Decades after Enoch Powell’s speech, and the fear of a black planet has in no way subsided. The word multiculturalism has become a proxy for a ton of British anxieties about immigration, race, difference, crime and danger. It’s now a dirty word, a front word for fears about black and brown and foreign people posing a danger to white Brits. If you are an immigrant – even if you’re second or third generation – this is personal. You are multiculturalism. People who are scared of multiculturalism are scared of you. And, in the spirit of 1980s-style political blackness, ‘immigration concerns’ are less about who is black, and more about who isn’t white British.
In campaign literature for the referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU, the Vote Leave campaign wrote that ‘there were 475,000 live births to mothers from other EU countries between 2005 and 2014, the equivalent of adding a city the size of Manchester to the population.’4 This was cloaked in a conversation about the ‘strain’ immigrants put on the NHS, but I’ve heard this discussion before. In the US, the phrase ‘anchor baby’ is used in the pejorative sense to admonish US-born children of immigrants. It suggests a takeover. Britain is not innocent of this kind of punitive talk. In 2016, one hospital began considering passport checks for non-emergency patients – including pregnant women – before they received treatment.5 In more campaign literature before the referendum, posters from UKIP read: ‘We want our country back: Vote to Leave’.6 The last time I heard the slogan ‘we want our country back’ was in my university town, when far-right group the English Defence League were staging a protest about what they called the ‘Islamification’ of Britain. Now, another form of the phrase – ‘taking our country back’ – is used as a strapline by Britain First. An IPSOS Mori poll published days before the EU referendum vote confirmed that immigration was the top issue for would-be leave voters.7 What was once fringe is now mainstream.
This is nothing new. For a long time now, far-right political groups have hijacked the anti-colonial struggles of native people in America and Australia to create a story of the embattled indigenous white British, under siege from immigration. Around the same time the English Defence League were marching through my university town, a group of my friends crowded into my student bedroom to watch former British National Party leader Nick Griffin on BBC Question Time. I watched in disbelief as he said: ‘No one here would dare go to New Zealand and say to a Maori “what do you mean indigenous?” You wouldn’t dare go to North America and say to an American Red Indian “what do you mean indigenous? We’re all the same.”’ He continued: ‘The indigenous people of these islands, the English, the Scots, the Irish and the Welsh . . . it’s the people who have been here overwhelmingly for the last 17,000 years. We are the aboriginals here . . . The simple fact is that the majority of the British people are descended from people who’ve lived here since time immemorial. It’s extraordinarily racist, it is genuinely racist when you seek to deny the English. You people wouldn’t even let us have our name on the census form. That is racism. And that’s why people are voting British National Party.’
It seemed to be that for Nick Griffin, accommodating difference was akin to erasing white Britishness. The comfort of white privilege blinds him to the fact that he is part of the majority and that he is already catered for. In his Question Time monologue, Griffin appealed to that British sense of fairness to conjure images of an embattled white minority under attack, losing control of their heritage and culture. Even more insultingly, he used the struggles of black and brown people who were colonised, raped and beaten by white British people to preserve white British culture.
Because of British defamation laws, you can get into hot water if you publish something that harshly criticises someone without giving them the right to reply in the same piece of work. I think that a book detailing British racism would be remiss to overlook the vast influence Nick Griffin and the British National Party has had in how we talk about race today. So I found myself in the position of trying to get in contact with Nick Griffin, a man who, throughout my lifetime, has openly attacked the idea of people like me being truly British, and who represented a party that held policies stating that my mixed-race family is an abomination.
Having been in the same position a few years before me, an editor I work with gave me his address. I wrote Mr Griffin a letter. He replied the next day, agreeing to speak to me. I suggested meeting at my publisher’s offices. He declined, saying he hardly ever goes to London, as it’s ‘largely a foreign country’. We agreed to speak on the phone the next day.
I was very worried throughout this whole process, but I chose to use my own mobile number to call him, in an effort to be as open and honest as possible. I needed the interview, after all, and acting suspicious or withholding information was not going to help with that. But I’d handed over my personal phone number to one of the most infamous British far-right leaders in the last fifty years. If he so wished, he could make my life a living hell with a few keystrokes. He could choose to post my number online. I knew it was something he’d done before – posting the address of a gay couple online back in 2012.8 My only security was that we both had something over each other – I had his number and email address. So I took the risk. Our conversation was so surreal that I publish it here in full.
REL: Back in 2009, you said something along the lines that white British people are an ethnic minority in Britain. Do you still think that?
NG: Not are. Will become.
Why do you think white people will become an ethnic minority in Britain, then?
It’s simply a demographic fact. If you want to go and look, I’d look at Professor Coleman from Oxford University. He’s probably Britain’s leading demographer. Using government figures, not my figures, he said some years ago we’d be a minority in our own country by the end of this century at the latest. That was at present trends, but of course, present trends have got worse. So there’s simply no doubt about it. Not just Britain, but the whole of Western Europe.
But currently in Britain, 81.9 per cent of the population is white British, don’t you think that’s a bit far-fetched?
No, that’s how demographics works. The British population is very large compared to the others, you’re right. But if you look at the age differences between the populations, and the British population is significantly made up of two waves of baby boomers who, over the next twenty years, are going to die off at an incredible rate . . . It’s going to go up. Whereas the age profile of a number of the immigrant populations is much younger, therefore they’ll have more children. You’re not arguing with me, you need to go and argue with Professor Coleman. He’s a leading demographer in the world, and you and I aren’t. What he says is true. There’s really no doubt about it.
Why do you think that his projections are bad news, then?
I regard that as a racist question. Because no white person would dare to go to, say, Nigeria, if Nigeria was being flooded with Chinese, and say ‘Why do you think it’s a bad idea that Nigeria should cease to be Nigeria?’ It’s self-evident that all the peoples of the world have a right to remain the dominant people, culturally and ethnically, in their own homeland. Anyone who says otherwise, just because we happen to be Europeans, is a racist.
I see. So I’m a racist then.
No, no, I’m not saying you’re a racist. It’s in saying that, with that point of view. [If you’re happy to] have fewer rights than Nigerians, then you’re a racist. If you’d be absolutely happy for Nigerians to become Chinese, then you’re not a racist, you’re just mad.
This was many years ago, so please do clarify for me, [but] is it true that the BNP had a policy, or had some sort of statement on the website, saying no to mixed-race relationships?
Yes.
Is that an idea that you share?