Zia Yusuf announced Reform UK’s latest policy this week: the Britannia Card, which allows wealthy foreign nationals to pay a one-off fee of £250,000 in exchange for tax-free residency in the UK.
It is designed to entice millionaires back to Britain, 16,500 of whom are due to flee in 2025. This exodus follows years of inflation and tax raids by Conservative and Labour governments.
But the promise that the policy will raise £1.5 - £2.5 billion in annual revenue is irrelevant. Reform has its priorities backwards if it thinks this will appeal to its base.
Reform voters want lower migration not for logistical or economic reasons, but out of concern for the pace and scale of demographic and cultural change. They don’t want a revolving door of wealthy strangers, no matter how much money it might bring into the Treasury. They want to live in a country that feels like a home, with familiar faces; not a frictionless airport departure lounge, cosmopolitan shopping mall, or retail park.
What does Reform have to offer them?
As I asked Zia Yusuf on X:
But what if I don’t want my home to be an airport lounge or global way-station for the rootless business class?
What if I want to be surrounded by friends, neighbours, and people with whom I have more in common than paying taxes?
The answer appears to be, increasingly, not much.
Reform UK are emulating the “Tech Bro” faction of President Trump’s MAGA coalition, rather than the “National Conservative” faction.
Yusuf resembles Vivek Ramaswamy: the polished second-generation immigrant from the Indian subcontinent, whose questionable business ventures gave him enough of a war-chest to get involved in politics, speak as an authority on what constitutes the “values” and identity of his host nation, and then ride the coat-tails of the most recognisable face on the right to fame and success.
The difference is that when Vivek insulted the MAGA base and American culture, insisting the USA needed more H1B visa immigrants from India, he was dropped like a hot stone from DOGE and banished from the Trump cabinet.
As I wrote about this division for Courage Media, in January:
Vivek’s vision of an 80-hour-work-week America is less a home, and more an insect hive of indentured servants. Trump’s supporters did not vote for that. Neither is citing Whiplash, a film about a musician who is verbally abused into being an exceptional drummer, at the expense of his sanity and intimate relationships, an enticing prospect to offer young people. Most see their careers as an enabling condition of having a home, and supporting family members who love them — rather than something which all must be sacrificed to maintain.
The pushback that ensued objected to more than just the legal technicalities and quantities of immigration. It concerned the characterisation of America as a company or sports-team, rather than a home. Why should comparative economic performance metrics come to define whether or not one’s country is a good place to live? The notion of “America winning” also led to the question being posed: if America only wins through mass importing foreign nationals to sustain its economy, then who are the Americans who it can be said are winning? Is America a nation — a home — or just an economic opportunity zone? How can nations compete, if one nations’ members are just another’s citizens-in-waiting?
Offence was taken to Vivek’s post in particular because a culture is a property of a people. The flaws in American culture are a result of the aggregate actions of Americans — and will therefore be remedied by Americans over time. To blame an entire culture is to blame an entire people for perceived shortcomings; and, although Vivek did not mean to, places the person levelling the criticism as outside the culture, and therefore not one of the people. It feels condescending to those being told that their culture is holding them back, especially by someone positioning themselves as an outsider — and especially when the culture is the enabling condition of the prosperity the critic is appealing to.
What Musk, Vivek, and proponents of mass “high-skilled” migration underestimate is how reliant America’s prosperity is on American culture. Meritocracy, honesty, and hard work are not universal principles, but particular to north-west Europe and North America. Most of the world is not WEIRD — Joseph Henrich’s acronym for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic countries. This mindset is peculiar to the US, UK, and Western Europe. While, yes, the Protestant ethic made America the world’s dominant economy, it remains the property of Protestants. Furthermore, it took the civic associations imported from England, as observed by de Tocqueville on his tour of America, to raise generations to whom the truths of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution remained self-evident. In short, the economy is enabled by the culture, which is practiced by a particular people.
A lack of theory-of-mind by WEIRD Americans means they fail to understand that most of the world does not think like they do. Many immigrants are not like Musk, or Courage Media’s own Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Rather than assimilate, they retain the clan-like collectivist mindset of their home countries. They see nothing wrong with lying, or nepotistic hiring on familial or ethnic lines, to advantage their in-group. Against this, the liberal meritocracy proposed by global market advocates has no defence. Instead, it only demands Americans conform to the inhuman working habits of foreign nations, or be replaced by cheap foreign labour with no loyalties to the host land and culture. As Harrison Pitt wrote, in an essay on the anthropological misconceptions of Musk’s immigration policy:
“Referring back to Indians, it is a testament to their giftedness as a people that they accounted for as many as half of the high-skilled H-1B worker visas issued between 2001 and 2015. On the criteria laid out above, this makes them strong candidates for integration. However, to be a fully assimilated citizen of a new country is not like being a well-fitted widget in a cybernetic collective. Human individuals are more than mere units of variable economic potential.”
Questions of quantity, and legal status, fail to address this cultural conflict. Ultimately, neglecting cultural concerns when setting immigration policy will recreate the same economic privation seen in the third-world. Importing thousands of culturally distant peoples into America will not change the imported people through economics, but rather change the American economy and culture through imported peoples.
This belief that values and culture are the property of a people is that of national conservatives. This movement has spanned the US, UK and Europe, and its members include observant Jews, tweed-wearing Anglicans, Christian nationalists, and traditionalist Catholics. Their proposed international alliance of unapologetic, culturally distinct countries, founded not on liberal values, but on friendships between self-conscious ethno-cultural groups, is alien to advocates of importing “Elite human capital” irrespective of its origin.
You can read the full essay on Courage Media.
Whereas Reform UK seems to have given Yusuf carte blanche to run Britain like his international concierge business, Velocity Black. (Despite the atrocious Glass Door reviews, and complaints of misconduct by Yusuf toward staff.)
Indeed, Yusuf’s attitude toward Britain seems to be to treat it as a propositional economic zone: saying, after flouncing out of the party over the burqa ban debate, that,
“I’m very queasy and uneasy about banning things that would be, for example, unconstitutional in the United States, as I think it would be, but we have a very particular situation here in the UK, I would think about it very deeply but I probably would be in favour of a ban.”
But Britain is not America; and America is not reducable to the principles written in its Constitution either. National identity is not a scout’s pledge of abstract values. It is a settlement that has evolved, through tradition and custom, as practiced by a distinct people in a set place over time. Belonging to that people is often a prerequistie to buying into that culture. Yusuf’s allegiances seem to belong more to the Velocity Black frictionless international business class — the Anywheres — than they do to the rooted, distinct, parochial people of the seaside towns, shires, and cathedral cities of England.
My country is more than just a glossy pit-stop for the international business class. Reform UK’s failure to understand how bad the optics of having its Muslim former-Chairman promote a new way for moneyed strangers to buy their way into Britain are, demonstrates a habitual ignorance of its reason for existing.
Will any party, any politician in Britain, stand up for the existence and interests of a distinct British people?
Share this post