No to Fraser Nelson, no to Steve Laws: towards a 'third way' on British national identity

An off-ramp from the very novel extremism of a venal and stupid political class

Irrespective of where they are on the political spectrum, no-one would seriously argue that the Britain of 2025 is a happy and contented place. The only exception would be someone like Fraser Nelson: the sort of person who is so far removed from the reality of everyday national life that they can continue regurgitating 2012-tier platitudes about how Britain is ‘the world’s most successful multi-faith democracy’, with an ‘integration miracle’ that serves as ‘a beacon of hope amid instability’. The country feels like it has gotten palpably worse even in the last three years. In real terms, it is poorer, it is more polarised, and is characterised by a cloying sense of over-crowdedness, particularly if you live in the Greater South East. People rarely go out anymore: clubbing, which dominated normative British youth culture until very recently, is dying out. More young adults than ever are living with their parents, with no realistic prospect of ever owning a house. These are highly eclectic markers of decline, but as we shall see, they have substantially shared causal origins.

The extent to which the country has ‘gone to the dogs’ has seeped into popular consciousness, including among the youth, has not yet been adequately recognised by the legacy media (with the notable exception of The Telegraph). But talk to any young, white British professional in their twenties or thirties, and the topic of emigration will inevitably rear its ugly head. Of course, the explanations given for why Britain is getting worse vary depending on who is speaking. Many will still blame ‘Brexit’, or ‘ten years of Tory austerity’. Even though many of the complaints people have are not really material, and instead relate to shifts in cultural patterns of behaviour, or to disgruntlement with the political process as a whole, there will always be those who try to retcon them into the reactionary analysis of ‘the bankers, the bonuses’. However, it’s important to emphasise that these explanations are rarely provided by the unhappy young people themselves. Brexit, of course, is (rightly or wrongly) not such a significant political watermark for people under the age of twenty-seven, who were not able to vote, and in most cases were not even politically sentient during the 2016 debate. ‘Tory austerity’ and ‘the Credit Crunch’ are more distant still.

Sadly, many complaints have taken on the form of a national self-loathing. The problems the country faces are viewed as indelible features of the British landscape. Britain is just irreducibly ‘worse’ than other countries; a nation of ‘nitties’ and knife crime, Deliveroo phone-snatchers and frothy, seven-pound pints. It might be worth noting that a cursory glance through Instagram and TikTok reels about British social life tend to focus on crime, anti-social behaviour, and the sheer expense of a night out.

Much of this country’s malaise is the product of self-inflicted harm which long predated 2016, including a destructively discretionary planning system that has created an artificial housing scarcity and blocked critical infrastructure projects. Thanks to the catastrophic failure of this country’s energy strategy since the Millennium, we have been left vulnerable to global shocks like the Ukraine War, and the resulting spike in inflation.

But much of it is not, and can definitely be said to be ‘right-coded’. The actual — usually unstated — cause of a high proportion of crime and much of the general deterioration in societal behaviour is immigration. When women complain of ‘creepy behaviour’ at nightclubs, commuters of conversations amplified through entire carriages by loudspeakers, and young professionals of being jumped a street away from their accommodation, we know who many of the perpetrators will most likely be: immigrants from ‘the Global South’, and their recent descendants.

Some of this malaise is immediately quantifiable, like crime, but other problems, like the endemic littering to be found in places as geographically dispersed as Walthamstow, Luton, and Blackburn, or the political corruption and sectarianism of South Asian rotten boroughs, are still noticeable trends. When one thinks of the worst towns in England — Aylesbury, Bradford, and Rochdale could be thrown into the aforementioned list — these are also some of the most dominated by immigrants. When influencers carry out vox pops of foreigners in Zone 4, all concede that their surroundings are a total dump. When people wonder why Britain has gotten so noticeably worse over the last four years, it is also the same reason for why Deliveroo drivers are running over infants on high streets, or why innocuous English provincial towns now have four or more Turkish barber shops: the Boriswave, which has resulted in 4% of our country’s population arriving in the last two years, compounding the many negative effects of the original wave of New Commonwealth immigration in the post-war period, and especially since the ’90s.

This is reflected, although not fully, in the 2021 Census, which showed 81.7% of the population were from white ethnic groups, a decline from 87% in 2011. Doubtless, most Pimlico Journal readers are familiar with these figures, but for those who are not, white British people now make up only 36.8% of the population of London. This is primarily due to the absolute decline in their share of the population as a consequence of white flight in the ’00s. Birmingham has seen a less remarked upon decline from 53.14% to 42.9%. It is not impossible, given current demographic trends, that Muslims will constitute the majority of the city’s population at some point in the latter half of the twenty-first century. Leicester’s white British population fell from 45.06% to 33.21%; Manchester’s from 59.3% to 48.7%. I could list innumerable further examples of dramatic demographic shifts in cities up and down the country. And of course, all of the towns that I have listed are mired by a profound spatial ethnic segregation. Majority-minority cities, which triggered some degree of debate after this was revealed to be true (at this time uniquely) of London in 2011, have now become the unremarked norm throughout Britain. There is no doubt that the recent onslaught (occurring shortly after the 2021 Census), in which gross immigration reached close to a million a year for four years running, will greatly accelerate this process.

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My purpose is not to spread despair: the British state is structurally weak, both in material terms and in its ability to shape public opinion. It is also diplomatically isolated, as demonstrated by the ideologically hostile Trump Administration’s green-lighting of Elon Musk’s information warfare against the Labour Government. People are becoming more aware of, and are profoundly disgusted by, the Pakistani rape gang epidemic, and their toleration by the public authorities. Britain is on the cusp of radical political change, whether this is spearheaded by the Tories, Reform, something else altogether, or some combination of all the above. But underneath all these changes, which are principally propelled by an opposition to the demographic change consequent from immigration, there is still an unwillingness to recognise the reality of our predicament, even on the part of many of the right-wing populist beneficiaries.

The first and foremost question Britain will face in the twenty-first century is not related to state capacity, land-use planning, or foreign policy, as important as all these things may be. It is whether — as demographer David Coleman predicted in 2013 — we will be a country in which only a minority of the population are white British by the latter decades of this century. By comparison, all other questions fade into insignificance.

There will be many people who are Reform supporters, or who are Jenrick-friendly Tory voters, some of whom may even be readers of this journal, who are nonetheless still unwilling to recognise the fundamental importance of the changes to the ethnic composition of this country over the last few decades. They will inevitably say — perhaps even trying to convince themselves — that the problems we are facing are not those of demographic change per se, but rather of ‘integration’ or ‘assimilation’, with the latter inhibited by mass migration itself, which places severe logistical pressures on British society. Some, especially those who are older, might also specifically focus on Islam as being particularly incompatible with wider British society.

There is some truth to all of this, but it is an insufficient explanation nevertheless. The reasons for why have already been elaborated upon at some length in Pimlico Journal and many other outlets. However, we might start off by noting that ‘assimilation’ is a floating signifier which has different implications when used by different people. It is actually entirely legitimate for people, whether Leftists or Islamists, to question what exactly immigrant diasporas are being asked to ‘assimilate’ into.

The attempt to totally divorce national group membership from criteria of ethnic belonging, and to treat it as instead being rooted solely in an identification with codifiable propositions, is as practically risible as it is historically illiterate. As has been explained in the article ‘Civic nationalism: practically impossible and theoretically absurd?’, an ‘assimilationist’ discourse centred on ‘British values’, nothing more and nothing less, is logically forced to deny that the vast majority of British people born prior to the ’70s or so are ‘British’. Moreover, we would also have to disclaim many contemporary people we intuitively know to be ‘British’: for instance, even though members of the British National Party do not subscribe to most of the purported ‘British values’, no-one can seriously contest their literal ‘Britishness’. This could also be extended to the rare cases of white British Islamists, such as ‘Jihadi Jack’, born to a Canadian father and a British mother. Conversely, Shamima Begum’s ‘Britishness’ is factually contestable, as is reflected by her legal denaturalisation.

Any attempt to abstract national identity into a set of ‘values’ inevitably entails the possibility that some significant figures within a country’s history are rendered retroactively un-national. Muslims are quite right to point out that if they are not ‘British’ (or ‘English’) because of their well-known dislike of Jews and homosexuals, then many ethnically British people, especially in previous generations, are not British either. Taken to its logical conclusion, civic nationalism appropriates a nominal identity and then completely separates it from any actually-existing national selfhood.

We might also point out that it is questionable whether ‘assimilation’ from a purely sociological perspective is actually the problem we face. It is worth noting that members of most African and Afro-Caribbean diasporas are, using the ordinary metrics, ‘assimilated’. They belong to ethnic groups which are usually Christian, typically Anglophone and Protestant, and sometimes Anglican also. They have high rates of outmarriage (typically a good marker of ‘assimilation’), and there is ostensibly nothing culturally alien about their way of life, so long as ‘culture’ is understood as comprising a series of lifestyle preferences and corresponding social attitudes. And yet, no-one who is being honest can contest the fact that many individuals within the large black populations in major urban areas have caused this country serious problems in the past, and seem likely to do so for the foreseeable future. Even aside from the economic insanity of subsidising people who are (on average) non-contributors to live on some of the most valuable real estate in the world, Africans and Afro-Caribbeans are significantly overrepresented in homicide, gun violence, knife crime, and muggings. This is a major national crisis in its own right — and yet, because the violence does not have a religious or any ostensibly political salience, it is not treated as evidence of a failure of the African and Afro-Caribbean population to ‘integrate’.

Similarly, it is worth also pointing that many Muslims, often accused (especially by older right-wingers and women) of having radically alien lifestyle preferences to the white British population, in many respects do converge with British national life, though mostly in the worst aspects of it. While we shouldn’t discount the role of Islam entirely, it is simply a fact that many purported Muslims drink, take drugs, dress in Western clothing, and listen to ‘Western’ music. Some of the most aggressive race-baiters on X are non-hijabi, Muslim-identifying women, like Bushra Shaikh. We can also look at some of the ethnic gangs which have facilitated political corruption in the North of England: once again, these people are often not visibly pious Muslims.

‘Assimilation’ as a solution to the problem is therefore, much like civic nationalism, ‘practically impossible and theoretically absurd’. It rests on outdated diagnostics of the problem facing us. Any system of ‘robust integration’ under a ‘muscular liberalism’ would probably involve Michaela School writ large. This is highly objectionable for its own reasons, but even if it promoted ‘assimilation’ per se, it would most likely not succeed in addressing the issue of politically problematic and/or high crime ethnic diasporas.

However, it is critical to note at this stage that none of this discounts the fact that ‘assimilation’ is indeed possible on an individual level. There are undeniably a certain number of individuals who can be pointed out as examples of successful assimilation and who, regardless of their ethnic origins, intuitively feel British and demonstrably identify with their family’s chosen country of residence. I am sure that most readers know at least someone in this category. But in British public life, consider someone like Suella Braverman, who did more than almost any other Conservative Cabinet Minister to stand up against mass migration, including from members of her own ethnic group.

But even this ‘assimilation’, which is intangible and intuitive, rests on some preconceived archetype of what ‘Britishness’ is. It seems indisputable that ‘Britishness’ is exemplified by ethnically British people. What many civic nationalists fail to understand is that the qualities which are exhibited by genuinely ‘assimilated’ ethnic minorities are non-codifiable, and relate to cultural mores as much as they do to political preferences. In order to adopt these cultural mores, it is virtually required to be around many people who are ethnically British, with organic imitation as the predominant element of ‘assimilation’ (rather than explicit instruction). In the real world, then, ‘assimilation’ is dependent upon there being a native supermajority. To talk about ‘assimilation’ in the context of extreme mass migration from radically different ethnic groups is obviously ridiculous.

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If the civic nationalist discourse of the mainline British Right fails to address the emergent reality of demographic balkanisation, then what can be offered as an alternative? As explained above, it will be impossible for the Right to completely forestall open discussions of immigration, ethnicity, and their connection to British nationality for much longer. And yet currently, the only available means of discussing these topics appear radically unpalatable to right-wing parties with any serious pretensions of being politically mainstream. On the one hand, we face the prospect of literally indefinite immigration, which will logically result — given that white British people have sub-replacement fertility rates, and what population growth there is has entirely been driven by immigration — in white British people becoming a minority in this country and, eventually, being totally ethnically substituted. On the other hand, we have the likes of Steve Laws calling for the repatriation of every single person who is not ethnically British (or, at the very least, those who are not ethnically European, using a narrow definition of ‘European’).

It is worth remembering that the vast majority of the British population wants neither of these two things. Right-leaning, white British voters do not want to become a minority in their ancestral homeland; nor, in fact, do most left-leaning, white British voters. But at the same time, very few white British people would support indiscriminately denaturalising and repatriating literally all of those with any substantial post-1948 immigrant heritage. Quite apart from anything else, attempting to hitch popular (but as yet somewhat inchoate) sentiments about immigration to such a radical position is simply counter-productive. This doesn’t mitigate the necessity of securing a permanent white British supermajority, for the reasons that I hope have been outlined above; nor does it change the need for us to recognise that ethnically British people, at least in some sense, have a special role within the British state (even if this is not necessarily reflected in any actual differences in legal status). But even aside from questions of right and wrong, calling for the deportation of (for instance) highly-Anglicised, third-generation Ugandan Asian professionals who live and socialise with white British people isn’t at all conducive to any of these ends.

I turn to the example of Israel as a country which is founded on ‘ethnonationalist’ principles, but which still largely adheres to a formally non-discriminatory legal and political framework. While Israel is conventionally presented as an ‘ideal type’ apartheid state by its critics, Left and Right, the truth is that it is far from being a de jure ethnocracy. Ignoring the sui generis heterogeneous nature of its ethnic core Jewish population, Israel has a number of minority populations which are, to varying degrees, accommodated to the reality of Jewish statehood. In fact, the State of Israel is only 73.6% Jewish, including the half-million Jews living in the West Bank (but excluding the Palestinian population in the Occupied Territories, including Gaza). The remainder of the population falls into two broad categories: ‘Arab’ (21.1%) and ‘Other’ (5.7%). The ‘Arab’ population is itself heterogeneous, comprised of a number of ethnic and religious groups which are cladistically grouped together by the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics. It includes Palestinian Muslims, Palestinian Christians, Circassians, Assyrians, Arameans, Armenians, Maronites, Alawis, and Druze.

While Palestinian Muslim citizens of Israel — often referred to as ‘48ers’, as they were part of the native Arab population that was not expelled by Zionist militias during the Nakba — have a generally antagonistic relationship with the Israeli state, with higher levels of welfare consumption, unemployment, crime, and political extremism, the same is not necessarily true of all other minority groups. Druze and Circassians fostered positive relationships with the early Jewish state. Like Jewish Israelis, they are subject to conscription into the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Bedouins, who are concentrated in the Negev and are sociologically distinct from the sedentary Palestinian Arab population, also have a tradition of serving in the IDF. Palestinian Christians, while subject to a greater or lesser degree of sectarian discrimination from Jewish zealots, generally express a preference in surveys for citizenship in Israel over citizenship of any hypothetical Palestinian entity, partly reflecting the fact that in Hamas-controlled areas, and indeed in Fatah-controlled areas also, harassment from the Muslim public authorities is common. In short, Israel has adopted a flexible approach to its non-core population, which has allowed it to maintain the international appearance of a civically inclusive state, something that is also internally of importance to a certain proportion of Israeli Jews, while operating on the principles of an ad hoc legal exceptionalism.

Some communities are fully integrated into the institutional framework of Israeli society; others are strategically excluded. Palestinians in East Jerusalem, annexed by Israel following the Six Day War of 1967, have various barriers to citizenship imposed upon them. Palestinian citizens of Israel involved in terrorism have been unilaterally expelled from the state into areas beyond its control. Jews in the West Bank function as resident citizens of the State of Israel, but the same political and civil rights are not extended to Arabs in occupied areas. Israel uses immigration to boost its core population while preventing any reinforcement of ethnic rivals: the ‘right of return’ is extended to anyone falling under the (very broadly defined) category of ‘Jewish’, yet the Palestinians who fled during the First Arab-Israeli War are barred.

In practice, Israel has sought to avoid adding any additional Palestinians to its post-1948 body politic, despite not systematically excluding the extant Palestinian population. It has sought to accommodate sympathetic ethnic minorities whenever possible. Israel, being an ethnically-defined state born into an international community which was increasingly normatively hostile to formal ‘ethnonationalism’, has had to balance its domestic prerogative of demographic integrity with outward-facing respectability. Israel is a conditionally tolerant society: minorities are permitted insofar as they do not threaten the hegemony of the core population and are (ideally) politically loyal. It is therefore in some sense a hybrid ethnocentric nationalist state, in which the Jewish population has a constellation of orbiting groups which are, to varying degrees, integrated into the national mainstream.

Of course, Israel cannot serve as a perfect model for Britain. It was a settler state founded on the displacement of a native population by a group that were predominantly outsiders; by contrast, Britain is presented with various state-sponsored diasporas at risk of displacing an indigenous ethnic group. Israel faces ethnic minority groups which are far more violently hostile to the state than anything the British state has to deal with, and this is reflected in state policy. But with these important caveats in mind, I would sum up the ‘lessons’ from Israel in three main points.

Firstly, Britain need not be literally ethnically homogeneous to retain its fundamental character as a white, Western, and culturally Christian country, populated principally by a number of native, ‘Anglo-Celtic’, ethnic groups, who we can define as being ‘ethnically British’.

Secondly, there are qualitative differences between different minority populations, and also between individual members of these populations. Some can be conditionally accommodated; others cannot. Any attempt to forge a sensible state policy towards Britain’s ethnic minorities must reflect this fact.

Thirdly, we do not need literal apartheid (or, for the avoidance of doubt, anything at all like it) to achieve the aims outlined above. They can instead be achieved through policies which recognise the centrality of the native, ‘Anglo-Celtic’, population to the British state, thus being politically — if not legally — acceptable in the current electoral climate.

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Using these three lessons from Israel, what would a ‘British Zionism’ look like in practice? Firstly, there would be an explicit state recognition of what ‘Britishness’ is. It wouldn’t be defined as an amorphous value set, or a series of cultural pastiches about liking cricket and being excessively polite. It would, first and foremost, be defined as an ethnic group — or, more precisely, as a set of closely related ethnic groups — itself defined by a common chain of descent to the original Brythonic and Goidelic population and, in the English (and to a lesser extent Scottish) case, Anglo-Saxon settlers. While certain other groups (Vikings, Normans, Huguenots, etc.) have contributed to the genetic makeup of these isles, unlike these groups they have not decisively changed it.

The nonsensical category of ‘white British’, which presupposes a coincidental relationship between the two descriptors, would be replaced with ‘native British’, with English, Welsh, Scottish, and Ulster Protestant being the subcategories people could identify with. ‘Irish’ would be given a special status. All other ethnic categories would have the suffix of ‘residentially British’ (or some other adjective of your choosing). This would mirror the Russian distinction between Russkiye (ethnic Russians) and Rossiyane (citizens of the Russian Federation). Britain could also pass an Act of Parliament analogous to Israel’s ‘Nation-State’ law. This would give a totemic recognition to the idea that the primary purpose of the state is the collective actualisation of the will of the native British people.

Another part of the ‘British Zionist’ reset in nationality could make use of the precedent established by the denaturalisation of Shamima Begum. This determined that those hypothetically eligible for nationality in another country can be stripped of citizenship and rendered de facto stateless, on the legal pretence that their citizenship reverted to that of their ancestral country. This could be employed to denaturalise certain people who have been convicted of serious crimes or who have a politically hostile orientation towards British nationhood. The status of Indefinite Leave to Remain would also be abolished, and a policy of refusing to renew most visas for the nationals of certain countries would be used to shift the country’s demographic composition in the favour of native British people in the first instance, and away from particularly politically hostile and/or fiscally damaging immigrant groups in the second instance.

Any policy towards future immigration to the United Kingdom would be underpinned by an understanding of the differences between immigrant populations, and the relationship of group members to the British state based on past experience. Certain countries whose citizens are deemed to be particularly hostile to British nationhood would have a de facto immigration moratorium enacted against them. For instance, a ‘Rape Gang’ total ban on the issuance of new visas could be imposed on Pakistan. Meanwhile, any further naturalisations of those from most non-Western countries would be completely paused for a period, and restricted only to special cases in the future.

It should go without saying that this would be paired with policies that are already mainstream among right-wing Tories and supporters of Reform UK. Britain would leave the ECHR and abrogate the 1951 Refugee Convention, suspending the right to asylum in the UK along with all asylum applications. Commonwealth voting rights would be abolished. All illegal immigrants would be deported, as would criminal legal immigrants, regardless of their current visa status. Something akin to the Rwanda Scheme, in order to better manage the flow of immigrants, would be revived, with Colombia-style sanctions imposed upon foreign countries that refuse to cooperate with us.

Finally, a ‘right of return’ would be introduced. This would extend to all peoples belonging to the global British diaspora, permitting both right of immigration and speedy naturalisation. A policy of ‘Anglo Aliyah’ would encourage a natural flow of immigrants to this country, buttressing the core ethnic group. Of all the policies outlined, this is actually the least radical (in fact, even less radical than leaving the ECHR). Besides Israel, it is already part of the citizenship laws of Italy and Germany (the latter of which absorbed millions of ethnic Germans from the former USSR and the rest of Eastern Europe in the ’90s). Japan, another democracy friendly to the United States, has also experimented in encouraging the return of its own ethnic diaspora in Latin America. Britain’s present economic malaise would reduce interest from many countries, but it could still reasonably expect to attract white British immigrants from South Africa (and, if things continue the way they are going, perhaps Canada also), who currently can find it difficult to obtain permanent residency here.

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Many people, including no doubt many regular Pimlico Journal readers, will regard some or all of the above policies as ‘extreme’. But in fact, rightly or wrongly, most of the proposals discussed are actually already employed by states which the mainstream British Right regard as our democratic allies, or at least as strategic partners. It is a simple fact that the large majority of nation-states view the maintenance of a demographic core as a prerogative of effective statecraft. It is also a simple fact that the views of a broad spectrum of British politicians, from Labour to the Tories and yes, to some extent even Reform, are objectively extreme relative to the global norm on immigration, ethnicity, and nationality.

The policies discussed above, while lacking in legal precedent, are nonetheless also entirely normative within our own historical political culture. The fact that Britain has not formally defined the relationship between ethnic origin and citizenship is reflective of a history mostly defined by homogeneity, not by diversity. In the current circumstances, this ‘fuzzy’ attitude — which most foreigners, including those resident in Britain, find very confusing anyway — can no longer hold, as the argument about Rishi Sunak between Konstantin Kisin and Fraser Nelson demonstrates.

But even putting aside these issues, my real question to those who regurgitate platitudes and inanities about ‘integration’ and ‘assimilation’ is the following: do you really think that the current trajectory can realistically continue? Can Britain become a ‘majority-minority’ society, and ultimately one in which ethnically British people constitute only a small fraction of the population? The basic expectation is that for the foreseeable future, a rapidly diminishing cohort of young, predominantly white, professionals will be forced to carry the economic burden of fiscally supporting the rest of the country, while experiencing declining living standards and the negative externalities of crime and anti-social behaviour, both principally (though obviously not entirely) caused by mass migration. This is economically, politically, and morally impossible.

Horrific, large-scale interethnic violence has already occurred in this country, with nearly zero recognition from the state, nor any substantive restitution for the victims. Irrespective of whether this emotionally affects you, it is clear that a large part of the white British population despises multiculturalism and regards state institutions as illegitimate. This isn’t because of ‘disinformation’. People weren’t rioting in Rotherham, a relatively small town in which over a thousand girls were raped, because of ‘fake news’ on X. Bear in mind that a third of those polled by YouGov thought the violence of the Southport Riots was ‘understandable’. No ethnic group has accepted minority status in its native homeland without some kind of resistance. Increased polarisation and the tendency towards political violence is a consequence of anthropologically universal sociopolitical dynamics, not the alleged pathology of 'racism'.

The above policies that we have adapted from state policy in Israel are not insurrectionary. Nor are they, as some far-right commentators might claim, merely a safety valve for a fundamentally doomed system. No: they could serve as an off-ramp for a country which has been set on an extraordinarily dangerous course by a venal and stupid political class. These policies would provide restitution for the wrongs which have been committed, and protection for the core population. But they would also recognise that not all of those descended from post-1948 immigrants are morally complicit in the crimes against, or the general deterioration of, the country. In some sense, this policy represents a genuine ‘Third Way’ between the current, wholly untenable state of affairs in Western countries and a radical ethnonationalism. Those who abhor the latter, or reject some of even the more moderate policies outlined above, should consider what other alternatives they will have should nothing be done.

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Image credits: Adam Cuerden, Public domain

This article was written by Rhodes Napier, a Pimlico Journal and J’accuse contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to pimlicojournal@substack.com.

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