13 hours ago
Can we still be Britain without the British? We'd rather you didn't ask
I couldn't care less about the burka debate. Not a tinker's. Why? Because it's a concession of defeat, a belated response by panicked politicians to a change that's already happened and that they largely encouraged.
Last week, a meteor hit Britain with the publication of a demographic study by the queerly named Centre of Heterodox Social Science. By 2063, say the sociable hets, white Britons will be a minority; come the new century, almost one in five citizens will be Muslim. This forces us to consider a very politically incorrect question: will Britain still be Britain if it's no longer majority white British?
The official answer is 'absolutely, yes'. Elite liberals believe nations are defined by values, and thus anyone, from anywhere in the world, can become British if they conform to them. It helps that these values are universal. Fairness, tolerance, kindness... this is a portable identity that is uncontroversial, because it demands nothing except to pay one's taxes and avoid murder.
Keir Starmer warns that we are becoming an 'island of strangers', while promoting a vision of citizenship that is entirely passive. It's also based on a misreading of human nature. Liberals assume that values shape culture, such that we could pass a law – ban the burka, ban Islamophobia – and we'd become good neighbours overnight.
But it's the other way around. Culture shapes values, and culture is the product of non-abstract, substantial qualities, such as climate, geography, religion, language and ethnicity. We can shorthand it as 'history'. Thus: we are democratic in Britain not because a committee decided it over one wild weekend, but following nearly a thousand years of revolution and reaction, baked into memory and expressed as temperament. Such a society is light-touch and self-governing, at least in theory, because we've been marinating in its ethics and customs since birth.
The English, Welsh, Scots etc do exist as cultures – not superior to others, nor unaffected by migration, but really real – and if they undergo a profound change in composition, this is bound to change the nature of Britishness, too. Isn't that obvious? It's regarded as axiomatic elsewhere. We rush to recognise and cultivate the historical identity of First Nations people, just as we step back nervously from a Holy Land conflict shaped by competing ethnic claims over biblical territory.
And even if you regard ethnic conflict as sinful, as I do, or based upon a category error, as academics insist, we have to accept that identity matters to a lot of people. In which case, I struggle to think of a society in history that has faced the scale of change happening to us without descending into violence or authoritarianism. Today, the liberal understanding of nationhood is already in retreat.
Remigration is being trialled in the United States. Donald Trump is reducing inflows by banning travel from named countries, cutting asylum and militarising his border. He's also increasing outflows by expelling as many people as he can on any pretext he can find. For instance, when an Egyptian asylum-seeker assaulted protesters in Colorado, the administration not only arrested the attacker but detained and is seeking to deport his entire family – a 'sins of the father' policy that judges are resisting.
Elsewhere, the BBC's Simon Reeve has caused a stir by highlighting the integrationist policies of Denmark, a country that offers people cash to go home and dismantles ghettos. That this is done by social democrats comes as no surprise. Scandinavia is historically conformist; a welfare state requires high levels of solidarity to function. Evidence of my 'history-shapes-identity' theory is offered by how countries respond to the immigration challenge in light of their own traditions.
Here, when a Reform UK MP asked the PM for his views on the burka, the PM had no answer and his MPs sounded as shocked as a maiden aunt offered cocaine. Why doesn't Labour want to have this debate? A cynic will say: it offends their core constituency. A Tory will claim: they don't really care about immigration. And yet Labour's immigration White Paper looks tough, and it has already increased deportations compared with the last government. Historically, it was Labour that restricted Commonwealth immigration in the 1960s, and Boris Johnson, of Brexit fame, who threw the borders open.
Boris, who liked to play both sides of the immigration game, infamously compared the burka to a letter box – yet did not wish to ban it. Do we not say 'an Englishman's home is his castle'? By extension, they are free to wear whatever they want in the street.
The problem, reply nationalists, is that by clinging to a liberal vision, we open the door to illiberal attitudes that might, by strength of conviction, overwhelm us. If the culture goes, our old values will follow. We are not, however, as tolerant as many assume. It has been reported that Prevent now regards 'cultural nationalism' – the fear that society 'is under threat from mass migration and a lack of integration' – as a 'sub-category of extreme Right-wing terrorist ideologies', and thus worthy of referral to the authorities.
GB News is up in arms – admittedly a permanent condition – but I've yet to hear a guest point out that white Christians are merely experiencing what the security services have done to Muslim Britons since 9/11: slander and harassment. Between 2016 and 2019, over 2,000 children under the age of nine were referred to Prevent, including a four-year-old Muslim boy who talked about a violent computer game at an after-school club.
Right and Left are chasing a mirage of British liberalism that, in an age when you can get 31 months for a social-media post, no longer reflects reality.
Immigration is ultimately a numbers game. A democratic society can get along fine with any minority, so long as it remains small in number. But when a government fails to police its borders, and thus loses control over numbers, it will feel obliged to police society to maintain harmony: monitoring, deporting, rewriting history, and indoctrinating us in a strange new variant on national character, a parody of kindness best described as 'sinister twee'.
If you want a vision of the future, it is a Dawn French-shaped woman, with a midlife-crisis fringe, talking to you about diversity and inclusion as if you were a baby. Then, when you raise an objection, ending the discussion with a disturbingly final 'NO'.
