Race and the UK Census: facing the facts

Mainstream journalists as well as H&D readers have this week been confronted by sobering news from the UK Census. This is a snapshot of the UK population taken in March 2021 (and a year later in Scotland), but whose results regarding racial demographics (excluding Scotland) were released a few days ago.

Some observers have clouded the picture by making inaccurate claims, notably Nigel Farage due to his longstanding ideological confusion of the concepts of race and nationality.

And some racial nationalists have seized on the Census to make pessimistic statements that the “Great Replacement” has already occurred.

So what is the true picture and how should racial nationalists respond? Click here for H&D‘s Census report.

UK census and racial replacement: H&D analysis

A march to the Home Office in 1972 by Smithfield meat porters protesting at the admission of more than 27,000 Asian immigrants from Uganda. Half a century later, the UK Census reveals the long-term consequences of mass immigration.

Demographic details were released this week from the Census taken in March 2021 in England and Wales – some of the figures for Northern Ireland had already been released a few weeks earlier, while in Scotland the Census was delayed by 12 months due to the pandemic, so Scottish results are not yet available. The Census findings should come as no surprise to H&D readers, though they seem to have shocked some civic nationalists and might yet convert some of the latter to racial realism.

Yet we should be careful not to react with excessive pessimism. The Census reveals a changing UK, but not one that has changed beyond rescue. White Britons are still a majority in most of our country and will remain so for years to come. The UK can be rescued, if racial nationalists have sufficient political will, discipline and competence.

The main headlines reflected census findings concerning both religion and the racial transformation of British cities.

For the first time the majority of the population in England and Wales no longer define themselves as Christian. This is only the third Census which has asked about religion, so no pre-2001 comparisons can be made, but it can safely be assumed from other data that the vast majority of Britons would have defined themselves as some sort of Christian until the 1960s when the younger generation began to abandon their parents’ faith and non-Christian immigrants began to arrive in significant numbers.

It is the abandonment of faith by White Britons that has contributed most to this aspect of the transformation of England and Wales: no doubt we shall find similar patterns in Scotland when the figures are eventually published. (The religious Census question is voluntary, and 6% of respondents in England and Wales chose not to answer it.)

37.2% of respondents answered ‘no religion’ (up from 25.2% a decade ago); 6.5% answered Muslim (up from 4.9%); and 46.2% answered Christian (down from 59.3%).

The other minority faiths remained at almost the same level as in 2021, including Hindu (1.7%), Sikh (0.9%), Buddhist (0.5%) and Jewish (0.5%). It should be noted that many Jews define themselves in racial/cultural terms and are not religiously ‘observant’, so would probably have replied to this Census question by ticking ‘no religion’ or refusing to answer, but even so it’s doubtful whether Jews of any description amount to more than 1% of the UK population.

In Northern Ireland far fewer answered ‘no religion’: 17.4%, a substantial increase from 10.1% in 2011 but less than half the figure for England and Wales. It seems likely that people from a Catholic background in Northern Ireland are especially likely to answer ‘Catholic’ for political/cultural reasons, even if they are no longer religious believers.

In reality, the surprise is that 27.5 million people in England and Wales still define themselves as ‘Christian’: anecdotal evidence suggests that these are heavily concentrated among older White Britons, Eastern European immigrants; and blacks. The churches can partly blame themselves for this decline. There has been no robust equivalent to the ‘Counter-Reformation’ of past centuries, little defence of traditional values, merely a meek surrender to political correctness and a wish to be ‘nice’ to those who promote an alien culture.

In short, while H&D readers will themselves be divided on religious questions, we can probably all agree that the religious transformation of our nation is not necessarily equivalent to racial and cultural replacement: it’s a different and only partly connected issue.

Turning to the question of race, the main headlines concerned British cities, where in some cases White Britons are now a minority and where Whites overall only remain a majority due to Eastern European immigration.

London is only 37% White British, though non-British Whites (in London’s case including many affluent Western Europeans as well as the stereotypical Poles, Romanians, etc.) help boost the overall White total to 54%. Similarly Manchester is 57% White but only 49% White British.

There are some cities where – even including non-Britons – Whites have now become a minority. Birmingham is now only 49% White, and Leicester only 41% White.

Leicester Police separating Hindu and Muslim mobs after inter-communal riots earlier this year

However these Midlands hotbeds of “diversity” also illustrate the political complications caused by immigration. The non-White populations are divided between several different cultures, some of which are far more hostile to each other than they are to Whites, as seen in recent riots between Indians and Pakistanis in Leicester.

Leicester is 34% Indian and only 3% Pakistani – but many of the former are Muslims who identify with the Pakistan cricket team rather than India (the immediate trigger for the riots). Leicester is 23.5% Muslim, 18% Hindu, and 4.5% Sikh.

Birmingham is even more complex, and as in Leicester this has already begun to cause problems for the Labour Party, not only because many ethnic minorities are socially conservative and detest Labour’s surrender to trendy ideas on ‘trans’ rights etc., but also because each community increasingly believes it has the right to control the selection of councillors and MPs.

The racial kaleidoscope of Birmingham is 17% Pakistani; 6% Indian; 4% Bangladeshi; 6% African; 4% Caribbean; with a further 10% being some other variety of black or mixed race. Only 43% of Birmingham is White British.

Most of the headlines focused on English cities, but there are perceptible though less dramatic changes elsewhere in the United Kingdom. Cardiff is now less than 74% White British: of course the city has long had its ‘Tiger Bay’ population of blacks and half-castes around the old Cardiff Docks, descended from migrants from dozens of different countries. But Wales as a whole remains 93.8% White, compared to 81% of England. Northern Ireland remains 96.6% White, though 6.5% of its population was born outside either the UK or Ireland (this mainly reflects Eastern European immigration, heavily concentrated in Belfast where almost 10% were born outside the British Isles, and in one or two other Ulster cities).

Turning from these large cities to areas of northern England which saw an explosion of support for racial nationalism more than twenty years ago, but where the nationalist surge lasted for about a decade at most, the Census suggests that we should not be too pessimistic.

Or put another way, the ‘Great Replacement’ is not yet an excuse for political cowardice, apathy or fatalism.

The political reality is that the vast expansion of the UK’s non-White population is concentrated in council wards and constituencies that we already knew – ten or twenty years ago – would not vote for racial nationalists. By contrast most of the areas that were winnable then, remain winnable now.

Lutfur Rahman returned to office as Mayor of Tower Hamlets several years after being disgraced and expelled from the Labour Party. Asian ghetto politics are becoming as much of a problem for Labour’s liberal multiracialists as they are for us!

Admittedly a big exception to this is East London, where council seats were winnable (and in one case won) by the BNP in the 1990s but have now been conquered, again with mixed benefits for Labour. The Borough of Tower Hamlets is now only 23% White British, and even the old Millwall council ward won by the BNP’s Derek Beackon in 1992 is now only about one-third White British (due to boundary changes a precise figure cannot be obtained).

The transformation is nowhere near so dramatic in those areas of northern England where nationalists polled well post-millennium.

Take for example three cities/towns that H&D knows well: Oldham, Blackburn and Preston. All three of these remain racially divided along stark geographical/political borders, which means that numerous council wards remain winnable for a racial nationalist party that got its act together.

In Oldham the two areas that make up St James’s ward (which the BNP almost won in 2002 when H&D‘s assistant editor Peter Rushton was a leading activist in Oldham BNP) remain majority White British: Moorside & Sholver (89.1%) and Derker (80.5%). A short distance away (on the other side of the former Oldham railway station) begins one of several Asian ghetto areas where the Pakistani population approaches 80%. In other parts of Oldham, Bangladeshis similarly predominate.

But in electoral terms this is only a small problem. There are council wards such as the old Alexandra (since broken up by boundary changes), where a White ghetto was outpolled by an Asian ghetto, but most wards are either no-go areas for White nationalists, or else remain overwhelmingly White and winnable. Overall, Oldham remains 65% White British, and its Asians are divided (often bitterly) between 13.5% Pakistanis and 9% Bangladeshis, with another 5% being some form of African, Caribbean or other blacks / half-castes.

Racial nationalist parties have not been defeated by demographics, but by our own failures.

Turning to Blackburn, where H&D editor Mark Cotterill won a council seat in 2006, there is a similar picture of stark racial-political division. Mark’s old ward Meadowhead remains 91% White British, and most of the old Mill Hill ward won by the BNP in 2002 is similarly 85%-90% White British, though with some Asian encroachment across the ward boundary. Looking at the entire borough, Blackburn with Darwen overall is only 57% White British, but this reflects the increasing Asian domination of their ghetto areas. As in Oldham this represents no practical political change in terms of winnable seats for racial nationalists.

The Oldham riots of 2001 were the most dramatic symbol of racial conflict in the UK, and helped expose great political potential for racial nationalism – sadly wasted due to the BNP’s charlatan leader Nick Griffin

And finally looking at Preston, where the H&D office is based, we can see the practical political options that still exist for our movement. These options can be complicated by racial realities but are not fatally compromised by them.

Preston’s Census figures overall are quite similar to Oldham’s: 66% White British – though Preston’s Asians define themselves as 13% Indian, 5% Pakistani, and only 0.5% Bangladeshi.

The Ribbleton ward of Preston City Council, which our editor has contested several times, is still 74.5% White British. Things got complicated (as explained at the time in H&D) during the 2021 Lancashire County Council elections, where the relevant county council division combined Ribbleton with Frenchwood & Fishwick, which is only 37% White British, and about half of which is an Asian ghetto.

So Mark achieved one of the best nationalist results in England at city council level, but the simultaneous county council result was never going to be as strong.

In these boroughs – Oldham, Blackburn with Darwen, and Preston – electoral campaigning requires local knowledge. Often leafletting literally stops at a certain point where the ethnic make-up of a street visibly changes.

But the 2021 Census doesn’t really change any of this electoral reality.

As Cassius tells Brutus in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

The fault in ourselves as nationalists twenty years ago was that most of the movement placed its faith in a charlatan, Nick Griffin, who destroyed any hope that the BNP had of building effective branches in the racial battlegrounds of northern England.

In the 2020s nationalists ought to be recovering from the self-inflicted damage of the Griffin era, but instead much of the movement has succumbed to a cult mentality that induces pessimism, and divides us from the vast majority of potential sympathisers.

A fatal attraction to crank conspiracy theories – and latterly adherence to the Moscow despot Putin and the Asiatic mysticism of Aleksandr Dugin – risks discrediting UK nationalism for a generation.

The UK Census results ought to sober up our deluded movement. It’s not too late, but within the next decade or two we must build a credible resistance and a White political renaissance. Scrap the cultism, build a serious movement, and start to win.

PA activists mark Indigenous People’s Day

Patriotic Alternative activists have been celebrating Indigenous People’s Day with a wide range of activities across the UK, highlighting the threat that fake ‘diversity’ poses to real diversity.

Multiracialism implies the extinction of the White Race. PA activists have been in the front line of mobilising opposition to this ‘Great Replacement’.

An especially excellent activity was held at Clifford’s Tower, a 13th century landmark in York built on the site of an earlier 11th century Norman castle.

One particular ethnic lobby group and their fellow-travellers believe that they ‘own’ Clifford’s Tower. In 1190 about 150 Jews are believed to have killed themselves inside the tower rather than convert to Christianity. Jews had become unpopular at the time because of their moneylending activities, seeing themselves as exempt from the Christian ban on charging interest (‘usury’).

In solidarity with these mediaeval moneylenders, 21st century wokeists and fake leftists are outraged that a patriotic group should have carried out a pro-White activity at Clifford’s Tower.

But if the Great Replacement is to be defeated, Britons will have to rediscover the spirit of their ancestors, defy ‘cancel culture’, and assert our own rights in our own land.

Readers can view a wide range of PA activities and discussions at their Odysee page and on the PA website.

Among today’s other celebrations of White Lives Matter on Indigenous People’s Day, PA activists made their point in locations as diverse as the Tullibardine distillery in Auchterarder – gateway to the Scottish Highlands – and Old Sarum, Wiltshire.

(Tullibardine also brews a ‘whisky beer’ called 1488, so called because it was produced for the coronation of King James IV of Scotland in that year.)

Old Sarum was the most famous of the so-called ‘rotten boroughs’ that elected MPs to the UK Parliament before the 1832 Reform Act. Until that reform, Old Sarum (which had once been a substantial town but now comprised only three houses) elected two MPs, while the fast-growing city of Manchester elected none!

The rottenness of today’s ‘democratic’ system is less obvious but even more toxic: Old Sarum was another ideal venue to make the point that White Lives Matter.

Congratulations to Patriotic Alternative and to all those who are fighting for our cause, not only on Indigenous People’s Day but throughout the year.

Black immigrant population of USA set to double by 2060

Most people assume that the black population of the USA has lived there for generations and is largely descended from slaves, while they associate immigration into the USA with Asians and Hispanics.

However, a new analysis of census figures today shows that the black immigrant population of the USA (the largest numbers coming from Jamaica or Haiti, but also including many varieties of African) is already about 4.6 million and could more than double to 9.5 million by 2060.

At present about one in ten black Americans are immigrants; with another 9% being only second generation. So that makes almost one in five black Americans who are only fairly recent arrivals.

These immigration trends combine with other demographic factors adding to the pressure on European Americans.

The Pew Research Center points out that between 1980 and 2019, the nation’s black population grew by 20 million.

In the recently published issue 106 of H&D, James Knight explains that less than 58% of the US population is now made up of European-Americans, and discusses possible solutions for the White crisis.

Covid-19 lockdowns in England’s racially ‘enriched’ areas

Tonight lockdown measures were suddenly reintroduced across large areas of northern England, where from midnight residents will be banned from any indoor meetings with people outside their immediate household. This will include pubs and restaurants, making the survival of some businesses very doubtful.

The government’s new rules were published just a few minutes before they came into effect at midnight.

Detailed examination of Covid-19 statistics that have led to this new lockdown show that as in Leicester, where the virus made its first big comeback, the areas concerned are predominantly those with very high Pakistani or Bangladeshi populations.

Yet the lockdown has been imposed across a vastly greater area, including many predominantly White districts where there is little or no sign of a Covid-19 resurgence.

The new measures will affect the whole of Greater Manchester; plus the East Lancashire boroughs of Blackburn with Darwen, Burnley, Hyndburn, Pendle, and Rossendale; plus the West Yorkshire metropolitan boroughs of Bradford, Calderdale and Kirklees; plus the city of Leicester.

Aside from Leicester, the vast area affected is broadly identical to the trans-Pennine region that saw the BNP’s major electoral advances almost twenty years ago. And the two phenomena – strong BNP votes in the early 2000s and a Covid-19 spike in 2020 – are of course related.

The common factor is that both were influenced by very high Asian populations, the behaviour of that particular minority and reactions to that behaviour.

Oldham – former cotton capital of the world, now one of the main Covid-19 hotspots

The statistics speak for themselves, to anyone who knows the racial geography of these areas (as the H&D team know very well). A detailed official map issued this morning gives a breakdown of confirmed new Covid-19 cases within the past week (20th-26th July), listed not merely by town but by much more detailed census areas within each town.

The much publicised Oldham outbreak featured Alexandra Park (22 new cases): this is the Glodwick area, one of the main Asian ghettos. Other hot spots included Chadderton SE (18); Werneth (16); Oldham Town South (10) and Busk – one of the original Bangladeshi areas in the Coldhurst council ward – (9). Also a scattering in several other Oldham areas.

But nothing (or below 3 anyway so not published) in the White working class Derker, Moorside & Sholver, or Alt areas of Oldham – once BNP strongholds. Perhaps a beneficial side-effect of Oldham’s notorious divisions.

In Rochdale, another very Asian area is the highlight: Wardleworth & Newbold Brow, with 21 new cases.

In Preston where H&D is based the outbreak is not as bad, and the city is not yet under lockdown, but those parts of Preston with most Covid cases are again Asian areas: notably St George’s (which includes some of the Deepdale area near Preston’s football ground) with 10 new cases in the past week. An exception is the mainly White working-class Brookfield & Holme Slack area (6 new cases).

The Jaame Masjid, Blackburn’s central mosque, in the Audley district that has seen a Covid-19 spike

Meanwhile in Blackburn with Darwen, where H&D editor Mark Cotterill was once a borough councillor and which is now under renewed lockdown, the worst hit areas are the very Asian Bastwell (23); Audley (18); and Central Blackburn (18).

It does seem likely that certain communities that have strong extended-family traditions, and might have held events, are leading to these latest outbreaks. In this context look at London, where there is very little in most White areas, and by Oldham/Blackburn standards no longer very much even in Asian areas, but Week 30’s highlights included Stamford Hill North (10 new cases); and Stamford Hill West (9 new cases), plus a scattering in other parts of Hackney.

It seems very likely that these are related to the Orthodox Jewish community which is particularly numerous in these areas; just as almost all the other outbreaks are related to areas with large Pakistani or Bangladeshi Muslim populations.

Today’s panic measure by the government is probably related to this weekend’s important Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha. Community leaders and local councils had already cancelled large public events, but there would certainly have been large, indoor, extended-family events in many of the areas now subject to a ban.

The question is whether at such short notice the ban will be communicated in time throughout areas where English might only be spoken at a very basic level, if at all.

Non-European immigration at record level

Newly released statistics show that net immigration to the UK from outside the European Union hit its highest level on record last year.

During 2019, 282,000 more non-EU citizens arrived in the UK than left. This was the highest such figure since this statistic began to be collected in 1975.

By contrast net immigration from EU countries declined to 49,000 – less than a quarter of the peak figure four years ago.

These statistics pre-date the Covid-19 pandemic, which will reduce both immigration and emigration for an indefinite period, though it’s worth pointing out that at least 20,000 people arrived in the UK infected with the virus before UK authorities got round to imposing restrictions.

Some commentators have explained the astonishingly high 2019 immigration figure in terms of increased numbers of students arriving from China and India, in particular.

What isn’t explained is whether all of these students go back home at the end of their courses: experience would suggest that many stay in the UK (legally or not).

One of the questions to be answered by any eventual inquiry into Covid-19 is the extent to which London’s massive overcrowding contributed to the virus’s spread. What’s already clear is that post-virus our bloated higher education system is no longer financially viable. Post-Covid reconstruction will depend on putting the British people first and ignoring the usual calls from the business community for a continued flow of immigrants.

Many of those who voted for Brexit believed (wrongly) that they were voting to turn off the immigration tap, when in fact the pro-Brexit lobby (from Nigel Farage down) were openly in favour of increasing non-EU immigration.

The government’s bungling of Covid-19 lockdown has already compromised the future of the next UK generation. It seems clear that a generation will grow up significantly poorer than their parents. It would be unforgivable if they also had to live in a country that was no longer either British or European.

Coronavirus predicted by nationalist science writer 14 years ago

As we all struggle to comprehend the scale and nature of the coronavirus crisis, it is interesting to look back at an article published fourteen years ago by the nationalist journal Scorpion.

This was written by a well-known nationalist activist who had a regular column in Scorpion under the pen-name ‘Loki’, and who presently contributes regularly to H&D under a different name.

Aside from formatting, we reproduce this article here unchanged – with thanks and acknowledgments to Scorpion – as our contribution to continuing discussions about the social/political implications of the present crisis.

Click here to read Loki on Health.

Loki on Health

reproduced with acknowledgments to The Scorpion, where this prescient article appeared in 2006

One advantage of submitting one’s copy to the Scorpion at (or beyond!) the ragged edge of the Editor’s forbearance with deadlines is that it does enable a certain topicality. So that I can open my remarks on the threat to the health of humanity posed by our present socio-economic system with the Dead Swan of Fife.

This is not the title of a sombre tone poem by some Scottish Sibelius, nor a dolorous ballad from the repertoire of Anne Lorne Gillies or Andy Stewart, but a deceased, and indeed somewhat decomposed, specimen of Cygnus cygnus found on a beach in the former Scots Kingdom of Fife a few days ago as I write. Although actually a whooper, it ended up as a very mute swan nevertheless bearing tidings of doom and despondency to be trumpeted throughout the media even unto the very gates of DEFRA (the British bureaucrats responsible for those relicts of our countryside not yet built over by the myrmidons of the sinisterly-named Office of the Deputy Prime Minister).  

The Dead Swan owed its unhappy state to an avian influenza virus, H5N1, which, having despatched a few dozen hapless Vietnamese and Turks who had evidently become overt-intimately attached to its principal host, wildfowl and poultry,  had been borne on migrating wings ever closer to our sceptred isle. Amid mounting media hype, usually of the form – page 1: NO NEED TO PANIC AS DEADLY BIRD FLU GETS NEARER (see pages 2-9 for further sundry scare stories and panicky reportage of the issue). 

This is of course the latest of a steady series of similar pandemic scares in recent years, from SARS to AIDS. Your author still has a London Sunday Times magazine issued in 1986 purporting to contain reportage from the AIDS-ravaged Britain of the mid-1990’s: millions dead, not a family in the land untouched etc etc. Sadly for such Government-sponsored prognostications, AIDS stubbornly refused to behave in the predicted Politically-Correct equal opportunity manner. Retreating into a bigoted epidemiology characterised by racism, sexism and homophobia. Disproportionately afflicting Africans, male homosexuals and women, even sinking to prey on disadvantaged drug-injectors. Shocking! Still, what can one expect of a mere virus…?

All, thus far, have proved specious. After the headlines and the hype departed, humanity carried on much as usual. So, nothing to worry about then? 

Sadly, not quite. Indeed, not at all. Regardless of how often or how speciously the media little boy cries “wolf!” there really is a big, dangerous beast out there. One we are pretty certain, sooner or later, to unleash on ourselves with apocalyptic consequences retroactively justifying every lurid headline and purple passage. As with almost every pestilence and plague throughout history, it will be in a sense self-inflicted, the price of the way we live. But not, this time, the unavoidable price, if we are prepared to change the way we live just a little. If we don’t, we will collectively deserve all we shall, sooner or later, get. 

First, it’s time to get to know Pestilence, the fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse. His colleague Death is several hundred million years old, introduced to our ancestors when they ended the arithmetically confusing practice of multiplying by division (binary cell-splitting or metazoan vegetative budding) and subcontracted reproducing to a minority of germ cells, leaving the rest to perish in an ageing body. Famine is probably an even more venerable fellow, manifesting himself to the first primitive mote of life to run out of primordial soup. War in the sense of battles between rather than within social groups of the same species introduced himself to our apish ancestors some millions of years ago. Ants and termites made his acquaintance much earlier. But, although he has been about since the first phage viruses began to afflict bacteria possibly billions of years ago, and pressed his unwelcome attentions doubtless upon our ancestors for much of the time since, Pestilence pretty much left our own personal ancestors alone for the past few million years, until relatively very recently.

The reason is that our ancestors, from perhaps 2 million to around ten thousand years ago, followed a lifestyle Pestilence found decidedly unconducive to his activities.  We were not herd animals, on and amongst whom pestilential pathogens could themselves graze, assured of finding another host when they used up the current one, either by rendering it deceased or immune. Our hominid, and Palaeolithic human, ancestors were thinly spread across the land. Living in bands of at most 200 individuals, each defending a tribal hunting and gathering territory and meeting in larger numbers only infrequently. A situation not conducive to plagues. If disease did break out in one band, it might well infect all its members quite quickly. But such an infection would have run its course, killing or rendering immune and pathogen-free those infected, before they were likely to have met anyone else to infect. In fact, extreme isolation is not necessary – if conditions were such that each person whilst infectious on average infected less than one other, any disease would, sooner or later, die out even if it managed to spread amongst more than one band. 

As was doubtless the sad (if one can spend sympathy on bacteria and viruses) fate of whatever disease organisms managed from time to time to jump the triple barrier that guards one species from the diseases of another. A barrier comprised firstly of the need to physically get from one host of one species to one of another. Not easy in the millions of years when humans generally only got close to other animals immediately before and during killing, cooking and eating them (which incidentally is why you won’t get bird flu from eating cooked chicken!). Secondly the disease has to actually survive and reproduce in the new host, without being simply swatted by the immune system that stops us being eaten, for example, by our own gut bacteria and the countless others that land on and in us constantly. This is especially difficult for viruses – bacteria basically just divide and multiply given a suitable food source, and we are quite suitable to many. But viruses, thousands of times smaller than bacteria, have to hijack a host cell, subverting it into making copies of the virus, before they can breed. Subversion which is highly selective in terms of whose cells can hear, and whose are deaf, to its genetic siren song. So the new disease has actually to succeed in making us ill. Thirdly – and this is the Third Barrier the H5N1 viral Bane of the Dead Swan of Fife has yet to cross – it has to be able to spread from one human to another before the first human is dead or all the germs invading him and her have been slain by the body’s very effective defences.  Having got that far, almost all diseases to afflict our pre-agricultural ancestors simply died out after a brief local epidemic when they ran out of new hosts having the dual desiderata of being both still alive and not already immune.  

To survive as a disease of human or humanlike hunter-gatherers, a pathogen had to gang exceeding warily. Being quite infectious, but not virulent, nor provoking a strong immune response. Subtly lurking in its hosts for decades, and killing, even debilitating most of them slowly or not at all. 

The result is that, as genetic evidence has revealed, only one major affliction of historic humanity ever managed to inflict itself on us lastingly before we started writing our first histories. Tuberculosis. Human TB, alone of all ills to which mankind is heir, is most closely related to its counterpart in our nearest nonhuman relatives, chimpanzees. And its genetic clock shows human and chimp TB diverged when humans and chimps themselves did. It was a disease of our common ancestors, several million years ago. Its practice of lurking, latent, in infected victims for years, even decades, before becoming active and infectious when their immune systems weakens for any reason means it can become endemic even amongst hunter-gatherers. The same genetic clock, the accumulation of random mutations in non-critical genetic material ticking away in lineages of life after they have divided, that shows TB is the one major indigenous human disease shows that pretty much every other human disease is little if at all older than recorded human history. Many are much younger. 

The reason is that both epidemic disease and recording history sprang from the same source. The “Neolithic Revolution”, the adoption of agriculture, the replacement of hunter/gatherers over wider and wider areas by farmers, leading in turn to towns, cities, civilizations, literacy and recording history. .  Pestilence likes farmers. 

There are a lot more of them to prey on, for a start. Even Neolithic-level farming can support tens of times, up to a hundred times, more people per square mile/kilometre than hunting and gathering.  People living cheek-by-jowl in villages, and soon towns and cities, in herds hundreds and even thousands strong. Amongst whom even the most virulent plague can spread quickly enough to be likely to find a fresh host before the current one has died or defeated it. Whilst an endless supply of interesting new diseases is assured by people living in close association and proximity, over long periods, with other species whose herding or flocking behaviour long enabled endemic diseases to evolve for them. Early farmers shared their homes with pigs and cattle (often housed at the other end of their houses or in a ground-floor byre under the living floor) with ducks and chickens underfoot (much as in those areas of SE Asia in the news lately for deaths from SARS and avian flu, by no coincidence whatsoever).

The result was that disease after disease crossed the species barrier from domestic livestock to man. Smallpox was originally the cowpox of cattle. The same species’ rinderpest mutated into human measles. Jumping the species barrier a second time to become canine distemper. Pigs contributed whooping cough – again passed on in turn to poor old Fido, who has got the short end of the stick medically speaking from being Man’s Best Friend.  Falciparum malaria was originally a disease of birds. The human form evolved from that found in ducks and chickens. Different strains of influenza have repeatedly crossed the species barrier to man from their original hosts in pigs and ducks. Southern China and Vietnam, where both pigs and ducks are kept in intimate proximity with impoverished peasants in unhygienic huts, has for this reason repeatedly contributed flu pandemics to the sum of human happiness. To help them make this contribution to mankind, said peasants have cultivated a taste for delicacies made from uncooked duck blood and similar suitably infectious tit-bits.

Agriculture, and the urbanisation it enabled, also allowed species we didn’t intend to share our space with to make themselves at home amongst us anyway and share their exciting diseases. Bubonic plague, for example, was in origin a disease of rats.     

Throughout the last few thousand years, disease after disease has crossed the species barrier and sparked pandemic after pandemic. In each case, the story is the same. Animal diseases were repeatedly exposed to potential human hosts living in intimate and insanitary conditions with their original hosts. Given the very short generation times of germs – some bacteria go through one generation every nine minutes – they evolve rapidly. Mutant strains arise all the time. In situations of frequent opportunities to infect humans, any mutant able to take advantage would prosper. At first, again and again, they would find themselves trapped in a human host, able to multiply and exploit him or her, but with no way of spreading out of the body they were in should it die on them or become able to kill them off. The only escape was a lucky mutation that could escape into another human. With populations in each infected hosts in the high millions and generation times in minutes, such mutations were generally not long in coming. And another new plague was unleashed on humanity…

With, in general, initially devastating effects on populations with little or no natural immunity or resistance. Mortality rates frequently of 25-75% in the first epidemic. Effects mitigated over time in the interests of the disease rather than humanity. Because the disease organism’s best long-term interests lie in farming rather than exterminating its food supply – us! Killing the host before he has time to infect anyone else is clearly a bad career move, which has spared us so far from the likes of the Ebola virus which do this. But even slaughtering the human host herd to the extent that the population drops below the minimum necessary to maintain the disease as endemic amongst it is also inefficient. Although it’s also inefficient to fail to harvest the maximum sustainable yield of germs from the bipedal food supply. On the other side of the evolutionary battle, a virulent disease is actually breeding, and socially selecting, its hosts for resistance to it – it is only the survivors of its attacks, or those who avoided infection, who survive to carry on their kind and/or their healthier way of life. 

The result is that, over time, evolution causes a gradual reduction in the virulence of each disease. And a progress away from devastating but intermittent plagues thereof to a permanent low-level endemic presence. Rinderpest, for example, is widely thought to have crossed the species barrier to become human measles in the 2nd Century AD, causing the devastating plague that caused over 25% mortality in the Roman Empire in the late 160’s AD, in the process ending the relatively idyllic Antonine apogee of Rome. After which it became endemic, with new mutations able to overcome immunity to earlier variants breaking out in a series of plagues of steadily decreasing virulence until, within a few centuries, it became what it was until the recent MMR vaccine came on the scene – a harmless (with the odd tragic exception) disease contracted by virtually every child in the host population, who thereafter became immune, and surviving at a stable level on that basis.  

Such human-adapted diseases can still wreak havoc on populations that have co-evolved with them. When Europeans reached the Americas and then the Pacific Islands, they inflicted a string of new diseases on the natives. Some, like smallpox, were still pretty dangerous even to Europeans, with mortality rates approaching 50%. Among the urbanised Neolithic populations of Mesoamerica those rates hit 95%. The 5% survivors of course passed their higher (though not total) degree of resistance to their descendants. But their society had been destroyed, easy meat for the Conquistadores. Even diseases fairly harmless to Europeans, like measles, could cause significant mortality in populations that had never been exposed to them. Lower mortality, demonstrating that the relative harmlessness of the disease in long-exposed populations was due not only to the hosts evolving resistance but to the pathogen evolving to be less lethal. An example of coevolution in action fascinating unless you happen to be a 19th Century Hawaiian!         

So the Dead Swan of Fife is not mere media hype. The fear that a new disease – or in this case a new variant of an old disease – will cross the species barrier from its non-human host and become an initially very deadly disease of people is well-founded. It is, as we have seen, the way we got pretty much every other disease to which humanity is now heir. From smallpox – first recorded in scabs on an Egyptian mummy from the 17th Century BC – to polio – the first epidemic of which was as recent as 1840, although it’s not yet clear which animal species we got that one from – and including wave after wave of New Improved Flus. Sooner or later – and more likely sooner than later – it will certainly happen again.     

The trouble is that next time, or at least one of the times in the next decade or two, this happens it will be a disaster on an unprecedented scale. Because of the way we live now. 

Disastrous disease epidemics, as we have seen, are already a result of changed human socioeconomics. Before we invented agriculture, they just didn’t happen. Now we have invented globalisation, they are about to get worse. A lot worse. 

Why? The simple answer is that there are more people than ever before, they move around more and faster than ever before, and the short-sighted selfish greed that is the ruling ethos of globalisation has made it much more difficult in a number of ways for us to defend ourselves against new diseases (and indeed made them more likely to arise).     

The unprecedented swarming mass of humanity, which has more doubled in number in the last 50 years to over 6,000 million, provides a feast for new pathogens as never before. Every year there are 74 million more juicy humans to prey on, an entire large European nation full – although the additional arrivals are not Europeans, of course. This seething biomass bred by Western medical and agricultural technology the prevailing ideology of the West caused to be sold, and sometimes given, to the rest of the World without thought of the consequences, beyond short term profit.   

Now they seethe like maggots, eating up the rest of the living world. Living in swarming squalor in their sewer-free shanty towns and favelas, sitting ducks for the next major pandemic and an ideal breeding ground for such a new human pathogen. The epidemiological antithesis of their ancestral scattered bands of Palaeolithic hunters.

Their sheer numbers also mean people are pushing ever deeper into formerly thinly peopled wildernesses, some of which, such as African rainforests, are rich reservoirs of potential pathogens, currently preying on species such as chimps genetically very similar (98%) to us, making the species barrier the germs have to jump temptingly low. To help the germs even more, the African rainforests are now being raided on an ever growing scale for “bushmeat” to be sold and eaten in the vast squatter camps around the continent’s cities. Chimp meat is, apparently, a particular – if 98% cannibalistic! – delicacy, as is that of various monkey species. From one of whom has already come AIDS. So as to enhance our experience of potential disease diversity here in Britain, recent Court cases reveal that Africans have been smuggling chimp and other bushmeat into Britain, where it is apparently a prized delicacy at a number of African restaurants in London. 

However, were any such diners to go down with some exotic germ here, they could be assured of swift and professional medical care. Not so in the teeming slums back home where most such prime cuts are more usually consumed. There any alien pathogens will be given every chance to try again and again to cross the species barrier to infect humanity in a medicine- and hygiene-free germ-friendly environment. Swarming with potential prey, their immune systems weakened by poor nutrition and in many cases in Africa AIDS. Welcoming any initially diffident bacterium or virus anxious to seek asylum from a rainforest animal host being hunted to extinction as its habitat is destroyed in the welcoming and abundant pastures provided by Homo sapiens – overwhelmingly Africa’s commonest large mammal. Though it would be churlish to pass over the peasantry of East and South-East Asia, living cheek-by-jowl with their pigs and ducks, in their efforts to help Mr Pestilence mount his horse for another good gallop through humanity.   

In fact, he has got his foot in the stirrup a few times already of late. Lassa, Ebola and Marburg viruses have all managed to evolve strains capable of infecting humans and spreading from one human to another. However, so far every outbreak has aborted itself because the viruses turn their human hosts into a bag of goo too quickly to allow effective transmission to a wider public. Any mutation of these viruses that makes them just slightly less deadly and they will be in business.  They don’t have to be any less deadly – and so far few have survived infection with Ebola or Marburg. They just have to be deadly a little more slowly, to take a few hours more to kill. And once these delightful creatures do manage mutate to epidemiological effectiveness (or maybe it will be something else not yet heard of, but we can count on  ex Africa semper aliquod something rather nasty  in the coming years) our delightful global Free Market economy will be there to waft Pestilence wherever he wants to go.

For not only is the vast human population swarming through the last wild refuges of exotic viruses and bacteria unprecedented. So is the speed and volume of human movement around the world. Fleets of jumbo jets roaring hither and yon in the service of the free movement of labour in the global economy.  So that a germ that was caught in a village in Gabon or a shanty town around Lagos or a street in Shanghai in the morning can be coughed out into a crowded London Tube, Paris metro or New York subway carriage the same evening. 

When the last big killer hit Europe, the Black Death in 1347, it took some years, and many thousands of germ generations, to spread West from its origin in China, giving the germ and its new host some chance to adapt to each other. Even then, one European in three perished. Now a germ can be in the heart of Europe and North America only a few tens of cell divisions, or in the case of a virus copyings by host cells of its genetic code from its first deadly incursion into our species. 

No-one is going to stop the carrier if the next Black Death from walking through Passport Control at Heathrow if his papers are in order even if he is looking a little peaky. Any suggestion of thorough medical checks or even quarantine periods on people entering the West from Third World plague danger zones would be howled down. 

Ostensibly, but doubtless effectively, with the parrot squawk of “racism” – though such controls would, to work, have to be applied with the same indifference to race, nationality and ethnic origin that most (though as AIDS shows not all) plagues themselves show.  But actually because they would interfere with the vast profits to be made by the multinational combines who own the West from shipping people quickly and freely around the world. Third World labourers to the West to be exploited in dirty, dangerous and low-paid jobs that no Western worker would do – unless they were made cleaner, safer and better-paid, and where’s the profit in that? And Western managers to run “offshoring” operations in the Third World, milking the low-paid labour at source. But if they carry on, one day they will get something very different from profit from the Third World.

The BBC recently released on DVD its chilling 1975 series Survivors, showing exactly the sort of pandemic plague this article is talking about in action. Then it was portrayed as an escaped Chinese germ warfare agent. But very likely Nature can still show human folly a trick or two here. But the opening sequence, showing the Death spreading around the World in days in a mix of footage of jumbo jets overhead and passport stamps at airports, is even more apposite today, when air travel is vastly greater than it was thirty years ago. Nor is the sequel depicted, of the swift collapse of government and civilization as all but one in ten thousand perished in weeks, dated in the least either. That mortality rate would be unprecedented in the history of humanity. But so is our current social situation, in ways that make such a killer plague far likelier than it was in the past. 

In fact, before the present day, Survivors’ plague, The Death, was, ironically, too deadly to spread around a world in which travellers were slower, better controlled, and fewer in number. More than a few decades ago, and Western Governments would have the time and the will to close their borders effectively as the Death rolled closer, to slam the gates in the face of onrushing Pestilence. With peoples who, as the patient endurance of the privations of the last World War by the ordinary people on both sides showed, were capable of reserves of discipline, dedication to the common cause and courage in crisis one suspects would be sought in vain amongst the consumerist hordes of their descendents, brainwashed into the selfish short-sighted greed that is the underlying ethic of 21st Century Western “civilization”.

Indeed, a few decades ago, not only would the next great plague of mankind be less likely to get into Western nations, there is a much greater chance it could have been beaten back even if it had done so. For the ingenuity and technological brilliance that is one of the better aspects of our civilization had, by the early 1940’s, come up with antibiotic “magic bullets”,  stunningly effective against bacteria if sadly not viruses. But being able to beat bacteria alone secures us against the Black Death, and leprosy, and even the ancient human killer tuberculosis. Combined with widespread vaccination, which does work against viruses, this lead the US Surgeon-General in 1962 to proclaim that humanity had won its war against Pestilence. 

Sadly, he reckoned without Pestilence’s good pal, Greed. And a socioeconomic system built on the mobilization of greed, and Greed’s ally Selfishness. The antibiotics, as everyone knew from the start, would eventually lose their effectiveness if they were used carelessly and promiscuously. So long as they were only deployed to save lives actually under threat and in controlled circumstances where the patient could be compelled to take the full course so there were no bacterial survivors of the attack, they would keep their effectiveness. Let them be used indiscriminately in doses not high enough or continued long enough to stamp out all the attacking germs, and some more antibiotic resistant germs would survive to pass on their resistance. Evolution by natural selection works if the best adapted organisms to a new environmental challenge – even if not yet fully adapted – get a chance to survive and breed. And, each generation, even better adaptation to the challenge was rewarded with better breeding success. With generation times in minutes rather than years, microbes can evolve fast and far – if they are given the chance.    

Capitalist greed gave them that chance. The antibiotics were soon the preserve of giant multinational pharmaceutical companies. Who saw there was no profit in hoarding them and using them sparingly so as to preserve their effectiveness. The more widely they were used, the more they sold. Helped by the fact that it was discovered that putting antibiotics into animal feed in the burgeoning factory farms enhanced yields of eggs, milk and meat. To the point that today 70% of all antibiotics made are not used to treat disease but are used in agricultural food production – fed to battery hens and pigs and the like. Much of the rest is wasted in, for example, bactericidal washing-up liquid and tissues. This was combined with the deliberate fostering of selfishness in the interests of profit, under the guise of “human rights” serving “freedom”. So that compelling tubercular drug addicts and Haitian illegal immigrants in New York to complete their courses of antibiotics was deemed an “infringement of their human rights”. 

The upshot was that bacteria were allowed to accustom themselves to antibiotics, constantly and widely exposed to dosages enough to favour resistant strains but not enough to kill them before their resistance had evolved to be complete. Thus Capitalism created MRSA – a strain of the ubiquitous bacterium of boils and zits, and wound infection and septicaemia, Staphylococcus aureus immune not just to methicillin but, in time, to every known antibiotic. Whilst tubercular trash of society exercising their “human right” to stop bothering to take their medication any more once it had cured their symptoms but before it had killed off the last most antibiotic resistant holdouts of TB germs in their bodies has bred a TB which is now almost as resistant to treatment as it was a century ago.    

Compulsory universal vaccination exterminated viral scourges such as smallpox altogether by the late 1970’s (apart from inside sinister secret US and Soviet Government labs). But again the pervading social spirit of selfishness promoted to create profitable consumer populations insidiously undermined the eradication of other viral plagues. 

To work, vaccination has to cover at least 95% of the host population, so the virus cannot find enough vulnerable hosts to sustain itself in the population. But it is not itself without a cost. Sadly, a very small proportion of those immunised are seriously harmed or even killed by the vaccine. Fewer than the disease used to maim and kill. But in today’s self-centred society the “rights” of the individual prevail against the good of the people as a whole. So, for example, a scare – later found to be unfounded anyway – alleging a link with autism caused British parents to opt their children out of the MMR vaccine. Which they were allowed, selfishly, to do. The result is that measles was not eradicated but broke out anew, and recently the first British child for decades died of the disease, whilst others were blinded or brain damaged because social selfishness backed by the courts allowed the eradication campaign to fail. In a different society – or our own a couple of generations ago – parents would have ensured their children’s vaccination out of social duty. Those few children who did die from the vaccine would be seen in the same light as soldiers who perished in battle or firemen who died on duty, as having given their lives nobly for the greater good of  the whole, by their sacrifice saving the lives of the far more children who would have perished had the populace not been protected by vaccination.      

One might think that, with antibiotics growing less and less effective and vaccination less and less universal, and with a general awareness, as the Dead Swan showed, of the danger of a new pandemic plague, those responsible for finding new drugs would be concentrating their efforts on better antibiotics to fight bacteria and cheaper antiviral drugs to fight viruses. But the big profits for the pharmaceutical companies to whom such research has largely, in the privatised market-run world of today, been abandoned do not lie in pills taken briefly to defeat a deadly germ. They lie in those taken lifelong to stave off a lesser chronic ill – a gyppy stomach or a creaky joint. Or mood-altering drugs to help people cope with their crazy world. Or perhaps really expensive and profitable pills to save a few from cancer rather than cheap and unprofitable ones to save many from germs.  So antibiotic research languishes and  resistant strains rampage through homes and hospitals. Necrotising fasciitis anyone?

So we are right to fear the message the Swan of Fife died to bring us. Modern, cosmopolitan, global market society is making the worst pandemic disaster in human history much more likely, and making it much harder to resist it when it comes. The global market is playing a game of Russian roulette with Pestilence. He pulls the trigger on the revolver’s chamber loaded with AIDS. Click! Spin the magazine. Pull the chamber loaded with SARS. Click! Ebola virus. Click! H5N1 flu. Who knows? The hammer is still falling on the chamber. But sooner or later- BANG!     

The last great pandemic, that caused by a new flu train in 1918, killed more people  in four months than perished in the four years of  the First World War. 80% of the United States soldiers who did not come back from serving in World War One died of this flu after the Armistice rather than in battle before it.   The next, spreading much faster amongst a much more closely connected world with lots more people in it, will doubtless kill many more people. Perhaps most people. Though almost certainly not all people. But quite possibly civilized society, which will collapse if enough of its productive people perish. We do not know how many individuals comprising a society need to die to bring down civilization with them. 50%? 75%? 90%? We may be about to find out…

Yet the predicament humanity has got itself into in the first decades of the 21st Century is so grim that such a pandemic is not the worst thing that could – and probably will – happen to us. Our teeming population eating the Earth like locusts has started a race to get us by all the Four Horsemen. Pestilence, as we have seen, is currently a few lengths in the lead. But, as we turn farmland into desert ever faster each year, partly from exhaustion of the soil in the Third World but increasingly in coming decades due to climate change brought on by our greed and filth, Famine is coming up strongly on the stand side. As rising sea levels force entire nations such as the Bangladeshis to pour inland seeking new land for their hundred millions and drought in a warming world displaces billions in Volkerwanderungen to dwarf those which flooded over and drowned the Roman West , War is beginning to spur on his steed strongly. Add the wider spectre of top tier biosphere collapse brought on by the mass extinction of other species at the hands of the spreading plague of excess humanity on a scale already surpassing that when the dinosaurs departed, and Death, currently hanging back and saving his mount’s wind in the certainty that he will get us all in the end individually anyway, must be the bookies’ favourite to sweep ahead in the final furlong and claim our entire species as his prize. 

Unless Pestilence rides a clever race and claims enough of us now to deny his fellow Horsemen their prey later. We are in such a plight by now, caused at root by far too many people, that a pandemic that killed enough people now might save us from worse to come. 

Not too many people, everywhere, though to collapse that Western technological civilization which, once it has sloughed off its Capitalist carapace, still offers the last best hope for the long term future of our species.  Indeed, resolute, determined and disciplined action in the face of pandemic might save one or a few Western nations more or less intact, whilst the rest of humanity perished. The survival of that part of human civilization which has stabilized its population already, freed from the certainty of being swept away in a tide of the desperate rest of humanity as it dragged us all down to disaster, might well be the last best hope of mankind. 

The tragedy of our current plight is that, for humanity as a species to survive the next thousand years, most humans must die as soon as possible in the next hundred. If he can do that for us, without reducing the survivors to savagery, perhaps Pestilence is our friend after all, and the Dead Swan’s message is one of hope in the hour of our coming desperation.       

Immigration surges after Brexit referendum

Many of those who voted in 2016’s referendum for the UK to leave the European Union believed that this would lead to a rapid reduction in immigration. A continuing debate ensued for example in the pages of H&D between keen Brexit campaigners (who broadly believed that leaving the EU would be a major blow against the multiracialist establishment) and more sceptical racial nationalists, some of whom feared that Brexit would actually worsen our country’s racial problems.

This week official statistics confirmed the sceptics’ worst fears. It is now apparent that almost from the moment of the 2016 referendum, net immigration from EU countries began to fall. In fact there is net emigration from the UK to the Central and Eastern European nations known as the EU8: i.e. Poland, Lithuania, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia, Slovenia, Hungary and the Czech Republic.

However there has been a sharp rise in net immigration from outside the EU, not only increasing numbers of university students (especially from China) but other immigrants from Africa and Asia. Prime Minister Theresa May’s office actually boasted that this increase in immigration was a positive sign!

Conservative-dominated governments for the past nine years have consistently stated their aim to reduce annual net immigration to below 100,000. If achieved, that would take us back to the start of the Blair / ‘New Labour’ era in 1997, when net immigration was 50,000.

Don’t forget that even then, there would be tens of thousands more people arriving in the UK than leaving, and these immigrants would be constantly adding to our existing non-British population.

Shockingly, none of those Conservative-led governments since 2010 has got anywhere near even their modest 100,000 immigrant target. The most recent figures for the year ending June 2018 show net immigration of 273,000.

And of these an increasing proportion are non-Europeans. In that same 12 month period, the number of non-EU citizens who are in the UK on a long term basis rose by 248,000, whereas the same figure for EU citizens was 74,000.

A very large number of the new arrivals are from India.

The UK faces an ever more dangerous demographic time bomb, and this crisis has been worsened by the Brexit process (so far).

U.S. Mid-Term Election Results Mixed, But Demographics Doom Republicans

(by James Knight for H&D)

The mid-term elections took place on November 6 in the United States. They were seen – correctly – as a referendum on President Donald Trump. In general, the results point to some trouble ahead for Trump. Despite a very strong economy, complete with low unemployment, Republicans lost control of the House of Representatives. They are now down by about 37 seats to the Democrats. On the other hand, the party increased its control of the Senate by one and now hold a two-seat lead in that chamber of Congress.

 

Most parties in power get defeated – often quite badly – in the mid-term elections. Trump’s losses are somewhat less that those suffered by Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama in 1994, 2006 and 2010 respectively. Democrats had a significant advantage in fund raising as almost all of Hollywood and the ultra-rich US elite support “The Resistance” against Trump. And nearly every single close election recount had Democrats winning over Republicans, which was almost certainly due to election stealing/tampering (more common in the US than many suppose).

The demographics of the election show the usual breakdowns. Non-whites voted for Democrats with the following percentages:

Blacks – 90%

Asians – 77%

Hispanics – 69%

Actually, Trump did slightly better among non-whites in 2016 than previous Republicans such as Mitt Romney and John McCain.

Among whites, Republicans only won by a margin of 54% to 44%. White men broke 60% to 39% for Republicans while white women were split 49% to 49%. The fact that so many whites decided to vote for Democrats is a big warning sign for Republicans. For years, the Republican party has been drifting toward becoming the party of white people. With roughly 80% of non-whites voting Democrats, and with the electorate getting less and less white with every election, the writing is on the wall for the GOP. Unless Trump can get the white vote up to 60% Republican in 2020, he will likely lose reelection.

Donald Trump pursuing the white working class vote in West Virginia during his 2016 presidential campaign

Working class whites in states such as Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania gave the election to Trump in 2016. This was due to his stance on issues such as immigration and trade and his populist rhetoric on economic issues. This base has been slowly drifting away from Trump in the last two years.

Likewise, the Dissident Right, which also came out for Trump in 2016, has been disappointed with his performance in the last two year. Ann Coulter routinely calls out Trump on Twitter for his tough talk but inaction on a border wall, birthright citizenship and stopping caravans of illegal immigrants. Gregory Hood of American Renaissance is even more blunt:

“President Trump has governed like a moderate, while speaking like a hardliner—the worst possible combination. He has done so unnecessarily. One struggles to recapture the sense of the 2016 campaign. In retrospect, it seems like something out of Homeric times, with almost supernatural forces intervening in the affairs of men. Everything had to break Donald Trump’s way; Hillary Clinton had to make every possible mistake. Somehow, everything happened exactly the way it had to, leading to one of the most remarkable upsets in American political history.

During both the primary and general election, candidate Trump seemed to run as much against the Republican as the Democratic party. Some of his promises had cross-party appeal—notably his calls for a massive infrastructure program and his pledge to protect certain entitlements. His health care proposals were admittedly vague, as he simultaneously promised to repeal Obamacare and replace it with “something great.” However, because President Trump had directly attacked the policy preferences of Republicans such as Speaker Paul Ryan and free-market institutions such as the Club for Growth, it seemed reasonable to believe he could lead the GOP away from the unpopular, wonkish economic policies that had little appeal outside the Beltway Right. The victory of President Trump was a victory for right-wing critics of Conservatism Inc., as he showed that its support for a liberal immigration policy, an interventionist foreign policy, and slashing entitlements had no real support among the conservative grassroots, let alone the larger public.

Yet since taking office, with rare exceptions, President Trump has governed like just another Republican. The president’s first major legislative initiative was a disastrous attempt to replace Obamacare. It is not surprising that President Trump did not have a specific “great” plan regarding healthcare, yet the conservative establishment’s failure to provide a workable alternative to Obamacare is testament to its uselessness.”

Conservative columnist Ann Coulter, once a pro-Trump campaigner, is now a critic

Demographic Realities

Since the election, the press has been making much of how demographics are turning formerly red states (Republicans) into blue states (Democrats). This is entirely due to mass immigration. The US takes in over 1 million legal immigrants every year. About 90% of these people are non-white.

My own Congressional district in northern Virginia (VA-10) is indicative of this. It went for the Democrats for the first time in 40 years. Conservative Republican Frank Wolf won the seat in the Reagan landslide of 1980 and didn’t relinquish it until he retired in 2014. That year, moderate Republican Barbara Comstock (who favors high immigration) won the seat by 16 points (56% to 40%) over her Democratic challenger. In 2016, her margin of victory was only 5.5 points. This year she lost by a margin of 56% to 44% to liberal Democrat Jennifer Wexton.

While there are many reasons for her loss, the main one is this. In 2008, VA-10 was 80% white. It is now 65% white.

Virginia used to be a rural, Southern and conservative state. It is now less than 56% white. Republicans have not won a state-wide election since 2009. This same trend is about to turn once solidly red states such as Georgia, North Carolina, Florida, Arizona and even Texas blue. Orange County, California (outside Los Angeles) used to be perhaps the most reliably conservative district in the nation. It was the home of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Yet it now has all Democrat representatives in Congress.

In terms of the 2020 elections, President Trump still has time to right the ship. Building his promised border wall with Mexico would be a great first step. He has also mentioned ending birthright citizenship (where children born in the US – even to illegals – are automatically given US citizenship) and affirmative action. If his actions can match his talking and threats, Trump can win reelection. But after 2020, demographics may permanently sweep the GOP away at the national level.

James Knight writes from increasingly vibrant northern Virginia.

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