UK Politics

“With the Conservatives, there are no blacks, no whites, just people.” That was 1983. But it’s hard to imagine Robert Jenrick, the Shadow Justice Secretary, who recently complained Dagenham wasn’t white enough, repeating those words. His radicalisation reflects a wider swing among some right-wing politicians, commentators and think-tankers away from objecting to immigration on (often flimsy or spurious, but not self-evidently irrational) economic grounds to straightforward “blood and soil” nationalism.

Rather than analysing the economic or social impacts of immigration, the new focus is on demographics, and in particular on the shrinking share of the White British population (with the emphasis on white), often described as the “indigenous” population or the “traditional majority”. While this is hardly new – I tracked it from Enoch Powell to Roger Scruton to Douglas Murray some years back – it has recently become much more prominent, most virulently in the overtly racist rhetoric of Matt Goodwin and Douglas Carswell.

So extreme is this, however, it has embarrassed some of the more restrained and thoughtful anti-immigration thinkers, who disavow the racism, but share the broader perspective that the most important thing about immigration is not its economic effects but its impact on British culture and society – and that these are both very large and very negative. Like Goodwin, they argue that demographic change, as measured by the growth in the non-white population, is the key metric.

The challenge for them is of course how they reconcile the apparent contradiction – if the problem is too many people who aren’t white, in what sense does this differ from old-fashioned Powellite racism? […]