The Hollow Kingdom

I have spent the past week in London. The city’s transformation, which I had followed only abstractly in the newspapers, has prompted a visceral shock.

“I haven’t been to London since I was a student,” I told a group of British journalists. “What the hell happened?”

“The fact that you would ask such a question,” one responded, “is an act of racism.” {snip}

The unstated premise of the joke was that everyone knows what the hell happened—mass immigration—but no one is allowed to speak about it. The statistics reveal the general trend. Since my last visit nearly two decades ago, the white British population of London has declined from 60 percent to 37 percent. Meantime, the Muslim population of London has nearly doubled, and migrants from South Asia and Africa have entrenched themselves throughout the city.

Anglos have been a minority for more than a decade. What I’ve observed in the city this week has amazed me. Women’s eyes peering through the slit of black niqabs. A procession of sub-Saharan Africans traversing Westminster Bridge, waving the flags of their homelands and demanding reparations. Street corners that could be confused for Peshawar or Islamabad. Districts in which one could pass an entire day with barely a glimpse of an Englishman.

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From a critical perspective, the history of mass migration in Britain is a history of civil tension, punctuated by violence: riots, terrorism, murder, rape. Events of this week have brought this suppressed conflict to the surface once again.

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A question lies buried under these events: What makes a nation? And what is the relationship between its content and its form?

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The predominant theory among Western elites is that the content of mass migration—the particular people, and the culture they bring—is irrelevant. All groups are equal. Individuals are interchangeable. To think otherwise is to engage in bigotry.

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The situation in London recalls the Ship of Theseus, a thought experiment that asks whether, if every part of a ship is replaced, it is the same ship in the end. The answer, in our case, is a confident “no.” England without the Englishman would no longer be England. {snip}

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