The conventional explanation of mass immigration among critical commentators is that “woke ideologues” in the civil service and the political halls of power believe that bringing more people into Britain is an unquestionable moral good. On the fringes of the Right, some even murmur of various theories of the “Great Replacement” which range in emphasis from elites bringing in compliant and desperate foreign workers to avoid providing good working conditions and fair wages to native workers, all the way through to Jews conspiring to replace white people with third-world immigration. Whatever the exact flavour this perspective comes in, the idea is that mass immigration is happening for primarily ideological reasons.

Likewise, advocates of mass immigration believe that anti-immigration sentiment is also motivated by ideology (hating immigrants/being racist etc) rather than reality.

What has been clear to me for some time, however, is that both of these claims are only partially true. Yes, some, as New Labour advisor Andrew Neather explained, wanted to “rub the Right’s nose in diversity”. Yes, many in Britain as a whole and in Westminster in particular think that immigration is an axiomatic moral good. The problem is, however, that this does not explain why a series of Conservative governments, elected on increasingly vociferous promises to bring immigration down to the “tens of thousands”, continued to ramp it up. Facing the threat of Farage, who tore chunks out of the Tory vote year after year, they instead proceeded to set new immigration records, culminating in 2023 when net annual immigration exceeded 900,000.

It’s also true that some people don’t like immigrants. But the idea that this motivates a significant portion of the opposition to mass immigration in a country like Britain is absurd. According to that infamous far-right, anti-immigrant rag The Guardian, British people are statistically some of the most welcoming towards immigrants in the world.

Put simply, both sides are misunderstanding what’s happening, often on purpose.

My view is that much of the concern about immigration comes from two practical realities.

First, mass immigration on this scale is necessarily displacing. I’ve only lived in Britain for 30 years, and no one can tell me that the country and especially its major cities have not been completely transformed in that time. Many of the people who live in London today are either unconcerned by or actively in favour of these changes. But that’s partly because most of the people who were concerned have left. Now multiply across every city in the country and many of their suburbs. You don’t have to dislike people to not want the area where generations of your family were born, lived and died to become alien to you within the space of two decades.

In that same timespan, the British people have been getting poorer. As I keep saying over and over, Britain’s GDP per capita is lower today than it was in 2007, before the Great Financial Crisis.

Ironically, this is also why parties of every stripe have brought in millions of people into the country: we don’t evaluate economic performance on GDP per capita. Instead, we measure GDP itself and itself alone. That is the equivalent of measuring how prosperous your household is without accounting for the number of people living in it. A household income of £100,000 per year is high (by British standards, at least - more on this later) but what matters a lot more than that is how many people are in your household. A single person living on £100,000 is in a very different position to a family of 5 who are effectively getting £20,000 a year each.

The explanation for why Labour and the Tories let immigration run rampant was best summed up by legendary investor Charlie Munger when he said “show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome”. If all you care about is the headline figure, why not hand a bedroom to your in-laws to top up your “prosperity” with their pension? When described like this, it sounds, frankly, insane, yet that is precisely what our politicians are incentivised to do. They are judged on the country’s total GDP. The easiest way to increase it when you’re busy strangling your economy with Net Zero, high taxes and endless regulations? Bring in more bodies.

This really isn’t complicated to understand so why do so many people in Britain, who clearly feel the economic pain, nonetheless refuse to see it? To see that mass immigration is an attempt by badly incentivised politicians to deceive them about what’s actually happening? Instead, they cling to their support for mass immigration and the seductive (but false) idea that they are struggling because “the rich aren’t paying their fair share”.

A report this week, however, has opened my eyes to another reason - one I had never considered:

Read more

Konstantin

Read more

Read more

Now, you might be thinking: look how “right wing” Konstantin has become. Why does anyone care whether a few unrepresentative areas have a lot of people from a particular community living there? After all, this tends to happen when groups of people move from country to country. People are not atomised individuals, especially in more traditional societies. British settlers who moved to the New World didn’t move in groups of 3 either. A lot of immigration happens in clusters. It’s why so many big cities have a Chinatown. I’m not against Chinatowns, but then again, I’ve never seen a British politician campaigning in Chinese, and the food is incredible.

I am aware, as I write this, that to some American readers this might seem a strange thing to take issue with. After all, there are many parts of the US where you’ll get by just as easily with Spanish as you will with English. But there is a big difference between Britain and America as a British-born-Pakistani Uber driver once explained to me in Los Angeles.

“British people aren’t racist,” he said. “It’s just space: Britain is a small country, America is a big country. When you move to America you’re not taking someone else’s space.”

This reflects in the linguistic differences too: when you become an American citizen, you’re called a “first-generation American”. When you become a British citizen, you’re a “first generation immigrant”. I’m not complaining - that’s what I call myself because that’s a cultural difference between Britain and America.

This difference is partly caused by something else too - America displaced its native population and replaced it with waves of colonists from different parts of Europe and later immigrants from all over the world. With the exception of the people brought there against their will, they all effectively took the land from someone else. Whether your ancestors did the initial taking or moved more recently, you still benefit from that land being taken by living on it. The native population of North America is dwarfed by the more recent arrivals. I say “more recent” and not “recent” because when it comes to land, someone always took it from someone else. With the exception of Australian aboriginals, there are no people in the world who can claim they were the first modern humans to settle on land they currently occupy outside a handful of tiny, isolated island communities. Everyone else took the land they currently live on from someone else. And because Americans have a collective sense of being historically recent arrivals, it’s just that much harder for them to deny other people the American Dream their great-grandparents sought, provided they do it legally.

As I’ve written before, until very, very recently, Britain was a highly ethnically and culturally homogenous society. Your opinion of whether that’s good or bad is unimportant for the purposes of what I’m saying here. The fact is, in the lifetime of almost everyone alive today, London and other British cities have gone from being overwhelmingly populated by native Brits to being majority minority. In 1991, 35 years ago, London was estimated to be 80% White British. By 2021, thirty years later, it was 36.8%. Over 75% of the country’s population is over the age of 35. This dramatic change happened in the lifetimes of three out of four people in Britain today. That’s not a political statement - it’s a fact.

Forget about the skin colours and races of the people involved. When European settlers came to North America and within a couple of generations became the more populous people on the Eastern seaboard of today’s United States, on a scale from 1 (dissatisfied) to 10 (delighted), how happy do you think the natives were?

“Konstantin, you can’t possibly compare the horrors inflicted on the native population of North America by a combination of brutal warfare, deadly European disease and forced displacement and ethnic cleansing,” I hear you say.

You’re right; no reasonable person would make that comparison. But say the colonists had moved to America because a handful of Native American leaders had welcomed them in despite the repeatedly expressed wishes of their citizens? Britain voted against mass immigration in 2010, 2015, 2016 with Brexit, 2017, 2019 and 2024, when they punished the Tories for letting immigration spin out of control. So, in our example, say there was no war, no violence and the displacement happened entirely peacefully and without coercion. Would you concede that in that situation quite a lot of Native Americans might have a few questions about whether their leaders made a better decision than the one they voted them in to make?

This is why I didn’t agree with Sir Jim Radcliffe using the word “colonisation” to describe what’s happened in Britain. But it’s also why I refuse to criticise him for it. Like all of us, he is trying to feel his way towards the right word to describe what’s happened in much of Europe in the last few decades. It’s hard because what’s happened is completely unprecedented.

Never in the history of our countries have our rulers decided that opening the borders to so many people from the rest of the world was a good idea. Indeed, at any other point in human history, the suggestion that we should pursue this course of action would have been met with bemusement to put it very, very mildly. It’s happened. In a very short period of time. Not only without the consent of the British people, but in direct contravention of their wishes.

Words like “invasion” and “colonisation”, which the edgelordy wing of the internet is so fond of using, sound like the people your anger is directed at are the immigrants themselves. This is why the #bekind brigade keep claiming that people with concerns about immigration are “demonising immigrants”. But 95% of the anger I see is directed at the people who did this: British politicians of all 3 major parties.

I don’t hate other people for wanting to come here. Britain is wonderful. Why wouldn’t they?

I don’t even hate the politicians who have done this. Some of them, at least, have the excuse of being incompetent and naive.

The people I am starting to hate, however, are the liars and the hypocrites who want to have it both ways:

Read more

Read more

Get more from Konstantin Kisin in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Read more

Subscribe now

Read more

This is why, the Polymarket odds for Starmer leaving vary so widely between him leaving in the next couple of months (unlikely) and leaving by the end of the year (very likely).

Second, and equally obviously, this entire scandal confirms something that anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear already knew: Labour is utterly devoid of talent. Even a weak and damaged Prime Minister will linger on because his potential replacements are, hard as that may be to believe, even less impressive. Indeed, his appointment of Mandelson was itself a symptom of the same problem: the Labour party is so short of serious operators that appointing a convicted paedophile’s best friend seemed like a good idea. David Lammy, who in opposition described President Trump as a “tyrant” and “a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath“, is this country’s Foreign Secretary whose most important job is to establish a productive working relationship with the US Administration. Most of Labour’s front bench should be stacking shelves at Lidl. Instead, they’re running the country.

Finally, and still equally obviously, the fallout from this episode has revealed in writing something that we all knew logically but had not previously heard a senior Labour figure say out loud: they are terrified of the Muslim vote. In an attempt to distance himself from Mandelson, Health Secretary Wes Streeting released their private WhatsApp exchanges. Hidden among these was a telling comment:

“I fear we’re in big trouble here - and I am toast at the next election. We just lost our safest ward in Redbridge (51% Muslim, Ilford S) to a Gaza independent. At this rate I don’t think we’ll hold either of the two Ilford seats. There isn’t a clear one answer to the question: why Labour?

Labour’s chickens are coming home to roost. For years, they fostered, encouraged, and profited from religious sectarianism. A significant number of the seats they hold were won by en bloc Muslim votes. Labour naively believed that these votes would stay with them no matter what, provided they continue to say and do nothing to offend this “community”. Their silence on grooming gangs, their failure to ban the Muslim Brotherhood and their aggressive push to criminalise thought crime under the guise of combatting “Islamophobia” are just some of the surface consequences.

The problem, as they have discovered, is that unlike the Labour Party, whose only guiding principle is political expediency, the Muslim “community” has a clear and well-defined political agenda.

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

The programme was recorded as Nadhim Zahawi was in the process of being sacked as Conservative Party Chairman because he had failed to declare that HMRC was in the middle of an investigation into his personal tax affairs when he was being appointed to various ministerial positions.

This anecdote alone gives you a flavour of the sorts of concerns many have raised about the increasing Toryfication of Reform. Last night it was confirmed that another Tory MP, Andrew Rosindell had defected to Reform, bringing the number of Reform MPs to 7, of whom more than half are now Tory defectors (Lee Anderson, Danny Kruger, Robert Jenrick and Andrew Rosindell).

The worry for many is that as conservative refugees become more numerous than “native” reformers within the party, the centre of gravity will shift away from Reform’s radical agenda towards the very policies and personalities they so thoroughly rejected at the last election. Reform’s defiant position against the failed status quo was what won them their legion of supporters. Now, some feel they’re cosying up to it. Personnel is policy, after all, and having forced out tough-talking right-wingers like Rupert Lowe and Ben Habib, Reform appears to be going slightly vegan.

It is rare for me to be accused of naive optimism, but, in this instance, I do not actually share these concerns for a number of reasons which we’ll come to shortly. But first, and much more importantly, we have to recognise that Reform has no choice but to continue salvaging what they can from the rotting carcass of the Conservative Party.

Why? Because Britain is not America.

Our electoral system does not allow a charismatic leader with a small band of acolytes to storm to power in the way that President Trump did with just JD Vance, RFK Jr., Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard and Vivek Ramaswamy at his side. To become Prime Minister, Nigel Farage has to have 650 men and women stand as candidates in constituencies across the country and more than half of them to actually be elected. Even now, when much of the public is fed up with the status quo and Kier Starmer enjoying the lowest favourability ratings in history, having a Reform rosette pinned on you will not guarantee victory in a specific constituency, especially to an unknown, politically-inexperienced candidate.

Once elected, that MP will be faced with the reality that standing as an MP is almost the exact opposite of being an MP. A political campaign is about making speeches, knocking on doors and selling yourself to the public. But once the sale is made, your constituents need you to solve their problems. Making witty comebacks on TV requires an entirely different skillset to filling in potholes. And metaphorical potholes are no small matter, nor one to worry about once the election is in the bag. The only way Reform can succeed as a political project is to win the war of the next election and then win the peace by actually delivering both locally and nationally.

Which brings us to the final reason why Reform has no choice.

Read more

Each had their reasons.

Western progressives view the world through a simple, warped but powerful lens. Their approach to global politics is exactly the same as their view of domestic politics, and is based on the appealing but misguided idea that success is always and everywhere the product of unearned, ill-gotten privilege. Their antipathy towards the West, white people, men, Jews and “the rich” stems from this basic formula: whoever is doing well must be doing so at the expense of others. To them, any imbalance in wealth, income, influence and so forth is necessarily bad and to be corrected.

At the domestic level, the culmination of this worldview is their demand for “social justice”, a forced redistribution of wealth, influence and opportunity from the “oppressors” to the “oppressed”. You don’t need to be a Robin DiAngelo acolyte to see how this Marxist dynamic extends to global affairs: “social justice” at home becomes “global justice” abroad. If the world is unequal, which it is, then that must be corrected. Their extraordinary ignorance of the world beyond the borders of the safe, peaceful, civilised countries they live in is extremely helpful, because it prevents them from seeing that peace, stability and prosperity are the products of culture, science and innovation. Instead, they argue that the West’s recent dominance is the product of colonialism, racism and imperialism. They hate the West for being successful and want a multipolar world as both a punishment and a corrective.

The isolationists are primarily an American phenomenon, albeit one which has spread to other parts of the West along with every other aspect of American culture. I have some sympathy for their instincts, even though they are, in my view, as misguided as the woke left about the way the world actually works. Having travelled extensively around America, I understand the feeling of a man living a comfortable life in rural Ohio being asked to care about events happening half way around the world. When I sit on the porch of my AirBnB somewhere in America I find it much harder to care about those events too.

For this reason, among others, isolationism has always existed in American history and was particularly powerful in the 1930s. Franklin D. Roosevelt, the president who orchestrated America’s support for Britain during WWII and his country’s eventual full involvement in the conflict, had to tread extremely carefully around this faction until Pearl Harbour.

The outcome of that war - an overwhelming moral and military victory over indisputable evil - kept isolationists quiet for some time. But the horrors of Vietnam, compounded by the trillion-dollar disasters of Afghanistan and Iraq, have understandably produced a powerful backlash against interventionism. “America can’t be the world’s policeman,” went the cry.

Unfortunately, simple slogans are rarely true and inevitably leave out much-needed context. America accounts for 5% of the world’s population but 25% of its GDP. Much of this is due to geography, natural resource wealth and the ingenuity and drive of her people. But much of it also stems from the fact that America is the world’s most powerful country, an advantage she uses with great skill to get the best deals, secure access to resources and shape global affairs in a way that benefits her and her allies. To pretend that Americans can continue to enjoy unprecedented prosperity, security and peace as their country completely withdraws from global affairs is to misunderstand the way the world works.

There is a strange irony here. The two groups that have most celebrated the coming multipolar world are now also the ones complaining the most about its consequences. And that is because, despite their good intentions, woke leftists and neoisolationists have served as useful idiots to the people who are actually driving the multipolarity narrative: hostile foreign powers that feel it is their moment to end American hegemony.

China’s economic growth and Russia’s recovery from the collapse of the USSR occurred at precisely the same time as the collapse of the West’s moral, economic and military authority. The shifting balance of power naturally produced a hunger for a different arrangement. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the terrorist attack of October 7 and China’s increasingly open coveting of Taiwan are all signs of a deeper geopolitical realignment. For the moment, the demographic and economic tide has swung powerfully against the West. Our enemies are emboldened by their growing strength, encouraged by our weakness and no longer constrained by international law—which was only ever worth the paper it was written on while the US was willing to act as the world’s policeman.

Europe, and Britain especially, are particularly responsible for this sorry state of affairs.

Read more

After a few days of this, the water company stopped making any promises about the water returning at all. Eventually, after a few more days, water supplies were restored—except it was the contaminated water the entire process was started to address. So we had water, we just couldn’t use it. A neighbour who drank it by mistake ended up in hospital with E.coli, a sign of fecal bacteria in the water.

During this period, bottled water was provided for residents at various collection points. Driving home one night, I saw an African woman carrying a pack of 6 bottles on her head, like something out of an ad asking you to send £10 to help drill a well in sub-Saharan Africa.

A week earlier, we filmed a documentary at a protest against 600 illegal immigrants being housed in a military camp down the road from my house.

A month earlier, I was walking through a posh part of London when I saw a young man in a balaclava snatch a bag from a tourist. When I told people about what I saw at various meetings, most people were surprised that I was surprised. Phone thefts, muggings and all kinds of petty crime are now considered normal and routine.

My point is, Britain’s infrastructure is crumbling, illegal immigration is out of control and crime is rampant. And that’s a good thing.

Read more

In other words, if history “repeats itself” or at least “rhymes”, it is because we are repeating the mistakes of our great grandparents, i.e. people who lived 80-90 years ago and could not personally warn us. As the saying goes, those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it, and those who do know history are doomed to watch others repeat it.

This is why, I think, many people cannot see what is happening on the right following the split which began with the invasion of Ukraine and was wedged open by the Israel-Hamas war.

The reason for this article is, of course, the unfolding events of the last few days here in the US, where I am in the middle of a month-long recording trip. It began when Tucker Carlson hosted Nick Fuentes on his show. Fuentes is a streamer on Rumble where he expresses his admiration for Hitler (“he’s very cool”), asks his followers to join in chants like “I will kill and rape for Nicolas J. Fuentes” and gives his latest takes on Jewish power in America, mixing all of this in with comments like “around blacks, never relax!”. When Tucker invited Fuentes on for a softball interview, many on the American right, who have been privately shocked by the recent direction some in their movement have taken, began to openly murmur about whether a dangerous line had been crossed.

In response, Kevin Roberts, CEO of the Heritage Foundation (whom we interviewed for TRIGGERnometry on our last visit) released a video in which he robustly defended Carlson against a “venomous coalition” which was engaging in “cancellation”. He pledged eternal friendship to the former Fox News anchor while also stating that he did not agree with Fuentes’ views.

This attempt to pacify both sides only stirred matters further. The following day, Roberts expressed disgust at Fuentes’ rhetoric and insisted that the answer was not to cancel but to engage.

The problem for Roberts is that this attempt to sit on two stools cannot work. This became clear in his interview with Dana Loesch. Throughout the interview Roberts repeatedly insisted that the answer to bad ideas is to engage them, while simultaneously saying that he would never host Fuentes at the Heritage Foundation or on his podcast. This is an obvious contradiction that even a slick political operator like Roberts cannot resolve. It’s not his fault that the generational and factional conflict within the right is coming to a head.

You cannot simultaneously appease people who believe in a fixed set of ideas and people who believe that the only ideas worth having are cynicism and revenge.

The BoomerCon establishment does not understand that Fuentes is not the problem, he is a symptom. And the reason they don’t understand that is that they don’t understand young men, who make up the overwhelming majority of his audience.

This entire phenomenon is driven by a number of factors which are affecting young men:

They are the most fatherless generation in history. A quarter of Gen Z grew up without a father present, up from just 9% in 1960. They’ve had less male guidance and direction than any group of men in American history, even the boys born after WW2, the most murderous war in human history which killed over 400,000 American men.

They did not experience the economic prosperity or political stability of the pre-9/11 era. Buying a house, especially in America’s major cities, becomes harder every year.

They were educated in a school and college system which is overwhelmingly female (77% of American school teachers are women). I don’t bring this up to criticise female teachers or suggest they are not as good as men; many female teachers are great at teaching mathematics, music, geography and history. But it’s just harder for women to teach boys how to be men.

As a result of the growing feminisation of education and society at large, many young men were not taught to channel their aggression, anger and competitiveness into productive activity. They were instead taught to suppress these natural male urges. And as any therapist will tell you, you can’t keep the things you suppress down forever.

Gen Z men spent their entire formative years lagging behind women in education and now earnings (young women without children outearn men).

And for the entirety of this time, they were told that “all men are trash”, “the future is female” and that they were to blame for every ill of humanity. It may be true that women haven’t always had a fair deal in society but that was never the fault of 15-year-old Zoomer boys, who understandably bristle at being held responsible for something they neither created nor benefitted from. And because they’re white men, nobody cares about their problems.

Is it really a surprise that some of them are resentful, angry and openly rebellious?

This perfect storm of alienation and the dearth of male guidance presents a lucrative opportunity for a new breed of influencer. Unlike fathers, uncles, male teachers, sports coaches and so on, Fuentes is not motivated by a desire to make a positive impact on the lives of the boys who listen to him. A father is incentivised to raise his sons in a way that makes them resist their worst instincts. As an influencer who makes money getting views online, Fuentes is incentivised to do the exact opposite.

But the reason Fuentes delights in saying Hitler was “very cool” is not only a transgressive revolt against the puritanical “gay race communism” rammed down his generation’s throat during the woke era and a desire for clicks.

Read more