To: letters@guardian.co.uk
Re: Race and immigration - from the perspective of a "Native Briton"
Date: Mon 8 September 2003

Dear Sir/Madam,

Gary Younge hits the race-and-immigration nail squarely on the head with his comments and quotes ("Unless you're a Native American, we're all immigrants in this country") in today's Guardian ("The wrong way round", 8 September 2003). Only the nail he so confidently hammers home is for the kind of multiracial, immigrant society that I and, I am pretty sure, most other "Native Britons", do not want - any more than Native Americans wanted what happened to their country.

Unlike America, Britain is NOT (at least, not YET) a country of immigrants, but has a predominantly native (indigenous European and thus, fair-skinned) population. British history, like that of the European continent, of which, geographically, racially and culturally, it is an intrinsic part, is the history of mixed, but nevertheless closely related European peoples, which goes back thousands of years (into the mists of prehistory and the stone age), while the history of Black and Asian Britons goes back no more than a few decades.

I'm sorry if this makes me a "racist" in your eyes, but I identify - for better and for worse - to a large extent with my own family and ancestors, who are all ethnic Europeans. The Nazis, to my shame, were also Europeans, but so too were the Greeks, the Romans and all the nations that created western civilisation (with a leg-up from the Arabs) in the course of the past 800 years or so.

I can understand why Gary Younge, and others of non-European descent, want Britain to follow America's example and become a "Nation of Immigrants", but would ask him, and those who share his views, to try and understand why an awful lot of "Native Britons", like myself, are not quite so keen on the idea, and that this does not automatically make us "racists", any more than one would call Native Americans racist for being deeply unhappy about what happened to their country.

We were shocked to the core by what the Nazis did and stood for (an insane and criminal misuse of the concept of race) and overreacted by insisting that race should be of no importance at all.

But the fact is that race is important. It is something most people, to a greater or lesser extent,  identify with. Not surprisingly, considering that it tells us who our ancestors were, where they came from and what our history is.

Britain's native population has been very tolerant of the huge numbers of immigrants which have come into the country over the past 50 years. The part of London where I was born and grew up in the 1950s has been completely transformed by immigrants and their foreign culture, to the extent that it is no longer recognisable as my home - a painful experience for me and most other members of the native population, who have effectively been displaced, choosing to move away rather than endure the increasing foreignness. Not that the immigrants are not nice people. In my experience they are every bit as nice as native Britons, but they are still foreign.

I'm being xenophobic. But tell me, who likes to have foreignness thrust into their familiar world?  Certainly no one I know of. Xenophobia is just one side of a coin, on the other side of which is the "love of things familiar". Visiting foreign lands and cultures is a wonderful and enriching experience, but you don't want them to follow you home. England is a land of pubs and churches, not of mosques and Hindu temples - which is the way I want it to remain!

Most people - manifestly including immigrants - prefer to live among their own kind, in their own culture. It's human nature, not racism.

Unlike Gary Younge, I want Britain to remain a country in which its native (fair-skinned) population remains numerically and culturally dominant, just as I also want black Africans to remain numerically and culturally dominant in sub-Saharan Africa, the Chinese in China, the Japanese in Japan etc. etc. Why? Because racial groups have histories associated with particular geographical locations which are of deep human significance, but are being ignored or deliberately trammelled on by Homo economicus with his gross and unholy materialism and his well-meaning but misconceived and superficial ideology of multiracial/multicultural society.

Race matters. Not in the way that racists think, but it does matter, deeply, and it does not help race-relations by denying it and pretending that it doesn't.

Britain can - will have to - cope with the immigrants already here (legally), but if their numbers keep on increasing, as they are at the moment, and people like Gary Younge continue to get their way in pushing us towards becoming an ever more multiracial and multicultural "Nation of Immigrants", like America (which we are not!), intimidating into silence those who object with calls of "racist!", eventually - when the intimidation ceases to work - there will be a backlash of social and racial conflict.

And besides, our country and continent are overcrowded enough already. The last thing we need is more immigrants.

Rather than fearing population decline, we should welcome it, in the interests of sustainability.