Islam in England

Fun and Frolics with the Fatwa Fraternity, part two

In this post I am going to look at the situation with regards to the Moslem population of England as it stands in 2020. I usually refer to the UK, rather than England alone when talking about modern British politics, however, in this instance the situation in England is rather different to the UK as a whole. According to the 2011 census the Moslem population of the UK was 2,786,635. Of these 2,660,166 were in England.

I apologise in advance, this will be a rather heavy with statistics, it can’t help but be. I will try to be simple and consistent, not easy as England is divided up in different ways and not all stats use the same geographic boundaries. Also, the stats that make the headlines are those that the MSM have deemed useful to their narrative. It is necessary to delve into the bowels of the Office of National Statistics (ONS) to dig up the stats you need. For the most part I’m using the last census, 2011.

The Basics

First the basic percentages according to the 2011 census. The UK is 4.4% Moslem, which breaks down as England 5%, Wales 1.4%, Scotland 1.8% and Northern Ireland 0.21%. The Moslem population of the UK outnumbers the combined Hindu, Sikh, Jewish and Buddhist population by very nearly a million, 2,786,635 to 1,798,975.

Of course, that 5% population is not spread evenly across England. As you might expect, there is a concentration of Moslems in cities, and within those cities there are further layers of concentration. Some 38% of England’s Moslems are in Greater London, making up over 12% (probably approaching 15% now) of Londoners. The London Boroughs of Tower Hamlets and Newham have the highest concentrations at around 37% and 25% respectively. Here is a map of the Moslem population across England.

There, I said it would be statistic heavy, two short paragraphs and we’re up to 11 percentages, four statistical layers and a map. I want to lay this out for you in detail because these details matter. Not just for reasons I will look at later but because when folk on our side come out with “facts” that are then proved wrong we look very foolish and good points are undermined. One of the many things I like about BW.com is the commitment to getting things right. Here is an example of what happens when folk get over excited, from the Guardian in 2015.

The article the goes on to say.

“According to census data, around 850,000 non-Muslims live in Birmingham, accounting for approximately 80% of the near 1.1 million population of Britain’s second largest city.”

Notice how the Guardian s**t weasel presents the stats in a way that avoids saying Birmingham’s Moslem population is about 22%, which it is.

So, Steven Emerson was wrong, however, if he had resisted to temptation to use a big broad clown brush and gone into a little bit of detail, he could have made his point and avoided looking a fool. What he said was technically wrong but the point he was trying to make was not.

Birmingham is a lot smaller than London but it’s still a big place; it covers over 100 square miles and returns 10 Members of Parliament. As elsewhere, the Moslem population is not evenly spread but is concentrated in the centre. There are large areas of Birmingham where Emerson’s statement wouldn’t sound wrong to the locals. Big parts of the centre are over 70% Moslem. 3 of its 10 MPs and 24 of its 101 Councillors are Moslem, including the current Lord Mayor. I’m not suggesting Emerson should’ve said all this, but if he’d qualified his statement a little, he could’ve avoided getting fact checked.

What is true of Birmingham is also true of large areas of Leicester, Bradford, Blackburn, Luton, Greater London, Slough, Oldham and High Wycombe. Most of these places have Moslem populations of between 10 and 15%, with Bradford at 16% and Blackburn at nearly 20%.

When it comes to people’s lives the local area matters. We travel around of course but day to day much of our life is played out on a fairly small stage. I’ve looked at the detailed statistics for the Yorkshire city of Bradford in the 2011 census. The results are interesting.

The level I looked at divides Bradford into 61 neighbourhood areas of varying population but with an average of 8,500 souls in each. Of these 61 areas 13 were over 50% Moslem with two of these at over 80% and another two at over 70%. I did the calculations and nearly a quarter of Bradford’s population live in an area where Moslems are in the majority and over a third live in an area that is over 25% Moslem. So, although the BBC and Guardian can say, hand on heart, that Bradford is only 16% Moslem, for many of the folk who live there it doesn’t feel like that.

Culture

These dry statistics have real life implications, let’s look at an example. Although the pub is one of the great English cultural icons, they are hard pressed and work on small margins. Pubs are closing and being turned into flats or shops at an alarming rate all over the country. In areas of significant Moslem population, the rate is even higher. Some Moslems do drink of course, despite it being strictly forbidden (I know one chap who switches from Lager to Guinness during Ramadan!) but the majority do not, especially publicly. Take my hometown of Southall, west London, when I started going to pubs in the late ‘80s there were 24 pubs. Today there are 4. When I was growing up it was a largely Indian/Pakistani town with Sikhs being the largest group. It has continued to attract immigrants (mostly Moslem) and today the ethnically English population is around 5% and the Moslem population 25%. It’s only the Sikhs keeping those 4 pubs going.

This is just one example of how the growth of Islam changes the cultural landscape and the subject is too big and complex to do justice here. Suffice it to say that when the much-maligned white working class express their anger and despair at the changes happening around them they are not merely objecting to the presence of folk who are different, they are bemoaning the loss of something they hold dear.

Politics, downstream from Culture

Let’s look go back to Brum, as Birmingham is often called, to look at the political implications of Islam in England. I’ve mentioned that it has 10 members of parliament, 8 Labour, 2 Conservative as of the last election, when Labour lost Birmingham Northfield. Here is a compilation of maps, showing the relationship between the Moslem population and politics. I took a map of the 10 constituencies as of the last election and a map of the distribution of the Moslem population. The population map is divided up at the smallest level of census stats, which is areas of less than 3,000 people. This gives a very detailed picture. I made the areas that are less than 5% Moslem blank and overlaid it on the political map.

As you can see, there’s a very high correlation between the Labour held seats and the Moslem population. I did the same with Greater London; and got this.

Again, very strong correlation. You can see most of the Conservative blue and the Lib-Dem custard colour (in their middle class, bien pensant ghetto along the nice part of the Thames, smug bastards), the Labour red is largely covered. I did it again for the West Midlands (where Birminghm is), Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire, again, there was a correlation, although not quite so strong. There are also strong Labour areas with very small Moslem populations like South Wales and Merseyside. Labour tends to be stronger in urban areas, and the Moslem population is likewise largely urban. Of course, correlation is not causation and there certainly are Conservative Moslems.

None the less, most Moslems do vote Labour and just like the Democrats in the US Labour is certainly seen as the more Islam friendly party. I’m sure Labour would have lost even more seats at the last election if it weren’t for the sizeable Moslem populations in many of them.

Small wonder then that the Labour party has been much more worried about “Islamophobia” than it has been about the growth of very real anti-Semitism in its own ranks. Sir Keir Starmer has said he intends tackle this, and I wish him luck, he’ll need it because there is a big, fat keffiyeh wearing elephant in this room. The Labour party has not had an influx of neo-nazis, but it has had an increase in participation by Moslems themselves. At the last election a record 18 Moslems were elected to Parliament, 14 of them Labour. This reflects greater participation at every level. I am not saying that someone is automatically an anti-Semite if they are Moslem, of course not. Nevertheless, Islam has anti-Semitism hard wired, it is naïve to think that an increase in participation by an ever more confident Moslem community comes without consequences.

Take Iranian born Ali Milani, the Labour candidate in Boris Johnson’s seat at the last election. He faced criticism for tweets that were not just anti-Israel but anti-Semitic. Examples included claiming that Israel has “no right to exist” and tweeting as a reply to somebody, “Nah u won’t mate, it’ll cost you a pound #Jew”. Milani has, of course, since apologised for them more than once and passes them off as youthful indiscretion, saying “These tweets are from an incredibly long time ago – when I was 16 to 17 years old.” I’d have more sympathy if Mr Milani wasn’t 26 years old now. Maybe I’m showing my age, but to me less than a decade back doesn’t count as an incredibly long time ago. The Islamic doctrine of Taqiyya, effectively lying in defence of the Faith, can’t help but cast doubt on his sincerity, but that’s for another post.

Although 5% in England and 4.4% across the UK may not seem like much, Islam, and its influence, is growing here fast. The plain and uncomfortable fact is there are 900,000 more Moslems in the UK than the entire population of Northern Ireland and about 350,000 fewer than the population of Wales. NI and Wales both have their own assemblies. Ethnically and culturaly varied though the Moslems are, they show a high degree of political cohesion. In future any party wishing to gain power will increasingly have to take Moslem opinions and attitudes into account and these can be quite divergent from the bulk of the population, often in alarming ways. Witness the years of petrified official inactivity over so called grooming gangs. We have a Moslem Mayor of London, we’ve had a Moslem Chancellor of the Exchequer (one of the four Great Offices of State, second only to the PM) and what this means for the future of our culture and politics only time will tell. Nearly two decades ago, in the 2001 UK cenus, 9.1% of all chlidren 5 and under were Moslem and last year Mohamed, in its various spellings, came top of the list of names given to new born boys.