Britain: the

About 15,000 years ago, the first immigrants from Asia crossed the Bering Straits, making their way to what is now Europe. Until 5,000 years ago, Britain was part of that land mass, then the ice sheets melted, sea levels rose and the nation of Great Britain was born.

The populace was the people who had wandered to this far corner of Europe and stayed there, trapped by the new seas. It wasn't a great idea, as they would find out, as the first wave of raiders sated their curiosity, invading the shores to find out just what was so special about this green and pleasant land.

Some invaders came and went, satisfied with a quick rape and pillage. Many more stayed, bred and interbred with the vanquished people of these isles.

So when Bridlington's Tory MP John Townend expressed consternation at the number of asylum seekers and immigrants coming to these shores - fearful they would dilute our pedigree and leave the country inhabited by "mongrels" - his comments were a tad late, by about five millennia.

The reality is that as a race, we are about as pure as a bag of pick-and-mix.

"Wave after wave of settlers have arrived here," says head of history at the University of Northumbria Dr Don MacRaild. "We have a very complex history, so the idea of the mongrelisation of the nation is a joke."

Even the so-called "homogenous Anglo-Saxons" heralded by Mr Townend as the pure Britons, actually hailed from what is now Germany and Holland. How British is that? The Flemish Jutes also popped over and left their mark, as did the Normans, themselves a Franco-Scandanavian blend. And who can forget the Romans and what they did for us? Their armies were a motley bunch made up of every conquered country in Europe.

Even those woad-painted ancient Brits, the Picts, who went into battle naked, shaking their wherewithals at their opponents to frighten them off, were from Scotland, except originally they were from Ireland.

In more recent times, the intermingling of races has continued, unabated. Britannia ruled the waves and travelled around the globe, spreading her seed among other nationalities. Foreign trade brought countless sailors in contact with all manner of races. The slave trade brought those races here, in chains, and many a master was happy to fraternise.

In the 18th Century, the Huguenots fled Catholic persecution in France and, being excellent business people, were greeted with open arms by the British. But then the British have a habit of welcoming races when they prove to be useful. In the 19th Century, Irish migrs arrived in their thousands to work as navvies on the country's fledgling rail network. Those enterprising Irish folk returned in the 1950s and 1960s to dig tunnels and build our motorways.

At times there was tension - history records many a fracas in Liverpool between the Irish and locals. It also recalls great anti-German feeling against settlers here during the First World War and Italian immigrants being interned during the Second. But on the whole, foreign folk have found a welcome here.

The post war years of the 1940s saw a chronic labour shortage in Britain's mills and public transport system sustained by an influx of workers from Afro-Caribbean countries, who stayed and assimilated.

"We have had skill gaps which led to immigrants from India," says Dr MacRaild. "We will have an unskilled gap soon. So, if sweeping the streets allows a Romanian family to fulfill its 'American dream', why not?"

Britain also became home to free speech and creativity. Karl Marx wrote his theories of socialism here, George Fredrich Handel penned his Water Music, and Eramus created the famous painting of a portly Henry VIII while living on these shores.

And what better example to set the nation than that given by the royal family, who have shared gene pools for generations. Queen Victoria was the great aunt of Kaiser Bill and Tsar Nicholas II, for instance. George I couldn't even speak English, despite sitting on the British throne, as he was German, and the current royals changed their family name to Windsor, from the less than British Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.

"Some geneticists would take it even further saying that all of us come from one or two Spaniards," Dr MacRaild says. "Robin Cook's comment that chicken tikka is now a national dish may be asinine but it is right. You can't argue any other and our culture has been enriched by it.

"Fifty years ago, if you went out for a meal with your friends it was likely to be for lamb chops and mash, washed down with two pints of mild. Things have changed for the better - our cuisine, our music - it's a fantastic intermarriage of cultures."

It's a point shared by project co-ordinator of the campaign group Show Racism the Red Card, Ged Grebby. "Most people accept multi-culturalism as a positive thing, you learn from other cultures," he says. "Music, food and football, three of my loves, are better for it.

"I consider myself a Geordie. But what is a Geordie? One side of my family tree I can trace to Ireland, the other back to the Vikings, then there are all the influences of being a centre for trading. You find Geordies all over the world, so it's only fair that people have a right to come here."

No one epitomises the race struggle more than former President of South Africa Nelson Mandela, in Leeds yesterday to be made a freeman of the city. He spent the best years of his life behind bars for spreading the seeds which would destroy apartheid, a system of overt prejudice condemned the world over.

But still political parties seek to make political profit from the race card. The British National Party campaigns against racial integration, the Conservative and Labour parties seem to welcome all cultures on the one hand yet condemn them on the other.

But whatever their arguments, the fact remains that the British population has been so ethnically mixed already, with so many people, from Africa, the Caribbean, Asia, China and every single nation of Europe, that it makes a mockery of debating the race issue at all.

l The race debate: see Hear All Side