Lamenting Immigration Is Nothing New

Back in 2007 I authored this blog. I fully expect you to have just consumed every word of it before reading this sentence, but if you somehow haven’t (you don’t like noughties style text formatting?) let me pick out a few random bits from it:

The ghastly Macpherson Report has been to blame for much of what we see now, a document so full of contradictions that on one page it recommends treating ‘minorities’ differently and on another page recommending treating them the same as everyone else.

The newspaper headlines of tomorrow will be much like today’s, only more so. We can confidently predict stories of the following nature: black mothers weeping and wailing as they bemoan a dead son, probably killed by a bullet or knife in some inner-city area; Islamic terrorist attacks on innocent citizens – and how the perpetrators sprung from British mosques.

The otherwise unemployable folk who have been sitting on Race Relations boards for the last 40 years have certainly been given meal tickets by their lucrative day jobs. Many may have good intentions, but they’re essentially getting paid for stirring up trouble.

This was by no means my first foray in trying to warn my fellow citizens about their impending doom. By about 1998 I was having serious worries about what I was seeing every day in London, and I started peppering national newspapers (see below) with tales of woe and warnings of social breakdown. I’d been living in the city for nearly eight years at that point, and for the first few years I loved it. It seemed to me the greatest place in the universe, the most exciting, the most vibrant, the most historic. Granted, my youthful state of the time no doubt contributed to my light-headedness, but I contend that London was still then a great city, albeit with pockets of rottenness.

In February 1998 Enoch Powell died – perhaps his spirit passed into me at his death (joking!), because the scales were rapidly falling from my eyes. Taking advantage of Powell’s exit, Blair opened the borders around the same time. I still had fun for many years after 1998, until I left London in 2008, thoroughly disenchanted, but I increasingly noticed things that led me to thinking that something was going horribly wrong in the capital of England, and it would spread to the rest of the country, if it hadn’t already (it had).

I fondly remember in ’98 sitting on park benches at lunchtimes, including one nearly in the shadow of the Houses of Parliament, reading Simon Heffer’s brilliant biography of Powell. Of course it influenced me.

I became more active, penning mostly pseudonymous letters to papers. I wrote this one to The Sun (then edited by David Yelland lol):

 I had this letter published in, I think, the Daily Express (apologies, I don’t have exact dates for most of these missives, but they are generally early 2000s):

I’d like to think these are prescient statements. And this next one is fun – Time Out had published an issue entirely devoted to non-whites, so I thought I’d mention good ol’ Enoch to them. The News Editor, who I’m sure was a very wise fellow, ahem, wrote me a reply in which he managed to call one of Parliament’s greatest ever intellects an ‘ignorant fool’ and made some interesting observations. Who do you think comes out of this clash better a quarter of a century on, him or me…?

I wrote to John Townend, a Conservative MP who had recently spoke out against multiculturalism (he was rebuked by his leader William Hague, who told him: “Multiculturalism is part of the strength of modern Britain”). I thanked Townend for his contribution and said I agreed with what he’d said. Townend’s 2018 obituary in the Telegraph reads:

He aroused the greatest controversy at the very end of his Commons career, after the Labour Foreign Secretary Robin Cook praised Britain’s growing multiculturalism. In a speech Townend called on second-generation immigrants to Britain to abandon their roots “rather than looking to a motherland abroad”. He went on to accuse the Commission for Racial Equality of “causing more racial problems than it solves”.

I received the following letter back from the MP, which I was hugely grateful for.

I also wrote to Norman Tebbit a couple of years later, thanking him for saying multiculturalism was a divisive force and presenting him with an article I wrote on the subject. I was pleased when he responded to me:

I even began keeping a log in a notebook of the many anti-social and criminal incidents I witnessed on the streets of London. It just so happened that virtually every incident I saw was committed by a non-white male.

The notes I made were often in the form of predictions:

I suggested solutions to the problem:

And in 2006, I dared to dream what Britain would be like had we not so thunderously gone down the ‘welcome the world’ route:

While I apologise for the handwriting above, I apologise for few of my sentiments. I believe that the vast majority of my words were not incorrect, and these days, on podcasts, on GB News, on Substacks like Matt Goodwin’s, and other more mainstream places, I hear very similar things.

There were a few parts of the mainstream media saying what I was saying a quarter of a century ago, but not very many. One exception was Peter Simple in the Daily Telegraph (the writer Michael Warton). Look at this great, prophetic column he wrote around the turn of the century:

What is the point of me looking back in time and coming out with all this? I promise it’s not me saying ‘Look how prescient I was, look at my wonderful observational powers’ partly because, at the time, I didn’t feel that. I felt late to the game! From the 1950s onwards there had been plenty of voices – albeit often unheard ones – lamenting the changing nature of Britain, its descent into lower trust neighbourhoods, its importation of tumultuous, US-style race politics, its importation of divisive, ugly Middle East-style religious divisions.

I guess I could draw two conclusions from my motive to put this post up. One is exceedingly gloomy: to show that no matter what people like me have tried to do, there has been failure. We have utterly failed, the Uniparty has done the hell what it wanted. Britain has got vastly worse in the past three decades on every metric that is touched by demographic change. So what’s the point in speaking out? We’ve made no positive change, perhaps the opposite.

The more optimistic take is: many more folk have nowadays taken up the fight, and it is now easier than ever to get your opinions out there and to affect change. We hear salient voices speak out against this slow-motion tragedy, this national suicide, and it could even be that after the next election we have a party in power that will genuinely reverse our decline. Could be, probably won’t be.

I’m afraid, though, I lean towards the former conclusion. I’m deeply pessimistic. I think Britain is ruined and there’s more ruination to come, much more. I will return to my predictions for the future in what’s sure to be a cheery post.

 

Russell David is the author of the Mad World Substack. 

 

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