We Can't Afford To Ignore Demographic Change
Inaction on immigration and unprecedented demographic change will disfigure Britain's culture forever.
This week, the Office for National Statistics released some alarming data about demographic change in Britain.
The first was that 1.2 million people immigrated to the UK between June 2023 - 2024.
86% (1.0 million) were non-European, North American, or Australian nationals. This includes:
240,000 Indians
120,000 Nigerians
101,000 Pakistanis
78,000 Chinese
36,000 Zimbabweans (formerly Rhodesia)
Only 10% (116,000) were EU nationals. The remaining 5% (58,000) were returning British nationals.
The breakdown of reasons for immigrating were:
295,000 students;
80,000 study dependents;
184,000 work visas;
233,000 work visa dependents.
So, work visas were down, and dependents up.
Alongside this, the visa figures for September 2023 - 2024 were released.
These totalled:
Visitor visas: 2,130,000
Safe and Legal (Humanitarian) routes: 73,000
Study visas: 444,000
Work visas: 453,000
Family visas: 87,000
So, the total for non-visitor visas was 1,057,000.
Additionally,
Extensions of stay: 863,000
Settlement grants: 147,000
EU Settlement Scheme grants: 405,000
Citizenship grants: 268,000
100,000 asylum applications
And >30,000 recorded illegal migrants, crossing the English Channel in small boats
52% of initial asylum applications resulted in grants to stay indefinitely in the UK; a 23% decrease (from 75%) from September 2022 - 2023.
Only 7,700 illegal immigrants and foreign criminals were forcibly deported in that period. Another 24,000 took an offer of a paid voluntary return, at taxpayers’ expense.
This alarming ONS net migration figure is also likely to be revised up — as it is every year.
At present, it is a 20% decrease from June 2022 - 2023. This, too, was revised upwards: from a net migration estimate of 740,000, published in May 2024, to net 906,000. That’s 1.3 million people total. How the ONS could undercount by 166,000 people is beyond comprehension.
I summarised the latest immigration data on this week’s episode of Tomlinson Talks.
What’s come to be known as the Boriswave — the post-Brexit influx of unprecedented levels of third-world dependents — has disfigured Britain beyond recognition.
The Boriswave is more obvious than the previous two decades of immigration, for numerous reasons.
Firstly, because of visual distinctiveness: suddenly, all sorts of people, from all over the world are walking around in small towns in large quantities, across England. A small number of Europeans could only be distinguished by overhearing their languages, seeing them dressed in Reebok full-tracksuits, or watching them walk into a Polish shop. But Boriswave migrants look distinct from your average indigenous Brit, and can be found outside the cosmopoles of London, Leeds, Manchester, and Birmingham. Their cultural peculiarities set them apart from the native population: such as milling about in random locations, in the middle of the day; playing videos and music aloud on public transport; shouting into speakerphone in the street; jumping, or failing to form, a queue; or wearing sandals without socks in the winter. The fact that a whole set of people have suddenly arrived here and haven’t acclimatised becomes obvious to anyone able to notice.
Secondly, because of the economic impacts. Whether because Turkish barbers are multiplying like Starbucks in a Simpsons episode, or your local slop-dispensary is swarmed by Deliveroo drivers, you’ll have noticed a lot more foreign workers going about their business. Not only do these new immigrants often work in the service economy, but the standards you would expect from third-world countries and cultures have been imported here too. Orders are frequently wrong, service is impersonal and abrupt, and the “skilled work” they do seems to involve a lot of loitering about outside fast-food restaurants waiting for an order to put on the back of their L-plated moped. To subsidise all of this economic growth, taxes are going up at rates not seen since the Second World War; all the while public services, the state of the roads, and the scarcity of housing continue to get worse. The problems continue to grow more salient.
We won’t know the true extent of the change in each area until 2031, when the next set of Census data is published. Most data drawing upon the 2021 Census is already out of date, because the worst of the Boriswave didn’t arrive until after the Census was taken and released.
As Keir Starmer himself said this week, ‘This happened by design, not accident.’
Policies were reformed… Deliberately … To liberalise immigration.
Brexit was used for that purpose… To turn Britain into a one-nation experiment in open borders… Global Britain – remember that slogan… That is what they meant.
This is incontrovertibly true, given the change in laws brought forward by Boris Johnson, Priti Patel, and civil servants in the Home Office led to a record spike in immigration from outside Europe.
And so, the Boriswave produced the second alarming statistic from the ONS this week: Muhammad is now the most popular boys’ baby name in England.
Muhammad was the 63rd most popular name in Wales. It has been in the top 10 since 2016, but surpassed Noah to become number 1 this year — thanks to the Boriswave.
Curiously, no distinctly Islamic name is in the top 10 for girls. I am disconcerted by the implication of that gender distinction.
Axel has conspicuously departed from the top 100 this year, for obvious reasons.
Meanwhile, the total fertility rate — the average number of children per woman — has fallen to the lowest since records began, in 1938.
The live birth rate reached 1.44 children per woman in 2023. This continues a trend of steady decline: from 1.49 children per woman in 2022, and 1.55 in 2021. There were 591,072 live births were recorded in 2023 — the lowest number since 1977, and the fastest falling rate of all G7 countries (including Japan).
In interviews, demographer Stephen J. Shaw explained to me that the total fertility rate is an obsolete metric, because birthrate collapse is driven by childlessness rather than women having fewer children per family. More than 50% of women in the UK have reached 30 without children. The problem isn’t mothers choosing to have 2 children rather than 3: it’s women not having the children they say they want, when they want them — or ever having them at all.
But if Muhammad is the most popular baby name, then there must be a discrepancy between which women are and aren’t having children?
Well, this might shock you.
In 2023, only 56% of births in the UK were to White British mothers.
This number was 74% in 2021.
An 18% fall in two years.
While live births to British mothers fell, births for foreign nationals continued to rise. More than a third (37.3%) of live births in 2023 were to parents where either one or both were born outside the UK. The figure was 35.8% in 2022; and 25.1% in 2010.
Ghana replaced Germany in the top ten nations for mothers of foreign origin giving birth in Britain.
Despite these trends, Greg Ceely, head of population health monitoring at the ONS, insists that
‘While our birth data show us the parents' country of birth, it doesn't give us a picture of the family's ethnicity or migration history … And it's worth noting that not all women born outside the UK will be recent immigrants.’
Oh, that’s alright, then. I’m certain that a country of Muhammeds will be as British as you and me.
I spoke about the consequences of an open-border immigration policy, allowing ethnic and religious colonies with antagonisms to the host population to exist in the country, with Andrew Gold in July.
A clip from my interview has been doing the rounds again, and seems pertinent in light of these new statistics.
If you invite too many houseguests into your home, and they outnumber the homeowners, then it is no longer your home.
The guests rearrange the furniture as they see fit, and you can't say anything to the contrary.
The same is happening across Europe: with births in the EU reaching an all-time low last year. 3.67 million babies were born across the 27 nations in 2023; a 5.5% decrease from 2022, and the largest decrease since records began, in 1961. Even the horrors of Soviet Communism didn’t cause such a birth dearth for Europeans.
The changing demographic composition of Britain is bound to lead to certain types of violent crime increasing — given the overrepresentation of Middle Eastern, North and Sub-Saharan African, Pakistani, and Turkish migrants in arrest rates, convictions, and prison populations across Europe.
Researchers in Norway, for example, found that men migrating from “African-Islamic” countries were twice as likely to have a criminal record as were native-born Norwegian men; the disparity was even larger for violent crime.
Similarly, a study of Finland found that immigrants from Iraq and Somalia were between six and seven times more likely to have committed violent crimes and larceny than were the native-born population.
This means that the sexual predation on white English girls by Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs, which went on for decades with the full knowledge of the authorities, is likely to continue.
I documented the recent Operation Stovewood convictions of grooming gangs in Rotherham and Halifax, in Yorkshire, for
’s Courage Media this week.
For decades, thousands of children have been raped by predominantly Pakistani Muslim predators. To this day, establishment media remain silent about these ethnic and religiously motivated grooming gangs. Unlike in Israel, the UK has no authority willing to defend and avenge these girls’ stolen innocence. Worse still, the British government continues to endanger English girls through its open-doors immigration policy.
The sad fact is that this will continue. Immigration from the regions where the perpetrators originate is at record highs. A Muslim activist network within the Home Office ensures that, whenever a crime or terror attack prompts public opposition to Islam, positive press is generated to renovate the reputation of Muslims in Britain. Politicians refuse to reduce migration, or enforce one rule of law for all ethnic and religious groups, despite their plummeting popularity, waning faith in democracy, and a summer of civil unrest. The irrefutable truth is that if none of these men were here in the first place, then thousands of young girls’ childhoods would not have been ruined.
The government and civil service know they are importing as a matter of policy the perpetrators of unspeakable crimes against children — and yet, they continue to do it anyway. Labour MP Naz Shah once mistakenly retweeted an Owen Jones parody account, which said “Those abused girls in Rotherham and elsewhere just need to shut their mouths. For the good of diversity.” As decades of immigration policy indicate, it appears that the lives of young women being irrevocably ruined is a price that some politicians really are willing to pay for diversity.
The 2020 Home Office report on child sexual exploitation perpetrators stated that “it is difficult to draw conclusions about the ethnicity of offenders as existing research is limited and data collection is poor”. However, the assertion that the majority of child sexual exploitation perpetrators are white omits that a disproportionate number of perpetrators are “Asian”. Despite making up only 8% of the population, ‘Asian’ offenders comprise 28% of all child sexual exploitation convictions. This makes Asians three times more likely than whites to commit child sex offences. But the term ‘Asian’ obscures the true identity of the offenders. It is not Sikhs or Japanese businessmen committing such heinous crimes.
A National Crime Agency report provided more granular data on perpetrators. It found that 1 in every 2,200 Muslim males over 16, and 1 in 1,700 Pakistanis, have been prosecuted for child sex offences between 1997 and 2017. This number was one in every 280 Muslim males in Rochdale, one in every 126 in Telford, and in Rotherham, one in 73.
The fact that Charlene Downes’ name is not as well known as George Floyd’s is testament to just how successful the Government’s containment narrative has been.
Charlene Downes was a 14-year-old girl who was abused by a grooming gang in Blackpool twenty years ago. That gang was known to have exploited 60 girls by 2011. Downes’ body is believed to have been dismembered and sold as meat by a kebab shop run by her accused murderers. The jury failed to reach a verdict; and the two suspects were spared a retrial, after Lancashire Police were subjected to an Independent Police Complaints Commission inquiry for mishandling the investigation.
A £100,000 reward still stands for those who come forward with knowledge about Downes’ disappearance. Her family still don’t know what happened to their daughter, twenty years later.
Keir Starmer was Chief of Public Prosecutions at the time, but you didn’t see him taking the knee for Charlene Downes.
Worse still: under Labour’s proposed Islamaphobia laws, citing these per capita statistics will be a criminal offence.
Last week in the House of Commons, Labour MP for Birmingham Hall Green and Moseley, Tahir Ali, asked Keir Starmer to support a law which ‘prohibits the desecration of all religious texts and the prophets of the Abrahamic religions’.
‘November marks Islamophobia Awareness Month. Last year, the United Nations Human Rights Council adopted a resolution condemning the desecration of religious texts, including the Koran, despite opposition from the previous Government. Acts of such mindless desecration only serve to fuel division and hatred within our society. Will the Prime Minister commit to introducing measures to prohibit the desecration of all religious texts and the prophets of the Abrahamic religions?’
The Prime Minister did not dismiss the request, as any sane person with loyalty to the Christian United Kingdom, should.
We discussed the implications of an Islamic blasphemy law, and how sectarian politics is the inevitable consequence of Diversity, with GB News comedian Simon Evans this week on Deprogrammed.
The economic and criminal consequences of immigration are undeniable. Cultural change is downstream of demographic change. The issues are all interlinked, and could be solved by the following policies:
The mass deportation of all foreign criminals — including all illegal immigrants currently residing in Britain.
Rescinding access to the NHS, social housing, universal credit, and all other welfare from foreign nationals — requiring immigrants to pay their own way, or leave.
A moratorium on inward migration (with very limited exemptions) for a number of years.
Fortunately, one man has supported these policies:
Rupert Lowe, Reform MP for Great Yarmouth, has been doing the Lord’s work since entering Parliament. He has made use of his daily allowance of written questions to procure data that those of us outside Parliament cannot. As such, he has become deservedly popular among those inclined to support Reform.
Rupert has discovered, in the course of his questioning, that:
Since 07/08, 440,788 non-UK 'lead tenants' have accessed new social housing lettings.
In 2023/2024, 33,075 non-UK lead tenants were accessing new social housing lettings.
Over four years of the data released by the Ministry of Justice (following Lowe’s question), foreign offenders were responsible for around 40,000 crimes.
10,012 offences were committed by 3,235 foreign criminals released between March 2021 - 2022.
Foreign reoffenders committed 555 sexual crimes, 11,852 thefts, and 4,418 acts fo violence against a person between March 2018 - 2022.
In 2023, 816,036 Department for Work & Pensions calls were translated, costing taxpayers £4.56 million.
40% of migrants in 2023 - 2024 signed up for universal credit (benefits/welfare).
Lowe appeared on
’s show this week, and said exactly what prospective voters want to hear.During the conversation, Lowe states the necessity of deporting all illegal immigrants in Britain. When Winston reminds him that Pew Research put the figure at 1.2 million, Lowe corrects him, saying it's almost certainly more — and that all need to be sent back anyway
Lowe then says we need a two-year immigration moratorium. Not "Net Zero": a total FREEZE for two years. Finally, Lowe suggests we should learn from Sweden, and that Reform should create plans to repatriate foreign nationals who do not abide by British culture and customs.
This is a popular and consistent position, and Reform should be shouting this from the rooftops.
Unfortunately, last week we learned that not everybody in Reform agrees with Rupert Lowe.
On Saturday the 30th of November, I published an article in The Critic which voiced concerns about Reform UK’s recent rhetorical softening, and electoral strategy. This followed the announcement that Dame Andrea Jenkyns had joined the party as its candidate for Mayor of Greater Lincolnshire — and preceded founder of Conservative Home, Tim Montgomerie also joining. (Despite his continued feud with Reform spokesman,
.)those fearing Reform will be a refugee camp for Tory MPs might dread Farage’s pronouncement that “half of the Conservative party in Parliament should join Reform, and the other half should join the Lib Dems.” Given Nigel’s close friendship with Priti Patel, despite her doubling-down on her unapologetic importing of the Boris-wave — millions of third-world migrants — into Britain, one grows concerned as to exactly which members he has in mind for his half.
That same day, my friend, former Deputy Leader of Reform UK, Ben Habib announced that he would be leaving the party.
Alongside his concerns that the promise to democratise the party were not being kept, Ben cited his opposition to Nigel’s apathy to demographic change, and categoric refusal to support mass deportations, as reasons for leaving. James Heale of the Spectator reports that Farage, when asked about Habib’s departure, sang “The sun has got his hat on, hip hip hip hooray”. Later, Farage told Michelle Dewberry that Ben’s departure was a “champagne moment” and “a huge relief”.
I share Ben’s concerns. As I wrote in review of the Reform UK Conference for Coruage Media:
Four days before the Reform conference, Nigel Farage was interviewed by Steven Edginton on GB News. When asked if the demographic decline of the native white British population, from 87% to 74% in the last twenty years, was concerning, Farage said, “No, no that’s not a concern of mine”. When Edginton asked if Farage supports mass deportations, Farage replied, “It’s impossible to do. Literally impossible to do”. When pressed on if, despite logistical challenges, it was Farage’s “ambition” to remove the over-a-million illegal immigrants currently residing in Britain, he said:
No. No, I’m not going to get dragged down the route of mass deportations, or anything like that. […]
If I say I support mass deportations, that’s all anybody will talk about for the next twenty years, so it’s pointless even going there. It’s a political impossibility to deport hundreds-of-thousands of people. We simply can’t do it.
This alarmed Reform voters. In Reform’s “Contract with the people” released before the election (which, I have on good authority, was rewritten by Nigel personally), it says, in no uncertain terms, that “Illegal migrants who come to the UK will be detained and deported”. Their policy on foreign criminals reads:
Deport foreign nationals immediately after their prison sentence ends. Withdraw citizenship from immigrants who commit crime with the exception of some misdemeanour offences.
Farage’s latest statements seem to be an unannounced departure from their election pledges.
It is also a change in rhetoric from Farage himself, who posted to X on election day:
Why retreat from an obviously popular policy among one’s own base? Why soften on what is a commitment to uphold the law — with anything less being a two-tier immigration system? Why do this when it puts Farage in the awkward position of simultaneously refusing to grant amnesty to the illegal migrants currently in Britain, while also refusing to dedicate resources to identifying and deporting them?
That last part came from Nigel’s interview with
in November.In it, Farage said something else which alarmed many of Reform’s core supporters — especially those of us who will have read the above data.
“If we politically alienate the whole of Islam, we will lose.”
As I wrote in my Critic piece last week:
if incorporating Islamic social teachings — incompatible with the Christianity, enshrined in England’s unwritten constitution, monarchy, and established church — is Farage’s vision of winning, then I cannot support Reform.
Nor is such appeasement an expedient electoral strategy. Pandering to British Muslims will only estrange the indigenous white working class voters which Reform needs to win. As my friend Ayaan Hirsi Ali often reminds us, Islam does not care about abstractions like religious freedom or family values: it cares only about Da’wah, the clan, and the Ummah. And moderate-minded Muslims, like Zia Yusuf or Rakib Ehsan, are a minority. According to polling by the Henry Jackson Society — which Farage himself cited on Sky News during the election campaign — three-quarters of British Muslims believe Hamas committed no atrocities on October 7th, and more than half view Hamas favourably. 52 percent agree with Labour MP Tahir Ali: that the “desecration of all religious texts and the prophets of the Abrahamic religions” by drawing Muhammad should be a crime.
Most alarming is that extreme views are concentrated in the 18-34 and British-born cohorts — meaning radicalisation is happening at home, and only getting worse. Both Conservative and Labour governments alike have allowed a 700-strong Muslim activist network to fester in the Home Office, and produce reports which call the grooming gang scandal a “grievance narrative” invented by “right-wing extremists”. The appetite to permanently expel political Islam from public life is only growing, and instead, Farage is worried about alienating it. This will be a fatal mistake for Reform, and the country, to make.
I intended for this piece to encourage Reform to focus their attention on consolidating their existing core supporters (who will use their alternative media platforms to amplify their message, and do local events and leafletting campaigns free of charge on their behalf); and to sound as strong as Rupert Lowe, or Donald Trump, as a unified front, in order to successfully snap up many available voters whom are concerned about immigration, but not represented by the mainstream parties.
When I posted the article to X, it caught the attention of Deputy Leader, Richard Tice MP.
Suffice to say, he wasn’t a fan.
This was disappointing, as I voted for Richard in 2021 in the Bexley by-election; my support for Reform’s policies (and Lee Anderson after being ousted from the Conservatives) was one of the reasons I was removed from the Tory Party; and I spoke at Reform UK’s Conference in September. I ended the article by calling myself ‘a critical friend of Reform’ — having voted for them, vocally, in July’s general election.
I suppose I will finish this week’s piece with one last extract from my Critic essay:
Habib also expressed discontent with Reform’s policy of distancing themselves from the crowds at the Unite the Kingdom rallies. A strawpoll of the attendees found that every one, to a man, voted Reform at the last general election. Despite this, Richard Tice denounced them on GB News, saying “we have nothing to do with [Tommy Robinson]” or “all of that lot.” Now, I don’t attend those marches, but I am concerned about this kneejerk need to disavow thousands of Reform voters through guilt-by-association. Tommy Robinson may be imprudent in his public and personal conduct, but he has done less harm to the country than some of the Tory politicians that Reform would doubtless welcome as defectors. More importantly, nobody on those peaceful marches has done anything untoward to warrant such contempt. Donald Trump does not feel the need to distance himself from even the kookiest elements of the MAGA movement when hostile press attempt to pressure him. Reform should be wise enough to do the same.
I hope this message is heeded, even if the messenger has been shot. If we have more men like Rupert Lowe in Parliament, and the rest of Reform making as strong statements as he has, then I have no doubt that there will be a political force with the courage to address all the problems implied by the above ONS data.
Until such a day comes, I will both criticise and encourage accordingly.
I'm surprised Edward and Alfred aren't in the top ten list. If I'm correct I think the name Alfie was very popular in the early 2000's. I didn't think Theodore and Luca were particularly English name.
"formerly Rhodesia" - haha!
Great article.