Britain’s migration policy is widely considered to have been an important driver of the protest, riots and ethnic violence that have erupted since the horrific attacks in Southport. Yet the story of migration into Britain – and the policy of multiculturalism that it begat – is little understood.
The story begins with the Nationality Act of 1948. Prior to the Act, the concept of a ‘British Citizen’ did not quite exist. Britons, like Indians, Jamaicans or Hongkongers, were subjects of the Crown to which they owed allegiance. After the Second World War, however, Britain was faced with the preordained break up of its Empire, and changing relations with its component parts and with the Commonwealth.
The 1948 Act was in part a response to this, and put those born in the U.K.’s Dominions and Commonwealth on equal footing to Britons. Although the previous shared status of ‘British Subject’ had in theory similar qualities, the Nationality Act meant that even with the new form of national citizenship, somebody from Kingston, Jamaica could live and work in the U.K. as freely as somebody from Kingston-upon-Thames.
Britain’s politicians and civil servants grossly underestimated the number who would use this opportunity. The Cabinet Papers in the National Archives show that what started as a trickle turned into a flood. For the five years after the Act passed, “Immigration from colonies remained at no more than 2,000 per year. This increased in 1954 and had reached over 135,000 by 1961.” By the late 60s, there were well over a million non-whites in Britain, up from only a handful after the war. Most had alien cultures, and often religions, too.
This posed a unique problem for England, where the majority of the newcomers settled. As Benjamin Schwarz showed in his superbly written essay, ‘Unmaking England’, Britain’s ethnic composition had remained almost unchanged for nearly a millennium-and-a-half, or, it might be argued, much longer than that.
Genetic records show that the matrilineal ancestors of some three quarters of white Britons were already in the British Isles some 6,000 years ago. “The tiny number of Roman and Norman conquerors were the thinnest veneer over the native population,” argues Mr. Schwarz, “and have left virtually no genetic trace.” Angles, Saxons, Frisians and similar (which brought no more than 250k) essentially completed the mix. “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.'” To be clear, this not to make an argument for blood and soil nationalism. It does, however, give the lie to the shibboleth that we have “always been a nation of immigrants.”
In fact, it would be difficult to identify a nation to which this statement would be less aptly applied: what makes England, and Britain, unique is its ethnic stability. For instance, Benjamin Schwarz points out that in the 1960s, Iona and Peter Opie showed that English children had played many of the same games since the 1100s. Robert Tombs, a professor of history at Cambridge, suggests that: “If a nation is a group of people with a sense of kinship, a political identity and representative institutions, then the English have a fair claim to be the oldest nation in the world.”
This singular permanence allowed England to develop and “evolve in itself and to adopt foreign cultural influences wholly on its own terms”, Schwarz contends (pointing out that even William the Conqueror was accepted as Sovereign because he vowed to uphold English Law). This Law, of course, is the Common Law, the immeasurable advantages of which are well rehearsed; however, it is difficult to imagine such a system – or even a community in which societal trust extends as far beyond extended family as it does in Britain – emerging and surviving in a country that had not remained so stable for so long.
Ironically, Britain’s stability had previously also made it uniquely tolerant of eccentricity and thus highly effective at integrating foreigners (to the extent their children were entirely anglicised: think Holst, Handel, Disraeli, Conrad, Churchill, Elliot, et al.) The problem posed by the immigration of the 1950s and 60s, therefore, was its scale and speed, which inevitably led to the formation of ethnic immigrant enclaves, making integration impossible.
In the second half of the 1960s, two of Britain’s greatest politicians offered competing solutions to this predicament.
Roy Jenkins was perhaps the most consequential British politician never to have been Prime Minister. An elitist and a liberal, Mr (later Lord) Jenkins was highly intelligent, an assiduous worker, a greatly esteemed biographer and a man of letters. He was one of the most important intellectual forces behind much of Britain’s liberal shift since the 1960s. Mr Jenkins argued in a 1966 speech that the country should not become a ‘melting pot’, turning out everybody in a common mould. Instead, immigrants could keep “their own national characteristics and culture”. Thus, integration would not mean flattening assimilation, but “equal opportunity accompanied by cultural diversity”.
This, then, is the core of multiculturalism. Today, the term is commonly misunderstood as ‘different races living alongside each other’. Instead, per Jenkins, it was the idea of many cultures living in parallel and tolerance.
Enoch Powell disagreed. An ambitious and curiously intense man, Powell was perhaps the finest intellect to serve in Parliament since the war. He knew 13 languages, was then the second youngest man to make professor (after Frederick Nietzsche), and had during the war been promoted from Private to Brigadier. Crucially, he had fallen in love with India during the years he had spent there, and had been horrified by the inter-ethnic violence he saw. He had also travelled to the USA in 1967, where he had seen first-hand the bloody conflict between African-Americans and the Detroit police. He believed that the multiculturalism that was de fecto emerging in Britain would inevitably lead to the same outcome. He therefore favoured ending immigration and a programme of voluntary repatriation.
In April 1968, Powell gave a speech in Birmingham to set out his case. What became known as the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech was one of the most notorious speeches in British political history. Powell’s prose was peppered with incendiary language, including racial pejoratives. Edward Heath, the Leader of the Opposition, was appalled by the speech – as were the rest of the Shadow Cabinet – and Powell was dismissed the next day, never to return to front bench politics. Indeed, the speech was so inflammatory that advocating for reduced immigration became difficult in polite society for two generations.
Yet, that same year, perhaps startled by the fact that 74% of Britons polled at the time supported Powell’s recommendations, the government pushed through the Commonwealth Immigrants Act to curtail migration. In 1971. The Immigration Act did likewise. In 1981 the British Nationality Act tightened control yet further. The cumulative effect was to keep net migration low until the 1990s.
In 1997, Tony Blair’s ‘New’ Labour was elected. It immediately set out to raise immigration levels in a deliberate effort to make Britain truly multicultural; to make Jenkins’s vision of a diverse Britain real. In 1997, New Labour removed the Primary Purpose Rule, which required those marrying foreigners to prove they had not wed to secure British residency. In 1998, it removed border exit checks to all destinations, making it impossible to know who was in the country and who had overstayed their visa. In 1999, it expanded student permits. In 2000, it relaxed work requirements. In 2004, it expanded post-study work visas. All of these steps (sometimes taken without Parliamentary oversight) led to significant increases in immigration.
Added to this, immigration from the EU increased dramatically. In 2004, the EU expanded with the accession of the so-called A10 countries – Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. Given eight of these countries had recently been members of the much poorer Soviet Bloc, many existing EU members harboured concerns that sudden access to the EU’s freedom of movement rights would lead to a surge in migration. The Netherlands, France, Germany, Austria, Spain, Portugal, Belgium and Luxembourg thus placed restrictions on migrant workers from the ‘A8’ countries, including quotas or two-to-five year transition periods. Not Britain. The Home Office estimated that only 5,000-13,000 immigrants a year would arrive from the A8 members, and it therefore saw no need to apply restrictions. In reality, average immigration from the A8 nations into Britain was 72,000 per year, eight times more than the middle of the Home Office’s forecast range.
The same thing happened with the accession of Romania and Bulgaria in 2014: by 2017, there were 413,000 Romanians and Bulgarians living in Britain, implying that some 90,000 had immigrated every year since the beginning of 2014 – three-and-a-half times the government’s estimate.
New Labour’s policies thus led to monumental increase in migration.
In 2016, Britain voted to leave the EU, in part because freedom of movement within the Single Market made controlling migration near impossible. Yet while Conservative governments have ended free movement, they have increased overall immigration. In 2022, Britain handed out a record 1.1 million visas for foreigners to work or live in the UK. Jonathan Portes, an LSE academic in favour of high immigration, wrote in the Guardian that EU migration had “largely or wholly been replaced by non-EU migration”.
Migration policy since 1949 increased the proportion of Britons living in the U.K. who are non-white from 0.1% in 1951 to nearly a quarter in 2021. Rightly or wrongly, this process has been unpopular.
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In the 19th century proposals to federate the British Empire were rejected on the grounds that London would lose political control of its empire.
Granting a new form of national citizenship and settlement rights to the populations of these territories after the Second World War appears to be a federating of the populations. Or something not unlike the French approach to populations in French overseas territories.
Creating a community of communities, especially those overtly ethnic or religious, has necessitated the government and it servants act towards these like a colonial administration, adjusting their approach accordingly. For all his great learning, this is the legacy that the accursed Jenkins has bequeathed.
Aside from all this, despite the matrilineal DNA, if we met anyone in the 5th century who had recently arrived from the continent by boat, they would be wholly alien to us. They would have identified themselves by clan or tribe, or traced their ultimate lineage to a god such as Wodan.
Whereas we were descended form Brutus, as Gildas records!
How on God’s firkin’ earth can the observation that islanders mix less with people outside of their island that those outsiders with each other be construed as argument for “blood and soil nationalism”? And what relevance does an old slogan of the NSDAP farmer’s organization have for England 2024, anyway?
NB: This is not supposed to be an argument against the spiritual value of the notion of groups of related people farming their ancestral homelands. There’s certainly nothing wrong with that and while rural communities may seem like a somewhat outmoded and infinitely distant other-thing to city-dwellers, they do exist. A charming story story I remember from village in the Palatinate is that someone who had lived all his life there was commonly referred to as “De Sohn von dem Nau” — the son of the new guy, the new guy being someone who moved there long before this son was born.
Whilst the author may not agree with Enoch Powell’s prognostications, nor the manner in which they were expressed, he has been proven to be to be outstandingly prescient, judged by intervening and current events.
The problem with “equal opportunity accompanied by cultural diversity” is that it assumes everyone must be as disinterested in his cultural heritage as Jenkins was disinterested in English culture. But that’s not how people work. They tend to favour their own stuff because it’s their own stuff and tend to fear and despise what differs from it. This means that a group of people living closely together will either develop or have some sort of shared identiy or will split into subgroups with distinct shared identities each who are principally hostile to each other.
The prominent example would be Muslims who aren’t willing to tolerate that other people do not believe in Allah, don’t consider the Quran sacred and really do violate its commandments. I’m perfectly happy with tolerating Islam as something that’s other people’s business I couldn’t care less about. But I’m absolutely unwilling to have anything islamic imposed onto me.
In short: multiculturalism = tribalism. And that always = conflict.
It’s more multiculturalism means conflict because of the tribalism and territorialism that’s inherent in human nature. Unless it manages to reduce all cultures to different kinds of fast food which is probably exactly what so-called liberals envision as mulitculturialism: Many different street food stalls staffed by essentially identical/ equally uprooted people.
I agree. The clue is in the word multiCULTuralism. There are many definitions of ‘a cult’, almost all, unsavoury. One particular religion ticks all boxes for the definition.
God invented ‘races’, national distinctions (Genesis 10) – does that make him a racist?
This illuminating article makes the prophecy about western civilisation in Revelation only the more alarming:
“Fallen, fallen is Babylon the Great! She has become an abode of demons, and a prison of every unclean spirit, and a prison of every unclean and hated bird. For all the nations have drunk from the wine of her raging fornication.”
The explanatory ‘for’ suggests that the birds are nations (Dan 4:14) and they have introduced unclean religions into the city. The largest mosque in the western world by land area is the Mosque of Rome, with Strasbourg’s not far behind. Demons have returned to the house that was swept clean and brought with them spirits more evil than themselves.’
(When the Towers Fall: A Prophecy of What Must Happen Soon p 217.)
All I want from an immigration policy is this:
I don’t care what they look like.
I suspect the vast majority of the protestors would agree with the above, and are not ‘racists’.
In practical terms, this implies a highly restrictionist immigration policy, with a passing IQ score (>100 to satisfy number 4 above) to enter, with immigration of peoples that have demonstrated a low desire to assimilate most likely banned.
I agree with your wish list with one exception – I do care what immigrants look like and I would prefer them to LOOK English.
The only reason I can think of for preferring immigrants to look English (or British) is that it helps preserve the link between the past and the present. If I look at a picture of Brits from times gone by, it help me think of them as distant great cousins, as it were, if they look like me.
But I’m under no illusions about the quality of the English as a race, and, especially following Covid, I wouldn’t say I have any particular affection for them.
Here we have a multicultural farmyard – over here the chickens, there the foxes and next to them the sheep with the wolves behind them.
All living together in peace and harmony.
“Knowing a great deal is not the same as being smart; intelligence is not information alone but also judgement, the manner in which information is coordinated and used.”
Carl Sagan.
I didn’t realise Woy was behind the evils of multiculturalism but he was certainly to blame for destroying our secondary education system and ensuring that the ‘working class’ that they pretend to champion were prevented from a good education. It isn’t communo-fascism as both of those creeds championed educational achievement as a benefit to the state.
Extraordinary article by Andrew Collingwood, who dares to challenge the lie that “the English do not exist, we are a nation of immigrants”, etc. The following fact was the most astonishing for me:
“[In the 1960s] Iona and Peter Opie showed that English children had played many of the same games since the 1100s.
Robert Tombs, a professor of history at Cambridge, suggests that: “If a nation is a group of people with a sense of kinship, a political identity and representative institutions, then the English have a fair claim to be the oldest nation in the world.”
Excellent and accurate assessment by Reform’s Mayuran. The epic failure of multiculturalism, Raynor now prioritizing migrants over British citizens for social housing and ”ideological possession leads to a denial of reality”, indeed. ( 5mins );
https://x.com/NotFarLeftAtAll/status/1823078288169811988
An absolutely brilliant precis of the immigration history of our islands. Worth its weight in gold.
Can we please separate race and culture. Race does not define culture.
People who think different cultures can live peacefully side by side evidently have never read a history book
Mix cultures = conflict, violence and warfare. History of the World – and look at the last few weeks.
The EU’s – and those who ache for a World Government – stated aim is to do away with Nation States in order to have one central government to rule all, and to achieve this, National Identity which is formed in a monoculture must be destroyed.
The way to achieve this is flood Europe with other cultures who do not share any identity or heritage with the host Country, erode culture from within, fragment societies, foment conflict… divide and rule.
I’m not an economist, so I am not in a good position to assess the following snippet. I chanced by it a year ago, on the internet, but have lost the source and my memory of it is hazy. The context was the sudden arrival of “Windrush Generation” shops in shopping malls in the UK. The USP for these stores is that said generation was hard done by, because of alleged racialism (as it was then known) in the 1950s and 1960s, especially in housing and employment. (The assistants in mine came over more as white, middle-class twenty-something Georginas with an A-level in Politics, and not as likely descendants of that generation.)
The snippet, as far as I remember it, was that the descendants of the Windrush Generation have done rather well economically, in one respect: property ownership. The thesis is that by being denied rental accommodation (especially in London) the generation of immigrants found themselves pushed towards buying extremely unattractive ruins (especially bomb-damaged sites) in city centres, and refurbishing or even building on them. Regardless of the poor condition of the property, the value of the property increased enormously and, more importantly, the property was owned by the generation, not by its landlords. Given time, and assuming that the property was bequeathed from that generation to its children and grand-children (not so easily done these days) then the proportion of owner-occupiers in the Windrush Generation’s descendants would be higher that that of its peers in the indigenous white population of the day (who would have been more able to rent). Consequently that generation is riding high on the crest of property ownership and high prices for property. I don’t know if this snippet holds up to examination, but it seems to be a thesis that is amenable to objective analysis by archaeo-economists and historians, rather than the subjective sound-bite regurgitation by Georgina.
If 2TS’s plans to concrete over the Green Belt in order to build affordable houses for the extra millions come to fruition, then that generation, sitting on a pile of house-shaped gold bricks, may object to the drop in house prices!
This is a subject with particular relevance to me.
Many of the people who came to the UK from the former Empire countries were descendants of Brits who had left to form the Empire. Many had a desire to remain ‘British’ and live as Brits and no matter to what extent fashions to encourage or prohibit ‘going native’ had ebbed and flowed over the years had mixed their ancestry.
My father immigrated to the UK (from Pakistan) in 1951. He was a citizen of Pakistan because the country essentially claimed any person within their territory at the time of partition as their own. My father was 2nd/3rd or more generation British in India and considered himself to be British – he was shocked and upset at the sectarian violence that engulfed his world at Partition. His direct family-name ancestor had emigrated from Cheshire at the opportune time to be wounded and pensioned off at Lucknow. The ‘Europeans’ in India tended to intermarry and so my fathers ancestry was English, Scottish, Irish, French, Swedish, Philippine with a bit of ‘Indian’ to spice things up.
At the end of ‘Empire’ many people wanted to return to ‘Blighty’ even though most, like my father had never been near the place. The UK was considered ‘home’.
As a child I never realised that my father had a Pakistani accent – though I now recall a number of family friends thinking he was Welsh. When I was about 8 I suddenly realised he was ‘foreign’ when we were walking somewhere in Slough and a young Asian lad was a bit cheeky to him; Dad responded in ‘language’ (I can’t even remember which language – and it’s too late to ask) and the kid’s chin practically hit the floor as he replied ‘Oh, sorry Uncle’.
Many of the people who came to the UK considered themselves to be coming home. They wanted to continue in the culture they had known (or thought they knew) from ‘Empire’ days. Later immigrants did not have the same culture or desire to return ‘home’ – in that respect they’re like my great-great..grandparents: seeking adventure and opportunity.
I think the article shows a fact that we all know, successive governments ignore the will of the people.
I’m a late baby boomer. Despite a decade of post-war immigration, I was born into a stable, peaceful, socially-cohesive country.
In my lifetime it has been turned into an unstable, violent, socially-fractured and ghettoised disaster.
My four grandparents had English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish ancestry. I have descended from people who will have been here, on these islands, for thousands of years.
What has been imposed on us in the last 70 years, and particularly the last 25, isn’t immigration: it’s race replacement.
I don’t blame the immigrants; they were offered an opportunity and they seized it with both hands . I blame the politicians (of every Party) who have deliberately destroyed the country of my birth and I hate them with a passion..
It is easier to have Global Governance if you dilute Nation States so that everyone just feels like citizens of the world rather than be French German Italian or British. That is what mass immigration seeks to do and the current flood or migrants coming via the open border EU has accelerated this Political Agenda masquerading as compassion for unfortunate peoples.
Methinks the Global governance is for Western nations only as it is difficult to imagine BRICs nations signing up to what in effect will be hardly indistinguishable from Uncle Sam’s Rules Based Global Order. And who can blame them – the West has gone rogue. Thus, it is difficult to see Uncle Sam pushing a global government unless it is in charge.
What the Western elites appear to doing is breaking down western nation states through mass immigration, wokery and Net Zero and aspects of theWEF agenda to create a huge new bloc/alliance of people to take on the BRICS burgeoning power.
You must admit though that what has come to pass has been well flagged and yet people continue to vote for the same parties that keep deceiving them time and time again. It is as if people still believe that the British political establishment care about them, their heritage, traditions and mores and do the right thing in the end. The British political establishment is rotten to its core and couldn’t give a fig about the plebs. The party system ensures that its MPs serve the Party who in turn serve their sponsors and those NGOs both national and International that a succession of governments have agreements with.
Never, ever vote for an establishment party if you value your sovereignty, traditions, freedoms and liberty.
I haven’t voted CON since Mrs Thatcher was ousted apart from 2019 when Nigel withdrew my BP candidate. I’ve never voted for Labour or the LibDems. Referendum Party; UKIP; and Reform.
I salute you!
Viewing the UK now I don’t see a NATION.—- I see a REGION. —-A REGION of the International Community where we are ruled by International Agreements and Foreign Courts. The governments we vote for are little more than Local Administrators. No wonder Starmer prefers Davos to Westminster.
There are parallels with Roy Jenkins and his multi-cultural ideals and Trofim Lysenko, who had ‘multi-cultural’ views on crops. In addition the Soviet Union outlawed any criticism of Lysenko.
Multiculturalism has been successful over centuries of immigration into Britain.
But it has failed now.
Why?
Watch and listen to this extraordinary interview – not only is it well worth it I hate long bloody podcasts but this one is compelling and I watched and listened to the very end:
Why the Establishment Hates This Man | Tommy Robinson | EP 462
The Dr. Jordan B. Peterson Podcast – 8.17M subscribers
3,405,943 views 8 Jul 2024
This is a truly remarkable – and shocking – how the British establishment has been covering up massive abuse of British children by grooming gangs.
Watch this and discover Tommy Robinson is not Far Right at all.
Part of the cover up was to label Robinson as a Right Wing extremist when judging from his account of his history and actions his purpose was to save young white girls as young as 12 and 13 from the drug dealing grooming gangs.
The problem is much much bigger than any of the legacy media have reported and they kept quiet about it for at least a decade and much more.
It tells the story from the beginning and his upbringing in Luton UK and why he became involved.
He has just been exposing what our political establishment and media have been covering up for two decades.
He deserves recognition and acclaim for his courage and tenacity to keep going against all the odds.
And it is not just drug dealing grooming gangs. Robinson identified and tied specific terrorist attacks and events to specific named people and how these attacks and events in and beyond the UK were planned in the UK and specifically in his home town of Luton, Bedfordshire, UK.
Luton had been identified by the CIA as an international terrorism centre.
What we need to see is Starmer’s ‘full force of the law’ to be brought to bear against all of the muslim grooming gang child rapists only a very small number of whom were prosecuted when Robinson instead was able to identify hundreds of them in towns across the UK.
And we need them all deported asap.
This is about protecting British communities from criminals and terrorists and nothing more.