As an eight-year-old immigrant boy on my first day at primary school in Bexley, I was introduced to my new best friends – Brian, Daniel, Aaron and Deborah, Sarah and Carla.
Nineteen ninety-two - the year I moved from the Punjab to Kent was a year when net migration was minus 13,000, and the top three names for babies born in England and Wales were Jack, Thomas, James and Chloe, Emily, and Sophie.
For me, this was a Britain that welcomed me with a warm-hearted embrace.
When speaking just two words of English on day one of school, I made this great nation my home, and she made me one of her own because integration flowed through the additional after school English language classes, getting along with my new found friends picking up cultural nuances and the ‘Indian and British English: A Handbook of Usage and Pronunciation’ which was thrust into my hands by my grandfather who had moved to England in 1959 as a carpenter helping rebuild post WW2 London.
With around five per cent of the population being from an immigrant background and net migration stabilising in the tens of thousands - integration had the pluralist space and wherewithal to be a success – to empower immigrants with the privilege to be Britons.
The top baby name confirms the erasure of Britain's inheritance is one minute to midnight - Aman Bhogal
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Growing up on a south London council estate also taught me a thing or two about the challenges facing the white working classes around me. Nonetheless, for me as an immigrant, it was a feeling of bonhomie and a sense of belonging that came with a real hand up of opportunity and aspiration.
I felt no one asked me where I was coming from, but only where I was going – to a grammar school, and that’s where, for the first time, I came across anyone named Mohammad.
Now fast forward to 2025, the top name for babies has been replaced by ‘Mohammad’ for two years running. A third of all babies born in England and Wales are to mothers born outside the UK, and in London, nearly seven out of 10 are born with at least one foreign parent.
And with 20 per cent of the population now of immigrant background, integration has been shunted out of public policy as a “far-right” dirty word.
Instead, we have had “multiculturalism” imposed on us under three decades of the Blairite orthodoxy eroding our proud national identity and national unity at the hands of the “diversity is our strength” brigade of Leftwallahs occupying polity, academia and media.
“Diverse”, i.e. immigrant majority White minority places such as Tower Hamlets are busy spending hard-pressed taxpayers' money on teaching “mother tongue” languages to second and third generation immigrant children when more than one third of local residents do not speak English as their first language and eight per cent cannot speak a word of English.
On the other hand, the White working classes promised the great ‘levelling up’, but feel left behind. The country is creaking under a two-tier system which sees those breaking into Britain, rewarded with cushy 4-star hotels and an easy route to settlement, whilst millions of our own are consigned to the DWP heap of universal credit.
The bottom line is – be it the alarmingly nose-diving White British birth rate, which will likely see White British people become a minority in Britain over the next three decades.
Or the millions of immigrants rocking up to ‘Yookay’ for a good time with little in common with our traditions, culture or way of life - to be residents not nationals, in contrast to my grandfather’s generation who made Old Blighty home driven by an affinity with good old ‘Vilayat’ to build a good life.
We are at a minute-to-midnight risk of abdicating our civilisational inheritance, which can mean only one thing – demographics is destiny.