The Unraveling of Britain

Darel E. Paul in Compact Magazine:

The possibility of communal violence depends, of course, on the coexistence of distinct communities. In the 21st-century United Kingdom outside Northern Ireland, this condition is a product of the country’s post-1997 mass immigration. Before Tony Blair became prime minister, annual legal immigration routinely ran about 300,000. That number doubled by the time Blair left office in 2007 and reached 800,000 under the Conservatives before Brexit. Over the past two years, legal immigration into Britain—nearly all of which settled in England—surpassed 1.2 million annually, more than 80 percent from non-European countries. The necessary outcome has been significant ethnic change. In 2001, Britain was 88 percent white British. In 20 years, the figure has fallen to 75 percent. In light of the past two years, that number is lower still today.

Other countries in the Anglosphere—those sharing not only Britain’s language, but a similar liberal polity, economy, culture, and civic national identity—have undergone similarly dramatic racial and ethnic transformations. Australia hasn’t collected such data since the 1970s, but its native English-speaking population dropped to 72 percent in 2021, down from 85 percent in 1991. From 1991 to 2021, the white share of the Canadian population fell to 74 percent, down from 91 percent. In New Zealand, those with European ethnicity made up 68 percent of the population last year, down from 83 percent in 1991. In the United States, the most diverse of all the Anglosphere countries undergoing the most rapid racial and ethnic transformation, the non-Hispanic white share of the population dropped to 58 percent in 2020, down from 76 percent three decades earlier.

Yet none of these other countries is witnessing communal conflict like Britain’s. Why not?

More here.

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