Alastair Moffat

THE question of who we are, the Scots and the British, is often seen as a matter of the heart, of emotions linked to notions of patriotism, often nostalgic (“When will we see their like again?”), sometimes sporting, usually blurred and unfocused, definitely not a matter susceptible to scientific analysis. The Scots are different from the English and the British are different from Europe. And that’s a fact. Our history shows it.

Immigration, on the other hand, is seen as something new, an ever more pressing problem some would resist by putting up barriers, and again, something that defies sober analysis. Britain is full, we don’t need more people.

As the arguments begin to intensify and swirl around the European referendum debate and emotions sometimes overcome reason, it is likely that for many they will boil down to two related issues: identity and immigration. Issues of economic impact will probably play a lesser role, no matter their importance. And identity seems closely linked in the minds of some politicians with questions of sovereignty.

In fact there is now a very revealing new way to look at Scottish and British identity and over the last two years ScotlandsDNA has been sampling the components of the genetic ancestry of 9,000 people who are dispersed throughout the United Kingdom. The results are fascinating and surprising.

Geneticists have looked at recent ancestry rather than going back into the depths of prehistory. And they also looked right across our genomes rather than focusing only on fatherlines and motherlines. They looked at 250,000 positions on our genomes, the 6 billion letters of DNA we inherit from both our parents.

First, they assessed our proportions of global ancestry by comparing the results to thousands of other samples, people of known ancestry from around the world. From this they inferred that the British were approximately 70% European, 13% West Eurasian (an area that includes Turkey and the Middle East), 11% Asian, 3% African, with the remainder being statistical noise.

These numbers strongly suggest complex patterns of contact and movement over the last few centuries and they represent an average picture of the total population of Britain. Geneticists then looked at how the European component, the 70%, is broken down and this process produced wide-ranging results. These are an average of all 9,000 results and are best read as a table:

North-West European – 46%

Balto-Slavic – 10%

Basque-Iberian – 10%

Ashkenazi Jewish – 8%

Mediterranean – 7%

Steppe-Turkic – 7%

Anatolian-Caucasian – 6%

Finnish – 6%

Because of a dearth of data, our genetic map of Europe has some gaps but all of the most populous countries are included – Britain, Germany, France, Spain and Italy. North-Western Europe encompasses Britain, Ireland, Northern France, North-Western Germany and Norway. Finnish is self-explanatory and Balto-Slavic concentrates in Eastern Europe and Russia west of the Urals. Basque-Iberian covers most of Spain and Mediterranean is Southern France, Italy, Corsica, Sardinia and Greece. Steppe-Turkic and Anatolian-Caucasian is dominant in Turkey and to the east of the Black Sea while Ashkenazi-Jewish originated in the Levant but many settled to form communities across Europe.

It is a colourful, complex picture of our ancestry but it shows at least one thing very clearly. Not only are the British emphatically, genetically European, the balance of our ancestral DNA is not from North-Western Europe as might be expected – it originates in the south and east of the continent.

These results are derived from a combination of residual DNA over the last few centuries but it is important to note that they are approximate and not precise. This is because while everyone inherits exactly 50% of their ancestral DNA from each parent, grandchildren are not exactly 25% of each grandparent and so on down the generations. But what the percentages mean is that somewhere in a person’s recent ancestry, there is an ancestor who certainly carried a larger percentage of, say, Balto-Slavic or Ashkenazi-Jewish DNA. With dilution over time a significant amount of different lineages have been passed down to show up in this analysis.

My own European results demonstrate that clearly. I have only 40% of my recent ancestry as North-West European but significant percentages have come from the east and the south. Just over 23% of my genome comes from the ancestry cluster described as Balto-Slavic and 17% is Basque-Iberian, from the other end of Europe. What that means is there were individuals in my family tree who came from those parts of Europe – and not all that long ago. My own genealogical research has turned up a grandfather who had links to eastern England – and therein may lie part of the answer.

What is certain is that we in Britain can claim a genetic affinity with several European populations, some of us more than others. The British, it turns out, are not different but a major branch of a European family tree.

As for immigration, the historical truth is even more straightforward. During the last ice nothing and no one could survive in the polar landscape that was Britain for thousands of years. The earliest settlers were driven south, and in the north the ice obliterated any trace of their passing. Once the glaciers groaned, cracked and began to rumble across the landscape as the ice finally melted, about 11,000 years ago, pioneers ventured north to hunt and gather the wild harvest of the Wildwood, the temperate jungle that carpeted much of Scotland. These were tiny populations. Farming was then brought to Britain by more immigrants and on into the historic period, new people kept arriving – Angles, Saxons, Vikings, Normans and others. And all of this did not only take place in distant history. After the Second World War, the 1947 Polish Resettlement Act offered British citizenship to more than 200,000 displaced servicemen unwilling to return home because of the Soviet takeover. Immigration is a constant, and a means of refreshing our identity.

In 1993, Europe was very much on the political agenda when the Prime Minister, John Major, made a speech to the Conservative Group for Europe. He closed with a definition of identity dripping with nostalgia:

Fifty years on from now, Britain will still be the country of long shadows on cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers, and, as George Orwell said, ‘old maids cycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist’, and, if we get our way, Shakespeare will still be read even in school. Britain will survive unamendable in all essentials.

However charming, this is a picture few Scots would recognise – and most English, Welsh or Irish people. Already backward-looking in 1993, this snapshot is now hopelessly out of date and Major missed a clear historical truth. Britain has constantly been amended, changed and developed, and one of the principal agencies of that change has been the fluctuating flow of immigration. Over millennia we have been amended and augmented by new people and they have turned our history in unpredicted directions.

Britain has been and continues to be the destination for millions of genetic journeys and this sense of who our ancestors were and where we came from cannot be frozen in time as old maids cycle through the morning mist. Identity and immigration are intimately linked, and have been over many millennia. The British will keep arriving. For this new research shows that our history is dynamic, an unfinished and incomplete story without a neat or tidy conclusion. It shows something unarguable. We are all the descendants of immigrants and in our DNA we carry their story, their origins, sometimes their culture and also their future as it made its way to this farthest north-west edge of Europe.