Rusere Shoniwa lays out a counter case to Simon Elmer’s argument that white British people are suffering colonisation by second generation immigrants in high office, in the first in a 2 part series. Originally published on A Plague on Both Houses.
In an essay titled ‘Woke, Racism and the Great Reset’,[i] Simon Elmer argues that woke politics in all its complex facets has eroded White British culture and that “in many respects the British are now a colonised people, much like India was under the British Empire”. In the process of setting out his stall, he has, in my opinion, succeeded in alienating non-White second-generation immigrants by adopting a hostile stance, rooted in ethnic identity, towards a group of politicians from this background. His argument seems to be that these politicians represent a colonisation of Britain primarily owing to their ethnicity and religion, and their ability to weaponise their identity. He is therefore implicitly scapegoating a wider group of ethnic minorities for whom these politicians serve as a proxy.
Pointing fingers in the wrong direction
The statements Elmer makes to support his argument are disturbing in their special and exaggerated emphasis on the role he believes second-generation immigrants of non-White ethnicity are playing in this alleged colonisation of Britain — a colonisation that he also believes is integral to the Great Reset policies being implemented by the state at the behest of global capital institutions and power structures.
To be clear, I hold the politicians Elmer mentions in the lowest esteem possible for the policies and agendas they support, but that is an entirely different matter to using them as a scapegoat for what he sees as an erosion of White British culture.
I recently applauded Elmer for his insights into the betrayal by Freedom Movement spokespersons over the genocide in Gaza. However, his subsequent analysis of race politics in woke Britain has left a thoroughly foul taste in my mouth.
I believe this issue is important because there is a growing undercurrent in the Freedom Movement that has powder-keg potential when it comes to immigration, to which Elmer devotes significant attention in building his argument. Dublin descended into riots when an immigrant who had been resident in Ireland for 20 years stabbed children at a school – a horrific crime that caused understandable levels of trauma to that community. I’m not ‘woke’ on the subject of immigration, and I have laid out a perfectly rational and sympathetic argument against uncontrolled immigration. Communities clearly have a right to collectively debate and determine levels of migration into their societies, and I acknowledge the growing feeling that thresholds have been crossed in many countries and that governments are not getting the message.
But I cannot condone or ignore Elmer’s insidious arguments that link: (a) immigration levels over the last two decades to (b) the actions and statements of ethnic minority politicians in high office, leading to a conclusion that White British culture is being eroded by the combination of these two factors. Not only has Elmer descended into irrationality with his latest piece, but his argument is dangerous.
Immigration and the dilution of whiteness
Elmer sets the scene with an assertion that Western governments are captured by institutions and power structures that I would loosely group under the umbrella term Owners and Controllers of Global Financial Capital (OCGFC) — this includes institutions with a vital role in global policy-making like the WHO and IPCC. I agree with this initial assertion. However, where I depart from Elmer is in the parallel he draws between this state capture and historical colonialism, which for me is tenuous at best and, in Elmer’s hands, descends into farce.
His argument begins in earnest with an examination of the politics of immigration. It’s a good place to start since free movement of labour was a fundamental underpinning of the neo-liberal economic policy that took off in the late 20th century. It’s also the right place to start if you’re going to advance insidious rhetoric about the role of “second-generation immigrants” in the demise of British democracy and culture.
That said, if someone is presenting an essay about woke racism and positing immigration as a key lever in the Great Reset, I want to see a coherent explanation of how immigration has in fact worked as a Great Reset catalyst. How exactly did immigration play a role in the repeat seizing up of credit markets in September 2019, the financial event which was arguably the main catalyst for lockdowns and the pseudo pandemic of March 2020 to December 2021? How exactly did immigration facilitate lockdowns? How exactly is immigration contributing to the rollout of the Biosecurity state? How exactly did immigration contribute to coercive vaccination policies, especially considering that immigrants were at the forefront of resistance to coerced vaccination? After all, the most successful campaign that brought coerced and mandated vaccination to a standstill here in the UK was the ‘NHS 100k’ resistance group, fronted by an organisation with a disproportionately high immigrant composition. As interesting as immigration is, Elmer offers no coherent explanation of its impact on the Great Reset.
The one link between immigration and the Great Reset that I can see but Elmer doesn’t explore is what will happen here when one mad first- or second- generation immigrant commits a crime similar to the ones committed in Ireland and France. Will we collectively keep our cool in the face of such a crime or will the streets be set on fire with vengeful hatred, the kind that is the logical outcome of the narrative Elmer has crafted? Will the authorities then seize on the crisis to accelerate Great Reset agendas of more online digital control? The answer to that is provided by Leo Varadkar, Ireland’s Taoiseach, who mounted the podium at lightning speed to announce that Ireland’s:
“incitement hatred legislation is not up to date for the social media age, and we need that legislation through, and we need it through within a matter of weeks.”
He strongly hinted at moving from an approach of controlling platforms to one of targeting individuals. This, as I see it, is how tensions around immigration, not immigration itself, will be exploited to further Great Reset agendas.
Instead of focusing on this angle, Elmer asks his readers to take note of, and be alarmed at, a 10% decrease in whiteness in Britain over the last two decades. What his readers are being invited to accept is that this decrease in whiteness equates to a decrease in Britishness or an erosion of British culture.
Before I present the gist of Elmer’s statistical analysis, I’ll point you to a footnote[ii] that may interest you on how Elmer abused statistics to portray what is actually an increase over two decades of around 8 percentage points (10% to 18%) in the total immigrant composition of the UK workforce as an increase of 21.2 percentage points (10% to 31.2%).
Based on a comparison of census data as of 2001 and 2021, the main crux of Elmer’s statistical analysis is that the UK was 91.3% White, of which 87.5% was White British, in 2001 and that this proportion drops to 81.7% White, of which 74.4% is White British, in 2021. So the total composition of ethnic minorities increases over this period from 8.7% to 18.3%.
Elmer makes absolutely no attempt to uncover how much of this increase is due to ethnic minority births in Britain – people born in Britain and therefore British – and therefore how much of the corresponding decrease in the majority White ethnic composition is due to declining birth rates in that group. We can get a hint of this from the go-to website for White British ‘patriots’ concerned about the effect of immigration on British culture – Migration Watch UK:
“34% of births in England and Wales in 2019 involved at least one parent who was not born here… the share of live births to non-UK born mothers has doubled from about 13% to 29%. In London, a majority of births (just under 60%) are now to non-UK born mothers… the non-UK born TFR [Total Fertility Rate] remains higher than the rate for UK-born women.”
This is important for one simple reason. Both the total percentage of ethnic minorities and its growth include a significant number who are born in Britain. However, that fact is not salient to Elmer because, for him, colour is the proxy for Britishness and British culture, and not who is born and raised here. On the face of it, a decrease in whiteness – this is the statistic Elmer is at pains to emphasise – of nearly 10% over two decades, is significant. But why is a drop in whiteness automatically assumed to correspond with an erosion in culture? Maybe it is, but there is no coherent discussion of the assumed relationship between dilution in whiteness and dilution in culture.
Notwithstanding the absence of an explanation for the link between the attenuation of British whiteness and the erosion of British culture – you must simply accept it, because whiteness is the proxy for British culture – the evidence put forward for the attack on British culture consists of the statements of “second-generation immigrants” in high office who are weaponising wokeism in the service of known political agendas. All of these statistics lead quite abruptly to this statement by Elmer:
“the UK is increasingly being run by second-generation immigrants who, on this evidence and quite openly, hate the White British working class, our indigenous culture and social customs.” [emphasis added]
Do “second-generation immigrants” in high office really hate the White British working class, their indigenous culture and social customs?
The “evidence” Elmer cites comes in the form of idiotic statements by Scotland’s recently elected First Minister, Humza Yousaf, and London’s Mayor, Sadiq Khan, regarding White ethnic representation in Scotland and London respectively. On the one hand, Elmer points out that these people are in fact no different from their treacherous White colleagues, but on the other hand he posits that they indeed do deserve special attention owing to a special quality they possess – the ability to pull the race card when needed to defend against valid political attacks. According to Elmer, the woke playbook governing UK politics makes them untouchable.
If their equally treacherous White cabinet colleagues are a fifth column serving the interests of the OCGFC, these “second-generation immigrants” are a sixth column doing what even their White colleagues cannot do because they lack the Teflon-coating of colour. However, in my view, in the bigger political scheme of things, they are no more ‘untouchable’ than their White counterparts, as I will explain. Nor should their reflexive resort to woke race rhetoric be interpreted as hatred of British culture, as I will also explain. Above all, there is a way to counter woke rhetoric, regardless of the colour of the politician spewing it, and it’s the same way to counter all political bullshit – with logic and reason. We simply need to call their bluff when they pull the race card as a defensive strategy.
I’m going to offer another perspective different from the “they-hate-our-culture” one. The parents of those second-generation-immigrant political miscreants had an incredible amount of respect for British culture. So much so that they inculcated in their children the very best of it – the value of hard work and a good education. And with no small thanks to their first-generation immigrant parents, those hard-working second-generation miscreants have, instilled with a work ethic that would make most Bible-bashing Protestants look like Homer Simpson, made it to the top of the pile. Against the odds in many cases. So why are they saying the stupid things they say? Well, as I’ve said – they are a sixth column, giving support to the fifth column. By this analysis, if the fifth column falls, they will fall too. Focusing on the sixth column as the source of all evil is pointless but incredibly appealing to those easily given to spotting the ‘foreign’ threat. The sixth column looks foreign but it isn’t – it’s British, and the failure to see that is, shall we say, problematic.
The claim that these second-generation immigrants in high office are doing what they are doing because they hate British culture and social customs doesn’t stack up. I don’t even think they hate the working class, White, Black or Brown, because many of them are only one generation away from it. It’s surprising to me that an opponent of wokeism would cite politicians’ woke statements as evidence of anything other than political manipulation. That’s one of the key pillars of woke: guilt-tripping and abusing the mantle of victimhood.
Elmer himself articulated the strategy very well in a previous piece he did and which I was happy to re-publish on my site. The entire political establishment, both Left and Right, have succeeded in rebranding all dissent or action that even vaguely threatens their Great Reset agenda as “far-right”, and the stigma of being labelled “far-right” is far more than any woke snowflake can handle. It’s an effective weapon, and the entire cabinet, Black, Green, Purple or White, know that, in matters concerning race politics, the weapon is more effective when fired by someone of colour.
Elmer in fact contradicts himself within his own essay because he acknowledges towards the end of it that these people don’t hold “any belief, even the racism against White people they demonstrate with impunity, that conflicts with their pursuit of power.” Precisely. They don’t truly believe what they are saying. Elmer also acknowledges that they have been appointed to “senior positions of political leadership in the UK specifically because they can make this accusation [of racism] without fear of reprisal against anyone who opposes the…agendas…of the Great Reset.” Yes, they’re tools, just like every other high office holder in WEFminster. So why focus on them in the thoroughly distasteful way he did? Why does he feel the need to bog himself down in the ugly quagmire of suffixing names with ‘Pakistani’, ‘Indian’, ‘Jamaican’ (more of which later) and preposterously telling us that we’re living under reverse colonialism?
In any event, the effect of Elmer’s claim is to set the scaffolding for scapegoating. The spotlight turns on these impostors in a way that sets them apart, and it leads to a statement about colonialism that is so preposterous, had I been sitting in a chair, I would have fallen off it, tried to reseat myself, and fallen off again.
The colonisation of Britain – according to Elmer
We now arrive at the set-up for putting these “second-generation immigrant” impostors in the driving seat of Elmer’s Great Reset colonialism:
“As the British ruling class know better than anyone…the colonisation of a country is conditional upon the erasure of its indigenous culture and the replacement of its native leaders with foreigners who have no allegiance, in beliefs or customs, to the conquered people.” [emphasis added]
Elmer points out that the “UK’s woke compliant leaders” of all colours have been appointed for just such a purpose. Now, as I’ve said, Western governments are captured by the OCGFC, but the whole mangling up of this capture with historical colonialism is where Elmer sets himself up for a great deal of confusion. That confusion is only compounded by this dramatic and caricatured representation of colonialism as being reliant on “the erasure of its indigenous culture and the replacement of its native leaders with foreigners”. Ideological agendas – in this case, trying to prove that “second-generation immigrants” are a trojan horse in a reverse-colonial revenge play – are the breeding ground of phantasies (unconscious imaginings, which makes them more potent than conscious ones), manipulations and intellectual dishonesty. I believe that it is possible to nuance colonialism into a more banal profit-centred evil than the culture-centred one painted by Elmer.
Colonialism didn’t actually care about culture. It cared about resources and money, though cultures often suffered in the process. I am inclined to start with Bernard Porter’s characterisation of colonialism in his work: The Lion’s Share – A Short History of British Imperialism 1850-2004:
“The roots of British imperialism were material, not cultural. Specifically, it grew out of the nature of the British capitalism of the time[iii]… This ‘informal empire’ was the product of Britain’s expanding economy…Every year the industrial system devoured more raw materials and turned them into saleable commodities, and demanded yet more materials and markets; that its appetite would spread ever wider beyond Britain’s national boundaries was therefore natural… The result was a constant expansion of Britain’s world market to match the expansion of her industrial production at home [iv].”
That is not to excuse the gross abuses of power by colonists who exploited, robbed and massacred native populations. Too often imperialism manifested in blatant colonial exploitation and tyranny, but the imperial justification for force was trade and profit. This is why imperialism, and therefore colonialism, manifested in different ways at different times and places. Colonists, as an extension of imperialism, were often given free rein because this saved costs, both human and financial, on direct policing. The cost of that to the indigenous populations was often abuse and, to the British government, sometimes the loss of the colony itself, as in the case of America.
It is important to highlight the abuses that became a hallmark of historical colonialism in its most brutal form because they render Elmer’s parallels with current migration to Europe untenable. His crude conflation, which becomes more explicit as he progresses his case, evokes images of minorities in the UK running rampant and trying to economically subjugate and oppress a White majority. This is not only farcical but also trivialises the crimes that were committed against indigenous populations during historical colonialism.
By adopting an exclusively cultural lens, notwithstanding that the lens itself is incredibly blurred, Elmer hopes to convince his audience that they are suffering an indignity equivalent to the violence of historical colonialism. Hilariously, this comes across as the equivalent of the woke claim that micro-aggressions are violence.
I concede that just because imperialism and colonialism were rooted in economic subjugation doesn’t mean that the cultures of subjugated peoples suffered no harm. Clearly, they often did. But imperialism and colonialism were messy, and targeting culture specifically was not a prerequisite for colonisation and was not always part of a planned strategy. One need only look at two prime examples of colonisation to understand that it was about theft of land and resources; culture and how to erase it were not a primary consideration.
Having arrived in Cape Town at the southern-most tip of Africa in 1652, it took the Dutch a mere seven years to figure out they had a pretty good chance of beating the indigenous Khoikhoi in a fight for land and resources. Tensions actually began two years after the arrival of the Dutch. Were the colonists thumbing through copies of social studies texts to understand how they might erase the Khoikhoi culture? I think not.
Having arrived in Virginia in 1607, it took just two years for tensions between the Jamestown settlers and the indigenous North American people to explode into the first Anglo-Powhatan war fought between 1609 and 1614. The rest, as they say, is history. Were the colonists conducting workshops on how they might erase Algonquian culture? I think not.
To be clear, the colonisation of a country or people is not “conditional upon the erasure of its indigenous culture”. It’s conditional upon greed, economic imperatives, survival and brute force. This is not to deny the many episodes of specific cultural attack. The 1976 Soweto uprisings in South Africa were sparked by the White minority government’s decree to enforce Afrikaans as the medium of instruction in Black schools. That’s an attack on language and therefore culture. But the foundations, scaffolding and brickwork for colonial oppression under apartheid had long been established and they were rooted in brutal settler land-theft. Statements by government officials involved in the decree strongly indicate that the decision was driven, at least in part, by a desire to ensure that South Africa’s cheap Black labour force was better able to take instruction efficiently from either English-speaking or Afrikaans-speaking managers in farms or factories.
Not every oppressor sets out to deploy cultural erasure as a weapon. When it was used as a weapon, not every oppressed group succumbed to it. The idea that cultural erasure has to be a central plank of any colonisation project is a revisionist oversimplification pedalled to bolster a very shaky modern-day theory about a foreign cultural enemy encroaching on “White British” culture. There is no repeat of historical ‘colonisation’ taking place. But, with an invasion and replacement mindset firmly in place, the narrative is still morphing from “they’re stealing our jobs” to “they’re killing our culture”.
It is fair to say that wherever capital and trade seek to multiply, they are accompanied by a form of ‘colonisation’. Westernisation is a form of global ‘colonisation’ in the way that technologies have been adopted by people everywhere and ideas have seeped into the global consciousness. But we should be careful in how we both define it and characterise it. And we should be wary of drawing lazy parallels with historical colonialism. History may rhyme, but it rarely repeats.
Let’s also acknowledge that there was, in fact, a high degree of agency involved in many indigenous populations’ acceptance or rejection of Western cultural ideas, which counters Elmer’s oversimplified cultural imperialism formula. It is estimated that by 2060 more than 40% of all Christians worldwide will reside in Sub-Saharan Africa. That isn’t because Africans were brainwashed at gunpoint. They could have rejected the Christian Gospel after independence swept through the continent post-WW2, but they chose to keep it, along with many aspects of African culture which could not have been obliterated even if the colonists had tried their damndest to. The West, by contrast, has chosen to jettison the Christian Gospel and adopt The Science™ along with a moral relativism that has underpinned the pernicious abandonment of the concept of morality itself. If we’re going to identify the source of cultural erosion in the West, why not start there? Elmer should understand that what he sees as the erosion of Western culture began long before neo-liberal mass migration and for that reason alone, his exercise in scapegoating is both intellectually bankrupt and morally reprehensible.
There is also an inherent contradiction in Elmer’s assertion that “the colonisation of a country is conditional upon the erasure of its indigenous culture” and his attempt to use this as evidence for what is happening in Britain today. If the countries from which today’s second-generation immigrants are descended were colonised for long periods as they were, Elmer cannot argue that the “second-generation immigrants” hate British culture and are working against it, because they themselves would have become completely British by dint of the supposedly successful erasure of their parents’ culture during colonisation. But as I have argued and will continue to argue, it’s more complicated than that. They are mostly British by virtue of having been born and raised here. To suggest otherwise is to posit some kind of imperviousness to learning and acculturation which would render them inhuman. Perhaps that’s what Elmer is trying to convey, albeit unconsciously. To the extent that they have other cultural influences, it’s precisely because colonisation did not and could not erase the culture of their parents’ homeland.
How alienation and scapegoating work – these people are not British. They’re actually Indian, Jamaican, Guyanese…anything but British
Following this specious set-up that posits the erasure of culture as a vital component of colonisation, Elmer launches into a tirade over how London’s Mayor, Sadiq Khan, clearly fronting obnoxious WEF agenda policies, is able to make criminal statements with impunity. I, like Elmer, would pay good money to see Khan royally kicked up the arse (figuratively speaking) for the garbage he spews. But is it really true, as Elmer asserts, that Khan will never be prosecuted “because he is protected from such charges not only by his office but also by his ethnicity, which allows him, as it does other Asian and Black Britons, to accuse anyone in this country who is White of being racist, far-right, anti-Semitic (etc.) with complete impunity”? Let’s examine this claim.
Boris Johnson has devoted virtually his entire adult life to the pursuit of lying in high office and has received nothing more than perfunctory wrist-slaps. In December 2019, we were reminded that Johnson “invoked some of the oldest and most pernicious antisemitic stereotypes” in his writing hobby. Did it halt his career? The High Court found that Matt Hancock in his handling of NHS procurement contracts had acted unlawfully. Confusingly, it also found that this doesn’t make him a criminal! From where I’m sitting, it seems to me that the entire political class, regardless of skin colour and regardless of the offence itself, is part of an untouchable crime syndicate, as long as they serve the interests of the OCGFC.
Our government siphoned off billions of taxpayer funds during covid to corporations. It has passed laws to legalise censorship. It is in the process of handing over national sovereignty to the WHO. This tiny list is just the tip of the tip of the criminal iceberg, but Elmer wants Khan arrested under the Public Order Act for using ‘threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviours that causes, or is likely to cause, another person harassment, alarm or distress’. This is what’s pissing Elmer off? And, frankly, if we were really serious about free speech, that is a piece of legislation that shouldn’t exist – causing alarm or distress with insulting words should not be a crime. Few sights would give me more pleasure than seeing Khan led away from the dock in an orange jumpsuit to serve a lengthy term in jail, but surely we can do better than that for a list of charges?
I find it tragic that the obsession with the culture wars and wokeism has caused apparently sane people to lose their marbles because something they can’t define – White British culture – is perceived as under threat.
But tragedy soon morphs into something sinister when Elmer devotes an entire paragraph to listing the names of senior-serving “second-generation immigrants” in both the current Conservative cabinet and Labour’s Shadow cabinet, all of them suffixed in parentheses with what is effectively their ethnicity and/or their parents’ national identity. The purpose of this ethnic roll-call of dishonour is, as we shall see, to home in on the ‘colonialism’ we now face. Thus Braverman is the “former Indian Home Secretary”, Claire Coutinho is “our Indian Secretary of State for Net Zero”, David Lammy is “our Guyanese Shadow Foreign Secretary”, and so on. Kemi Badenoch might object to being “our Indian Secretary of State for Business” since I think she is of Nigerian descent, but when you’ve decided to use detail as a device with which to bludgeon the reader into submission, a few mistakes here and there won’t matter. The point Elmer is trying to make is that these people are anything but British and never could be, because they’re really Indian, Guyanese, Jamaican, and so on.
Elmer’s dogged labelling of these people as “second-generation immigrants”, along with what he portrays as their true country of allegiance, is a dog-whistle intended to signify that these people are not really British. And this absence of Britishness isn’t purely because they are WEF acolytes, as we know they are. It’s because they are Indian, Guyanese, Pakistani, Iraqi, Jamaican, and so on. Kemi Badenoch will tell you that she was born in Wimbledon, but to Elmer, this is inconsequential. Another interesting point about Badenoch is that she has acquired a reputation for not weaponising ethnicity in woke politics. On the contrary, when it comes to race she is very anti-woke. And yet she still made Elmer’s ignominious list. Why?
Michael Howard, who led the Conservative Party between 2003 and 2005, was a “second-generation immigrant”. His father, Bernat Hecht (the family anglicised their name), was born in Romania. Had Michael Howard been serving in high office today, he would probably not be covering himself in glory. Would Elmer have included Mr Howard in his list of second-generation immigrant miscreants who hate British culture, suffixed with “Romanian”? He either wouldn’t have dared to include him or it wouldn’t have even occurred to him, because Howard would have blended in quite nicely.
There is a very simple yet highly potent and visceral psychological device at play here. If you have a hunch that a person in high office is up to no good, but they look like you and have broadly the same heritage as you, you’re likely to be more forgiving. But if that person doesn’t look like you and doesn’t share your heritage, it is far easier to see them as innately evil. It is far easier and more satisfying to hate the evil foreign impostor than the evil brother or sister from within. The ‘foreign’ impostors are the treacherous fifth (or sixth) column. I urge you to read Elmer’s paragraph in which he comprehensively and very deliberately ethnically alienates people born and raised in this country and ask yourself if you don’t feel slightly sickened by that paragraph alone, never mind the conclusion that follows.
Dear Britain: Simon Elmer regrets to inform you that you have been colonised by four second-generation immigrants in the Government’s cabinet. Don’t laugh.
But before I discuss that wretched conclusion, there’s another problem with Elmer’s (ab)use of statistics. He states that “17% of the Cabinet of the current Conservative Government are second-generation immigrants, which is representative of the 18% of the UK population from a Black, Asian, mixed or other ethnic group, although all five of them occupy the most senior offices of State”.
Sensing that Elmer is a master of collecting, in magpie fashion, and spraying out large quantities of statistics, but is not too hot on quality control, I decided to do my own colour audit of the cabinet of the current Conservative Government. And, as of 4th December 2023, I found only four “second-generation immigrants” of colour polluting the pristine white halls of Westminster. That’s out of a total of 32 cabinet members, or 12.5%. Bear in mind that Elmer published his piece on his own website on 17th November and the UK Column publication date is 24th November. And as we inch towards his dramatic conclusion, also bear in mind the scale of havoc Elmer claims these four people are wreaking.
Despite pointing out that the composition of these “second-generation immigrants” in the current cabinet (he states it’s 17% but it’s actually 12.5%) matches the census data (18%), and is less for the Shadow cabinet, this horrifying list of ethnic minority impostors in Westminster is underlined by the observation that they “have been appointed to such senior leadership positions in a UK whose population is 75% White British”. Shocking. How did that happen? Well, on the face it, it suggests to me that these impostors have electoral legitimacy from those 75% “White British” voters, but then perhaps these poor voters had some sort of gun to their head?
Drum roll…the absurd conclusion Elmer reaches is that:
“if any non-European country had such a high proportion of senior politicians of another ethnicity and religion in its government… we’d call this colonialism.” [emphasis added]
In part II, I will explain why Britain has not been colonised by four second-generation immigrant impostors in the Government’s cabinet. (I’ll try not to laugh while I’m doing it.) I’ll also tackle questions about whether, under Elmer’s model of Britishness, second/third/fourth-generation immigrants can ever get to be British; is “White British” culture a red herring in staving off the Great Reset, and; is cultural homogeneity something to embrace?
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[i] Web archive capture on 7/12/23 – https://web.archive.org/web/20231207164341/https://architectsforsocialhousing.co.uk/2023/11/17/woke-racism-and-the-great-reset/
[ii] Elmer surveys the change in the composition of the foreign born working-age population (i.e. immigrants) between the years 2004 and 2021 by comparing two qualitatively different numbers at each point in time. Using a 2005 Fiscal Studies paper, he cites the overall composition of the immigrant working-age population in Britain as 10.5% (although the paper itself only ever refers to 10%, not 10.5%), and then compares that to the composition of immigrants in elementary occupations of 31.2% at 2021. In effect comparing apples and oranges because these two are not the same thing. A like-for-like comparison of either the total composition or the elementary-occupation composition could produce a different result than the one presented. And in fact a little research shows that the total composition of the foreign-born was an estimated 18% of the employed population in 2021. So, instead of a jump from 10% to 31.2% suggested by Elmer, we’re probably looking at a jump from 10% to 18% in the total immigrant composition of the UK workforce.
[iii] Bernard Porter, The Lion’s Share: A Short History of British Imperialism 1850-2004, Pearson Education Limited, 2004, Preface, page [x]
[iv] Bernard Porter, The Lion’s Share: A Short History of British Imperialism 1850-2004, Pearson Education Limited, 2004, Chapter 1, page 15.
This Simon Elmer and his like have fallen for the oldest trick in the imperial book, the method of divide and rule. Unfortunately so many of the people whose eyes were opened by the lockdown and associated oppressions have fallen into this trap- including everyone on the former “lockdown sceptics” site.
The whole point about Rishi, Suella, Priti, James Cleverley etc is that they’re exactly the same as their white colleagues, and therefore they need to be countered in exactly the same way.
As regards the numbers in the population, by using the term “at least one parent” Simon Elmer clearly includes mixed-race people as non-British. James Cleverley’s father is white isn’t he? So this is a purely biological view of nationality, but with the totally unscientific belief that any element of non-white ancestry negates the white element. Americans called this the “one drop rule”.
As regards British culture, people should define what they mean by this term before they try to weaponise it. For me, British culture includes the Peasants’ Revolt, the Levellers and Diggers, the Chartists, and the Trades Union movement. Other people may define it differently.
My slight disagreement with this article is that I think British imperialism wasn’t all about economic exploitation- that was a constant factor, but there was also a cultural element which varied between different times and places. For instance the army, traders and plantation owners seem generally to have disliked Christian missionaries and their converts, showing the most contempt for mixed-race people and western-educated Indian “babus” (clerks) while admiring the “pure” warrior cultures like the Zulus and Pathans
Thanks for these perspectives. Yes the mix of economics vs culture in imperialism is hugely debated. I won’t deny that culture enters into the mix but if you ask me what the fons et origo of imperialism was, I will always lean towards economics. The imperialists weren’t setting out to edify the masses in foreign lands. They were plundering! Once you decide to plunder, you then try to justify why you are stealing someone else’s land and resources. Culture is then used, subverted, exploited etc. As for the admiration expressed for warrior cultures, that is perhaps the inevitable consequence of one warrior class coming into contact with another and learning from them while they do battle. As you say, there is nothing to be admired about a paper-pushing clerk!
A good take on a thorny problem, Rusere. I’ve admired what I’d come across of Elmer’s work up till now, though I must admit I hadn’t seen this particular essay, not being signed up to his blog. This is perhaps what we music fans might call The Morrissey Syndrome! Speaking of which…
Pete Luce, your last paragraph makes a valid point. The contempt for the mixed race, while admiring the “pure” warrior cultures is something I think I’ve been sub-consciously guilty of in the past.
I have yet to read Part II, and I agree that fundamentally Simon Elmer may be arguing from within the wrong paradigm. In some senses the extract in question (a full chapter from his latest book, which I own but have not yet read) has similarities to Paul Embery’s much thinner discourse. Embery’s book of a year or so ago supposedly props up the white working class view that “things have gone too far”. (I would dispute that this is even a widespread view, but a mainstream press propaganda point.)
I read his argument to be that there are parallels between the victim mentality that fuels many woke tropes and how some British politicians deploy their ‘disprivilege’ (is that a word) to intercept and shout down any criticisms as racism. In just the same way of course as antisemitism has been weaponised. It’s unfortunate that this seems so uncomfortably close to the ‘right’ arguments, but that’s because it is, as you’ve ably demonstrated. Thanks
Thanks. I’ve picked up on a comment you made in Part II because I thought that in part II, I argued that Elmer had seriously lost the plot on ‘colonised’ Britain and I spent some time trying to disprove him. It seems I failed to convince you and was curious to understand exactly where / why.
Prove this unnatural and a-historical state of affairs will benefit the native people.
Prove that the trade-offs are acceptable (without knowing the black swans).
Show evidence importing people who share nothing in common with us will make our lives better.
Refute the endless videos of the entitled welfare class of imported foreigners disrespecting us and our culture are the exceptions and not the rule.
Explain why people who will never speak English or celebrate our traditions will be wonderful neighbours and work colleagues.
Perhaps you can also explain why this client group of the state (here only for the welfare) is not just massive State over reach and control.
I have read Simon Elmer’s article and I don’t think you do his arguments justice. The point is that just as ‘health and security’ has been used to justify draconian policies, the ‘race card’ is also used in this way. ‘You can’t criticise me because I’m a victim’ has been used for so many egregious acts. Tragically, the attack by the Israeli government on Gaza and the Palestinians shows this with awful clarity. Israel can’t be criticised because it claims it is Jewish. The conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-semitism means that Israel can act with impunity.
BTW colonial histories and in general race has been used as a divide and rule. I would strongly recommend Theodore Allen’s “The Invention of the White Race’ to see how racism was created in order to divide and rule.
Finally, it is worth noting that apart from the Irish/travellers, the most disadvantaged group in UK society is white, working class males. We really need to recognise this and stand in solidarity with them. The response of the ‘left’ to the Canadian truck drivers was to treat them as ‘the wrong type of working class’ and not only didn’t support them in their struggle, but sided with their oppressors. The risk is we will find that they ally with the extreme right. If we don’t recognise the class aspect of oppression and realise that race is not a cause of oppression, merely an excuse, then we are, to quote the Marxist Harry Braverman, collaborating in our own oppression.
Finally, Simon Elmer has been a beacon of sanity in the whole Covid/trans/Ukraine/Gaza debacle. Unlike many on the so called ‘left’ he has been consistent in his analysis of how power is maintained and how peoples are persuaded to conform and comply. Please, don’t attack allies – the real enemy is still the greatest threat.