Britain Has Never Been A Nation of Immigrants

Myths about Britain being "a nation of immigrants" and "an integration miracle" were destroyed when rap act Bob Vylan gloated about dispossessing the English of their country at Glastonbury.

Irish republican rap group Kneecap's plan to glorify Hezbollah and incite “a riot” outside their impending trial in Westminster was overshadowed by grime artists Bob Vylan at Glastonbury last weekend. Lead lyricist Pascal Robinson-Foster led chants of “I heard you want your country back, Uh-uh, you can't have that” and “Death, death to the IDF,” to the cheers of thousands of middle-class useful idiots.

Behind him were a Palestine flag and the words, “This country was built on the backs of immigrants” — because Britain didn't exist before it was discovered by the HMS Windrush in 1948.

This is one of the more pernicious myths in modern Britain — entertained by all parties. Prime Minister Sir Kier Starmer said in his “Island of Strangers” speech that “Now, in a diverse nation like ours, and I celebrate that, these rules become even more important… Migration is part of Britain’s national story. We talked last week about the great rebuilding of this country after the war; migrants were part of that, and they make a massive contribution today. You will never hear me denigrate that.”

During the last Conservative government, Michael Gove announced at the despatch box that “The United Kingdom is a success story: a multi-national, multi-ethnic and multi-faith democracy, stronger because of our diversity.” Even the new chairman of Reform UK, David Bull believes “immigration is the lifeblood of this country, it always has been,” and that “We are an island of immigrants.”

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That line was first popularised by former Immigration Minister Barbara Roche in a speech to the Institute for Public Policy Research, in September 2000. Roche appropriated it from John F Kennedy's book, A Nation of Immigrants, written for the Anti-Defamation League. The contempt for the British people, if left unmolested by imported Diversity, permeated all of Blair's policies. Roache's speechwriter, Andrew Neather said her rhetoric and policies “intended - even if this wasn’t its main purpose - to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date”. Even now, Blair's advisor John McTernan says that “The concept of ethnic English is truly evil”.

I had this battle last August with former Labour MEP and minister, Sion Simon, who said “we the mainstream, normal, proper Britain don’t talk like that in this country.”

As I wrote in the Critic at the time:

It is “illegitimate,” even “racist,” to note any difference in the ethnic composition of crowds waving the St George’s cross versus those shouting “Allahu akbar” beneath the Palestine flag.

For Simon to both deny the existence of an ethnic group indigenous to Britain, and denounce me as anti-British, is consistent with his concept of Britain. Labour, and liberals in media and academia, have redefined Britain as an ideological project. In the mould of America since JFK, Britain is now a nation settled by immigrants, and a landmass in which “British values” are practised. Despite the geographically-particular prefix, those values are universal, liberal, pluralistic, tolerant, multicultural, and embodied by the institutions which espouse them. They are not the property or invention of a particular people. One need only buy into “British values” to be British.

This deprives the English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish of a claim to their own homeland. Even the Celtic nationalism of the SNP, Plaid Cymru, and Sinn Féin use progressive platitudes and a limitless admission of immigrants to provide regime-approved window dressing for their hatred of the English. The only time English ancestry is invoked is to beat us with a cudgel of unique and ahistorical guilt for racism, slavery, and Empire. (As David Lammy did when advocating reparations be extracted from British taxpayers.)

So, a man who has lived in Lagos all his life, but believes in freedom of private practice of religion and common law, is now more English than King John: born in England, but who required Magna Carta to constrain his tyrannical rule. This is absurd. We can recognise the Nigerian chap may well make a better neighbour, but that he is not because of this more “British” than someone whose ancestors were born here. Nor is this observation a moral judgement of our Nigerian friend. Even mass immigration critics feel the need to soften the definition of an “indigenous” person, for fear of being mislabelled a racist. But stating the fact that the English exist as a distinct people is not to say other ethnicities are inherently lesser. Only that Britain has a host population whose concerns should be addressed, because they have no other home to return to when conditions worsen.

This lie proposes not only that there is no distinct British people, and thereby nothing of which we can call our own and be grateful to inherit. It is that Britain is simply a repository for anyone from anywhere who wants to come, and that there is nothing special about those who lived here and build our country. Our ancestors could have been swapped out with anyone else, and we wouldn’t have noticed the difference. More accurately, it is unilateral disarmament against demographic displacement.

But it just isn’t true. As the venerable Bede observed in 731 AD in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, the Germanic tribes of Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians emigrated to southern Britain in the fifth century and mixed with indigenous Celts and Britons to form the Anglo-Saxons. Their first king was Æthelstan, who established the Kingdom of England in 927 AD. A handful of Dutch protestants, French Huguenots, and Jews aside, Britain remained largely homogeneous for two millennia. The English of 1927 were more than 90% the descendants of the English of 927. The Norman conquest added no more than 5% to the population after 1066, and left a genetic imprint of only 1%.

As Sam Ashworth-Hayes wrote in the Telegraph, as recently as 1951, the total non-White population of Britain was 0.07 percent. We have seen more immigration since 1997 than between 1066 and the Second World War. The Windrush Generation were not invited, and were the casus belli for the Atlee government to pass the British Nationality Act (1948), which permitted Commonwealth citizens to live, work, and vote in our country. By 1958, 210,000 non-white Commonwealth migrants were living in the UK; and only about 4% were working in the brand new NHS. (The same goes for the Boriswave, with only 3% being doctors and nurses.) Windrush has now been recast as an American-style slavery narrative — an original sin, which occurred over a thousand years into England existing as a kingdom.

All of this underwrites Vylan's performance. He harbours an ethnic grudge against the native people of this land, based on a contortion of its history, and so takes glee in their state-assisted dispossession of their own country.

We cannot hope to have a cohesive, peaceful civilisation with such people. They are already singing songs akin to Julius Malema's genocidal “Kill the Boer” chants. As Professor David Betz warned during an event at the Unherd Club on Tuesday, the choice is clear: either Britain ceases to exist after over a thousand years of continuity, or it doesn't. Vylan and his fans are enthused about the imminent likelihood of the latter. We should be fighting a political war of self-defence to ensure the former.

But Britain's ostensible right-wing outrage has largely concerned Vylan's comments about the IDF. Danny Kruger MP, who found himself on the wrong end of the crowd's questions about demographics and English identity at last week's Now & England conference, condemned Vylan on BBC Newsnight for his antisemitism — but did not mention his invective directed at Kruger's English constituents. While Vylan's thinly-veiled rant about “Zionists” at his old record label and wishing death upon Jewish soldiers are wrong, the Israeli state seems to be doing a good job of protecting its citizens regardless of Glastonbury attendees’ disapproval. Since Kruger is a member of the UK Parliament, not the Knesset, his primary concern should be the continued security and prosperity of the British public — not Israel.

But because British politics continues to orbit the gravity-well of the Second World War, even our nationalist elites feel a need to argue for ethno-cultural homogeneity by proxy, for Israel, and insisting on Churchillian interventionism abroad, while practicing liberal pluralism and a Chamberlain-esque multicultural appeasement strategy at home. Rather than arguing for Anglo-Zionism — for Britain to have what Israel has — they defend the Jewish people's right to survive “as a race” when faced with genocidal threats, while remaining indifferent to the equally tragic displacement of the British from their historic homeland. This is also why any non-moral distinction along ethnic lines, or qualitative judgement between cultures, is treated like the Volk racism of the Third Reich by the likes of McTernan. (While supporting the Jewish people in the protection of their only state.)

This is the reason those with nativist concerns — from “Cultural Nationalist” commentators to working class protestors — are called “Far Right”. Again, from my essay last August in the Critic:

This is because of an a priori commitment to an anthropology of fundamental human sameness. They believe in a natural egalitarianism, before superficial cultural differences and Tory cuts pried us apart. If only the rest of the world were allowed to make contact with the material abundance and secular liberalism of “British values”, then the scales would fall from the eyes of even the most ardent Jihaddean. All third-world migrants are just potential Britons, who have yet to realise the self-evident truth of the Enlightenment. [...]

We are on the precipice of being one large glass of undifferentiated, infinitely interchangeable human biomass; of returning to the hypothetical state of nature which predated civilisation.

The only thing stopping this is the one group not given “community” status: the English “Far Right”. The lack of definition for Far Right is purposeful. Those using it hope the listener substitutes the term for “Nazi”, and allows their intolerable policies to inherit the dwindling legitimacy of the post-War consensus. But what “Far Right” really describes are English people who still dare to be cognisant of themselves as an ethnic group, with an ancestral tie to the land that is stronger than that of any newcomer. When they say “Far Right”, they mean the indigenous populations of the British Isles who refuse to have their identities liquidated by liberal egalitarianism.

This is the great Diversity divide between older establishment and incensed younger right-wingers: that of integration optimism and a bellicosity toward foreign adventurism, versus a scepticism of liberal regime-change efforts overseas and demographic pessimism at home.

Wealth and age act as insulating factors for the deleterious economic and social consequences of ethnic heterogeneity, and thus cause old and young right-wingers to speak at irreconcilable cross-purposes. As Mary Harrington wrote in her latest column for Unherd:

Those on the Right that hew to a civic-nationalist view of identity tend to break older and more wealthy. This reflects the classic “Somewheres vs Anywheres” divide, but is now complicated by a further attack from their Right, at the hands of a typically young and increasingly vocal group for whom “British Values”-type multiculturalism asks too great a cultural sacrifice to bland liberal buzzwords like “equality” and “diversity”. [...]

Older mainstream conservatives were outraged by “Death to the IDF”, (probably accurately) interpreted as code for wishing death on all Israelis, or even all Jews, but had far less to say about “the gammons on retreat”. Younger radicals, though, show relatively little interest in ethnically-coded territorial disputes in the Middle East, while expressing increasingly vocal anxieties over the emergence of ethnically-coded territorial disputes here in England.

These tensions erupted at the Now & England conference last week, which Laurie Wastell described in the Spectator:

This is the nub of the issue: the largely generational divide that is becoming increasingly visible on the British right. There are many who prefer to ignore ethnicity, ancestry and demographics on the grounds that such topics are both immaterial and icky; there are even some who insist, against all the available evidence, that multiculturalism has been a success. On the other hand there are those who are unapologetic about believing that the English are an ethnic group, that England is our home, and that the more diverse our society becomes, the less happy it will be.

In my own write-up of the conference, criticising Robert Tombs’ insufficient suggestion that we “clone Katherine Birbalsingh” and have girls in hijabs recite Kipling to solve the problem of integration:

what Badenoch, Birbalsingh, and the Michaela School model represent is a replacement of Britain’s traditional high-trust, homogenous, self-governing spontaneous order with an authoritarian headmistress state to make new tribal minorities and the besieged host majority play nice.

Michaela tries to bind its student body, of different ethnicities and faiths, by enforcing militant secularism, vegetarianism, and silence in corridors upon its students. In March 2023, Muslim students began spontaneously praying in the school playground, and pressuring others to wear Islamic garb and observe Ramadan. When Birbalsingh banned all prayer to put a stop to it, Muslim parents petitioned the High Court, complaining the ban perpetuated “the kind of discrimination that makes religious minorities feel alienated from society”.

Birbalsingh’s eventual triumph was touted in the New Statesman as “a victory for tolerance” and “a metaphor for the challenges of multi-faith Britain.” The author criticised the “naive assumption among a certain type of liberal that tolerance is the factory default setting of British life,” and praises Birbalsingh as “a radical optimist”, who reminds us of the “trade-offs and contradictions inherent to the soul of multicultural Britain.” Birbalsingh embodies the “keenly cultivated sense of self-sacrifice” required to “argue our way to a fairer world.”

Stripped of ideological gloss, what Birbalsingh’s admirers want is for the state to abstain from favouring any one version of what constitutes the good, except for liberalism. This is premised on a tabula rasa reading of human nature, which presumes that a universal culture can be rationally formulated for anyone to buy into. [...]

As a friend described it at ARC: “I’ve never been to Belmarsh, but I suspect the inmates feel much the same... Michaela is a category-A experience.” If this is the downward pressure on diversity necessary to “make multiculturalism work,” then why would we want multiculturalism at all?

That influential, self-identifying conservatives think Michaela is a model for an authoritarian Headmistress State, to manage diversity and multiculturalism, should worry us. This is not a desirable environment for children, or a country writ large. This is an authoritarian adaptation to a culture that was broken against the expressed will of the British people, which now seeks to cement multiculturalism as the new settlement.

But Britain’s conservative intelligentsia have thought themselves into a bind. Having a priori ruled out the ability to exclude anyone from self-identifying as British or English, because it feels mean and unjust, they are forced to propose convoluted, contradictory criteria for how one can become as indistinguishably British or English as someone whose ancestry stretches back as far as the Battle of Hastings. The solution offered to the deleterious social consequences of increased ethno-cultural diversity is to liquidate the settled culture and identity of the people who already lived here.

This, and the accompanying clip from Tomlinson Talks in which I discussed the article, provoked a response from Michael Gove — who has long celebrated Michaela as proof that his education reforms were a success.

Despite insisting that “There is literally *no-one* I know arguing for compulsory national vegetarianism and enforced silence in the public square”, an article appeared in the Spectator that week justifying why British restaurants might go Halal to accommodate the impact of mass migration on demographics and culture.

if a restaurant goes that way for commercial reasons, that also betrays a strange, slightly fearful attitude to hospitality. So here’s my advice to restaurants: ignore the comments and do what you want. The customer isn’t always right.

So while the man who invited Greta Thunberg to Parliament expresses scepticism that Britons may be forced to adjust their diets to refrain from offending imported religions, the magazine he edits thinks nationwide Halal is an idea worth entertaining.

The cognitive dissonance of a “British Values” version of national identity drove Gove to argue with Matt Goodwin that the English do not exist as a distinct ethnic group this week.

“Why this emphasis on white?” Monty Panesar, Kemi Badenoch, Rishi Sunak, Kelly Holmes, Tony Sewell… None of these people are white, but they're all as British or as you or me!"

The above quote shows Gove still doesn't get it. During the exchange, he reduces British identity to a fondness for "the rule of law, parliamentary democracy, the role that institutions like the Royal Navy have played in safeguarding liberty…" In doing so, he effectively makes the whole world a standing reserve of Britons-in-waiting, if they have a misty-eyed love of liberalism. But “British” or "English" is not synonymous with all things good; and excluding people from being considered English because of their ancestry does not imply that they are bad people.

Nor does liking English culture or a comprehensive knowledge of British history make you English, any more than reading about the Edo Period would make me Japanese. Lots of Indians and Pakistanis would say they are a "cricket-loving, tea-drinking family man." But that does not make them, nor Rishi Sunak, English. A distinct people must precede the constituent parts, culture, and history attributed to their identity, otherwise why would these features denote belonging to that people? It's a contradiction that those extolling liberal platitudes like “British Values” refuse to address.

It is important to recognise this, because ethnicity is a much more salient factor for foreign nations and their diasporas in our country. After all, the Indian press celebrated Rishi Sunak’s coup into Number 10 as an “Indian son rises over the empire”. Kemi Badenoch told Gove in an interview last December that she identifies as Yoruba, and that other Nigerians are her “ethnic enemies”. These intractable elements of a person's identity do not disappear just because someone has been born in Britain, or lived here for a long time.

This distance from feeling that Britain belongs to you via ancestry can range from an indifference to the disappearance of the English as the dominant ethnic group, to a vengeful hostility toward the host majority and a desire to deprive them of their country. Bob Vylan is an example of the latter — and a cause for further pessimism, given he has English ethnic ancestry on his mother's side, and so theoretically should count himself among the “your” (the English) whose country he gloats about having conquered.

The conservative establishment will continue to be pressed on demographics, ethnicity, and identity until they come up with a better answer than obsequious integration strategies imposed on imported and indigenous populations alike. The questions will pursue them everywhere they go. They will come to dread the raised hands of anyone under 30 at a Q&A. Their weak prescriptions for the terminal sickness of unidirectional ethnic contempt, emanating from non-whites to whites, will look increasingly unserious and downright suicidal. As David Shipley wrote in the Telegraph yesterday, echoing my response to McTernan:

To suggest, as McTernan did, that it is “truly evil” to even conceive of the English as an ethnic group, is to deny our right to describe, recognise and understand ourselves. That is the true evil.

But this is the necessary position of those who have a priori ruled out excluding anyone from being considered English, because it feels prejudicial and unjust. Insisting that one can “learn to be English,” as Gove and Tombs have, is the other side of the coin to denying that the English exist.

If establishment conservatives want to ruin their credibility with anyone under 60 by joining McTernan in denying the English exist, that's their prerogative. Just don't take my country down with you, because we'll have a hard enough time getting it back from the talentless race communists at Glastonbury.

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