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Look upon them, and weep.
Recently @2rafa responded to a jannied comment of mine on Reddit saying that within 80 years, my homeland and her homeland would still exist and have roughly a similar character to what they currently do but England would not, as its people and its traditions slowly get replaced by les peuples outremers. The original character of the towns and cities of the UK would slowly be gnawed at and eaten away while the institutions, traditions and social fabric dissolve in the alkahest of multiculturalism. She mentioned that it isn't surprising that the native population would fight against it as this replacement basically severs the link between the them and the future.
I agree with that sentiment and I absolutely agree the original character of what made Great Britain truly Great has been lost. But this loss didn't happen thirty or forty or whenever the immigrants started to come in big numbers years ago, rather it happened in the aftermath of the Second World War when the UK dropped its long standing traditions of Classical Liberalism, "an Englishman's home is his castle" and the Anglo developed system of limited government, preferring to go for the expansive and nannying welfare state model instead.
There is a saying that tradition is like a legacy codebase, half of it is deprecated stuff you can get rid of safely while half of it is absolutely mission critical to the project functioning and it's very difficult to tell exactly which bit is which. The UK had over the centuries since the enlightenment created both a social and legal system based on individual rights centred on liberty and freedom and built on a bedrock of Christian values where it was expected that the government would minimise it's interference with what you do with your personal property and take steps to ensure other people also couldn't interfere with it. Charity and helping the less fortunate was very strongly encouraged and the Christian values indoctrinated in everyone since birth meant that lots of people with the means to do so gave away a large portion of their income/wealth to the needy, but crucially it wasn't forced onto anyone. Indeed income tax was first introduced as a temporary measure to fund the British armed forces during the Napoleonic Wars, an existential threat to the country and most definitely not the "lets use it to pay the rent of those who don't have the skills to earn enough to stay in London otherwise" racket that's going on at the moment.
This system generally functioned extremely well, but like all systems there were edge cases where it failed. In a severely misguided attempt since the end of WWII (and continuing until the present day!) successive governments tinkered with this system and slowly removed the things that made the system work (e.g. The Town and Country Planning Act 1947 which gave locals extreme levels of say into what you could build on your own property and is the prime culprit for the UK's current housing crisis), while if anything amplifying the things which were peripheral at best originally and now have become burdens upon society (e.g. how poor people renting in London effectively have the right to get to stay in of one of the only two alpha++ cities in the world and the taxpayer will fund their rent if they can't afford it themselves).
At the point the immigrants started arriving "Great" Britain was already in the process of dying. The things that made it great were being removed slowly the the British themselves. Plus new fads that were counterproductive like the destruction of the nuclear family were being adopted wholesale. It was only a small matter of time before things degenerated to the point where it was necessary to either import immigrants to make up for the collapsing birth rate or accept extreme economic pain for the vast majority of people. Britain choose to do the former. Indeed as Kipling warned a good thirty years in advance:
On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."
What remains of the original culture of the UK are not the things that made it great. Much like how a cadaver (initially at least) still looks like the person when they were alive but has lost that divine spark that made it more than just a heap of flesh and bones what we have at the moment is little more than a poor caricature of what the Great Thinkers of the Enlightenment envisaged the perfect society to be like. It is an ersatz, cargo cult imitation where things as fundamental as the right against double jeopardy are no longer respected (see the Criminal Justice Act 2003).
Now admittedly the specific cases behind why this right was abolished were quite clearly where a guilty person had been acquitted but was clearly guilty after new DNA evidence was discovered and so their retrial led to justice being delivered (and equally, the family of Emmett Till were denied justice due to the Fifth Amendment which protects against double jeopardy in the US) but at the same time this change showed that another fundamental enlightenment ideal, that "you should not create laws based upon a few specific examples, but rather upon general principles" was no longer respected.
As such, the rot had already set in on the inside well before immigrants started coming over in large numbers and changing the outward, visible character and appearance of British society. Hence what they are now replacing is not a culture with hundreds of years of history, but a thoroughly modern creation that for most of its existence has had mass inward migration. This bastardised culture is not worthy of the protection that should have been granted to Enlightenment Liberalism, but unfortunately that is dead and has been long buried, and no amount of effort will ever bring it back. Indeed as a crude mockery of what I consider to be the best societal system discovered yet by man I would prefer if it disappeared as soon as possible. I see modern British culture as belonging to the same class of objects as smallpox and polio - something to be eradicated post haste - rather than that of the Giant Panda and the Snow Leopard - valuable diversity that should be protected by humanity and nourished.
Just yesterday ethnicity estimates for the 2021 UK census were revealed. As expected the percentage of the UK that is white British fell from around 81% to 75% since 2021. Given the continuing high migration that this country is now basically reliant on - the recent budget depended on very high levels of inward migration to be balanced, lower migration than expected in the next few years will create a short term fiscal black hole that will be very painful to British society, see what happened when Truss and Kwarteng tried to borrow with abandon- and the higher birthrate of immigrants it is practically a given that the Replacement is going to happen come hell or high water. British culture and the country character will continue to change over the coming generations and it will be best for the natives themselves if they just go with the flow rather than trying to fight an inevitability.
Well, if you want Limited Government then I hear Somalia is a great place. You can even buy arms in open air markets with minimal regulations. Perhaps you can sense my dripping sarcasm, but I have little patience for these kinds of arguments. Taxes can go up and they can go down, but what - or rather, who - made Britain were the Anglo-Saxons.
This type of argument is the right-wing version of the blank slate.
Singapore is actually a great place and their government is significantly more limited on the tax and spend side (well, they have a ton of social housing, but that's a good thing). The UAE is also pretty good with a very limited government, Dubai has effectively run out of oil and they still do extremely well because of government fees on transactions. You don't have to choose the literal worst option.
Yeah, and it's also a place that is 75% Han Chinese, thereby proving my point. Demographics will always trump whatever laws is on paper, libertarian or not.
Total overstatement. I feel the need to drag out the trope of East/West Germany and North/South Korea.
Don't know about Korea, but at least for Germany there were some notable differences even before the split after WWII. To name a few:
the east was much more agrarian than the west, although there were of course many industrial centers like Halle, Berlin or Breslau/Wrocław but these were much more spread-out than in the west
politically, the east was dominated by the protestant Junker class, the descendants of the feudal nobility that conquered/colonized the east, while in the west industrialist families like the Krupps had the most influence, with a much more mixed religious background overall, as most German Catholics lived in the areas that were to become part of West Germany
in terms of cultural history, the west was largely congruent with the core German territory since the first time there was something like Germany, while the east was a colonial conquest taken from the territory of the relatively unorganized Western Slavic tribes like the Sorbs or the Pomeranians that were stuck between Medieval Germany and Poland. Go back in history far enough and I guarantee that anyone whose ancestors have lived in Eastern Germany for a while will have a lot of Slavic ancestry, this is completely unusual for Western Germany outside of regions that have received heavy Polish immigration in the Industrial Age
I can't find a good map to illustrate this, but the most notable political thing about the territory of DDR - and I mean the specific territory - was that even during the pre-WW2 times they were the strongest area of support for the left parties, ie SPD/USPD/KPD combined. In the West German territories the Centre was a force, while the areas annexed by Poland were the ones where the Nazis had their most hardcore base of support, but the left dominated most of the territories that would end up forming the DDR.
(also @Syo)
Maybe these maps help: SPD, USPD, KPD; for comparison NSDAP, DNVP (monarchists, revanchists and hard conservatives), Zentrum (Catholic centrists and conservatives).
Looking at these, I agree that there is a trend, but it's not that strong and centered less on East Germany as a whole and more on Saxony* in particular, especially for the KPD votes. Both Nazis and DNVP were pretty strong in Brandenburg, Mecklenburg and Pomerania, all three of which would become part of the DDR.
*Funnily enough, my parents always called the Saxons the 5th occupying power (besides Russia, the US, France and the UK), because chances were high when talking to a representative of state power like a policeman in East Berlin you'd be spoken to in Saxon dialect. EDIT: I just found this article from the early 60s that investigates this cliché via a statistical deep dive quite like the debates about Jewish overrepresentation elsewhere in this thread. The result: while strongly overrepresented among the chief leaders of the DDR, Saxons are actually underrepresented in various important committees and positions.
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I can't make out the territory which would in 1945 find itself behind the Iron Curtain, on these maps of results of German elections from 1920-1930.
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