A Muslim woman wearing a burqah walks down a London street in 2005. Increasing immigration to the United Kingdom from Islamic countries has created severe political conflict in Britain. Photo courtesy CS Smith.

I have lived in London for the past four decades, mostly working as a journalist for the BBC and The Times, and have always thought of it as one of the greatest cities in all history. My wife, a former BBC television news presenter and daughter of a British naval officer, has loved it even more. But recently at breakfast, she suddenly lifted her eyes from the newspaper and said: “Let’s sell up and leave.”

She had not panicked so badly last July, when four suicide bombers killed 52 innocent passengers on the city’s underground train network. She loves our house on the northern bank of the Thames: the ancient river, with its working barges, sailing yachts, and ocean-going cruisers, is a living organism. London has some of the greatest libraries in the world for my work, and, more importantly, our daughter and most of our friends are here.

What made my wife anxious was the belief that the city, and by extension the whole of Britain, had become politically unstable. The results of May’s local municipality elections had just been announced and a virtually all-Muslim party—formed early last year by George Galloway, an anarchist admirer of Saddam Hussein and former Labour member of Parliament—had captured nearly a third of the council’s seats. The winner, the Labour Party, is also locally dominated by Bangladeshi Muslim immigrants and is rumored, despite vehement denials, to have won only by resorting to vote rigging. This practice is new to Britain and is typically associated with a large Muslim presence of Pakistani or Bangladeshi origin. It takes the form of political activists requesting that people under their influence or care, such as those they employ or look after, be allowed to vote by mail. When the ballots arrive, they are collected by the activists and filled in without securing the consent of the people concerned. A few people have been convicted for such fraud.

A Shifting Demographic

Of course, signs that our locality was becoming less European had been noticeable for years. Had my kind and liberal wife, now a university lecturer in broadcast journalism, really wanted to see, she would have noticed that, as one moved northward away from the narrow strip of big houses beside the river, the white inhabitants of the large, publicly owned tenement blocks had largely disappeared over the past two decades. As the newcomers were settled in thousands of new high-rise apartments by the local authorities, the previous inhabitants, poor native whites and East-European Jews, moved out in a phenomenon known as “White Flight.” Other signs of demographic change included the increasing number of women clad in black, all-enveloping burqahs, the erection of mosques, municipality leaflets arriving in the mail in several languages, and attacks on white males passing though our local park by groups of teenage Muslim boys.

One more news item that was even more disturbing, though not surprising, was that a far-right party had come out of nowhere to become the second largest party in the neighboring municipality, Barking. There, too, Labour managed to hang on to power with 19 seats, but the British National Party (BNP), which urges the expulsion of all non-European immigrants from Britain, captured 11 seats in the same May elections to overtake the former major players, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. Barking suddenly became a national newspaper headline as ”the race hate capital of Britain,” causing soul searching among the country’s well meaning liberal elite as to how such an outrage had become possible.

A week or two before the May elections, Margaret Hodge, the local Labour member of Parliament and a member of Tony Blair’s cabinet, had caused controversy by announcing that “8 out of 10” voters she canvassed in her Barking constituency told her they were thinking of voting for the BNP. She was accused of giving publicity to racists. She answered that reality had to be faced and the grievances of the local whites had to be heard if the danger were to be averted. The whites had told her that they were “fed up” with decades of “discrimination” in favor of foreigners who had never paid a penny in taxes. As soon as they arrived from the airport and said they were homeless, these foreigners were given the best and largest housing while the homeless children of the whites were ignored. The minister implied that the objectors might have a point and that, if the mainstream parties did not pay them attention, they had other parties to turn to in a democracy.

The British are a proud, even arrogant, people in some respects, despite trying not to appear so. On numerous occasions I have had members of the political class tell me that they “would never be like the Germans,” meaning that their people are much more experienced in the ways of the world; during the days of empire they learned that tolerance was best, and indulging in ideologies and social theorizing of any kind was dangerous. The thought that the BNP could gather enough muscle in the country to make life unpleasant on the streets is ridiculous to such elites. But I am not so sure—there are signs that some sections of that same political class, including my fellow journalists, may be waking to the danger. Certainly Margaret Hodge’s announcement that the majority of her constituents were thinking of voting BNP is still reverberating.

The Overall Situation

In large areas of Britain, immigration has not become a front-running electoral issue. But they are sparsely populated rural areas with relatively few seats in parliament. Elsewhere, in the urban conglomerates, more and more people are noticing the development of ghettoes as immigrants take over some districts while indigenous populations move out. Recently, the chairman of the government’s own Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Philips, himself a first-generation West Indian immigrant, said that Britain was “sleepwalking toward segregation.”

This is all natural. Most of Britain’s immigrants come from the rural parts of Asia and Africa, where they are regarded by their own countrymen as less culturally advanced. When they arrive here, they are bewildered by alien European ways. They seek solace, understanding, and employment among their own people. They watch satellite television beamed in from their homelands and, if literate, read only their own newspapers. In short, they soon find that they do not need the natives and have spent months or even years without having been required to utter more than a few words of English. Their children go to schools where over 90 percent of the pupils do not have English as their mother tongue. Furthermore, Britain has always allowed these immigrants to import their own religious leaders from their own villages, often steeped in jihad and little else. This is reminiscent of the shock the French felt last year when a survey in Marseille, the country’s chief southern port, revealed that out of 56 imams only 3 spoke French.