The topic that everyone is afraid to talk about has broken into the national conversation. A new report by professor Matt Goodwin of the University of Buckingham finds that on current trends, the UK’s white British population is set to become a minority in Britain by 2063. How Goodwin comes by this projection, and the precise date this might happen, are not really the issue here; 15 years ago Britain was likewise projected to become the “majority-minority” by 2066. Rather, the real question is whether such a future, whenever it might take place, is seen as a problem. And is it a problem anyone is willing to talk about?
One of those to attempt to put this issue on the map in recent years has been GB News’s Steven Edginton, putting the question of Britain’s declining native majority to several prominent right-wing politicians, including Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, Liz Truss, and Nigel Farage. In those exchanges, all of them felt the need to deny that this is a concern, instead appealing to some form of colourblindness. Following Goodwin’s report, it was Richard Tice’s turn to be grilled, and he again sought to downplay the issue, before scolding Edginton for being “obsessed with this stuff”. 2063 is “a long way off”, said the 60-year-old — by then he’ll “be long gone”.
Perhaps these politicians really are indifferent to such a future — though if so, that puts them out of step with the public, who mostly commonly reported being “uneasy”, “unhappy” and “disappointed” at the prospect in a 2018 poll. Still, one suspects that lurking close behind the unwillingness to grasp this particular nettle is the sense that it might be considered déclassé, or worse, “racist” to do so. It is strange, given that countries like Denmark, Singapore and Israel take the question of their demographic policy seriously, that mainstream British conservatives apparently feel unable to express any opinion on such a major issue.
Discussing his findings with the Telegraph’s Camilla Tominey and Gordon Rayner, Goodwin encountered a similar attitude. While remaining neutral as he presented his research, Goodwin tried to impress on the pair the seriousness of what these projections would mean. “This is going to be like nothing we have ever seen before”, he said — and he was right. Yet for Tominey and Rayner, it was a trifling issue. It could be “worrying”, mused Tominey, but “if people come here and share our values, that is less problematic”. Rayner’s opinion on the demographic future of his nation, meanwhile, was apparently based on social etiquette. Most people will have ethnic minority friends, he says, and “the idea that they are less British somehow is quite insulting, so I wouldn’t want to go down that route”. He added: “There’s no reason to fear anything if — and it’s a massive if — people come to this country and embrace British values.”
Across the country, multicultural Britain is tearing at the seams
The whole discussion has struck me as something from another era. Is it still 2010? No, in 2025, the disadvantages of a Britain undergoing demographic transformation are hardly an abstract “if” anymore. The results are in!
Across the country, multicultural Britain is tearing at the seams. Politics is fracturing into ethnic silos. Birmingham MPs campaign for an airport in Mirpur, Pakistan, even as rubbish piles up in their own city; a young female Muslim councillor calls for an end to the “free mixing” of men and women; a Labour MP stands up in parliament and calls for, in effect, an Islamic blasphemy law.
He need not have bothered — our public order laws already function as a de facto blasphemy law, as Hamit Coskun has now learned. Indeed, the Batley Grammar School teacher, hung out to dry by the authorities, is still in hiding.
Far from newcomers embracing our values, as Britain’s population changes, our culture changes. Pubs become mosques. The UK is now the Western capital for Sharia courts. As for “British values”, well — polling by the Henry Jackson Society shows that 32 per cent of British Muslims favour the implementation of Sharia Law and 52 per cent would criminalise depictions of the Muslim Prophet Mohammed, while only one in four British Muslims believes Hamas committed murder and rape in Israel on October 7th.
Britain’s changing demographics are also increasingly bringing foreign conflicts into British politics. We know that Labour’s position on Israel-Gaza is significantly determined by their reliance on Muslim voters. (Not to be left out when it comes to sectarian pandering, at the last election, some Conservative MPs signed a Hindu manifesto.) The presence of these large, South Asian immigrant communities in Britain means that when Pakistan and India almost fell into open conflict earlier this year, Britain held its breath: less at the prospect of violence in Kashmir, but on the streets of Leicester. These fears were hardly unfounded: in 2022, Leicester saw a month of rioting and violence between Indian and Pakistani mobs after a cricket match between the two nations.
Years into Britain’s “experiment” with multiculturalism, ethnic conflicts most of us have never even heard of now regularly flare up on our streets. Eritreans battle each other in Camberwell and Sheffield; Somalians protest at the Ethiopian embassy; groups of Bangladeshis smash cars and attack police in Whitechapel after anti-government riots in Dhaka; every November 28, central London is brought to a standstill by raucous Albanians celebrating their homeland’s declaration of independence from the Ottoman Empire. None of this is remotely normal — certainly none of it is in the interest of the British people — and none of it will get any better the more Britain’s majority declines.
The British never voted to become a minority in Britain
Then there is the most damning indictment of our experiment with multiculturalism: the rape gangs, the industrial-scale grooming and sexual torture of white British girls by predominantly Pakistani-Muslim heritage men. This grotesque stain on British history serves as a reminder that ethnic realities don’t cease to exist because of polite liberal notions of colourblindness.
What of the public in all this? The British never voted to become a minority in Britain: on the contrary, every winning manifesto for the past four decades has pledged to reduce immigration. Yet it only ever seems to go up. Unsurprisingly, this is causing a major crisis of legitimacy for Westminster and bubbling resentment across the country. Last year, after a second-generation migrant attacked a children’s dance class and murdered three children, what followed was mass public unrest about years of betrayals over immigration. Seeing this as part of a trend, King’s College London academic David Betz has predicted that Britain could see civil war within five years. A sense of “downgrading” — the loss of the dominant position of the majority — is a key reason behind this. Similarly, in a recent blog, Dominic Cummings observed: “As Tories and Labour have continued their deranged trajectory, they have provoked exactly the reactions they most feared including the spreading meme that our regime itself has become our enemy and the growing politicisation of white English nationalism.” How exactly is sticking our heads in the sand over demographic change supposed to improve any of this?
And yet, there is no law of physics which says this that Britain has to acquiesce to a future of ethnic sectarianism and civil strife. One country which has largely avoided a nativist backlash against the political class in recent years is Denmark. In a recent BBC documentary, a puzzled correspondent asks a Danish MP how his country managed this. The answer is very simple: Denmark has avoided mass immigration and ethnic change; it doesn’t allow the formation of ethnic ghettoes; it also is transparent with the public about migrant crime (in Britain it’s up to think tanks to analyse the official data to inform us of the scale of crime committed by foreigners). Far from pretending there is no issue here, it has given voters what they want.
Here, though, this avoidable, unwanted disaster is treated like the weather. Ho-hum, I suppose a people that has existed for well over 1000 years will become a minority in its own country in a fit of absent-mindedness. “It would be the first time in history that a major indigenous population has voluntarily become a minority, rather than through war, famine or disease,” as the Guardian coolly observed — 25 years ago.
In raising these demographic projections, Prof Goodwin rightly calls for us to “have a conversation” about what we think about such a future. So allow me to start one: we must not let this happen. A serious approach to immigration policy must in future bear demographic concerns centrally in mind, alongside factors like cultural compatibility. Policies on citizenship and indefinite leave to remain must be reassessed. And we need to seriously reform a tax structure which crushes the standard of living, and ultimately the birth rate, of hardworking indigenous taxpayers, while doling out massive benefits and subsidies to the foreign-born, especially through social housing. Britain has to change course — and it has to happen soon.
