How vibrant diversity is working out in my ancestral homeland

The PMC has spent the past four decades punching down – economically and culturally – on the white working class. Now they are punching back

Photo by paul jespers on Unsplash

[London is] not really an English city anymore
John Cleese, 2019

Britain has a stagnant economy that relies on cheap foreign labour and a population that is utterly fed up of mass immigration… White Britons are already a minority in London and other major cities and will become a minority in the country itself within our lifetimes… This is one of the reasons you see increasing levels of censorship and thought policing in the UK. As people begin to express dissent against what is happening, maintaining this state of affairs requires more and more suppression… I hope this particular flare-up of violence can be calmed but you're kidding yourself if you think that will be the end of it. 
P.S. There were many brave people who warned us this would happen. They were all demonised and ignored.

Konstantin Kisin

[Russian immigrant to the UK], 6/8/24

Ever since England’s riots and protests erupted, I have consistently argued — here, here, and here — that they are not simply “far-right thuggery” but reflect a much deeper reservoir of public angst and anger over the policy of mass immigration…

While the polling company YouGov have done all they can to downplay some of the key findings, the results paint a very different picture to what we are being told… While it is true that very few British people say they have any sympathy at all for people causing unrest at the protests — only 8% do — a much larger 58% of British people say they have sympathy for people taking part in the protests peacefully…  And who do Brits hold responsible for causing unrest at the protests? Well, while 88% blame rioters themselves, 86% blame social media, 74% blame “far-right groups”, 69% blame “news media”, 57% blame Tommy Robinson, and 47% blame Nigel Farage, I think it is very significant that more than two-thirds of all voters blame something else entirely — “immigration policy in recent years”.

In fact, 67% of all Brits think immigration policy in recent years has “a great deal” or “fair amount” of responsibility” for the unrest, rising to 71% of all men, 75% of the over-50s, 78% of Conservative Party voters, and 95% of Reform voters.

Matt Goodwin

, 7/8/24  

1979 was a big year for Perfidious Albion, not least because it was graced by my presence for six weeks.

My mother, a ten-pound Pom, left the UK in her late teens in the early 1960s and ended up marrying my (distantly Welsh)-Australian father. Had things worked out differently, she might have returned to Great Britain. As a small but not insignificant proportion of British migrants who find themselves unenamoured of life in the New World always have.

I imagine youngsters who have known nothing but a globalised world would struggle to understand how unglobalised it used to be.

As was the fashion at the time, my mother got on a boat and sailed to Australia. (Air travel was prohibitively expensive.) If she wanted to communicate with friends or family members “back home”, she wrote them letters and – weeks later – received letters back. (Phone calls were expensive, and international ones prohibitively so, mainly because the internet didn’t yet exist.) Nobody from the UK visited, even for her wedding, and she didn’t return to England for almost two decades.

The children of migrants are often taken back to live in the motherland for a period. Even highly assimilated immigrants – and it’s harder to think of a group of immigrants to Australia, Canada, the US or New Zealand that have assimilated more frictionlessly than Brits (for self-evident reasons) – usually want their children to understand the cultural forces they were shaped by.  

Last year, I was charmed to read that New York-based, Australian-American advertising genius David Droga splashed out on a holiday house in Tamarama. Even in Sydney, $45 million is a lot of money to pay for a beachside shack you’ll probably only spend a couple of weeks a year in. But as Droga noted:      

I’m Australian, right? I’m very fortunate to have some places I love in America, in the city and the farm. But it’s weird to be Australian and have to rent every time I come here, for Christmas with my family,” he says… ‘I’m Australian. No matter where I live, I still want to spend time here, and I want my kids to have a connection to here’.”

A somewhat more prominent Aussie success story was also keen on his children forming a connection with his ancestral homeland. It seems his favourite child, Lachlan (aka Kendall Roy), did form such a connection. Indeed, he famously married a dinky-di, sun-kissed Australian model. One I briefly went to school with, as it happens. This is presumably part of the reason the two – ultimately – formed such a tight alliance.

While Murdoch is widely considered Australian-American, he’s spent lots of time in the UK, starting with his studies at Oxford. Rupert’s father, Keith – the son of a Scottish Presbyterian minister – made his name reporting on the catastrophe of the Gallipoli campaign.

I could go on about how Australians and Brits have impacted each other’s societies all day.

Though she occasionally mentions it and retains a trace of the accent, I suspect many fans of Louise Perry, the brilliant and brave tyro behind

Maiden Mother Matriarch

and author of the – dare I say seminal? – work The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, is the issue of Aussie expats.

 Enoch ‘Rivers of Blood’ Powell was appointed Professor of Greek at the University of Sydney at age 25 in 1937. One of his students was future Labor PM, Gough Whitlam. Ironically, Whitlam was the first Australian PM – or at least the first Labor one – with socially progressive, cosmopolitan globalist tastes.

The takeaway message is that Brits in Australia and Australians in Britain overwhelmingly make a positive contribution to their new home, and often continue to enrich their old one.

Neither they nor their offspring are in the habit of massacring young girls. Or gang-raping them on an industrial scale. Or going on the dole and helping themselves to free or heavily subsidised housing and healthcare despite the fact neither they nor their ancestors paid into the system at any point.   

Memories of Merry Old England  
Even back when I first visited 45 years ago, the UK, especially London, was some way off being an ethnostate.

Famously, 50,000 – 100,000 (Protestant) Huguenots immigrated from (Catholic) France between the late 17^th and early 18^th centuries. Admirably, the UK also welcomed tens of thousands of persecuted Austrians/Germans, primarily but not exclusively Jews (including one Sigmund Freud), in the 1930s.

Imperial capitals are often subject to reverse imperialism, and I saw Britons of Indian, Pakistani, Jamaican and sundry-former-African-colonies descent during my first visit.  

That noted, just as China is still full of Chinese, Hungary is still full of Hungarians, and Japan is still full of Japanese, England was then full of English people. It was – and this must be near unimaginable for anyone under 30 – 95 per cent white British.

It would be disingenuous to suggest that the UK in 1979 didn’t have problems. It had recently been roiled by widespread strikes. At one point, the gravediggers downed tools (shovels?) for a fortnight. This led to much outcry, which reverberates to this day, about a once mighty empire having degenerated to the point where it “couldn’t bury the dead”.)

There was high inflation, high unemployment and a sense of malaise, stagnation and post-imperial decline; a grim, despairing milieu that would both power the punk movement and propel Thatcher to victory.   

But at no point during my long stay in my mother’s birthplace do I recall any of my relatives saying, “You know, young scamp, the answer to all Great Britain’s problems is to import vast numbers of people, ideally from very different cultures, then revel in the subsequent vibrant diversity.”          

Is multiculturalism modern-day Lysenkoism?  
Highly intelligent, well-educated, well-intentioned people can believe dangerously idiotic things for an unfeasibly long time. Often despite the seemingly abundant evidence right in front of their lying eyes. Many thoroughly decent people believed Communism was the answer to all humanity’s problems throughout much of the 20^th century.

Turns out it wasn’t.

Members of the corporate and cultural elite – full disclosure, I reluctantly but undeniably have at least a toenail in both camps – have long insisted that you can simply dump hundreds of thousands of people – often ones with incompatible worldviews and value systems, ones who don’t speak the language, have few marketable skills and are traumatised by war, civil unrest or ethnic/religious conflict – into a society year after year and the end result will be a well-functioning, economically vibrant, cosmopolitan utopia.

Well, how’s that been working out lately?

Poor Fellow My Country
I don’t recall the ordinary people being asked if they wanted mass migration. I find it impossible to call to mind any Anglosphere politician who went into an election campaign promising to increase immigration. I seem to remember almost all of them promising to substantially reduce it.

Strangely, that never seems to happen.

As migrants – and the offspring of migrants – often are, I’m saddened when I see what has become of the Old Country. The UK has profound problems, ones the new Labour government will find it devilishly difficult to properly address.

But if the political will exists, it’s certainly possible to stop illegal immigration. We Australians did it back in 2001. Australian politicians are rarely quoted by foreigners. (Albo isn’t exactly Obama.) But a surprising number of Anglosphere politicians and voters are familiar with John Howard’s rallying cry: "We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come."  

I never voted for Howard, but he’s undoubtedly been proven correct.

The actions he took – massively popular with many Labor voters, not least legally arrived migrants and their offspring – appalled members of the cultural elite, including many journalists. But Howard’s strength and foresight helped prevent Australia from becoming as Balkanised as the UK now is.   

If two-tier Keir doesn’t want to meet the fate of all his recent predecessors, I’d humbly suggest he actually fix the UK’s broken migration system, rather than just pretending he’ll get around to it shortly.  

As I discovered earlier this week, when I recklessly blew up a much-valued relationship because I got high on my own supply of righteousness, moral grandstanding feels undeniably delightful in the short term. Regrettably, it often doesn’t work out quite so well over the longer term. Once certain things are broken, it’s near impossible to piece them back together again.

This is a life lesson many otherwise insightful progressives have struggled with since the Marxist dream soured and they jauntily hopped from economic socialism to the cultural variety. (Say what you will about old-school Leftists – including the Communists – but they were/are hardnut pragmatists who got/get things done, rather than preeners desperate to sit with the cool kids at lunchtime.)     

If centre-left politicians hope to maintain any relationship with the class centre-left parties emerged to represent, they may now wish to consider the radical approach of responding to that class’s entirely legitimate concerns.

This is, after all, how democracies are supposed to work.

As I’ve pointed out once or twice in these digital pages – see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and, oh yeah, here – members of my class, the professional-managerial class, are running out of time.

Societies spin out of control gradually then suddenly. It sure looks to me like many Anglosphere and Western European nations are careening towards the ‘suddenly’ phase, or already in it.

If self-righteous, self-dealing elites want to keep fucking around, I fear they – and the rest of us – really are about to find out.