London is No Longer Ours: How Mass Immigration Transformed Our Capital

 London is No Longer Ours: How Mass Immigration Transformed Our Capital 

Good afternoon everyone. 

So when I told Rafe that my remarks today were going to be a riff on Henley's poem England, my England, he knew it so well that he actually recited it back to me.

 So that's where l'm going to begin. 

What have I done for you, England, my England? What is there that I Would not do for you, England, my own? 

Like Peter, I'm a Londoner. I was born and raised here, which you're not allowed to say now apparently anymore. 

My dad was born here, his parents, their parents, and so on and so on. Islington, Fulham, the East End. And I find that when people ask, "Where are you from?" They're always shocked to discover that there are actually people who are from London originally. 

Not just originally, but for hundreds of years. And if you're a Londoner, that also means that you've got a head start on the dispossession that the rest of the country is now facing. 

As Michael Collins, who you just saw in Peter's film there, as Michael Collins, who was the author of the great book the likes of us, wrote, "Londoners were the guinea pigs for multiculturalism long before the fissures and failures appeared." 

So, let's start there with the cultural implications of the census. And I'm going to round up the numbers. I think we've got a graphic. I'm going to round up the numbers um so that I don't have to give the decimals. 

So the year that Peter was born in Peekom, the London burough of Soduk um the population was white of white British people was 96%. 

By 2021, it was 38%. My dad was born in 1954 and grew up in the council estates of Dagnham in tight-knit communities of working-class people who'd moved out there from the East End after the war. And in 1961, the Burough's population of white Brits was still 99%. When I was born in 1993, it was 92%. 

By the time I was in primary school, it was 83%. And by the time l was in secondary school, it had dropped to 50% , thanks to Mr. Blair. 

And today it's 31%. To paint this as a picture, my grandma had a baby sister who died when she was an infant. And some years ago, my dad tried to find the grave for her and discovered that a massive tower block had been built on top of it. The people   living in that tower block probably have no memory of the people who were there before, the lives of those who were buried in a graveyard that they probably never even knew existed because they are by statistical likelihood recent arrivals. 

People laid into John Cleese if you remember when he said that London isn't an English city anymore. But the population of the white British is less than 50% in 26 London bursers including the city. The white British population is only more than 50% in seven London boroughs and even then not by much. In Walsworth it's only just above 50%. And there are no borrowers anymore where it is above 68%. Now that is a pretty significant demographic and cultural shift in my relatively short lifetime. 

And to explain what I mean, you just have to take a look at Tower Hamlets. ( Here )

Now, Tower Hamlets, as you can see from this chart, has had one of the most dramatic shifts anywhere in the country, not just in London. White Brits fell from 95% in 1961 to 24% in 2021. 

White Brits were already the minority by 2001. And significantly, the borough also has the largest percentage of Muslims of any local authority anywhere in the UK at 40%. 

This fact was recently mentioned by the police when they explained why they had banned a UKIP protest for taking place in the area due to a realistic prospect of serious disorder. ( Here ) 

The Met commander Nick John explained that the planned protest had caused significant concern locally. That's a quote. As Steven Silverman from the campaign against anti-semitism pointed out, the Met never cared about the concerns of the Jewish community when pro Palestine hate marches were planned right after Jihad Al- Shami murdered a Jewish man in a Manchester synagogue on Yumkapur. No, the Met only ever cave one way. Hence, instead of the UK protest, what we saw in Tower Hamlets was masked blackclad Muslims on mass chanting Allahu Akbar. And I'm sure you saw the foot footage of the leftist who said, "There's no need for that. We're on the same side, Brav." And the masked Muslim replied, "No, we're not." 

In another video that you might not have seen because it didn't go quite as viral. Um, one of the protesters gave a speech and he said,"We're not the ones coming to your area to cause you problems. You're coming into our home." He said that they were standing up for their legitimate right. He was basically making a territorial claim. This is a Muslim area and we call the shots. 

And this was also a recent point of contention in the same area because East London Mosque organized a park run in a public park that excluded women and girls over the age of 13. 

It was reported this week also that in Tower Hamlet several counselors are running to be candidates of the BNP. Not the British National Party, but the Bangladesh National Party. Let me repeat, elected politicians are running to be MPs in another country while they are still in post here. They post online about the Bangladeshi economy and potholes. Um, one of them apparently regularly missed meetings because she was away campaigning in Bangladesh. And a council spokesperson said that there is no reason why legally a sitting counselor cannot be an MP in another country. At least two of these MPs are connected to the Aspire party founded by Luter Ramen of electoral fraud fame and he was temporarily banned from running but oopsie now he's mayor. Um, and so this is an area where Islam rules the roost, where elected officials are literally concerned about constituencies abroad, and history is being rewritten accordingly. Absum, the MP for popular and Limehouse, gave a speech praising those mass counter protesters as if they were the heirs of anti-fascists at the battle of Cable Street. And she said, and this is a quote, I'm going to read it out to you in full. She said, "We need policies that reflect our values of dignity and compassion. That's why I will continue to push back against toxic narratives and stand up for solidarity, truth, and the rights for all who live here, because this is in line with the traditions of solidarity in the East End of London, where we see diversity as a strength, and where all of our communities include migrants from all around the world. Now, l am pretty sure that my grandmother and my great-grandfather, who both lived and worked in the East End with their Jewish neighbors and loved Jewish people, would be horrified by the sight of those masked men. And they would be horrified by the Met's capitulation to anti-semitism under the banner of diversity is a strength. This is not diversity This is an area where one culture is boss and where I know for a fact many Jews would not feel safe. 

The authorities are increasingly willing to concede our rights and liberties in order to quell community tensions. Our government has created a tinder box without our consent. And we now have to have our equality before the law undermined in order to appease those most likely to kick off. 

And it's always the potential aggressor, not the victim, who is protected. Hence, you see situations like when Gideon Falter, also from the campaign against anti-semitism, was told to leave the vicinity of a protest because he was openly Jewish. You see it when we saw a Jewish lawyer who was arrested and questioned about his Star of David necklace uh with the police saying they antagonized pro Palestine protesters. Yet they let ma Muslims march through the streets of London every weekend chanting kaibar kaibar yay hood oh Jew the army of Muhammad will return a chant referring to a battle in which Muhammad's army besieged a Jewish community in Saudi Arabia charges were dropped against a group of Muslim uh men who shouted kill the Jews and rape their daughters a man who attacked Hammit Coxen for burning uh the burning a Quran going around slinging his knife and saying that he was going to kill him. Got no jail time. I mean, for goodness sake, the Met even defended the use of the word jihad, claiming that it had multiple interpretations. So, I'm sure they were absolutely bamboozled when someone with such a peaceful name set out to murder Jews. 

How long will it be until the Met think that I shouldn't walk through the streets where my family have lived for hundreds of years because my uncovered head is a provocation to a certain community. As Collins said, London was a guinea pig, but this is now playing out across the country. We saw it when we saw the McCabby Tel Aiv bands recently banned from Birmingham. The person who campaigned for that was Aayub Khan, an independent MP for Birmingham Perry Bar, where the Muslim population is 45%. 

He was backed by MPs like Ikbal Muhammad, who's also an independent MP for Jesus in Batley, where the population is 46%. Obviously made famous by the fact that a school teacher there was driven into  hiding after showing um a picture of the prophet Muhammad where he remains until this day as far as anyone knows. 

Only last year, the uh Labour MP for Birmingham Hall, Green and Mosley, where the Muslim population is 57% called for the reintroduction of blasphemy laws. And he was one of the MPs who campaigned, unsurprisingly, for an airport in Pakistan. Um and MPs were saying, you know, they're just representing their constituents. What's the problem? uh they were saying that you know this is not they're not asking for taxpayer money to fund this new airport but of course it's taxpayer money that pays for their salaries. So this is just a tiny snapshot. But across the country the Muslim as the Muslim population grows politics is changing Labour's Muslim vote share dropped by 29% at the last general election. So you should expect more of this. you should expect more independent MPs campaigning as one um did in local government for things like sex segregation and she won by the way by quite a large number. 

Independent Muslim candidates are already nipping at the heels of major Labour figures people like Wes Streeting Russian Ali Naz Shah Shabban Mammud all had their majorities slashed by these independent candidates at the last general election. So this is the future of British democratic politics. The future is sectarian and this is the consequence of multiculturalism. The state lacked the moral guts to say that England meant anything at all and now we are well on our road to as David Betts has pointed out civil war. 

We've already seen plenty of examples of what Betts called negotiated policing in the West Midlands in August last year after we saw it when community uh leaders were consulted by the police and then police decided not to police a group of masked and armed men who intimidated journalists. We saw it in Stafford when one police officer was recorded telling crowds to uh discard their weapons in the mosque. And all you have to do is look at Wakefield where kids received death threats for scuffing a Quran, but the police investigated the children. The mother of one, the autistic boy, many of you remember, uh was filmed dawning a headscarf and begging for forgiveness. 

And I don't blame her. She must have been scared. But still, it was a terrible and pathetic sight to see her thanking them for letting her be there. Saying how disrespectful her child had been, saying that you had to face the consequences of what he'd done, and that they'd researched together how sacred the Quran is, and how you have to wash your hands before touching it, and apologizing about what he'd done to each and every one of them, and promising not to prosecute anyone for the death threats because of the stupidity of her son and his friends. 

Almost implying that the death threats were somehow his fault. No, they should have been made to apologize to her and her child. The law should not be on the side of oversensitive religious zealots. Are we supposed to believe now that the Quran is actually sacred? Is that is that what we are demanded to profess publicly? 

That it has some sort of special status above any other book? Absolutely not. But this is how the culture of our country is being transformed one area at a time where scuffing a book requires public mortification, but the threatening threatening the life of a child is excused. 

So let's pan out to look at immigration more broadly. Since 1997, 7.8 million people migrated to the UK. Since 2020 alone, 2.8 million. ONS data shows that the population will grow by 5 million by the next decade driven almost entirely by migration. Between June 2023 and June and June 2024, the population of the UK grew by the size of leads. 98% of that growth was due to immigration. Migration watch and you saw AI Me also in uh Peter's film there. Migration Watch uh noted that urban in urban centers the white population demographic has collapsed by minus42% since just 1981. The last time that demographics changed that dramatically and quickly in England was the black death. And we have begged people like us in this room. We have begged the government to control borders. We've begged until we've been blew in the face. And time and time again, nothing has been done. We have been ignored and we have been demonized. And every single day, it is the same story. I woke up this morning and immediately there was a slew of the same stuff. So many things that I thought I not even going to bother to add them to this speech um because the list is already so long from this week alone. A man was murdered walking his  dog in Oxbridge. An Afghan migrant has been arrested for that. an asylum. The asylum seeker who murdered Rian White was convicted of stabbing her 23 times with a screwdriver on a train platform as she went home from working in a migrant hotel. She has a small son. An asylum seeker who had his claim rejected was jailed for stabbing Gavinda Joe through the heart in a bank. He has three young children. 

It was reported also that an Afghan asylum seeker whoʻd overstayed his visa used a friend's ID to work as a delivery driver and then sexually assaulted two women on their doorsteps. And then of course we had the the far of Hades Kabatu, the asylum seeker from the Bell Hotel in Eping where he sexually assaulted a child. He was sentenced to only 12 months and then served only one before being released by mistake instead of deported. And in the most pathetic manhunt of all time, he went back himself to the prison several times and apparently even tried to hand himself into the police saying, "l'm a wanted man." And they let him go. And then it took 48 hours until he was arrested after a tip off from the public. It wasn't even the police that found him, having traveled all the way from Chelmsford to Finsbury Park. It's a long way to go with all of that CCTV and nobody managed to catch him. And just yesterday, an asylum seeker was jailed for the brutal rape of a teenager in Elgen in Scotland. And people are really, really sick of it. Many of you will have heard the video of um a woman who called up Julia Hartley Brewer Show on Talk in floods of tears, sobbing about how afraid she is to go outside. 

All of you will have heard again and again and again about how we're supposed to have compassion for migrants. But what about compassion for us? We can't even object to being raped and murdered without being demonized. And how precisely are we supposed to offer safe haven to genuine asylum seekers if our country becomes exactly like the one that they fled? A place where you can't  go  country becomes exactly like the one that they fled? A place where you can't mock Islam without getting death 

threats. Where you might get murdered for apostasy or blasphemy, possibly even arrested. 

Most British people are fair, but we have not been treated fairly. I did a BBC show earlier this year with Yasmin Alibi Brown where she very seriously said that white British people should be required to integrate. People feel worse than helpless. They feel that they're being erased. And as ever, it was the Londoners that got hit with it first. A community and a culture was extinguished. my culture, my community. You remember that fell from Tower Hamlets who said that they didn't come into our area to cause us trouble? Well, I think the previous inhabitants of White Chapel might beg to differ. Where was their legitimate right to their home, to their culture, of their area, and their community? And you might say, country becomes exactly like the one that they fled? A place where you can't mock Islam without getting death threats. Where you might get murdered for apostasy or blasphemy, possibly even arrested. 

Most British people are fair, but we have not been treated fairly. I did a BBC show earlier this year with Yasmin Alibi Brown where she very seriously said that white British people should be required to integrate. People feel worse than helpless. They feel that they're being erased. And as ever, it was the Londoners that got hit with it first. A community and a culture was extinguished. my culture, my community. You remember that fell from Tower Hamlets who said that they didn't come into our area to cause us trouble? Well, I think the previous inhabitants of White Chapel might beg to differ. Where was their legitimate right to their home, to their culture, of their area, and their community? And you might say, well, what trouble did they cause? Well, then I would answer if you can't burn a Quran in the streets of White Chapel without getting knifed in the neck or at worst or at best arrested, then that is the trouble. If you can't run in a race in public because, for example, I'm a woman, then that is the trouble. And if you have to abide by another community's religious strictures in order to live in in this city or indeed in this country, then that is the trouble. As I said to Yasmin Alibaby Brown, we were not the ones who chose to move to another country. And I kid you not, someone told me the other day that I should leave if I don't like it. As if London, as if England is a product to be consumed rather than a home to be loved unconditionally. l am not going anywhere. 

Michael Collins, as I mentioned already, who who wrote this great uh article for the critic back in 2020, um called the tribe that disappeared. Um he said that he was born in southeast London. And in this article, he describes how um the past of this urban tribe, the London's white working class has been rewritten and quote airbrushed from the present. And like Absana Beum's comments, Sidi Khan's commission of diversity in the public realm was intended to make statues and monuments reflect the diverse present rather than the two white past. On the one of the tube poems is genuinely I couldn't believe this when I read it. One of the tube poems is actually called colonizati in reverse. I would have read it to you but it's in PWA. I don't think that London. And in this article, he describes how um the past of this urban tribe, the London's white working class has been rewritten and quote airbrushed from the present. And like Absana Beum's comments, Sidi Khan's commission for diversity in the public realm was intended to make statues and monuments   reflect the diverse present rather than the two white past. On the one of the tube poems is genuinely I couldn't believe this when I read it. One of the tube poems is actually called colonization in reverse. I would have read it to you but it's in PWA. I don't think that that would uh go down particularly well with the Metropolitan Police. So Sadi Khan like many others claims that London was built by immigrants. But London has been here for almost 2,000 years. So unless by immigrants he means the Romans, I will remind you that as we saw in that chart, London was over 90% white British within our lifetimes. London was primarily built and defended with the sweat and the suffering and the lives of England's white working class. However politically incorrect that might be, it is an historical fact. But that tribe has been disappeared. As Collins wrote, and I quote,"When they dominate a demographic, they are a blot on the landscape of diversity. When they leave, they're advancing white flight. They are only allotted the status of an ethnic group when singled out as racist, and otherwise they are lumped in with the beneficiaries of white privilege." Now, Collins quotes uh Virginia Wolf's 1931 uh short essay, A Portrait of a Londoner. Um which l ironically I have here. I bought this because l wanted to quote from it. Um I bought it online and it turns out, funnily enough, that it's in French. And uh in this book, Virginia Wolf says that nobody can be said to know London who does not know a true Cockney. Now if  that is true, then London will soon be unknowable. To be a Londoner will mean nothing except that you've lived here for a few days while passing through. But l am so pleased that I got to know them, that I got to take them for granted as a child, to hear the last of their voices, their accents, their stories of hot picking and the blitz, of the craze, and how lovely it was to move to Dagnum with all the wire fenced gardens. I am so lucky to have glimpsed it, even if I was born into the twilight of my own culture, of my own tribe. And Collins tells this story of a funeral uh of a relative of his whoʻd lived on the same street in Southeast London since marrying in the 1950s. He calls them the original cast of the post-war years. Now my dad is the second owner of the house where l grew up and um this house was built in the 1930s. He's lived there around 50 years. And when I was growing up, there was a lady on our street called Mrs. Waterman a few doors down who was an actual Victorian. And next door to my parents, there was an old policeman who lived with his Cockney wife. Now, the policeman is still there. Um, but his wife died a few years ago. And at her funeral, it hit me that almost no one from the original cast of the street was there left to mourn her. And it felt as if it were a funeral for the whole community. A whole street of ghosts of of weddings births, parties, New Year's Eve, Christmases, all the landmarks of life. And then came all of the funerals of the last of that generation with my grandmother went the shut your ass. And I realized that the accent had died with her and that the only place l was ever going to hear that again was on BBC archive clips. And we drank whiskey at her funeral listening to Chaz and Dave. And I've got a lovely bunch of coconuts. And core lover Duck died with my great aunt Marge. And there were actually jelly deals at her wake. 

And most of the pubs now in that area were boarded up. The one where my great grandma used to play ragtime on the piano was recently bulldozed. And it was such a privilege. 

You forgive me. I get choked up. It was such a privilege to know the last cocknney. But I realize now that I experienced my culture as an expat, like someone who lives abroad experiences their culture from a distance, awkwardly transplanted to a new place. Except rather than visiting my homeland, my homeland was gone. Beyond having a pint in an Essex pub where the last glimmer of that world survives, all I can do to breathe it in and to bask in it is to walk around town with my dad's memories. The Barrow Boys with their cabbages in Covent Garden, the famous fights in the blind beggar in what is now the Islamic Republic of White Chapel. 

And I felt myself guilty integrating into something else. 

Something that will never be mine in the way that that culture was mine. 

And it is the most hideous feeling to know that in no time at all I will be completely cut off from it. My family never chose this. They didn't immigrate. Like my grandfather, this generation fought, suffered, and risked their lives for this country only to have their whole world taken from them. 

My grandma was stationed at the coast with the ATS during the war and then spent her final days on the coast watching boats wash up next to her house in Kent. 

But we did exist. We did. We existed here. And when I walk around this city, it means everything to me. Everything. I love nothing more than just wandering around and looking at it. Just walking through all of the layers of history. The layers of history that Sadi Khan wants to erase. Her statues, her memorials, her guilds, her monuments, broken bits of Roman wall, Anglo-Saxon warfs. Queen Hyw Warfar in the city of London is an Anglo-Saxon dock that existed when Alfred was king of Wessix. And when I first started working in Westminster during my lunch break, I would stand in Victoria Gardens beside Parliament and just stare at the temps imagining all of the boats that had passed through whether they were Roman, Viking, Anglo-Saxon. And I remember seeing Parliament on that gloriously sunny morning, the day after the Brexit vote, the ill- fated Brexit vote, and thinking of Wdsworth po Wdsworth's poem composed on Westminster Bridge in 1802. So that was before the current Palace of Westminster was rebuilt, but still a perfect description nonetheless of what I saw. I walked out of Westminster Station and in Wordssworth's words, "Dull he be of soul who could pass by, a sight so touching in its majesty, this city now doth like a garment where the beauty of the morning silent bare ships, towers, domes, theaters, and temples lie open unto the fields and to the sky, all bright and glittering in the smokeless air. Now, I know that everything changes and it's normal for generations to come and go and that can't be stopped. But this is something else. Sometimes I walk around London and I wish that I could somehow physically embrace it. That I could somehow just hold it for a moment and just draw it into my soul so that it could never leave me because a Londoner can't just abandon London. But I'm afraid that London will abandon me. And I know that this sounds all doom and gloom. I'm sorry, Philip. I know this was supposed to be about courage and about hope, but it is so so hard to find any cause for hope. But you know where I do find it? And I was thinking about this last night after I had messaged into the NCF group chat and said, "This is really gloomy." So I thought, I've got to think of something, something that really does give me hope. And I tell you what does where I find hope. I find it in Peter. I find it in people like Peter. Peter has the courage to build even in the face of despair. 

It is a courage that builds things like the new culture forum. So this, if anything, is a call to have courage like Peter, to have steadfastness, to build things. Because this is really a call for you to live in the spirit of th those old East Enders who were the toughest, most resilient people that I have ever known. They had a hard hard time, but they appreciated everything and they were filled with life and fight even in the darkest days. People today embrace now I think because it hurts less. But Londoners never did shy away from pain. And so this is my plea to you. You are London. Don't abandon me. 

When shall I rejoice again such a breed of mighty men? Those are the words from William Henley's poem. So I will finish with that. Ever faith endures. London my London. Take and break us, we are yours, London my own. Life is good and joy runs high between the English earth and sky. Death is death but we shall die to the song on your bugles blown. London to the stars on your bugles blown. So all I ask of you is that you ask yourselves this. What have I done for you, London, my London? What is there that I would not do for you? London, my own. Thank you. 

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