“It’s the economy, stupid!” So said Bill Clinton in 1992. And, as attack slogans go, it hit the spot. The incumbent US president, George Bush senior, wanted to focus on his big wins.
The end of the Cold War. The Peace Dividend. But Clinton knew better. What Americans really cared about was the state of their domestic affairs. Jobs! Inflation! The economy, stupid!
Fast forward more than forty years, and Nigel Farage would do well to commit Bill Clinton’s most famous dictum to heart, albeit with a twist. Because British politics has its own versions of George Bush Senior. Members of the Establishment (Bush was an Ivy League former CIA director) who can’t picture the elephant in the room. Not the economy. But the unsanctioned ethnic transformation of the UK. In other words, it’s the demography, stupid!
Demography - famously - is destiny. But it’s also dull. The science of predicting population change relies on graphs, big datasets and statistics. It also relies on patience. If you switch on the news, you will see - in real time - how economics affects lives today. An announcement that mortgage rates will go up from noon? Let’s interview a struggling homeowner and put them on the evening news. Easy. But how do you dramatise demography?
But just because population change’s big headlines are decades away doesn’t make demography stupid. It’s not a pseudo-science, like medieval alchemy. Guessing how many people in a given country will be born, or die, or migrate, isn’t like taking a punt on Bitcoin. The science isn’t exact, but it’s pretty robust. Based on observable trends and confirmed (after a fashion) every few years by the census.
Of course, scientific accuracy doesn’t guarantee political salience. Rising sea levels are hard to predict accurately. But that hasn’t stopped climate change activists from making massive changes to the way we live, based on unprovable scenarios decades away from fruition.
But then, environmentalism, unlike demography, is a fashionable, politically correct cause.
For the record, I’m not a climate change ‘denier’. I merely observe that, when it comes to science making big predictions about the future, some sciences are more inconvenient than others.
And that’s the way our politicians like things. Demography is a dusty, dry, abstract subject, studied by serious, if anonymous, academics. It’s easily ignored. Or, at least, it has been.
But thanks to academics like Professor Matt Goodwin, at the independent-minded University of Buckingham, demography is coming out of the shadows. And his findings are so astonishing, they risk blotting out the sun.
Goodwin’s report this week tabulates and crystalises, at a national level, what many Britons feel they are seeing and hearing about in their localities. A picture of a country undergoing unprecedented ethnic change, and change for which there is no - and never has been - democratic assent.
Goodwin’s research suggests that, by the end of this century, only a third of the UK’s population will be white British, by which time between a fifth and a third of Britons will be Muslim. White Britons will become a minority by 2063, though in England considerably sooner. Goodwin stresses that demographics always involves an element of guesswork, while adding that most of the projections for the last quarter-century have under-represented the scale and pace of change.
Nobody voted for what will soon come out of the shadows - and it risks blotting out the sun - Colin BrazierGetty Images
What does all this mean for British politics? It certainly explains some of its volatility. Many Britons are so angry about immigration that they are willing to vote for a party which has no proven track record of governance. They feel that our political class has, at best, ignored the problems caused by mass ethnic change and, at worst, been their handmaiden.
Labour may now talk about an ‘island of strangers’. But many voters also remember how the same party sought to “rub the Right’s nose in diversity” by opening the floodgates in the 1990s. And the Tories, thanks to the ‘Boriswave’ which saw annual net migration rise to almost 1million, are now equally on the hook.
It’s not uncommon nowadays to hear reasonable - and hitherto patriotic - people wonder out loud if the UK is a land fit for their children. Others talk darkly about Britain’s future as one of civil strife and unrest. Not a United Kingdom, but an ungovernable one. Many of those most nervous are the children of immigrants, who fear that migration has run out of control.
Anyone tempted to dismiss this as so much right-wing scaremongering should call up an edition of The New Statesman, the Bible of Left-wing thinking, from April this year. In it, John Gray (definitely not a Right-wing philosopher), speculates that: “In a generation or so, if current trends persist, an Ottoman-style millet system – in which different religious communities are governed by their own laws – may coexist uneasily with nationalist governments.”
And that is the reasonable extrapolation from the Goodwin projections. Because, although the country as a whole will not see white minorities until the second half of the century, it is already a reality in cities like London and Leicester. Larger and larger conurbations will become ethnically homogenous, with millions of tomorrow’s children growing up with relatively little exposure to the culture, history and mores which built Britain over centuries. In short, some areas (whole towns, not just neighbourhoods) will feel like foreign countries. Or, as Douglas Murray recently said of parts of London, “like Islamabad, but with better lighting”.
Where do we go from here? A joint apology from our political leaders would be a start. But also with a realisation that pro-natalism has to be part of the answer. If we want a functioning economy, we must wean ourselves off cheap foreign labour. We must make our own people work, and help those who want children to have them.
For what it’s worth, I think we are only just beginning to see the collapse of the white British birth rate. A cohort is coming which thinks children are an expensive lifestyle choice or (in the case of some hardcore environmentalists) an unnecessary evil. Last month, The Times published a survey showing how many young people see dogs or cats as a substitute for having their own offspring.
People will blame the cost of housing, childcare, and student debt. But, as I pointed out here recently, economics only explains part of Britain’s birth dearth (Scotland has the cheapest housing in the UK, and the lowest birth rate). Ultimately, if people want the future to retain recognisable levels of ethnic representation, they have to be bothered to have kids. Because, when it comes to the future, it really is the demography, stupid.
Most Read
