Unmaking England: Will immigration demolish in decades a nation built over centuries? By Benjamin Schwartz. A long article with a lot to say, especially in light of the latest election. Imagine you are “old British”. How do you vote against what is destroying your country? Something to ponder as the election results come in and the post-election spin begins.
Over the last 18 years, Great Britain — more precisely, England, a distinction we’ll get to soon — has been in the grip of the most profound social transformation since the Industrial Revolution. …
The mass immigration that Britain has experienced since 1997 — the year Tony Blair’s New Labour government radically revised the immigration laws in a deliberate effort to transform Britain into a multicultural society — has had an effect wholly different from that of all previous political and social disruptions. …
Mass immigration hasn’t merely embellished, changed, or even assaulted the enduring, resilient national culture [of England]. Rather, by its very nature — by its inherent logic, and by the ideology, aspirations, and world-historical forces from which it springs and to which it gives expression — it perforce obliterates that culture. …
No, England won’t last. Some background:
The tiny number of Roman and Norman conquerors were the thinnest veneer over the native population and have left virtually no genetic trace. Furthermore, based on DNA sampling of contemporary native Britons and of the mitochondrial DNA recovered from the teeth of prehistoric human skeletons, the emeritus professor of human genetics at Oxford, Bryan Sykes, concludes that “by about 6,000 years ago, the [matrilineal genetic] pattern was set for the rest of the history of the Isles, and very little has disturbed it since.” At least three-fourths of the ancestors of today’s Britons were already in the British Isles then.
A final influx of Angles, Saxons, Frisians, and the like — which brought no more than 250,000 people over a period of several centuries — essentially completed the genetic mix. Thus, the evidence demonstrates the striking fact that, genetically, the population of Great Britain has been essentially frozen in time and place since at least the Dark Ages — indeed, settlement patterns from that period emerge clearly on contemporary genetic maps.
As the dean of British geneticists, Oxford’s Sir Walter Bodmer, explains, the country’s genetic history reveals “the extraordinary stability of the British population. Britain hasn’t changed much since 600 AD.” …
“If a nation is a group of people with a sense of kinship, a political identity and representative institutions,” the Cambridge historian Robert Tombs writes, “then the English have a fair claim to be the oldest nation in the world.” England’s people have called themselves English since at least the 700s. …
The newcomers:
No discussion of mass immigration to Britain can avoid the terms “non-white” and “visible” minority, the meanings of which are interchangeable. …
Several largely unassimilated, in fact often rigidly self-segregated, ethnic groups, members of which may be the British-born children or even the grandchildren of immigrants, form geographically distinct enclaves throughout urban England.
To cite extreme examples, British-born children of immigrants make up most of the estimated 3,000 British Muslims trained in al-Qaeda camps, most of the estimated 500 British citizens fighting for ISIS, and most of the 300 known or convicted British Islamist terrorists — including three of the four bombers responsible for the 2005 “7/7” attacks, the coordinated series of bombings in London that killed 52 people and injured more than 700. (Those three, by the way, were all of Pakistani descent.) A majority of the rapists and procurers — almost all ethnically Pakistani or Bangladeshi — in the sexual “grooming” crimes that have plagued England’s North and Midlands are also British-born. …
Some ethnic groups — such as the East Indians from Uganda, who fled Idi Amin in the 1970s — have proved far more assimilable than others. Even the widely used, somewhat euphemistic term “Asian” sweeps in, for instance, Sikh Indians who have largely integrated into British life with Bangladeshis and Kashmiri Pakistanis, groups that, as we shall see, haven’t. …
No, this isn’t tantamount to arguing that all Kashmiri Pakistanis or Bangladeshis are jihadists or sexual groomers. But plainly, different cultural and ethnic groups have affected Britain in very different ways: it’s obviously unhelpful to probe for sexual groomers among Britain’s “Asian” population of Indian Jains. If certain minority groups, as groups, pose certain problems — and yes, even present certain dangers — any meaningful discussion must focus on those specific groups. To do otherwise misdirects attention and obfuscates analysis.
What happened:
In 1948, Britain’s non-white minority population stood at the statistically insignificant number of about 30,000. …
By 1997, Britain’s ethnic minority population had grown, thanks to immigration and the children born to immigrants, to about four million. … British — again, really English — society remained defined by a national culture that Orwell would have recognized.
In that year, however, Tony Blair’s just-elected first Labour government launched a demographic — and, concomitantly, a cultural — revolution, a revolution that historians and commentators of all political stripes now recognize as by far Blair’s most historically significant legacy. New Labour greatly relaxed or entirely eliminated previous restrictions on immigration, with the aim to convert Britain quickly to a polity as fully exposed as possible to the apparent social, cultural, and economic advantages of globalization.
Labor was after new votes:
New Labour recognized that the Labour Party’s traditional constituency — the working class — abhorred it. On the issue of a mass-immigration society, however, as on a host of social issues, New Labour believed the wise course wasn’t to alter its policies to conform to the outlook and preferences of old-fashioned Labour voters — after all, where else would those voters turn? — but to forge a new constituency that embraced an economically entrepreneurial and socially progressive vision.
The scale, scope, and rapidity of Britain’s demographic transformation — the consequence of New Labour’s revolution — is unprecedented. Over the last 18 years, about twice as many immigrants have settled in Britain as had done so in the 49 years (1948-97) that constituted the first wave of mass immigration. About 80 percent of these have come from outside the EU, the greatest number from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Somalia, and Nigeria.
In 2014, 636,000 migrants came to live in Britain, and 27 percent of births in Britain were to foreign-born mothers. Since 2001, Britain’s visible minority population has nearly doubled, from 8 percent to 14 percent today. Already “White British” residents are the minority in London, Luton, Leicester, Slough — as they are in large districts of towns and cities throughout England’s Midlands and North. The visible minority population is projected to rise to about 38 percent by mid-century and to over 50 percent by 2070, which will make Britain by far the most ethnically diverse country in the West. …
And England is ceasing to be England:
Together the Pakistanis and Bangladeshis form the biggest minority population in Britain, and they share a similarly rural, intensely clannish, religiously fundamentalist background. (Bangladesh is the former East Pakistan.) They make up a little over half of Britain’s total Muslim population—more than 2.7 million people, slightly under 5 percent of Britain’s inhabitants, are Muslim, though that portion, thanks to high birth rates and immigration, will reach 8.2 percent by 2030. …
A Home Office report on the standoffish Pakistani and Bangladeshi districts in the northern mill towns found that “Separate educational arrangements, community and voluntary bodies, employment, places of worship, language, social and cultural networks, means that many communities operate on the basis of a series of parallel lives.” Less abstractly, Andrew Norfolk, the self-described liberal London Times investigative reporter who methodically uncovered the Rotherham sexual grooming scandal, concludes that “It is possible for a Muslim child to grow up—in the family home, at school and in the mosque and madrassa—without coming into any contact with Western lifestyles, opinions or values.” …
Large minorities within the deeply rooted, largely inward-looking, in some ways markedly alien Muslim enclaves that now blot most of England’s cities and major towns embrace views that are at best at remarkable variance with, and at worst inimical to, those of their new countrymen — the native British. At the very least, this situation marks an astonishing and probably unalterable change in Britain’s social and cultural landscape. …
From a Rotherham style rape case
The preponderance of immigrants since 1997 — three quarters of net immigration — has been from underdeveloped Africa and South Asia. Somalis are the largest group within this category. Only about 10 percent of them are in full-time work. Single-parent families make up about 60 percent of their households. … Intensely clannish, the Somalis have proven somewhat resistant to British ways: an estimated 42 percent of British-born Somali girls have endured genital mutilation, a practice outlawed in Britain. …
Most of the new immigrant groups … didn’t come to Britain to be transformed culturally. …
It renders unimaginable the kind of integrationist formula—“Full absorption is the condition of entry”—that the veteran Tory politician Quentin Hogg promulgated in 1947 in the face of immigration that was on a greatly smaller scale. …
England’s elite don’t see themselves as “white British”:
This upheaval has profoundly disturbed … [the] “White British,” as they’re designated by officialdom and academe, who are not part of the progressive elite. (Significantly, in practice the elites implicitly exempt themselves from this designation: a London-based media professional, say, who is white and British would probably recoil from being classified as White British, a pasty alien people ensconced in the shires, the tacky suburbs of Essex, and the drab council estates of the post-industrial North).
Old Britain — a group that would include both the traditional working class and the broad middle class of Middle England — still forms the great majority of the country’s population. And a staggering 71 percent of the total voting-age population believe immigration is the most urgent problem facing the country; 76 percent want immigration reduced. …
It all economic?? Then England imported the wrong people.
Ultimately, I believe, the pursuit of a mass-immigration society has been rooted in the evolution of global capitalism, which has generated in the West a radical individualism destructive of traditional bonds and loyalties and has produced a cosmopolitan outlook, ever-expanding in its sway, within the dominant class. …
However economically desirable to Britain a clutch of software engineers from Palo Alto or even Mumbai may be, a mass of semi-literate peasants from Bangladesh offers few attractions, and more than a few impediments, to an advanced economy. The imperatives of what is called “global competitiveness” may demand that the nation incorporate the former kind of workers, but those same imperatives would certainly dictate that it shun the latter. Indeed, the costs imposed by the overwhelming number of low-skilled migrants offsets the undoubted economic gains contributed by the tiny talented minority. …
The “old” British are excluded from politics:
Whereas less than 15 percent of the country’s population belongs to the mobile, university-educated elect, nearly half of Britons still live within five miles of where they spent their childhoods, a fact that, again, reflects the stability of the country’s population since the Dark Ages. …
Sarah, a Rotherham abuse survivor. Read her story.
The “White British” … have keenly apprehended the power of the cultural and ideological logic arrayed against them. If they were at first condescended to as simple-minded folk frightened of change, they were soon dismissed as stubbornly backward-looking. From that point, they were inevitably condemned as xenophobic. And then they were easily detested as racists with bad taste and even worse diets. …
In the context of the enlightened cosmopolitan values that hold sway in Britain today, once the majority’s views are thus ruled beyond the pale, liberal democracy permits — in fact demands — that the majority be excluded from political consultation. …
The impotent seething abundantly in evidence among Old Britain is rooted in their disfranchisement, in the disdain with which their political and cultural leaders have forsaken them, and in their realization that those leaders, ensorcelled by fatuous slogans and intellectual fashion, in pursuit of vacuous and untested ideas, have irretrievably transformed an ancient nation.
Britain is in catastrophic decline, with the US following. Australians are not realizing the significance of this.
hat-tip Stephen Neil
