https://newsletter.martingeddes.com/p/light-to-dark-the-changing-look-of

Light to dark — the changing look of London

Martin Geddes

Jun 01, 2024
Observations on the ethnic shift of the capital city (and the taboo of a genocide)

One of the very difficult things I have been coming to terms with is how innocent people of all races, birthplaces, languages, religions, and professions are pawns in power games. Wars can be overt and fought using more traditional bombs and bullets, or covert and conducted via subversive ideology.

Many who have done no wrong in seeking a better life can end up being tools of cultural destruction and ethnic cleansing. It is paradoxical, in that there is a brotherhood of all men and women that we recognise, yet at the same time I feel I have little in common with many fellow inhabitants.

I have taken it for granted that this is how things are and will continue. Was I wrong?

Who are “we” — what is this place, and whose is it? While the Normans back in 1066 made a pact to respect the customs of the locals, it is hard to pin a date on when London was last identifiably English in its general sense. There has been a cosmopolitan capital of Empire and commerce, surrounded by a more parochial culture of farmers and craftspeople, for many centuries.

What does it mean to belong to this piece of terrain? A belief in the rule of law and individual liberty? To be part of the history of a people that goes back for thousands of years? A blood tie to those who came before us or the risking of bloodshed to fight for the country?Who am I, here, now?

Why it is a tragedy to despoil indigenous people elsewhere but not here? Why are these questions taboo? What happens if that taboo is forcibly confronted?

London has endless waves of immigration: Low Countries (15th century), Huguenots (C17th), Italians (C19th), Jews (C19th), Chinese (C19th), Greeks (WW2), Poles (WW2), Windrush generation (1940s/50s/60s), East African Asians (1970s), Baltic states (2000s), and LatAm (2000s). None of these changes are conceptually new, yet there is a qualitative difference: the disappearance of the white British, and the attack on the Anglosphere (UK/USA/Australia/NZ/Canada) via Covid and attempted genocide.

Growing up beside Heathrow Airport it was taken as normal to have an internationalist neighbourhood, and my neighbours were Pakistani, French, Syrian, and Irish. My primary school was still very white British, however, with only one non-white person from Fiji. London has been “diverse” all my life… yet something is shifting; the default is no longer what it was.

On the train from Stonebridge Park to Euston I counted 45 heads, and only five were white. As a teenager I had the experience of being the only white person on a crowded bus in Barbados (as my father worked for British Airways and we got free staff travel). It starts to get jarring as that becomes the experience at home. Who am I, here, now?