Modern racism has become loud and proud

All were responding to a photo that Katharine Birbalsingh had posted on X of a class at her school. The headteacher of Michaela community school, in north-west London, and self-described as “Britain’s strictest headmistress”, Birbalsingh has often faced criticism from the left for her conservative views.

This time, though, the onslaught was from the far right and hardline racists. The photo was mainly of black and Asian children. For many, this tagged it as a class of “foreigners”. Birbalsingh herself was condemned as an “invader”. There were more than a thousand responses, most of them hostile.

“Racists always existed,” a bewildered Birbalsingh wrote, but “things are much, much worse now”. But what is it that is much worse?

There would be little sympathy from the public for the kind of racism Birbalsingh faced. Few people think that to be British is to be white. More than twice as many believe that Britishness is about respecting laws and political institutions rather than ancestry.

What has changed is that out-and-out racists have become more confident in proclaiming their bigotry. That confidence rests on the way that ethnic notions of national identity, and laments for white decline, have seeped into the language of mainstream conservatism.

“Mass deportation of Pakistanis from Britain. I don’t care how long you’ve lived here. Out,” tweeted Douglas Carswell, the former Conservative and Ukip MP. Carswell may be an outlier when it comes to mainstream conservatism, but the idea that Britain has declined because of demographic change is now almost conventional wisdom in certain circles.

“Is there some minimum number of natives that a capital requires before it ceases to be the capital?” David Goodhart, head of the demography unit at the conservative thinktank Policy Exchange, wondered recently, referring to data that white people are becoming a minority in London. Perhaps, he suggested, half-jokingly, Nigel Farage might propose “moving the government to York”. Goodhart acknowledges that “immigration is not responsible for all London’s ills”, yet frames the city’s decline in terms of demographic change. So does Matthew Goodwin, academic turned Reform advocate, for whom “London Is So Over”, brought down by “a toxic cocktail of rapid demographic change, mass immigration, and economic stagnation”.

One statistic such critics deploy is that in almost half of social housing in London, the head of the household was born abroad. The implication is that these are foreigners scamming the housing system. “It is morally wrong,” the shadow home secretary, Chris Philp, tweeted, that “48% of London’s social housing is occupied by people who are foreign”. In fact, these are mostly British nationals, although they were born abroad. The insinuation, though, is that not to be white is not to be British.

London “has become a foreign country”, Douglas Murray, the Spectator’s associate editor, has written, because in most boroughs “‘white Britons’ are now in a minority”. Britons, the novelist Lionel Shriver suggested, have been forced to “abet incursions by foreigners so massive that the native-born are effectively surrendering their territory”, a process she calls “biologically perverse”.

If anyone questions such claims, the usual response is: “But you’re not listening to people’s fears”, or “So you want open borders?” There are important and necessary debates about numbers, border controls and public anxieties. But laments over white decline are less about immigration than attempts to turn concerns about immigration into existential fears about identity.

There is a long history to this. In the debate over the 1905 Aliens Act, Britain’s first immigration control, aimed at barring Jewish refugees fleeing pogroms in eastern Europe, the prime minister, Arthur Balfour, claimed that without the law British “nationality would not be the same”. Half a century later, the Colonial Office worried that “a large coloured community” in Britain “would weaken… the concept of England or Britain to which the people of British stock throughout the Commonwealth are attached”. The existential fears eventually dissipate – who today, except hardline antisemites, would claim that too many Jews would undermine British nationality? – only to be resurrected again a generation later.

Most mainstream conservatives would reject the arguments of Birbalsingh’s racist critics. Yet it is not that great a leap from viewing Britons of colour as foreign to seeing Birbalsingh’s class as full of foreigners. Few, though, are willing or able to make that connection.

Birbalsingh herself, in a discussion with me on X, denied the link. Mainstream arguments about white identity and decline, she insisted, were “not unreasonable”. The problem was “leftist dogma”. It is true that the left’s abandonment of class politics in favour of the politics of identity has allowed racists to rebrand racism as white identity. The contempt displayed by sections of the left for the working class has pushed many into the arms of the radical right. Nevertheless, the denial by conservatives of the way that mainstream white identitarian arguments have helped pave the way for open racism reveals an extraordinary degree of blinkeredness.

The dogmatic embrace of demographic change and white decline as one-stop explanations for Britain’s social ills not only brings racialised ideas mainstream but also makes it more difficult to address the real roots of our social problems.

Photograph by Katharine Birbalsingh @Miss_Snuffy/X