Michael Andrews

Peter Hitchens, looking back on his days as a revolutionary Marxist: “When I was a Revolutionary Marxist, we were all in favour of as much immigration as possible. It wasn’t because we liked immigrants, but because we didn’t like Britain. We saw immigrants, from anywhere, as allies against the staid, settled, conservative society that our country still was at the end of the Sixties. Also, we liked to feel oh, so superior to the bewildered people, usually in the poorest parts of Britain – who found their neighbourhoods suddenly transformed into supposedly ‘vibrant communities’. If they dared to express the mildest objections, we called them bigots.” Nothing fundamental has changed. Today’s left still doesn’t like Britain. They still treat mass immigration, open borders and demographic transformation as a weapon against the people, culture and institutions that already exist here. The motive was never affection for the newcomers; it was hostility to what the country was and, in their eyes, still is. That is why the same circles keep aligning with Mohammadans, recent arrivals, the useful “born here’s,” the halves and anyone else willing to help dissolve what’s left of the old country. They still sneer at anyone who objects as a bigot or a racist, while making sure their own lives stay as far from the consequences as possible. The revolutionary students of the Sixties came mostly from the nicer parts of London and the Home Counties; today’s equivalents do the same. They talk endlessly about vibrancy and enrichment from safe distance, then retreat to the expensive enclaves, the private schools and the areas that have not yet been transformed. The people who actually live with the results are told their concerns are “illegitimate.” Hitchens noted even then that many of the arrivals were not useful revolutionary allies at all, deeply religious, socially conservative, with attitudes toward women that sat uneasily with the left’s supposed principles. The modern version of the project has simply absorbed that contradiction rather than confront it. The alliance continues because the shared goal remains the same: to weaken and remake Britain in their image, not because the partners suddenly became “compatible”. Same anti-British impulse, same strategy of demographic change as political tool, same contempt for the native population that notices what is happening. Only the branding has been updated. The continuity is plain in the way dissent is handled. What was once the sneer of student radicals is now institutional practice: objections to the pace and scale of change are met with the same labels, the same refusal to debate numbers or outcomes, and the same insistence that noticing patterns is itself the problem. Meanwhile the areas most affected continue to change, and the political class that oversaw it continues to treat the resulting tensions as evidence of the public’s failure to adapt rather than as the predictable result of policy. Hitchens has since described the arrogance and self-righteousness of that earlier outlook. The present version shows little sign of the same self-examination. The project proceeds under new names, diversity, inclusion, anti-racism, but the underlying calculation remains recognisable: demographic transformation as a means of permanently altering the character of the country, carried out by people who will not be required to live with the full weight of what they have set in motion.