Having looked at London in part one, in part two I’m going to look at England as a whole. I’m not going to look at the whole of the UK, the way the figures are collected and presented can make that difficult. Also, of the 67 million people in the UK, 56 million of them are in England. The combined populations of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland is only about a million more than the population of Greater London.
Before we look at England today, a very brief look at the history and how we got here.
The English, broadly speaking descend form the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who invaded and settled the former Roman province of Britain after the Romans withdrew in 410 AD. They were Germanic tribes from the coastal regions between Denmark and the northern Netherlands. Naturally they first settled in the east, and slowly spread west. The people they were replacing are usually referred to as the Romano-British, the Romans having been in Britain for over three centuries. Although the population had adopted Roman culture, and there had been settling by Romans and people from all over the empire, the people were still essentially Celts.
That part of the island of Britain conquered and settled by the Anglo-Saxons is essentially England today (not exactly, but I’m keeping this brief). Traditionally it was assumed that the Romano-British were replaced, but today we think it was a bit more messy, with a good deal of intermarriage, and that the further west you go the more the populations mixed.
Then other invaders came from the east, from the 700s to the 1000s AD the Saxons’ northern cousins, the Vikings, first raided and then settled various parts of the British Isles, especially the east and north of England. These Danes and Norwegians who settled were culturally and linguistically close to the English and eventually merged with them. Their influence is still evident in place names and dialect in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire especially.
Finally, in 1066, the Duke of Normandy, Guillaume le Bâtard, conquered the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of England, defeated Harold Godwinson at Hastings and became William the Conqueror. He replaced the vast majority of the Saxon aristocracy with his own followers. His army was something like 10,000 men, and the Norman Conquest did not see a massive demographic change. Essentially the Normans (themselves descended from Norse settlers in northern France) became the new aristocracy. The population of England in 1066 was something like 1.7 million. The new lords and their families represented maybe 1% of that population.
So, the English are a mixture of Anglo-Saxon, Celt, Norse and Norman, the proportions varying by location and class, but of one ethnicity, being a group sharing ancestry, tradition, language, and culture. This was pretty much it from 1066, until after the Second World War.
There were other people living in England of course, but not great waves of newcomers. There were Jews in early medieval England, they were expelled (after years of persecution and massacre) by Edward I in 1290, but were living secretly in places like London and Bristol again by the 1500s. Oliver Cromwell officially lifted the ban in the 1650s.
From the 18th century onwards the bigger port cities, especially London, Liverpool, and Bristol had small communities of Afro-Caribbean origin. Slaves brought to England by their masters were technically free once they got here and some settled here.
Again, big port cities tended to have communities of foreign traders, Dutch, Germans, and Italians especially. These tended to be transitory, but some did settle here. There were other groups at different times, but in relatively small numbers. German refugees from Hanover during the Napoleonic Wars of the early 1800s, Ashkenazi Jews from Russia in the late 1800s and Belgians during the First World War.
The one exception is the very large influx of French Protestants (Huguenots). Fleeing persecution and death in France the Huguenots settled in many places, Switzerland, northern Germany, the Netherlands, and England. They came largely in two waves, in the late 1500s and again in the late 1600s. There were well over 100,000 in total, and Huguenots would have been maybe 2% of the population of England at the time. Mostly they settled in London and the southeast, but they did go elsewhere, including England’s American colonies. They made a big contribution to the economy, bringing skills in silk weaving, lace making, and glass making especially.
Integration was not too difficult, they adopted English swiftly, intermarried, and most joined the Church of England or other reformed churches. Having fled persecution in France they had no qualms with England’s usually anti-French stance, Huguenots fought alongside the English against French armies and navies. And, of course, they didn’t look any different from the rest of the population. By the end of the 1700s Huguenots were pretty much Englishmen with French surnames.
So, at the end of the Second World War England was overwhelmingly English. Of a population of a little over 40 million, less than 100,000 who were not ethnically English (or at least British), in percentage terms around 0.25%
With Britain’s swift retreat from Empire came the first big demographic changes since the Huguenots. From 1948 people came from British colonies in the Caribbean (The Windrush generation), there was also immigration by Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis. Some came in the fall out from the partition of the British Raj into India and Pakistan, which saw massive, vicious violence between Muslims on one side, and Hindus and Sikhs on the other. Other Indians came here from east Africa in the 1960s. The newly independent countries of Tanzania, Kenya and especially Uganda, were not keen on the Indians who formed a big part of the business community and were not shy about letting them know it.
By 1981 the population of England was 95.4% “white British” as the census people like to put it. 2.7% were of Asian stock, and 1.5% were black, mostly from the Caribbean. Of course, these new communities were concentrated, and there were tensions in the areas where the new communities had settled. I grew up in one such place, Southall, and as a school kid in the late 70s/early 80s I was never in a class with more than five English kids out of thirty or so. Most of the rest were Punjabi, with a few Caribbeans. The area was often called “Little India”.
The Thatcher government was elected in 1979, partly on an anti-immigration platform. Unlike every other “Conservative” government since, they kept their promises on this. Laws were changed and mood music altered. Immigration didn’t end by any means, but the situation calmed down a lot. By 1991 the white British population had only reduced to 93.7%, the Asian went up to 3.75% and the black to 1.9%. Things were a lot less fraught, there were still real racists who hated the fact there were any non-white people in the country, but they were quite rare and by and large a breathing space had been created for the communities to start to integrate and get used to each other.
This process was always going to be harder than it had been for the Huguenots. There were large cultural differences between the newcomers and the native English, from faith to food, marriage to music, drinking to dress. Many things set the immigrants apart, especially race and skin colour. The son or daughter of Caribbean or Asian parents might be born and brought up in England, play cricket, attend an Anglican church, and speak like a 1950s BBC radio announcer, but people will know their origins are from elsewhere just from their skin colour. This would matter less over time, as people grew used to having compatriots of different colours, however, we were not given time.
In 1997 the Labour government of Tony B Liar was elected. Among other things, he was determined to increase immigration. He was quoted as saying he wanted to “rub the right’s noses in immigration”. From being largely anti-immigration up to the mid-1970s, Labour had an epiphany when they realised immigrant communities voted Labour in huge numbers. Laws were changed, directions shifted, and by 2001 the white British population of England had dipped below nine out of ten, to 87%.
Where are we today?
With the release of the data from the 2021 census we learned that the English have gone, in three decades, from being more than nine out of ten of the population of their own country, to a little less than three out of four. Here is the basic break down of the population of England in 2021.
The Asian population, which is largely from the old Raj, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, is still the largest immigrant group. Now there are also a big number of “other whites”, mostly from Poland and Romania, with swiftly increasing numbers of Albanians. You may see some news outlets lump all the whites together, in the hope folk don’t notice. Despite what you might think from British TV and adverts, the black population is still under 5% (with many more now from Africa, especially Nigeria, Ghana, and Somalia). Again, the Devil is in the detail, these figures aren’t spread evenly across the country. It won’t surprise you to learn that there is a much greater concentration of non-English population in the bigger cities, while rural areas are still 90%+ English. Here’s the census map for the white British population.
This split between town and country is shown by this list of the ten biggest cities and their white British populations, remember the national average is just over 73%.
London 36.6%
Birmingham 42.9%
Leeds 73.4%
Sheffield 74.5%
Bradford 56.7%
Manchester 48.7%
Liverpool 77.3%
Bristol 71.6%
Leicester 33.2%
Wakefield 88.2%
Coventry 55.3%
Within these cities there are further concentrations. As the old saying goes, “birds of a feather flock together.”. Take England’s second city, Birmingham. At a little under 3 million people and 231 square miles it’s about the size of Chicago. It has a white British population of 42.9%, but few districts actually have a white British population of around that figure. In the north and south there are districts of 60 to 80%+, while in the middle it is mostly less than 20% and a good many districts of much less than 10%, only a handful on the borders in between and the city centre itself are at the 30-40% mark. Here’s the map.
I have to reiterate, plenty of folk of other ethnic backgrounds are as just as devoted to this country as I am. Just a couple of examples, Johnson Beharry, who was awarded the Victoria Cross for his bravery in Al-Amarrah, Iraq, in 2004, is a black lad, born in Grenada. Dr Afzal Ashraf, is an Ahmadi Muslim who I have met a number of times. A former RAF officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, he is now a respected security and counter-terrorism expert. Both of these chaps have given far greater service to my country than I ever have.
I’m not saying that I don’t regard folk of other colours, or faiths, as my countrymen, I do. What I am saying is that when huge numbers of people from different backgrounds live together in places where the English themselves are a small minority, the culture of those areas is not English. It makes it much harder for young people growing there up to think of themselves as part of the wider culture. The data from the 2021 census has very worrying implications for the future of integration in this country.
There is an understandable (but quite mistaken) view that the children and grandchildren of immigrants will naturally and automatically be ever more adapted to the host culture as each generation progresses. This can be true if the numbers are stable. Let’s say ten families move into an area, if these families live among families of the host nation, their kids grow up among host nation kids, the parents work and socialise with host nation adults, then yes, they can adapt. However, if the ten families are joined by another ten, and another ten etc, until the whole neighbourhood is composed of families of the incoming culture, then three generations down the line the children will be less integrated than the first children born in the host nation. I have seen this happen in my hometown.
As I mentioned earlier, when I was at school in the early 1980s the adult population of our neighbourhood was no more than 20/25% English, lower for school age kids, typically 5 out of a class of 30+. The majority of the rest were from the Punjab (which straddles the border between India and Pakistan), a majority being Sikhs, with some Hindus and Muslims. There were a few Caribbeans, and a smattering of folk from various places. We all got along pretty well; it was rare for kids to speak anything other than English at school. I had Sikh, Hindu, and Muslim friends, we went to each other’s houses, ate each other’s food and learned about each other’s cultures.
That neighbourhood now, according to the 2021 census, is 2.7% white British.
There has always been a divide between town and the countryside. In every nation, rural areas and big towns and cities have different ways of life, attitudes and experiences, but within a nation there are, or should be, things that connect them too. This is less and less the case in England. To see that London, Birmingham, and Manchester are all now less than half English was shock.
Of course, the overwhelming mood music coming from the MSM and politicians is we MUST celebrate this diversity, it is our strength, and anyone who dares to point out possible problems is denounced. The massive, and organised grooming and raping of English and Sikh girls by almost exclusively Muslim gangs has been shamefully dealt with by the establishment and would not be known about if it weren’t for the internet. The MSM utterly ignored nearly three weeks of violent clashes between Hindu and Muslim youths in Leicester last year, until independent internet news providers forced their hands. Yet our TV screens are filled with leftist wish fulfilment. In adverts families are either black, Asian, or mixed, wholly white families are so rare that when you see one in an advert it’s remarkable. In crime drama senior police officers, managers and lawyers are black and Asian, dealing with white racist thugs constantly plot mayhem. In historical drama there is the utter fantasy of Bridgeton and a black Anne Boleyn. Education also plays a role retarding integration and pushing The Message. When I was at school we certainly weren’t taught that the Empire was a wonderful thing, but we equally weren’t taught white people are, by definition, racist and that everyone else is a victim of their systemic racist ways.
Like the situation in the US between the coastal “elites” and the real folk, the cultural and political disconnect between the cities and the country is growing and growing fast. Where will it end? The Lord only knows. Some of my friends (many of them pretty sound) think I’m paranoid or even a touch waycist about this. I remind them of Southall, and how it’s developed, and the other places like Hounslow, High Wycombe, Luton etc. which are now as Southall was a generation ago. Then I say, “Just how much of England do you want to be like Southall? Because by today’s standards, if you say less than 100%, from Cornwall to Northumberland, from the Pennines to the sea, then you’re a racist.”.