At a birthday party in Yorkshire last week, I was brought up short by a photograph of my much-loved maternal grandparents. It was taken on a sunny day in the 1980s in their small garden in Bradford.
My grandfather, Harry, is leaning back with a joke on his lips. A gentle and funny man, who overcame the childhood tragedies that saw him orphaned and brought up by nuns. My grandmother, Minnie, stares at the camera with a look of keen intelligence, as befits a woman who passed the 11-plus, but whose parents were too poor to afford the school uniform she needed for grammar school.
Both are now long dead. But their lives echo down the generations. Seven of their nine children survived into adulthood, including my own mother. That idea of living on through our children is no longer universally shared, which is one of the reasons our birth-rate is in free-fall.
Some sub-sets of British society buck the trends. In my native Bradford, Pakistani-heritage families often cleave to the reproductive habits of the old country, not the new.
That, and our inability to control immigration, is one reason why one of Britain’s leading demographers told GB News recently that the UK’s white population will become an ethnic minority sooner than officialdom ever imagined.
Paul Morland, whose books on population declines have grown steadily more despondent, said: “I think by 2050, at least, the majority of children in this country will be non-white British and quite possibly of the whole population.”
It’s an astonishing thought. For two reasons. First, the rapidity of change. My mother recalls being on a bus in the early 1960s and seeing a non-white person for the first time. Think about that. This wasn’t a rural village cut off from modernity. It was Bradford. An industrial metropolis that sucked in cheap Kashmiri labour to re-populate failing textile mills and, in so doing, became an unwilling laboratory for race relations. And yet, even in a city like Bradford and within living memory, my mother vividly remembers coming into contact with someone whose skin colour (nor culture) she didn’t share.
How do ethnic majorities become minorities? It doesn't make you racist to ask this question, writes Colin Brazier
Getty Images
My own children struggled to believe this oddly important milestone in my mother’s life when I relayed it to them. They’ve known nothing other than a multi-racial society. And they’ve also been instructed to believe it was ever thus. That the UK has been home to a patchwork-quilt of ethnicity since before the Romans. This social engineering runs deep. Schools, publishers, advertisers, TV and film producers all present a version of British history which seeks to make recent mass migration easier to swallow. It allows my children to watch an historical drama in which non-white characters are massively over-represented and, when I quibble, insist that such a scenario might have been possible “because there were black people in London”.
So the speed of change has been dizzying. In a solitary lifespan, one lifetime, it’s possible to have been born into an ethnically homogeneous country - but to die as an ethnic minority. Historically such tumultuous demographic alterations have only ever happened as a consequence of conflict.
Which is not to say that this revolution has enjoyed overwhelming approval. Which brings me to my second point. The question of consent. In 2009 a former Labour speechwriter-cum-whistleblower wrote that Blair’s government opened the migration floodgates so they could “rub the Right’s nose in diversity”. For some conservative commentators this was proof of a dark plot to supplant indigenous communities. What became known as the Great Replacement Theory.
I very much doubt any such plot existed. Experience has taught me that cock-up is usually a better guide to human affairs than conspiracy. But that doesn’t alter the fact that extraordinary demographic change has happened - is still happening - and with our organs of democratic scrutiny (Parliament, MSM, judiciary, civil service) content not to think too hard about long-term consequences.
I think again about my grandparents. My grandfather fought in World War Two. My grandmother fought against grinding poverty. By the 1960s they had finally bought their own home, on a street named after one of the UK’s great liberal politicians; Gladstone. Social cohesion was tight, neighbourliness everywhere and patriotism a given. What would their reaction be if you showed them a photograph of that same street as it exists today?
The Left dismisses such misgivings as nostalgia at best, at worst xenophobia. But the reality is that millions of Britons feel a sense of despair when they consider the future. You’d think it would run strongest among the old, who’ve seen their country undergo a kind of unapproved metamorphosis within a couple of generations. But, interestingly, it’s now often young Britons who feel that the pace of change has been over-hasty and unauthorised.
Significantly, these fears are not determined exclusively by ethnicity. My childhood in Bradford was characterised by Sikh, Hindu, as well as white friends. Members of all those communities now have grave doubts about immigration and the atomised neighbourhoods it can create. They know that the country in which grandparents and parents made their home, requires time for assimilation to work. It’s not only white Britons who talk about being ‘swamped’.
It is not irrational, nostalgic or racist to lament the passing of a country previous generations might still recognise. People are tired of being told that it is.