Language is a funny thing. This week, a new report appeared to warn that the white British population could be a minority in the UK within 40 years. And it has brought out the worst in some of us.
An analysis of migration, birth and death rates by the University of Buckingham suggests the white British population is set to fall from its current 73 per cent, to 57 per cent by 2050, before becoming a minority by 2063.
One newspaper’s report explained, rather curiously, that white British is “defined as people who do not have an immigrant parent”. Bad luck, then, all you non-white kids of an Irish, French or German parent. Unlucky, too, King Charles, Winston Churchill and Boris Johnson. By this metric, it seems that you no longer qualify as white British.
Beyond this rank stupidity, there is of course something else going on here. This is less dog whistle than plain old whistle. Dodgy extrapolations posing as predictions.
Few people are spared. We’re informed, presumably with some regret, that there is going to be a rise in the number of foreign-born people and of second-generation immigrants, all of whom could well be British. Further on, Matthew Goodwin, the author of the report, shifts the goalposts one more time, asserting that by “the end of the current century, most of the people on these islands will not be able to trace their roots in this country back more than one or two generations”.
And then, of course, we have the equating of “foreign-born and Muslim populations”, implying, presumably, that if you’re Muslim, you just don’t cut it wherever you happen to have been born.
If the problem that this country simply isn’t white enough, someone may as well just come out and say it. Because it’s clear the issue here isn’t Britishness.
There is a serious debate to be had not only about immigration, but also about integration. Happily, the country that most of us inhabit is somewhere where both ethnic and religious integration is a daily reality for millions of families, including my own.
While I think we in the UK do rather better at this than many of our Western peers, there is still more that can and should be done. There is also a conversation worth having about what a manageable level of immigration might be, and whether immigration policy is fit for purpose.
This, however, is not the way to have those conversations. Indeed, potentially inciting distrust and dislike between different communities is not how anyone sensible would go about, in the words of the report itself, “informing, rather than polarising”.
That is the only conclusion that I can draw from their sloppiness. If, after all, their aim really was to “inform, rather than polarise”, they might spend more time explaining that forecasts are not predictions. They might explain that there is good evidence that the total fertility rate among immigrants tends to fall over time. That the population projections Goodwin has used – calculations based on assumptions about fertility, mortality and migration – are already massively outdated, and become even less reliable the further forward one projects.
But no, there is no such nuance to be found. Merely certainty that the findings are certain to spark a “considerable degree of anxiety, concern and political opposition” from those who oppose immigration.
And, let’s think about this in a global context for a moment. The world is changing, its balance of power is shifting steadily eastwards. Demographically, and I’m sorry about this, it is becoming less, not more, white.
Relatively small countries like the UK will have to work ever harder to compete and to attract talent in this new world order. Do we really think that bemoaning the insidious impact of non-white foreigners who cannot trace their ancestry back several generations is going to help us in this task?
But what I do know is that I’m not only not white, but apparently not British, either.
Anand Menon is director of UK in a Changing Europe and professor of European politics and foreign affairs at King’s College London
