‘The Telegraph’: Is British civilisation really being erased?

Pic.: ‘The Telegraph’

Mass migration risks making the UK and its neighbours ‘unrecognisable’. America could one day cut them loose, ‘The Telegraph’ notes.

Donald Trump’s description of Europe, offered in an interview with Politico last week, was characteristically blunt: “What they’re doing with immigration is a disaster.” Unless this changes, some nations “will not be viable countries any longer”, with politicians like Sadiq Khan “elected because so many people have come in. They vote for him now”.

It was an assessment that came hard on the heels of the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, which warned that Europe would be “unrecognisable in 20 years” and risked “civilisational erasure”.

The response on the Continent was predictable – outrage that the American state, having spent 80 years promoting diversity and globalisation in the West, has pivoted the other way. Trump’s thesis, however, is not a new one. It’s essentially the same question posed by Christopher Caldwell in his 2009 book, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe. Can the Continent be the same with different people in it?

The answer, according to the Security Strategy, is decidedly still in the balance – the “character” of European nations is “strategically important because we count upon creative, capable, confident, democratic allies”. The Security Strategy goes on to say, “it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain Nato members will become majority non-European. As such, it is an open question whether they will view their place in the world, or their alliance with the United States, in the same way as those who signed the Nato charter”.

What’s interesting about the response within Europe is that the strength of the denial is not really rooted in an empirical argument, so much as an emotional one. In the long shadow of the Second World War, questions of cultural assimilation were gradually pushed to one side by elites worried that the answers would not be what they wished for. In some countries, even the gathering of basic statistical data about the composition of the population was banned.

For a US administration attempting to work out how foreign policy and electoral dynamics will shift as a result of diversity, this evidence is what matters. So is Trump right to say Europe is being transformed? We can split this question into two parts: the degree of population turnover, and the change in culture.

Or, to put it another way, how many new people are there, and to what extent are those new people resistant to assimilation?

The battle of Barking

 In 1991, every London borough except Brent had a sizeable majority of white British residents. By 2001, this number had dropped to 24. In 2021, it was true in just six: Sutton, Richmond, Kingston upon Thames, Havering, Bromley and Bexley.

Hillingdon, which in 2001 had a population that was 73 per cent white British, is today around the 40 per cent mark. London now has the lowest population share of white British people of any region in England and Wales, at 36.8 per cent for the city as a whole.

And as in Barking, these transformations have had political consequences. When Trump says that Sadiq Khan’s election is a result of the dramatic population change in the capital, he’s neither entirely right nor wrong. Polling in the run-up to the 2024 election showed Sadiq Khan leading the Conservative candidate, Susan Hall, among both white and ethnic minority voters, with a greater lead among the latter. But at the same time, the white British voters remaining in the capital are those who have opted in to greater diversity – a form of political self-selection likely to favour Labour.

This pattern of group sorting could now play out across the rest of the country. Just as Barking showed one pattern for London, the capital potentially indicates what the rest of Britain will come to look like.

Fertility rates for migrants from South Asia and West Africa, in particular, are higher than those for UK-born residents. Some of these differences are maintained into subsequent generations, with research noting that “cultural” factors can “remain deeply rooted” in those born in the UK. The result is that while England and Wales are 74 per cent white British, the future is considerably more diverse. In 2014, 65 per cent of births were in this category. Last year, the figure was 54 per cent.

US National Security Strategy is identifying a genuine shift in Britain

In Britain, at least, research suggests that ethnic minority voters tend to lean slightly left on economic issues, tending to favour greater redistribution and the sharing of wealth over pursuing faster growth. But this group categorisation conceals considerable variation, with Chinese and Indian voters holding considerably more Right-wing views.

As we saw with the wave of Gaza independents elected in last year’s general election, British Muslims have strong opinions on foreign policy that are often distinct from the rest of the electorate. Polling for the Henry Jackson Society conducted before the election found that 26 per cent of British Muslims saw the Israel-Palestine conflict as the most important issue for their vote, compared to 3 per cent of the general public.

Somewhere around 46 per cent saw Jews as having too much power over British and American foreign policy; 39 per cent were in favour of forming a Muslim political party; 32 per cent wanted Islam as the national religion. These views are well out of line with the general public.

The effect of migration on national politics, then, is likely to depend on where migration comes from. Assimilation is not a given. Indeed, there is some evidence that ethnic identity may be maintained or even strengthened across generations.

For the United States, this is a headache. Europe is useful as an amplifier of American force, and a weight dragging the global system towards Washington’s preferred outcomes. If a more diverse Europe begins to pull the other way, however, the time may come when the US decides to cut it loose.

In other words, the US National Security Strategy is identifying a genuine shift in Britain. Within the reports that have made efforts to forecast it, the tipping point at which the white British become a minority is somewhere in the 2060s.

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