The Hollow Kingdom

A dispatch from London on the brink of chaos

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.” The others laughed.

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.

These are facts. There is nothing inherently racist or antiracist about them. The question is one of perspective. England’s progressives would have one believe that these snapshots represent the triumph of diversity. But this position appears increasingly untenable.

For good reason. England, unlike the United States, does not have a long history of assimilating others. And many of the country’s migrants—in particular, the large Muslim population—are among the most difficult populations to integrate.

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.

The day after my conversation with the British journalists, England broke out in another round of riots. A first-generation Rwandan teenager had stabbed three young girls to death, prompting British nationalists and Muslim counter-protesters into the streets. The resulting clashes led to significant property damage and nearly 400 arrests. The country’s left-wing prime minister, Keir Starmer, has signaled his support for suppressing the nationalists.

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

It’s easy to understand why migrants from Somalia or Pakistan would select England as their destination. The political, economic, and cultural form of their home countries is a disaster. In England, by contrast, these migrants are able to secure an income, often including public benefits, and enjoy the fruits of a developed, modern, peaceful country.

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.

This logic has a whiff of liberalism, but only in the most reductive, naïve sense. The truth is that, even if we believe in the principle that all men are created equal, this does not mean that all cultures are equal or interchangeable—far from it. The structure of a civilization is a delicate thing. Changing its citizens will, over time, change its form.

This process is underway in London. The buildings, avenues, and palaces look the same as before; there is still a parliament, a king, and the pound. But the central city feels hollowed out. The old connection between citizen and nation has been altered. The old bonds of culture have been frayed.

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. The form—parliamentary democracy, economic growth, liberal culture—might hold for a time, but eventually, it would give way, too.

To engage in violence is not the answer. But neither is the answer to pretend that this conflict, or this re-composition, does not exist. Sooner or later, Britain will have to answer some hard questions. Reality has a way of breaking through.

This article was originally published in City Journal