Welcome to the Disunited Kingdom

By Edward McLaren

Saturday, November 01, 2025

 

Britain is no longer a “cohesive” nation.

 

Drastic and sudden demographic changes have facilitated a strong sense of frustration among the English that is not fading anytime soon. A month ago, I reported on Tommy Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom rally. When I spoke to protesters there, the unrelenting mood was that of anger; as one woman said to me, “I just don’t want my daughter to live in an Islamic country.” I spoke with at least a dozen others who shared this sentiment. Perhaps this is to be expected, given that London, Manchester, and Birmingham are no longer majority English. London was 97.7 percent English in 1971 but had become only 36.8 percent English by 2021. Manchester, meanwhile, was 95.8 percent English in 1971 but only 48.7 percent English in 2021. Birmingham was 99.6 percent English in 1951 but only 44.4 percent English in 2021.

 

Matthew Goodwin, former professor of political science at the University of Kent, has argued that unless something is done, the British people will be a minority in their own country by 2063. But now that native birth rates have vastly declined, it’s likely that this date will arrive sooner rather than later. The Office for National Statistics reports that in 2023, 37.3 percent of all live births in Britain were to parents “where either one or both were born outside the UK”; that number is much higher in cities like London. No wonder that people I spoke to at Unite the Kingdom told me that they “no longer recognize” their own country. This is an issue so existential for those who love England — and lack the escape routes possessed by luxury leftists — that some have resorted to rioting, including outside of hotels housing immigrants.

 

If the riots continue to escalate, then it will largely be a reaction to broad demographic change, and the twin crises of Muslim “grooming gangs” and increasingly widespread immigrant crime. Non-European immigration into Britain began to increase in small levels in 1948 with the passage of the British Nationality Act. Almost immediately, reports of migrant sex crimes began in Bradford, Kent, West Yorkshire, Lancashire, Hartlepool, Faversham, Nelson, Halifax, Oldham, and many other locations. Where are we now? The 2025 Casey audit has revealed that “an estimated 1,400 children had been sexually exploited” in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013. Meanwhile, Operation Stovewood found that nearly two-thirds of convicted grooming gang offenders in Rotherham — 62 percent — were recorded as having a Pakistani background, even though Pakistanis then made up just about 4 percent of the town’s population.

 

The increase of non-European immigration to roughly (sometimes more than) a million individuals a year during Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s “Boriswave” has intensified the issue. Before sustained mass immigration was established as a Tory norm during David Cameron’s premiership, the Office for National Statistics recorded 12,295 cases of rape between April 2002 to March 2003. Now? Britain has overtaken Sweden as the rape capital of Europe, with 71,227 cases in 2024 according to the ONS. After the promotion of the grooming gangs story by Dominic Green, Eric Kaufmann, and Elon Musk — among others — the British people can no longer feign blindness when faced with statistics.

 

Immigration has strained Britain, and because of the increased competition in the market, younger generations can see their opportunities dwindling and their quality of life declining. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development has reported that “there are now 775,000 fewer young people in employment than there were in 1992, a decline of 18%.” In 2024, the U.K.’s unemployment rate for young people aged 16 to 24 was 14.2 percent, which is almost three times higher than Germany’s unemployment rate of 5.9 percent in 2023. Further, the Institute for Public Policy Research indicated all the way back in 2011 that Britain would be 750,000 houses short of required housing demand by 2025. This year, however, the Centre for Policy Studies has revealed that the number is closer to 6.5 million. And this isn’t even getting into the dating and marital experiences of Zoomers, which are too depressing to mention.

 

Now, Britain is multicultural and therefore no longer distinctly British in any meaningful sense. The government has clearly prioritized foreigners from around the world who not only fail to assimilate but actively destroy long-standing customs and norms. (Consider, for example, that an arm of NHS England published a defense of first-cousin marriage.) Even worse, acknowledging the harms to England and the English imposed by foreigners risks one receiving a visit from the vengeful speech police. While violent riots should not be the answer, a great swath of the English population increasingly and justifiably sees the need for radical change.