TRIGGERnometry - June 10, 2025


Britain Has Never Been a ＂Nation of Immigrants＂. But It Will Be Soon. - Konstantin Kisin

Hosted by
Francis Foster Konstantin Kisin
Guests
Konstantin Kisin
Mentioned
Beautiful Noise Michael Markavich Tony Blair Axel Ruder-Kabana Matt Goodwin David Aronovich Norman Conquest Sweet Caroline Eisenberg King Barbara Roche Joseph Conrad Mark Savotka Usman Khan Ian Dale Manchester Nottingham Brexit Slough
WW2： Why We Fought & How We Won - Historian James Holland Who's Really In Charge？ - Roseanne Barr

Episode Stats


Length

12 minutes

Words per minute

163.41

Word count

2,025

Sentence count

109

Harmful content

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

When I once challenged the notion that Britain was a nation of immigrants on Ian Dale's LBC show, my host was shocked and asked me to clarify. And I did. Media and commentators in our public space regularly claim that immigrants, built Britain. But let s set the politics aside for a moment and look at the facts.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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00:00:13.340 Broadway's smash hit, the Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise, is coming to Toronto.
00:00:21.620 The true story of a kid from Brooklyn destined for something more, featuring all the songs you love, including America, Forever in Blue Jeans, and Sweet Caroline.
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00:00:50.060 I still remember my confusion nearly 25 years ago when I read an article on the BBC in which Barbara Roche, Tony Blair's immigration minister, called Britain a country of migrants.
00:01:01.820 I was in my last year of school and not remotely political.
00:01:04.560 I found the quote shocking not because of its political implications, but simply because I had, up to that point, done my best to educate myself on the history of this country.
00:01:14.720 Nowhere in my reading had I found any justification for the claim that Britain's history was defined or even significantly shaped by immigration.
00:01:22.160 Before we look at the facts, it is worth observing that Roche's claim is now widely regarded as self-evident.
00:01:28.500 When I once challenged the notion that Britain was a nation of immigrants on Ian Dale's LBC show, Ian was shocked and asked me to clarify.
00:01:36.200 Journalists and commentators in our public space regularly claim that immigrants, quote, built Britain.
00:01:41.220 I could give example after example, but let's be honest, for all intents and purposes in the public space, this matter has been effectively settled, until last week at least.
00:01:51.500 A recent report from the University of Buckingham produced by Matthew Goodwin predicts that people born abroad and their descendants will constitute the majority of the British population by 2079.
00:02:01.800 This statistic triggered into action commentators like David Aronovich, who responded by claiming that the foreign born and their descendants covers just about everyone in the country.
00:02:12.400 On question time last Thursday, Mark Savotka, the former head of one of Britain's major unions, claimed that Britain is the great country that it is because of centuries of immigration that brought us cultural enrichment, supporting our public services and some of our greatest things, before adding that we should be proud of it to inevitable applause.
00:02:31.800 Let's set the politics aside for a moment and look at the facts.
00:02:35.720 The Norman Conquest following the Battle of Hastings in 1066 brought around 5,000 to 10,000 people from what is now France.
00:02:43.380 England's foreign born population at that time was in the low single digits, possibly as low as 1%.
00:02:48.560 This remained unchanged for centuries, with a 1440 survey recording just 14,500 foreign born residents in England, which was about 1%.
00:02:57.100 From 1330 to 1550, total immigration is estimated at 65,000 people.
00:03:03.580 During the early modern period, about 1,000 people a year came to England over the course of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.
00:03:11.040 The following 100 years saw a significant increase, primarily through a large wave of Irish people fleeing the Great Famine in the 1840s.
00:03:19.180 In total, Britain's foreign born population increased by between 1.5 and 2 million people in the 19th century.
00:03:26.300 If that sounds like a lot, remember that this occurred over 100 years, i.e. an annual increase of between 15,000 and 20,000 people.
00:03:35.300 By 1901, Britain's foreign population had risen from 0.5% to a whopping 1.5%.
00:03:41.780 The first half of the 20th century saw little change to this, with between 10,000 and 14,000 arrivals annually.
00:03:49.060 This included immigration related to both world wars and from the Commonwealth.
00:03:53.260 By 1951, the foreign born population of the UK was 4.5%.
00:03:58.140 Despite significant post-war immigration, between 1951 and 2001, average net migration into Britain is estimated at just 7,800 people a year.
00:04:09.560 Taking the 1990s as a separate decade, it was much higher, but still just 40,000 annually.
00:04:15.280 As late as 1996, the year I moved to Britain, net immigration was running at 55,000 people a year.
00:04:23.040 By this point, the foreign born population of the UK had risen, but only to 7%.
00:04:27.760 To summarize this barrage of figures, immigrants have played a small but not insignificant role throughout British history,
00:04:34.000 making up a few percent of the population.
00:04:36.560 They did not build Britain. 0.82
00:04:38.080 Britain was at its peak as a nation during the 19th and early 20th century, losing its dominance in terms of territory, population, wealth, and global influence in the wake of World War II.
00:04:48.640 Of course, individual immigrants and their children made significant contributions during this period,
00:04:53.760 including the great engineer Eisenberg King and Brunel, Michael Marx, the co-founder of Marx and Spencers, and the author Joseph Conrad.
00:05:00.840 But we must not lose sight of the fact that Britain's glory days were built by its native population.
00:05:06.080 The reason we're having this nonsensical debate, of course, is that the claim that Britain is a nation of immigrants serves two different purposes.
00:05:14.440 First, in a world of global infotainment, the cultures of different countries, especially in the English-speaking world, are converging.
00:05:21.680 This is why British TV channels and column inches are filled with commentary about American politics,
00:05:27.060 and why American commentators tweet themselves into a rage over events here in Britain. 0.96
00:05:32.800 The phrase, a nation of immigrants, is a foolish and misguided import from our American cousins, 0.94
00:05:38.020 in whose context it is actually relevant and true. 0.99
00:05:41.160 The uneducated, uninformed, and often dishonest elements of British progressivism
00:05:45.400 use this phrase for the same reason BLM protesters in London chanted,
00:05:49.760 hands up, don't shoot, at British police officers who do not carry guns.
00:05:54.140 It's unthinking mimicry.
00:05:55.460 But the second reason we keep being told that Britain is a nation of immigrants
00:05:58.960 is to conceal the fact that while this has never been true, it will be true soon.
00:06:03.880 It is not remotely an exaggeration to say that a time traveler from the 1990s
00:06:08.380 would not recognize the country we live in today.
00:06:11.520 Even London, which has always had a significant foreign-born population,
00:06:15.540 21.7% in 1991,
00:06:18.420 was still an obviously and unquestionably English city when I first came to this country.
00:06:22.820 Today, over 40% of Londoners are foreign-born,
00:06:26.520 and people who identify as white British make up less than 37% of the population.
00:06:31.960 In other words, a country once made up of people whose ancestors lived here for centuries
00:06:35.980 is becoming a nation of immigrants.
00:06:38.760 It's immediately assumed that any concern about this reality is based on bigotry, prejudice, and xenophobia.
00:06:44.200 This is interesting to me because in 1996, when I first came here,
00:06:48.580 just 3% of the British people thought that immigration was a major concern.
00:06:53.060 Why did this change?
00:06:54.560 The election of Tony Blair the following year.
00:06:57.340 His government flung open the doors with net migration during Labour's 13 years in power,
00:07:02.160 reaching 200,000 annually.
00:07:04.380 From 2010 onwards, the British people's concern about this issue shot up sharply,
00:07:08.760 and they repeatedly voted for parties that promised to control immigration.
00:07:12.280 In the year before the Brexit referendum, between June 2015 and June 2016,
00:07:18.320 immigration was consistently named the most salient issue facing the country,
00:07:23.120 peaking at 56% in September 2015.
00:07:26.720 Since the referendum, the British people have voted for politicians
00:07:29.980 who promised to reduce immigration at every single opportunity,
00:07:33.680 including 2017, 2019, and 2024,
00:07:37.560 when reform took millions of votes away from Labour and the Tories over this issue.
00:07:41.600 Despite this, net immigration from 2010 to 2024 under the Conservatives
00:07:46.600 totaled 5.2 million people, or 371,000 a year.
00:07:52.120 In 2023 alone, it approached 1 million.
00:07:55.720 The result?
00:07:56.820 The foreign-born population of this country is quadrupled as a percentage in just 75 years,
00:08:01.940 from 4% in 1951 to approximately 17% in 2025.
00:08:07.520 White British people are already a minority in Britain's three biggest cities.
00:08:12.520 London, 36.8%, Birmingham, 42.9%, and Manchester, 48.7%,
00:08:19.120 as well as in Leicester, 33.2%, Luton, 31.8%, and Slough, 34.5%.
00:08:25.740 By the next census, Bradford, Coventry, Wolverhampton, and Nottingham will join them.
00:08:30.560 You may not think this matters.
00:08:31.900 You may not care.
00:08:32.880 You may, in fact, think this is great.
00:08:34.920 But these are the facts, and we should state them plainly.
00:08:37.840 Britain has never been a nation of immigrants, 0.96
00:08:40.340 but it will have been made one in the next few decades
00:08:42.740 by a series of Labour and Conservative governments,
00:08:45.940 despite the clearly and repeatedly expressed democratic wishes of the British people,
00:08:50.880 who've been thoroughly and comprehensively ignored.
00:08:53.420 Very important, before sharing this video with your friends and family,
00:08:57.160 please be aware that the government's Prevent Anti-Radicalization Program
00:09:00.920 has recently declared that concern about mass immigration is terrorist ideology.
00:09:06.640 A Prevent training course hosted on the government's website
00:09:09.200 lists cultural nationalism as something that could cause you to be referred for deradicalization.
00:09:15.280 Prevent, you'll remember, is the program to which the Southport murderer,
00:09:18.520 Axel Ryder-Kubana, was repeatedly referred from as young as 13.
00:09:22.080 He went on to stab a number of children and adults, three of whom died.
00:09:26.440 Usman Khan, the terrorist who committed the London Bridge attack in 2019,
00:09:30.380 was under Prevent monitoring when he carried out his attack
00:09:33.040 in the middle of a prisoner rehabilitation event for which he traveled to London.
00:09:37.860 Prevent officers tasked with monitoring him had,
00:09:40.140 quote, no specific training in dealing with terrorists.
00:09:44.300 According to the Prevent training guidance,
00:09:46.500 if you believe that Western culture is under threat from mass migration
00:09:49.720 and a lack of integration by certain ethnic and cultural groups,
00:09:53.140 you will be referred to the very program which failed to deal with them.
00:09:56.940 This is Britain, so think before you think.
00:10:00.040 If you enjoy these videos, remember that they're available on my substack
00:10:03.960 days, weeks, and sometimes months ahead of time.
00:10:07.200 Head on over to ConstantinKishin.com and subscribe today.
00:10:10.980 The world is changing fast, and it's not enough to just know what the news is.
00:10:15.460 You have to know how it's being reported,
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00:10:41.420 Their blind spot feed is my favorite feature.
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00:10:47.260 so you can actually spot media bias as it's happening and stay ahead of the narrative.
00:10:52.040 They surface around 20 of these a day, and some of them are pretty eye-opening.
00:10:56.180 This story on the UK developing a predictive tool to determine
00:10:59.660 if someone will become a killer, barely showed up in left-leaning outlets.
00:11:03.460 It's a major story when you think about how far governments might go with AI and surveillance.
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00:11:14.460 currently has no coverage in right-leaning media at all.
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