PROF ROBERT TOMBS: British tolerance is being stretched to its limits. Mass immigration is destabilising our country

Last weekend, my cousin’s lovely daughter, not long out of medical school, married her sweetheart – a handsome young doctor from an Indian family.

The Hindu wedding ceremony was spectacular, colourful and huge fun for everyone. Watching as young English and Indian people danced together, I reflected that the day was a perfect example of multicultural integration as we all wish it to be.

But it is dangerously naive to take these benefits for granted and to expect that the meeting of cultures will automatically lead to universal love.

The UK has arguably the best record of any country in the way that, for hundreds of years, it has taken in immigrants and refugees from every corner of the planet, offering a safe and civilised haven.

From the Huguenot Protestants who fled massacres in France during the 16th century, to the Jews escaping Nazi genocide during the Second World War, right up to the Ukrainian women and children offered shelter today, British tolerance and compassion have been a lifeline for millions.

Now that tolerance is being stretched to its limits. Mass immigration, compounded by people-smuggling on an industrial scale, is destabilising our country.

We must not fall into the trap of supposing that, because it has usually worked out fine in the past, Britain can absorb any amount of demographic change.

We have never seen escalating immigration on anything like the scale of the past 20 years, wites Prof Robert Tombs 

History shows that, even here, sudden influxes of migration have caused upheavals that last for centuries. And we have never seen escalating immigration on anything like the scale of the past 20 years.

Official figures from the Department for Education revealed on Thursday that white British children are already the minority in one in four schools in England.

This transformation has been especially marked in our big cities. At Rockwood Academy in Birmingham, for example, there was not a single white British pupil recorded among the 1,084 who attend the school.

Last week also saw the publication of a report from Professor Matt Goodwin at Buckingham University, predicting that white Britons will be a minority of the population by 2063 – barely more than a single generation.

By the end of the century, according to his figures, 60 per cent of the country will have been born overseas or will have at least one parent who is an immigrant. By then, more than 19 per cent of Britons will be Muslim (compared with the current 7 per cent). Goodwin’s projections are based on census data and figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

I suspect these numbers badly underestimate the true rate of change. They assume a steady influx and stable geopolitical conditions, when we have every reason to expect both of those factors will prove volatile.

An anti-immigration protester holds up a placard during a demo in Dover in 2020

Climate change could have a devastating effect on migration, if even one or two of the more alarmist theories are borne out.

Tens of millions of people in low-lying countries such as Bangladesh could be made homeless if sea levels rise. Millions more would flee their homes if glacial melt in the Himalayas caused catastrophic flooding in India.

Civil wars in Sudan, Congo and Eritrea have already driven enormous numbers of people to cross the Mediterranean into Europe. African nations from Nigeria to South Africa are in danger of tearing themselves apart, and the result would be a massive rush of people seeking to escape the fighting.

These upheavals would be minor compared with the aftermath of war between India and Pakistan, or in the Middle East. In those cases, Europe could see 100 million refugees or more.

Add to that the rise of organised crime and people trafficking. For all Sir Keir Starmer’s bluster about ‘smashing the gangs’, he closes his eyes to the fact that this is a multi-billion-pound business – one that will not cease just because he makes speeches.

These are not petty criminals. They are international cartels, who have discovered a revenue stream that rivals profits from the drugs trade. The Government has no ideas at all about how to stop them.

The numbers of economic migrants making the perilous crossing from France in overloaded dinghies are mounting, sometimes topping more than 1,000 in a single day.

The cumulative effect is mind-boggling. According to the House of Commons library, 44,000 people arrived illegally in the 12 months to March – and that figure, of course, represents only the people we know about. Many more have likely slipped under the radar, landing undetected or hidden in lorries and containers.

But 44,000 equates to just 5 per cent of the immigration total for the year. Legal arrivals outnumber the illegal ones by about 20-to-one.

Nothing in our long and fascinating island story has ever come close to this. Mass immigration, ushered in by New Labour under Tony Blair, is a reckless experiment in demographic revolution that has never been attempted in Britain before.

But it has happened elsewhere. And for indigenous populations, it has often been disastrous.

When Europeans settled in the Americas, from the 16th century, they forced their way on to the land. In Australia and New Zealand – countries that were much less densely populated – there was less large-scale violence but the effect on the aboriginal people was no less devastating.

Significantly, the British Empire never allowed migration to India, which had a large settled population. British subjects were encouraged to settle only in sparsely peopled areas: for instance, Canada and wide-open parts of Africa such as Kenya.

But in every case, once this process began, it was soon uncontrollable. More than six million Irish emigrants arrived in the US during the 19th century, a third of them in the space of less than a decade from 1845.

Almost as many Italians emigrated to America, most of them between 1880 and the early 1920s. In a country riven with racial divisions, the Italian and Irish communities fought to survive, often of course by hard work, but also by political corruption and organised crime.

Starry-eyed Left-wingers like to claim that Britain too is a ‘nation of immigrants’. That’s utterly disingenuous.

William the Conqueror, who arrived across the Channel in 1066 with his own flotilla of boats, brought only about 7,000 men. Yet that small army and the French-speaking Norman immigrants who followed destroyed the native Anglo-Saxon culture and subjugated an entire people.

Almost every large Saxon building was demolished, the ruling elite was replaced, their property seized and the language changed beyond recognition. For centuries, Saxons were forced to labour as serfs, despised as an inferior race by the colonising elite. Even Saxon saints were demoted.

It took at least 400 years for the aftershocks of the Norman invasion to subside.

Resentments ran so deep they are still visible in our folk legends: Robin Hood was imagined as a Saxon knight fighting Norman oppression. The idea of this ‘Norman Yoke’ inspired democrats well into the reign of Victoria.

Even today, nearly a thousand years later, the Conquest may be embedded in our class system.

A 2011 study found that Britons with names indicating Norman descent – such as Mandeville, Lacy, Glanville or Percy – were on average ten per cent better off than those with Saxon artisan names such as Smith, Cooper, Baker or Shepherd, almost a millennium after the Battle of Hastings.

To understand fully how badly damaged a country can be by unrestrained immigration, we need only look at Northern Ireland. During the 17th century, tens of thousands of Scottish protestants migrated to Ulster. Though separated by the Irish Sea, these two countries are so close that on a clear day they are visible to each other.

This was a state project, initiated by the Scottish and English governments during James I’s reign, and conceived as a way of ending mass poverty in Scotland by encouraging people to live by farming in Ireland.

Well, we all know the result: it led to enmity and violence still prevalent today that has seen thousands killed over the centuries.

Not all the social inequality in Britain is the result of the Norman invasion, of course, any more than all Ireland’s Troubles were the consequence of a plan to alleviate starvation in Scotland.

But when problems have complex causes, people seek easy scapegoats – and immigration will always supply one.

The UK population is now 69.5 million, according to the ONS. (Many believe it to be

significantly higher). That’s an increase of ten million this century. Yet the birth rate is falling: in 2023 it reached its lowest rate on record in England and Wales, at 1.44 children per woman, compared with the ‘replacement rate’ of 2.1 – the number of children needed to keep numbers steady.

If our growing population is not due to childbirth, it must be driven by immigration.

The falling birth rate is not a new phenomenon. In 1938, it was predicted that the UK population would peak within five years at 41 million, and that it would then fall steadily for the next three decades, to 31 million by 1975.

In the event, this turned out to be nonsense, partly because the official statistics did not anticipate the Second World War and the baby boom that followed.

But the predictions also failed to take account of the beginnings of immigration from former colonies, with many thousands arriving from the West Indies after 1948 – the ‘Windrush generation’ – and Pakistan and India following independence and partition in 1947.

There were other surges, for example from East Africa after the rise of the despot Idi Amin who expelled 80,000 Ugandan Asians, among them the parents of former Home Secretary Priti Patel.

Crucially, the great majority of these immigrants were determined to integrate into British life. If not already English-speaking, they learned the language. They looked for work or started businesses. Many brought much needed skills and dynamism.

But that is not the case today. A high proportion of legal immigrants come to do low-paid work, for example in care homes and the hospitality sector. Those who qualify under the government visa scheme for skilled workers or health and care workers can expect to be paid 80 per cent of the standard salary.

Those in the fishing industry, for instance, receive £12.82 an hour, as opposed to £15.88 for British workers. A similar discrepancy applies in many trades from welding to dance and choreography.

This has a threefold effect: wages are depressed, new arrivals live in comparative poverty, and many British people have dropped out of the labour market. Resentments grow on all sides and the cost is unsustainable.

Many other migrants, it has to be said, take full advantage of our generous asylum system – including housing (sometimes in comfy hotels), food, free NHS healthcare and even spending money.

The greatest source of resentment, though, comes when immigrants refuse to integrate. Incredibly, many on the Left encourage this by trashing our culture and libelling our history – elevating every background except the indigenous one. It spells disaster for our future when immigrants are encouraged to remain locked within their own communities and taught that the British have always been their enemies.

How dangerous this is, we can see by looking across the Channel, to France where second and third generation immigrants from North Africa create a constant state of unrest. Riots are frequent, car-burning is a national sport and extremist politicians talk of ‘re-migration’ – the expulsion of people who ‘don’t fit in’.

This will be Britain’s future if the Government does not take control of the situation right now. Immigration can benefit everyone, but only if it is strictly managed, democratically accepted and culturally integrated.

Allowed to run out of control, as the arc of history shows, it destroys countries.

Professor Robert Tombs is the author of The English And Their History

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