No more stiff upper lip: My fellow Brits are fed up with ‘diversity’

How would you destroy a country if you had the opportunity?

Deracinate the native population? Create authoritarian hate-speech legislation to prevent civilians from questioning the state’s actions? Smear those who disagree as dumb, racist idiots? Eliminate symbols of national solidarity and pride?

Leicester is one of the first British cities to have a non-white majority, thus earning the newly coined progressive accolade ‘super diverse.’

The British state has done all of the above.

Suicidal empathy

Liberal elites think “diversity is a strength.” I would call it suicidal empathy. White British people made up 98% of the United Kingdom’s population in 1968, but they are predicted to become a minority by 2063. The barbarians are at the gates, and we have merely opened the doors. All in the name of multiculturalism.

What is so alarming is the speed of increase. Net migration has increased the number of people living in the United Kingdom by 3.7 million since 2010 — more than the population of Connecticut. The percentage of foreign-born people living in the U.K. has almost trebled in 30 years.

If you only account for people entering the country, about 3.6% of Britain’s total population has arrived between 2021 and 2023. To put this in context, the Huguenots, who are sometimes referred to as “Britain’s first refugees,” arriving between the 16th and 17th centuries, made up about 1% of the population. It took about 50 years to accomplish.

It wasn’t always this way. For the bulk of the 20th century, immigration had a minor impact on British life. Between 1945 and 1995, net migration to the United Kingdom was less than 1 million.

Care Blair

That all changed in 1997. It was multiculturalism’s year zero. The “New Labour” government was new Britain: managerial elites and technocrats exercising power through bloated government bureaucracies and radically transforming society. The architect was Labour Party leader and newly elected Prime Minister Tony Blair, who sought to socially engineer a multicultural society and “rub the right’s nose in diversity.” In the 30 years since 1995, net migration has rocketed to almost 8 million.

Mass immigration, along with its accompanying doctrine of multiculturalism, has been a 30-year flawed experiment. The notion that the West has entered a post-historical period in which cultural practices, religion, and ethnicity would coalesce into a harmonious global community based on universal principles has proven to be dangerously false.

The limits of tolerance

What has happened to my country over the last few decades gives the lie to the neoliberal fantasy of an all-inclusive, peaceful, and prospering multicultural society. A once-tolerant citizenry has grown weary of the fruits of diversity: Pakistani grooming gangs targeting mainly white, working-class girls; cousin marriage; inter- and intrareligious conflict; terrorism; Sharia law courts; and independent MPs advocating for Islamic blasphemy laws.

Our compassion for asylum-seekers has also waned — especially with the realization that many of the people our government chooses to import harbor values antithetical to Western civilization — if not downright opposed to it.

Brothers Hashem and Salman Abedi — responsible for killing 22 people when Salman blew himself up at an Ariana Grande concert at Manchester Arena in 2017 — were both born in the U.K. after their Libyan parents were granted asylum in 1993.

But their father had Islamist ties back in Libya and took his family there in 2011. It is believed that both boys — then teenagers — fought with the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group against Muammar Gaddafi.

Just last month, an Afghan migrant was found guilty of threatening to kill Nigel Farage, the Reform U.K. leader.

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Nina Power

Super diverse

The Muslim population of England and Wales has risen to 4 million — a 44% rise in a decade. Driven by a huge increase in Asian immigrants from Pakistan and India, immigration has led to rapid demographic change to major cities across the country. Leicester is one of the first British cities to have a non-white majority, thus earning the newly coined progressive accolade “super diverse.”

When Conservative MP Robert Jenrick stated that he had not seen another white face while walking around Handsworth, an inner-city area of Birmingham, he was merely stating a fact. There are approximately 600 White British people in the neighborhood, out of a total population of about 12,000.

But Jenrick was criticized for being “divisive” and “irresponsible” by Ayoub Khan, the independent MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, where Muslims account for about 45% of the resident population, according to 2021 census data.

Khan won his seat partly on a pro-Palestinian platform and has criticized the major parties for what he describes as neglect of his community. He also endorses cousin marriage and controversially labeled the grooming gang scandal a “false right-wing narrative.” It’s not so much Britain first as anywhere else first.

Collapse of cohesion

I could go on. Among the issues that increasingly preoccupy the British public are those rooted in rapid demographic and cultural change. Coroners have warned that vulnerable elderly patients are dying because some foreign care-home staff lack adequate English — one 2024 case involved workers unable to distinguish “bleeding” from “breathing” when calling emergency services.

White British children are a minority in one in four English schools. The national flag, though legally unrestricted, is often treated as an embarrassment outside state-sanctioned occasions such as football tournaments. And several of Britain’s largest cities — including Birmingham and Bradford — regularly appear near the top of European crime rankings, a trend critics link to poor integration and rapid immigration.

Each of these concerns points to a deeper unease about whether the institutions meant to preserve national cohesion are still capable of doing so.

In 2014, a BBC straw poll asked viewers the question, “Is multiculturalism working?” 95% of the respondents replied with a resounding “no.”

The mood has not improved since then; more than half of U.K. voters now support mass deportations.The British, renowned for their toleration and stiff upper lip, have had enough.