How having 13 million foreigners living permanently in our country has affected Britain

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:02]Hello again.

[00:00:04]The news that half a dozen Afghan asylum seekers have been arrested in Norwich on charges relating to the sexual abuse of children will probably come as little or no surprise to the average citizen of this country.

[00:00:20]There was a time when such a news item would have provoked amazement or perhaps disbelief.

[00:00:26]What on earth could a bunch of Afghan tribesmen possibly be doing near the Norfolk walls? It would have sounded too weird for words.

[00:00:36]These days though, we simply shrug and accept that even the quietest and most pleasant of our towns have been colonized by dubious individuals from the third world.

[00:00:47]It began, of course, with London and the other large British cities. And then towns in Yorkshire became centers for immigration from Pakistan.

[00:00:56]Then a few years ago, Trickle became a flood and before we knew it, everywhere was being overrun with foreigners.

[00:01:04]People who might be perfectly okay in themselves, but who spoke different languages from us followed different religions and preferred to associate with each other rather than integrating with the existing community.

[00:01:18]It all happened so rapidly from the early part of this century onwards that we most of us didn't really grasp the nature of what was going on until we suddenly noticed that our own street was becoming full of foreigners.

[00:01:33]The Essex town of Lon on the very edge of London is a case in point. Lon was 25 years ago a bit like Chwell. It was entirely white and many of the people living there had roots in the east end of London. After the second world war, many people from East London moved out into Essex so that places like Romford, Lon and Harour shared a common heritage with the East End.

[00:01:59]I was born in Custom House down by the docks and I grew up in Ilford which was at that time in Essex. My grandmother lived in Romford and I had uncles in Hall Church in Dadam. So nothing of a tribe of cousins in East Ham. He's a Dcoy half gypsy.

[00:02:17]When I moved to Lon in 1999, it was like coming home because all the ways of speech, the culture, the outlook and so on were perfectly familiar to me. Lton was at that time completely white English and full of the sort of people I grew up with. We used to joke when we moved there that a good slogan for the town council would be welcome to Lam the town immigration forgot. Today the place is simply unrecognizable.

[00:02:48]The older folk have for the most part like me moved away.

[00:02:52]Ironically many of them chose to move to Norfolk because that was unscathed by immigration until quite recently. The arrest of all those Afghans in Norwich shows that this is no longer the case.

[00:03:06]Today in Lton, you're likely, more likely actually, to hear Romania being spoken in Rectory Lane, the road running down to Devon station.

[00:03:17]When last I got off the tube there, having come to visit, I was the only white person to get off the train. The place is simply unrecognizable and instead of the distinct East End workingass character that the Debon estate on the edge of Ldon had 25 years ago, it has become just another multicultural place indistinguishable from anywhere else on the outskirts of London.

[00:03:44]Why do I object to this? It's very simple. I used to like hearing people who spoke like my relatives. I had an affinity with the community there.

[00:03:56]Near to Lon is Lamporn End, a little country hamlet where I used to go for picnics with my family in the 1950s and 1960s.

[00:04:06]My wife's mother also knew Lamp End because in the 30s she used to go there for Sunday school outings from Forest Gates.

[00:04:15]The people who have moved to Lon now have no such connections with the place nor any memories of the countryside nearby. They're not rooted here. The Romanians have their own church, St. Nicholas in Rectory Lane, but acquired by the Romanian Orthodox Church some years ago. The Pakistanis who moved there do not in general speak to the white neighbors. And the street where I lived is not a random now. It's a random collection of strangers from various parts of the world. When first I moved there, all the neighbors knew each other and all were white English.

[00:04:51]We are witnessing the end of England in a sense. The fragmentation of a nation which has been here for over a thousand years and I feel sad about that.

[00:05:02]Little wonder that I have abandoned the place now and spend my days walking up and down mountains instead of visiting London and so on.