It is amazing what journalists and commentators will pretend not to understand for the sake of creating a story. On Radio 4 this week Nick Robinson pressed Rupert Lowe on whether the King qualifies as a White Briton. While Fraser Nelson dismissed the whole notion of the White British becoming a minority as “a trope designed to go viral on social, to be repeated uncritically by shysters“. The implication: the term White British is meaningless, so pointless even to discuss it.
Except it isn’t meaningless. White British is a formal category in the UK census, and, as often as not, you’re invited to ascribe one to yourself when completing most official forms – remember the pandemic and the vaccine queues? You had to answer every question, including declaring your ethnicity. This is how our chairman, Alp Mehmet, responded to Mr Nelson on X: “What does the ONS mean by ‘White British? It also refers to ‘other White’ groups and other ethnic groups including: Asian British, Black, Black British, Black Welsh. All tropes? Prof David Coleman + other demographers have for over 15 yrs pointed to 2065.”
It is why Migration Watch uses the term capitalised, as that is how it is written in the census. And on that official, census-tracked measure, the trend is not in doubt. In 2021, 74.4% of people in England and Wales described themselves as White British, down from 80.5% in 2011 and 87.5% in 2001.
As Alp said, Professor David Coleman, Emeritus Professor of Demography at Oxford University, projects white Britons would fall below half the population around the 2060s. Professor Matt Goodwin similarly projects a crossover point in the 2060s.
Messrs Robinson and Nelson, of course, know all this full well. Their confusion is purely performative. It is a tidy way to dodge the real issue, that Britain is being transformed by rapid mass immigration faster than at any time in its history, despite government after government promising to address the causes of rapid demographic change.
The demographic change Fraser Nelson alludes to, far from being a trope, is not only real but threatens the future stability and economic wellbeing of our country. Rapid transformation on the scale we are now experiencing strains public services, housing affordability and, above all, the cohesion engendered by a common history, a shared heritage and values inculcated in us by families and communities over generations.
There are those who say, White Brits becoming a minority will have no effect on our country or that we shouldn’t care either way. Others say not to worry, diversity is our strength. Remember this by Anthony Browne in the Guardian some 25 years ago:
“Jasper felt the process would strengthen Britain. ‘Diversity strengthens a country. It makes it more exciting. We have hundreds of languages spoken, when we go out to eat we never eat English, we eat Thai or French or Indian. It makes London a very cool place to live and work.’”
You may recall Migration Watch commissioned polling into what the public actually thinks about all this. The findings were not surprising – half of the population consider White Brits becoming a minority to be a very negative development for Britain.
So the pretence collapses on contact with the public. Ordinary people do not find “White British” baffling – they know exactly what it means. For some reason, it is only in the radio studio or the editor’s office that a plain census term becomes a riddle. Britain deserves better than a debate in which words in the title of the debate are off limits. This is both absurd and senseless.
