Finally, They've Admitted It
The battle over the upcoming by-election in Gorton and Denton has, so far, been largely uneventful. The Labour Party which holds the seat looks set to lose it as you would expect: their leader has, after all, the worst personal satisfaction ratings of any British leader since records began. Reform look set to do well which, with immigration dominating the political conversation, is also unsurprising. The Greens are also performing strongly, and, like Reform, may even win the seat, for reasons I explained last week. So far, so predictable.
But then, a video by Green candidate Hannah Spencer began doing the rounds. The clip itself is unremarkable. It wouldn’t even be worth discussing if it weren’t for one minor detail - it’s delivered entirely in Urdu.
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:
