits in print for anyone to look at.

Primacy is the condition of every nation which has ever existed, and the reason most of them still function.

Something comes first: a language, a church, a calendar, a body of law, a story about where the country came from.

The English majority is entitled to keep its own inheritance in first place, to say so in public, and to decline proposals to replace it, while every citizen keeps equal rights before the law.

The English majority owes nobody an apology for coming first in England. Our culture is better. Our people are better. Our technology is better. Our ideas are better.

We call them primary and give them primacy. But they deserve the word supremacy.