There is a lot of talk these days about how immigration is a threat to British culture, to all that we are proud of, and to our deepest values.
Let's dig into that.
Immigration has changed British culture in the past. As I'm sure you know, Britain is named after the Celtic people known as the Britons. Their culture was drastically changed with the immigration of Romans after their successful invasion in 55 CE. Under Queen Boudicca, the Iceni tribe launched a very bloody uprising, and were suppressed with characteristic Roman effectiveness.
After the Romans withdrew from Britain in the 5th century, immigration changed British culture again. Angles, Saxons and Jutes invaded from what is today northern Germany. The English language is named after the Angles. I am not writing in a Celtic language like Welsh or Gaelic, or a Romance language like Spanish or French. English is a Germanic language ... mostly.
The last time that immigration changed British culture was 1066, when the Norman French invaded. They are the reason why, despite being a Germanic language, English includes a lot of French words with similar meanings. For example, "ask" is Germanic, and "demand" is Romance.
Since then there have been many shifts in British culture, but all of them have been initiated or motivated by British people. The 16th and 17th centuries saw huge religious upheavals, initiated by British people.
The 18th and 19th centuries saw huge cultural shifts during the Enlightenment, with transformational ideas like David Hume's idea that morals originate with people, not God, and Adam Smith's foundations of capitalism, and John Stuart Mill's ideas about ethics and equality and freedom. People like these helped to mold British culture into what it is today: A culture that welcomes diversity, innovation, and progress. These ideas formed the foundation of what Britain became, and has become; not English Protestantism, nor the Anglo-Saxon race, whatever that is.
But since 1067 immigration has not changed British culture.
The Danes colonised the east midlands in the 10th century. A Dane, King Cnut, sat on the English throne. And what became of all that? Their descendants speak English, and believe in British ideals.
The Spanish Armada, intended to reestablish the dominance of the Catholic Church, was defeated.
The Gunpowder Plot, by French conspirators, was foiled.
Less malevolent, and more desperate, the Irish Famine resulted in mass immigration, particularly to Liverpool and Glasgow, and to many other British cities. By 1851, more than 25% of Liverpool's population had been born in Ireland.1 This has affected the culture and identity of the city, but Britain is British, not Irish.
Jews, Huguenots, and others, century after century, have come to Britain, established communities, shared their traditions, and become British.
Britain has imported cultural elements from its former colonies, like tea, and sugar; like curry and shampoo and pyjamas; like burgers and jeans and rock. But those were selected by British people, not forced on Britons by foreigners.
Why do we speak English, not Danish or Irish?
The answer is two-fold: numbers and cachet. Even the Danes and the Irish had neither the numbers, nor the cultural cachet; British people didn't want to be more Danish or more Irish.
The Romans shaped Britain forever by establishing Latin as the language of academia. The latin alphabet replaced runes and ogham. Latin is still taught in British schools, and is still used in science and law.
Genetic studies show that Anglo-Saxon immigrants did not replace the Romano-British population. Rather, migrants from the continent, both men and women, arrived over multiple generations, and intermarried with Britons. It seems that unlike with the Romans, the Britons got on a lot better with the new immigrants. The Anglo-Saxons appear to have had both the numbers, and cachet.
The Norman French were knights. They also had kingdoms in Sicily and Palestine. They were powerful, and cool. They rapidly dominated England, confiscating land from the resistance and handing it to their supporters. They formally abolished slavery. They established Norman French as the language of the English court until Henry V made English the official language of the government 350 years later. An estimated 8000 Normans and other continentals immigrated to England after the invasion, and within a century intermarriage between natives and immigrants had become common.2 Britons today, as back then, think of the Battle of Agincourt and the 100 Years War not as a war between French invaders of England and other French, but as a war between the English and the French.
I hope that it's obvious that recent immigrants to Britain, an island of very close to 70,000,000 people now, have nowhere near the numbers to shift British culture, nor do the cultures that they bring with them have the cachet necessary to sway the population to want to become more like them.
Instead, the opposite is true. Not all immigrants, but growing numbers want to dress like Britons. They want to eat and drink what British people eat and drink. And while population growth in poorer parts of the world is higher than in Britain, the birth rates of the descendants of immigrants tend to mirror the birth rates of the rest of the British.
Some British people have been scared into believing that Islam is an existential threat to British culture. Of the 70,000,000 Britons, 4,000,000 identify as Muslim -- less than 6% -- although some foreign Muslims will point out that many of their fellow Muslims in Britain drink alcohol, eat bacon, and wear headscarves only occasionally.
What kind of numbers would Muslims need to "threaten" British culture? Numbers close to the 25% of Irish in Liverpool? No, Liverpool is still British. What Nigel Farage is not saying is that Muslim immigration cannot reach 25%. Not only would that require a logistically impossible 13,500,000 Muslim immigrants, but also that they would have to resist their lifestyle being diluted by the cosmopolitan, pluralistic nature of Britain; something British Muslims have demonstrated is unrealistic.
It is not that the British become more like immigrants. It is always that immigrants become more British; without exception, since 1067, always.
Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson (Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) are not telling the truth. They are fear-mongering and rage-baiting for their own political and financial advantage.
Earlier we touched on Britain's centuries of Enlightenment tradition. Some people argue that British culture can be summarized as Anglo-Saxon. What does that mean? Depending on who you ask, that could mean Protestant; or just not Muslim; or not Muslim, Jewish, or Hindu; or it could mean white; or white and speaks English in an accent that is easy to understand; or it could be a reference to a pseudoscience called Social Darwinism, which requires ignorance of genetics and race as its foundation.
But all of those definitions forget lessons that took a lot of British blood to learn centuries ago: Lessons that are distilled in Enlightment values.
For example, Britain learned the lesson of religious freedom the hard way: Henry VIII created the Protestant Church of England in order to get a divorce, with the objective of siring a legitimate male heir. He destroyed shrines to Catholic saints, and seized the church's property. When Henry's Catholic daughter Mary I succeeded his son Edward VI, Mary had more than 280 Protestants burned at the stake, with 30 more dying in prison, earning her the epithet Bloody Mary. She was succeeded by Protestant Elizabeth I. A century and a half later, James II of England / VII of Scotland tried to etablish freedom of religion in Britain and Ireland with the Declaration for Liberty of Conscience. It was criticised for having no specific limits, and could theoretically allow the practice of any religion, including Judaism or Islam. But this initiative was cut short by the Glorious Revolution, where prominent English Protestants invited William, the Dutch Prince of Orange, to invade Britain unopposed, and to rule alongside his wife Mary, the daughter of James II/VII. Although taking the throne was bloodless, a lot of British blood was shed in the aftermath. In Scotland, men, women and children of the Clan MacDonald of Glencoe were killed in the Massacre of Glencoe, allegedly for failing to pledge allegiance to William III of England / II of Scotland and Mary II. Across the Irish Sea, the Protestant forces of William III/II defeated the Catholic forces of James II/VII at the Battle of the Boyne, with combined casualties and losses of about 2000. A year later the Battle of Aughrim repeated the outcome, with about 7000 killed collectively, making it one of the bloodiest battles ever fought in Britain and Ireland. These events are commemorated still on 11 and 12 July as "The Eleventh Night" and "The Twelfth".
What did Britain learn from these hard lessons?
Admittedly, some people learned nothing.
But many learned that freedom of religious belief, and of no belief, should be allowed and defended. (The UK Census for 2021-2022 found that at 51.1%, Scotland has more people with no religious belief than belief in all religions added together.)
Religious liberty is now a foundational principle of what it means to be British, and it is codified in law. That means that those fighting against this freedom and other freedoms like it are anti-British. They are not defending British culture. They are struggling to dismantle it, and to erase the lessons that Britain has learned over centuries.
The pseudoscience of Social Darwinism is widely accepted as fact within the circles that believe that immigration is a threat to British culture. I'm not going to talk about Social Darwinism. To learn more, start by asking an AI app like Perplexity, "How many genes are there in the human genome, how many of those genes are different between races, and what do those genes do?" (It's a misleading question, but I'm sure Perplexity will handle it, and will give you sources that you can explore further.)
I rather want to talk about why pseudoscientific ideas like this are believed.
It's because they sound right to us. We see dog breeds and we think that human races work the same way, which they do not.
Even if they did, it would miss the point that British Enlightenment thinkers, and British Quakers before them, have been trying to teach us for centuries.
Humans are primates, and primates have very powerful brains, capable of navigating complex social structures and tribal interactions. For most of us, this is the kind of thinking that steers our lives: schmoozing each other, protecting each other, and fighting each other. For the most part, chimpanzees live zero-sum lives: They don't make societal progress, and love does not extend beyond their tribe.
But to be a great human in a way that a chimpanzee does not have the capacity to achieve, you need to think like a Quaker, or an Enlightenment philosopher. This does not come naturally, but it is peculiarly British. It was Britain's new rulers who abolished slavery in the 11th century, and then again the British who enforced the emancipation of slaves around the world in the 19th century.
Lord Horatio Nelson said, "England expects that every man will do his duty." It is the duty of every British person to extend our respect beyond our tribe: To behave in a way that chimpanzees cannot: To be great humans, and to lead others to be great humans by example, metaphorically unflinchingly on the deck like Nelson.