What's been happening in America has been taking place in the mother country as well. There used to be saying that England was always ten years ahead of the U.S. in negative trends and that may still be true. But both nations are in the same boat demographically and culturally.
Nick Griffin has been involved in British Nationalist politics for half a century. He’s best known for succeeding John Tyndall as the head of the British National Party (BNP) at the height of its success in 1999 and remained at the helm until 2014. The BNP elected a number of candidates in the ‘90s and early ‘00s and Griffin himself was one of several members of the party elected to the European Parliament. However, his ascension to the chairmanship of the BNP was achieved against the strong wishes of Tyndall, who had founded and led the party from its beginnings and led to a lot of hard feelings, and Griffin’s leadership was eventually marked by a number of accusations of financial impropriety and misplaced priorities and the BNP fell into a nearly defunct state by 2014. I’m not taking sides, just giving some background as I respect anyone who keeps at it through thick and thin (and it’s vastly more thin than thick in nationalist activism both here and across the pond) and Griffin has plenty of talent. This article was originally published in American Free Press, for which Griffin now writes. American Free Press is the last patriotic print publication standing in the U.S. after I discontinued my own, The Freedom Times, in 2023.
By Nick Griffin
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” The opening of L. P. Hartley’s “The Go Between” neatly encapsulates how those of us of a certain age feel about the enormous changes to society since we were at school.
But if it were true when the 1900 turn of “this hideous century” was considered from the perspective of 1953, the process has accelerated to such a bewildering extent that people could be forgiven for trying to block it out; to try to forget what we have lost. Or, rather, what has been stolen from us.
I suspect that many of the changes seen by most middle-aged Brits will ring a bell with AFP readers as well.
Born in London in 1959, my early school memories include one Black boy, about whom I remember nothing save that he was there, and an entrepreneurial Jewish lad who sold me a Great Crested Newt in a jam jar for sixpence.
Apart from those two, everybody in my school in suburban north London was a native Brit. Most, if not all of us, were the children of parents who had lived in the capital during World War II.
The once ubiquitous boarded-up bomb sites were already quite rare, but the pond which produced the newt was one of a line made in an open field and piece of woodland by a stick of Luftwaffe bombs. While the girls played hopscotch, the favorite game for the boys remained Spitfires vs. Me109s, as we roared around the playground with arms outstretched. Day after day, we saved Britain from being invaded.
True, our parents said that conductors on the famous red double-deckers would call out “Passports please” as they arrived in the tiny enclaves where a few thousand post-1948 immigrants had settled. But, apart from the West Indians in Brixton, the Indians in Southhall and the strangely dressed Jews of Stamfort Hill, the only foreigners anyone was even aware of were Irish and a scattering of East European refugees.
Outside of London, Britain was even more homogeneous. School photographs sometimes illustrate the difference 60 years has made. They confirm that, even in northern mill towns – which now resemble Pakistan far more than England – the schools back then were still as “hideously White” (to use the phrase infamously used by the BBC) as mine.
The rate of change was speeding up by the time I joined the anti-immigration National Front in 1974, but Britain was still a White country with a few black and brown spots. Margaret Thatcher celebrated her 1979 election victory by immediately breaking her pledge to halt immigration, letting in more than 20,000 Chinese and Vietnamese boat people, but England was still overwhelmingly “ours,” with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland even more so.
While this essay is about the recollections of a “Boomer,” the truth is that Britons still only in their early 40s can also remember that now very different country. It was the war criminal Tony Blair who opened the floodgates that turned the place foreign. From the moment of his election in 1997, his government sent envoys all over the world to invite in millions of immigrants.
The aim, revealed quite shamelessly a few years after, was to “rub the right’s nose in diversity.” And, of course, to import millions of new Labour voters. Your Democrats are not the only ones to have turned gerrymandering into a massive industry of fraud, violence and alienation.
When the native-born responded by electing the Tories in 2010, they expected the flood to end. The capture of the Conservative Party by the liberal elite, however, was so far advanced that the new regime actually opened the gates even wider. With several hundred thousand native Brits emigrating every year, and the older Boomers dying off rapidly, net immigration in the range of a million every years has meant that even small towns which had completely escaped the earlier waves of “diversity” have been “enriched.”
The unexpected Brexit vote of 2016 was a collective howl of protest from working class England against this resented transformation, as was the electorate’s foolish decision to give Labour another try last June. Like the Tories before him, Starmer’s anti-immigration noises ceased the moment he was safely elected.
The immigration flood continues. We are already the minority in London and the second city Birmingham. One-third of school children – and rising fast – are born to immigrant parents. Real English is unheard in vast swathes of our towns and cities. According to population statisticians, the indigenous British will be in the minority by 2063. When Brits feel like foreigners in our own country, it’s all too well founded.
And yet, it isn’t only immigration which has done this. I mentioned the sixpence I paid for a newt. Actually, we all called the little silver coin a “tanner,” and it was part of a currency using pounds, shillings and pence, which dated back centuries. There were two farthings to a ha’penny. Two ha’pennies to a penny. Twelve pennies to a shilling. And 20 shillings to a pound.
I guess that inflation had pushed your nickels and dimes to effective obsolescence even before electronic payments became more common. But, in our case, we lost our old currency, complete with worn coins which could date back to Victorian times, virtually overnight, in 1972. In their place came a much simpler decimal currency, with 100 “new p” to an increasingly devalued pound.
The cultural generation gap caused by this, which went hand-in-hand with local government “reorganization” that abolished many of our old counties, is even greater than that caused by immigration. No one below the age of 60 has the faintest understanding of the strange pricing system seen occasionally in old movies.
The majority of Brits do still remember the time before our noses were rubbed in “diversity.” The vast majority of us knew the time when the dominant accent of London was “cockney,” now strangled by London “multi-cultural English,” a moronic-sounding fake gangsta patois which does at least reflect the homicidal lawlessness that has gripped our once friendly capital.
Perhaps the biggest change of all, however, is how we see our neighbors and fellow countrymen. In 1960s’ Britain, the default position was trust. As a six-year-old, I walked to school across that piece of open country in which Hitler’s bomb had made nature-filled ponds. We were told to meet with friends who lived further along the street, and ordered not to talk to strange men, but, apart from that, we were free – and safe – to wander and play wherever we wanted.
Those below the age of about 30 lack the faintest conception of the freedom that has been taken from them and their own children. Likewise, when I mentioned on “X” how we all used to hitch-hike all over the country as teenagers, I was astounded by the number of Gen Z comments that didn’t merely express surprise and envy, but actual disbelief. The idea of asking strangers for a life is something so unthinkably unlikely and dangerous to them that they believe it’s a myth, something we make up to show how tough we were “back in the day.”
Don’t get me wrong. I still love my country, and even in its changed state there is still much to commend it. If you’ve never visited, I strongly recommend that you do so, before things really go wrong. Don’t worry about feeling like a foreigner – we all do!
Nick Griffin has been involved in British Nationalist politics for half a century. He’s best known for succeeding John Tyndall as the head of the British National Party (BNP) at the height of its success in 1999 and remained at the helm until 2014. The BNP elected a number of candidates in the ‘90s and early ‘00s and Griffin himself was one of several members of the party elected to the European Parliament. However, his ascension to the chairmanship of the BNP was achieved against the strong wishes of Tyndall, who had founded and led the party from its beginnings and led to a lot of hard feelings, and Griffin’s leadership was eventually marked by a number of accusations of financial impropriety and misplaced priorities and the BNP fell into a nearly defunct state by 2014. I’m not taking sides, just giving some background as I respect anyone who keeps at it through thick and thin (and it’s vastly more thin than thick in nationalist activism both here and across the pond) and Griffin has plenty of talent. This article was originally published in American Free Press, for which Griffin now writes. American Free Press is the last patriotic print publication standing in the U.S. after I discontinued my own, The Freedom Times, in 2023.
By Nick Griffin
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” The opening of L. P. Hartley’s “The Go Between” neatly encapsulates how those of us of a certain age feel about the enormous changes to society since we were at school.
But if it were true when the 1900 turn of “this hideous century” was considered from the perspective of 1953, the process has accelerated to such a bewildering extent that people could be forgiven for trying to block it out; to try to forget what we have lost. Or, rather, what has been stolen from us.
I suspect that many of the changes seen by most middle-aged Brits will ring a bell with AFP readers as well.
Born in London in 1959, my early school memories include one Black boy, about whom I remember nothing save that he was there, and an entrepreneurial Jewish lad who sold me a Great Crested Newt in a jam jar for sixpence.
Apart from those two, everybody in my school in suburban north London was a native Brit. Most, if not all of us, were the children of parents who had lived in the capital during World War II.
The once ubiquitous boarded-up bomb sites were already quite rare, but the pond which produced the newt was one of a line made in an open field and piece of woodland by a stick of Luftwaffe bombs. While the girls played hopscotch, the favorite game for the boys remained Spitfires vs. Me109s, as we roared around the playground with arms outstretched. Day after day, we saved Britain from being invaded.
True, our parents said that conductors on the famous red double-deckers would call out “Passports please” as they arrived in the tiny enclaves where a few thousand post-1948 immigrants had settled. But, apart from the West Indians in Brixton, the Indians in Southhall and the strangely dressed Jews of Stamfort Hill, the only foreigners anyone was even aware of were Irish and a scattering of East European refugees.
Outside of London, Britain was even more homogeneous. School photographs sometimes illustrate the difference 60 years has made. They confirm that, even in northern mill towns – which now resemble Pakistan far more than England – the schools back then were still as “hideously White” (to use the phrase infamously used by the BBC) as mine.
The rate of change was speeding up by the time I joined the anti-immigration National Front in 1974, but Britain was still a White country with a few black and brown spots. Margaret Thatcher celebrated her 1979 election victory by immediately breaking her pledge to halt immigration, letting in more than 20,000 Chinese and Vietnamese boat people, but England was still overwhelmingly “ours,” with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland even more so.
While this essay is about the recollections of a “Boomer,” the truth is that Britons still only in their early 40s can also remember that now very different country. It was the war criminal Tony Blair who opened the floodgates that turned the place foreign. From the moment of his election in 1997, his government sent envoys all over the world to invite in millions of immigrants.
The aim, revealed quite shamelessly a few years after, was to “rub the right’s nose in diversity.” And, of course, to import millions of new Labour voters. Your Democrats are not the only ones to have turned gerrymandering into a massive industry of fraud, violence and alienation.
When the native-born responded by electing the Tories in 2010, they expected the flood to end. The capture of the Conservative Party by the liberal elite, however, was so far advanced that the new regime actually opened the gates even wider. With several hundred thousand native Brits emigrating every year, and the older Boomers dying off rapidly, net immigration in the range of a million every years has meant that even small towns which had completely escaped the earlier waves of “diversity” have been “enriched.”
The unexpected Brexit vote of 2016 was a collective howl of protest from working class England against this resented transformation, as was the electorate’s foolish decision to give Labour another try last June. Like the Tories before him, Starmer’s anti-immigration noises ceased the moment he was safely elected.
The immigration flood continues. We are already the minority in London and the second city Birmingham. One-third of school children – and rising fast – are born to immigrant parents. Real English is unheard in vast swathes of our towns and cities. According to population statisticians, the indigenous British will be in the minority by 2063. When Brits feel like foreigners in our own country, it’s all too well founded.
And yet, it isn’t only immigration which has done this. I mentioned the sixpence I paid for a newt. Actually, we all called the little silver coin a “tanner,” and it was part of a currency using pounds, shillings and pence, which dated back centuries. There were two farthings to a ha’penny. Two ha’pennies to a penny. Twelve pennies to a shilling. And 20 shillings to a pound.
I guess that inflation had pushed your nickels and dimes to effective obsolescence even before electronic payments became more common. But, in our case, we lost our old currency, complete with worn coins which could date back to Victorian times, virtually overnight, in 1972. In their place came a much simpler decimal currency, with 100 “new p” to an increasingly devalued pound.
The cultural generation gap caused by this, which went hand-in-hand with local government “reorganization” that abolished many of our old counties, is even greater than that caused by immigration. No one below the age of 60 has the faintest understanding of the strange pricing system seen occasionally in old movies.
The majority of Brits do still remember the time before our noses were rubbed in “diversity.” The vast majority of us knew the time when the dominant accent of London was “cockney,” now strangled by London “multi-cultural English,” a moronic-sounding fake gangsta patois which does at least reflect the homicidal lawlessness that has gripped our once friendly capital.
Perhaps the biggest change of all, however, is how we see our neighbors and fellow countrymen. In 1960s’ Britain, the default position was trust. As a six-year-old, I walked to school across that piece of open country in which Hitler’s bomb had made nature-filled ponds. We were told to meet with friends who lived further along the street, and ordered not to talk to strange men, but, apart from that, we were free – and safe – to wander and play wherever we wanted.
Those below the age of about 30 lack the faintest conception of the freedom that has been taken from them and their own children. Likewise, when I mentioned on “X” how we all used to hitch-hike all over the country as teenagers, I was astounded by the number of Gen Z comments that didn’t merely express surprise and envy, but actual disbelief. The idea of asking strangers for a life is something so unthinkably unlikely and dangerous to them that they believe it’s a myth, something we make up to show how tough we were “back in the day.”
Don’t get me wrong. I still love my country, and even in its changed state there is still much to commend it. If you’ve never visited, I strongly recommend that you do so, before things really go wrong. Don’t worry about feeling like a foreigner – we all do!