Mass migration will permanently alter Britain
It’s not just a matter of hospitals and houses. The British way of life could be irrevocably changed
Call me old-fashioned, but I rather liked our country when women and children didn’t have acid thrown at them in the street, teachers weren’t forced into hiding for educating pupils about religious tolerance, Saturdays in the capital didn’t feature anti-semitic hate marches, and well-loved Members of Parliament didn’t quit their jobs after being threatened for speaking up for their Jewish constituents.
Yesterday was a perilous and dark moment in the history of this democracy. Mike Freer, Conservative MP for Finchley and Golders Green, announced he was leaving politics after being hounded with death threats for his pro-israel views.
Freer considers himself “lucky to be alive” after learning that Ali Harbi Ali, the Islamist terrorist who murdered Sir David Amess MP in 2021, once turned up at his constituency office in north London with the intention of killing him. An arson attack there in December followed by an email (calling him “the kind of person who deserved to be set alight”) was the final straw.
Freer’s decision to step down is a victory for the zealots who have no respect for the norms of what feels daily like a less and less civilised society. It’s a capitulation to forces against which we need to stand firm if the ballot box is to mean anything.
But don’t expect the Prime Minister or the Leader of the Opposition to attack the culprits. After lovely, gentle Sir David was murdered, his fellow Parliamentarians could not wait to change the subject from barbarous slaughter to online safety.
In the Commons, there was a cowardly stampede away from the elephant in the room. It is a measure of the success of extremist groups that, too often, fear of being seen as Islamophobic now trumps the solemn duty to defend the British way of life.
This isn’t just visible in direct violence. A primary school in east London received bomb threats after its headteacher banned pro-palestine badges.
Katharine Birbalsingh, the redoubtable head of Michaela Community School, and her staff have faced appalling threats of violence after Muslim pupils were told they were not permitted to pray during the school day, in keeping with the strict secular ethos that Birbalsingh believes is the best way to bind her multi-faith school together.
What runs through these alarming events is a tantrummy defiance, a determination by hardline “community leaders” to get their own way regardless of what custom or the law of the land may say. As long as such people remain an aggrieved minority it is just about possible to keep a lid on it. There are enough of us to speak up for our Jewish citizens and call out medieval attitudes towards women, girls and gay people, and to assist those who want to integrate to do so.
That’s why I found the Office for National Statistics projection that the UK’S population will exceed 70 million by 2026 so devastating. It’s not just that our hospitals and infrastructure can barely cope with the people here already, or that our useless elites won’t build anywhere near enough housing.
No, it’s that 92 per cent of the 6.6 million rise – 6.1 million people – will come from immigration, not British people having children. Such a surge would utterly reshape the Britain we love, its culture and even its language.
Prof Matthew Goodwin points out that, since the 1990s, the share of school pupils whose first language is not English has almost tripled. I have taught English as a second language in Tower Hamlets and, let me tell you, it will not be possible to integrate such a vast number of people within that timeframe. And that’s if they want to be integrated, which the extremists who have hounded out Mike Freer clearly don’t.
There is no democratic consent for such demographic change. No one voted for it. Mindboggling “diversity” is being ushered in against the express will of the people by politicians who think GDP matters more than a contented nation and that anyone who objects is “racist”.
Parliament has the power to stop this, and stop it it must or it will never be forgiven. And it must do so soon. I could cry thinking of the hundreds of thousands who gave their lives in two world wars to protect this precious island, its values, its green places, its eccentricity, its kindness, its humour.
What did they die for? So we could become some teeming Travelodge of Babel? Call me old-fashioned, but no. We have to protest; we must.