Is Britain About to Lose Its Identity?

Nick Freitas (0:00)

Connor Tomlinson, that's who we're gonna be talking to today. Again, this was part of a larger documentary series we did on mass migration and how it is killing the West. Connor is a young British writer and host of Tomlinson Talks, a forthright conservative voice on immigration, culture and the defense of national identity, and he does not hold back. Let's see what Connor has to say. British conservative and author and host of Tomlinson Talks, and probably the most important new fact is about to be a father, technically a father already, just waiting for twins to be born.

Connor Tomlinson (0:34)

Yeah, we're just waiting for them to come in the world and make their troublesome personalities known. But as a joke to your producer on the way up the stairs, we're winning the demographic war faster than we thought, I suppose.

Nick Freitas (0:42)

Yes. Well, it's amazing how many, whenever I'm talking to young man, of which you're a young man, and they always ask me, how do we fix this problem? Like get married, be happy, honor God, have lots of kids and you can win in one generation. But you have written a lot about the current problems within the UK, specifically associated with both immigration and its impacts on English culture, British culture.

The thing that I wanted to ask you about is you use this terminology where you talk about the asymmetric use of language, where every demographic in the UK that isn't ethnically English or whatnot, gets some sort of special position or protection except for the majority one, except for the people that actually created the culture that has attracted so many people to come from foreign lands. Explain more about what you mean by that.

Connor Tomlinson (1:37)

So to put this in context for maybe some of your American viewers, you guys are presently having the conversation about what it means to be an American, what the demographic and cultural foundations are for revering the Constitution, having a cohesive American culture and fulfilling your civic obligations. And you now have this distinction between birthright citizenship or paperwork Americans and heritage Americans. And this conversation has come about because of confusion in the 20th century with the idea from John F. Kennedy and the Anti-Defamation League that America is just a nation of immigrants rather than of Anglo-Protestant settlers and then the other groups that were mainly European, predominantly Christian, folded in.

Bear in mind, Britain has had less immigration than between the Norman Conquest of 1066 and 1945 than it has since 1997 and now.

We are still described as a nation of immigrants by successive governments, from Tony Blair's government all the way through the current chairman of the right-wing populist party at the top of the polls, Reform UK.

We just aren't a nation of immigrants. From 927, when the last Viking settlement was vanquished by Athelstan, to 1927, 90% of the people in the British Isles could trace their ancestry back a thousand years. We've had that unbroken chain of continuity. And yet, there's still this confusion about what an English person is or what a British person is. To the extent of where, I mean, a couple of years ago on television, I suggested there are a difference between the Muslim counter protesters that were masked up, tooled up, had weapons, and were waving the Palestine flag, and the English working class that were protesting outside asylum hotels after the Southport massacre when three young girls were butchered and 11 other injured by a second-generation random migrant, Axel Ruda-Cabana. The state told us he was a Welsh choir boy because he was born in Wales, but he hated white people to the extent where he went and stabbed children. When I said there's a difference between the English working class demonstrating against the government and the Muslim enclaves waving the Palestine flag demonstrating against the English working class, I was described and decried by a former government minister as a racist because you can't say there's such a difference between English people based on ethnicity and immigrants with different heritage even though they describe themselves as such. This confusion has been the source of a lot of animosity, repeated demonstrations and there's a fear that this could build towards extra-political civil conflict, violence, war. That's been the discourse over the last year. The reason we need to have this conversation is because the British people are feeling a profound sense of demographic insecurity because in 1997 we were 95% white British. Now we've gotten to the last census in 2021 where London and many of our other cities, Manchester, Birmingham, Luton, Leicester, are minority British. And on current demographic trends, before the thousand year anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, the Norman Conquest, before 2066, we will be a minority in our own country. The problem is the British public have voted against this, against more immigration in every election and referendum since 1974, and have had it inflicted on them, no matter what they've said. And so this isn't just a question of who we are, the pre-political we that Roger Scruton said that exists prior to talking about tax policy and economics and energy. But it's also, do we believe in a democratic system anymore? Because democracy is meant to take the place of civil conflict. If you lose an election, well, you're okay with that because you don't necessarily lose your country. But people are feeling because of demographic shifts, because those pockets of immigrant communities are electing their own representatives now, they're campaigning in their own languages, they're instantiating de facto Sharia law in certain areas, or they're establishing sort of like Hindu and Indian lobbying groups. They feel that if they lose the next election, the one after eight, they will actually lose their country. So you're seeing a increased consciousness among the British people about their culture, their heritage, their identity, and setting a harder boundary than they used to be. Because back when you were like 95 percent white British, you could say, oh, there's a black chap and he's basically one of us. You would use British as interchangeably of a member of our tribe, even though he has a different heritage. And now people are saying, well, we've been so gracious, and we've had so little criteria for what counts as one of us for so long. British values have been identified as democracy, tolerance, respect for other faiths and beliefs, and playing cricket, something you could probably get in everywhere from Canada to India, you know, that it means nothing anymore. And so extending that indefinite tolerance and generosity has led to a place where we may become a minority in our own country and we won't be treated as well as a minority as the minorities currently in our country that we are giving special protections and provisions under DEI laws, the Equality Act, hate speech legislation that imprisons 33 people, gets people arrested 33 people a day. And prior to the Ukraine War, imprisoned more people for speech violations than in Russia. So the reason this conversation is being had is because if we don't set hard boundaries about who we are and who isn't a member of our tribe and who shouldn't belong here, then we will be dispossessed of our country within the next 30 to 40 years.