A Video that’s a Metaphor for the Decline of the UK and the West, By Andrea Widburg
Very short video has emerged of an older white woman in England trying to get off a bus, only to be utterly defeated by a surge of black people — happy, not aggressive — streaming onto the bus. We don't know where in England the video was taken, nor the circumstances (perhaps it was after a football match or concert), but it's a perfect metaphor of how the West has changed with unlimited, unassimilated immigration.
Two data points are necessary to understand the video's metaphoric weight. First, while the UK is still a majority-white country, that majority is dropping steadily. At the beginning of the 1950s, the UK was almost 100% British. When the 1960s began, 95.1% of the UK population identified as White British. When the 1970s began, the white population had dropped to 97.5%. By the beginning of the 1980s, it was at 95%.
At the start of the 1990s, and this is a pivotal date because it was before Tony Blair took power, the white population in the UK was still a relatively high 94.5%. Everything started to change very rapidly, though, once Blair opened the borders, a policy that remained under conservative leadership and consistently accelerated under Labour leadership.
In 2001, after a decade of Blair-ist policies, the white population had dropped to 89.7 percent. A decade later, it was 82.8% percent, and the official number as of 2021 was 76.8%.
As of 2024, the number of UK residents identifying as White British was only 73%-- which was a decline of over 25% in sixty years. The assumption is that, within 40 years, Britain, which has been a white nation since prehistoric times, will be a majority minority country, with whites estimated at 34% of the population by 2100.
In the major urban areas, the future is now.
In 2022, it was revealed that London and Birmingham have become minority white British.
A 2023 ONS report stated 46 per cent of Londoners were from black and minority ethnic groups.
A census from the Birmingham City Observatory noted in 2021 that the percentage of white people had declined from 57.9 per cent to 48.6 per cent between 2011 and 2021.
But skin color is an external factor. What creates a nation isn't color, it's culture, which leads me to the second data point. Paired with the white skin in Britain were cultural expectations: stiff upper lips, good manners, public decorum, honesty in one's dealings, etc. It was all "keep calm and carry on." That was the perception the world had of Britain and that the Brits had of themselves.
That's still the Britain I knew when I lived there in the early 1980s. Back then, the stereotype of British people politely standing in line for things (or "queuing," as they called it) was true. Whether at banks or bus stops, public conduct was ordered and polite.
However, the immigrant population in the UK doesn't come from ordered and polite societies. It comes from African, Middle Eastern, and Indian subcontinent cultures that are utterly chaotic when it comes to public conduct. And that's how you get this video of a lone white woman trying desperately to get off a British bus in the face of an onrush of people of African descent (or even directly from Africa).
When America experienced a massive influx of immigrants in the last decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century, assimilation was the name of the game. America's institutions—schools, governments, entertainment, and general culture—expected the new immigrants to embrace American norms: law-abiding, orderly, hard-working, and patriotic. In schools, you saluted the flag and, later, said the pledge of allegiance, something that was still the norm when I was in elementary school.
Now, though, it's considered "racist" to expect recent immigrants to conform to their new country's values. So, the country is expected to conform to the recent immigrants' values.
It doesn't have to be this way. Singapore imposes its values on immigrants, and the immigrants comply. The result is an exceptionally high-functioning, liveable country.
The reality is that humans are the most adaptable species on the planet — and the more powerful humans will always force the weaker to adapt. Unless the West starts flexing its cultural power, it's done for.
