Londonistan: The content is in the book’s title.  Melanie Phillips, the author, had great difficulty in finding a publisher; no main house would take it, even though she is a distinguished and successful writer, and in the end it came out in 2006 with a minor publisher, Gibson Square.  The book’s theme is that Britain has become the European hub for the promotion, recruitment, and financing of Islamic terrorism, whose adherents are a fifth column in the land.  Ideas that can kill are spread over “a continuum of religious thought which acts as a recruiting sergeant for violence.”  The reviewers were sharply divided, with most taking the book with the utmost seriousness, while the Observer compared Phillips to “a crazed boxer” and the Independent’s Kenan Malik opined that, “if you want fear and hysteria, nobody does it better than Phillips.”  I think we have our bearings.

That was 2006.  In the dozen years since Londonistan was published, there have been numerous Islamic terrorist attacks on the Continent, and in Manchester and Westminster (March/May 2017).  At the latest atrocity, Theresa May was moved to remark, “Enough is enough,” with the air of one saying They really have gone too far this time.  These people!  The government has slowly stirred from its supine attitude toward the Islamic danger, and now plans to enforce a law that will compel Muslim marriages to couple sharia with the normal law of the land.  That would allow Muslim wives a divorce under our standards.  It is a slow-moving shift of policy, and Melanie Phillips, reviewing the current state of affairs in May 2017, has said, “Denial still flows over Londonistan.”  The Establishment’s policy of appeasement toward Islam is largely unchanged.  What is changing is the sheer brute fact of London itself, its numbers and power.

The 2011 Census found that just under 60 percent of the population was white, while nonwhite groups made up 40 percent.  That was already an underestimate—in 2015 the number was put at 44-percent nonwhite—because illegal immigrants are not punctilious in disclosing their names to the authorities.  And the government has openly admitted that it has no idea of the number of illegal immigrants in Britain.  A startling ray of light came from the BBC in a well-researched report of February 20, 2013.  The story was headed “Why have the white British left London?”  In the first decade of the 21st century the number of white people in the capital fell by 620,000, equivalent to the entire population of Glasgow moving out.  This story was not enlarged upon or repeated; it is on the official index of banned subjects.  One answer to the headline question is that it pays people to leave: Anyone owning a house or apartment in London has made massive gains, and they or their heirs can sell and go.  They do.  The Daily Mail reports the latest figures from the Office of National Statistics: “London is seeing the biggest exodus to other parts of the UK for more than a decade.”  From the middle of 2016 to the middle of 2017, 336,000 people moved out of London, while 229,000—that we know about—took up residence.

We now have the latest local election results for London, which give us something more than a daguerreotype of the capital.  Politically, the broad picture is essentially unchanged, with the Tory citadels of Wands worth and Westminster holding off the Labour challenge, much to the glee of headline writers.  The forlorn ex-supporters of UKIP, looking for a good home, found it in the traditional parties, mainly the Conservatives.  But at the end of the count, the number of London’s Labour councilors, the best measure of party gains, was up by two percent.  London is and will remain a city-state, like Renaissance Venice, that thinks differently from the rest of the country.  Its vital statistics are astoundingly at odds with provincial England; as President Trump has noted, knife-killings in London are now at an all-time high (at least 51 to date this year, as of July 31—A&E admissions to London hospitals for stab wounds are running at 100 per week).  They are almost entirely black-on-black, a feature that the media do not care to dwell on.  But the Daily Mail has helpfully published photographs of all the victims, and with one or two borderline exceptions they are black.  It is a fair inference that the knife-wielders are as well.  Unlike all other official statistics, knife-killings cannot be massaged out of existence by the authorities.  They are hard and real.  With them go many minor crimes, also on the increase, but unnumbered.  Shoplifting is not now investigated by the police when the theft is under £200.  The moral for shoplifters: Walk away with an item with a £190 sticker price, and you’ll be all right.  That crime has therefore ceased to exist.  The call goes up for a crime policy like that of New York, which has been extremely successful.  But that would mean overturning the policy of Theresa May, Home Secretary and Prime Minister for six years.  It is not going to happen anytime soon.  In the meantime the crime record of the capital does not add to its attractions.

London is of course multifaceted.  The most important benign immigrant body comes from France.  Boris Johnson likes to boast that some 400,000 French live in London, while 20,000 British work in Paris.  For French presidential candidates, London is a necessary campaign stop—it is held to be the sixth city in France—and the queues at the polling stations are extremely long.  Ever since the Huguenots, French businessmen and bankers have been welcomed to the city.  England has always had high regard for the administrator/officer class of France.  (General Picton, one of Wellington’s best men, said that if he were given an army composed of British troops with French officers, he would undertake to stroll through Europe.)  There used to be a problem with the shortage of places at the excellent Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle in South Kensington, but the French then acquired the rather splendid Brent Town Hall, which became the Lycée International de Londres Winston Churchill.  Both institutions are prestigious, and flourish.  But they are not typical of the face London shows to the world, a face most clearly visible on the Underground.

The great cities of Birmingham and Manchester show a similar picture.  In Birmingham, the largest nonwhite group was “Pakistani” in the census, comprising 13.5 percent of the population.  The Muslim birthrate is such that those numbers have by now been left well behind.  There are decent official figures for hospitals, and it is now reported that more Muslim children are born than Christian.  The most popular first name is now, with its spelling variants, Muhammad.  Politically, the immigrants vote Labour, and that party is in total charge.  There are nine MPs for Birmingham, all Labour, most with stupendous majorities.

Manchester has a less heavy but still very strong ethnic population.  Visitors from abroad are often surprised at the number of black nurses and staff in the hospitals, but it is a truism that the NHS would collapse without immigrant personnel at all levels.  It used to be said that the NHS is the largest employer in Europe, barring the Soviet Army.  I do not know if the Russians have cut back on their ranks; the NHS certainly has not, and its numbers swell all the time.  Manchester has five parliamentary constituencies, all Labour, all with impregnable majorities.  The three greatest cities in England form a power bloc that in numbers and political direction is unchallengeable.

We are seeing an increasingly informal, unacknowledged but real ethnic partitioning of England.  Obviously, London is gripped by the triple lock of Establishment status quo, the Labour Party, and immigration, much of it Islamic.  It will continue to vote Labour, and the mayoralty will go to another Muslim as at present (Sadiq Khan).  The Home Office is now headed by a second-generation Muslim, Sajid Javid, referred to on the BBC as “the Minister for the Interior.”  Property buying is impossibly expensive for young people; the commuter journey is hellish, both in its expense and its conditions, and it is not even necessary for much middle-order work.  The capital is increasingly alienated from the host country, and that will not change; Londonistan is now a better-deserved term than when Melanie Phillips coined it.  It is the Britain of the future, with choked transport, overworked hospitals, schools with an ever-increasing immigrant population, housing that can never match demand, ever-rising crime that the authorities are powerless to control.  London has the hallmarks of a future Third World city.

But leave London and head west, and the picture changes.  “But westward, look, the land is bright.”  You might like to pause and wonder at Brighton—superb climate, the Royal Pavilion of the Prince Regent, the gay capital of England—and pass on past Southampton, halting at Lymington in Hampshire, the White Highlands of the Old England.  This reference point is at the heart of two parliamentary constituencies, New Forest West and East, both with traditional Conservative MPs and armor-plated majorities.  The New Forest, a National Park, is not a real forest—there are none left in England—but a stretch of woodland, which is guarded by rangers, who are the sons of their fathers, also rangers, who were the sons of theirs.  New York firefighters have a similar arrangement.  I do not think that diversity and inclusiveness have a future in Lymington.  I also note that a couple of garden walls in town have the undulating or “crinkle-crankle” walls, with alternating convex and concave bends, that I first saw at the University of Virginia, Jefferson having picked up the idea during his stay in England in 1786.  You know where you are in Lymington, and that sense does not change when you go on to Dorset, Hardy’s county.  And then comes Devon.  Surprisingly, the county capital, Exeter, has an Islamic Centre, at the University of Exeter.  But this is not one of your metropolitan hotbeds of the jihadis.  It is the creation of Sultan bin Muhammad Al-Qasimi, ruler of the Emirate of Sharjah.  He took his PhD in history at the university, and the Islamic Centre is very wealthy, wholly self-funding, and conservative in outlook.  Beyond Exeter is the English Riviera, and the very popular Torquay has the alluring air of a Continental seaside resort.  Torquay reminded Napoleon of Portoferraio.  Cornwall, the final stage before the Atlantic takes over, is the last redoubt of the English.  Writers and artists are attracted; John le Carré has long lived there near Land’s End.  All southwest counties have strong population growth, coming from the indigenous groups that have constituted Britain.

I sketch in these attractive milieux to make the most obvious of points: There is no need for the natives to flee their country; they may simply relocate.  The trend I discern is hardly white flight—nothing so dramatic—but something more akin to a Continental drift, as people choose a region and neighborhood where they will encounter their own kind.  (As they do with country.  Most emigrants from Britain choose Australia and New Zealand, followed by the U.S. and Canada.)  This trend is moving into a settled fact, heavily underscored by the realities of much longer life with the extended freedoms that a safe pension confers.  An asthmatic Scot, on the brink of retirement, might well decide that he can pass his later years more comfortably in Devon than in Dumfries.  If he fancies a dram of scotch—a taste not unknown in Scotland—that may sway his decision, for Nicola Sturgeon’s tax on alcoholic units has just started.  That means that a bottle of regular scotch costs £4 more in Scotland than it does in Berwick-on-Tweed just over the border, a fact which could drive many Scots to drink elsewhere.  A Welshman may judge that the Labour-run National Health Service in Wales—which is a notorious disaster; Theresa May girds at it every week in Prime Minister’s Questions—is good enough reason for moving to England and the South.  (Of the Second Severn Passage, Rod Liddle lately observed that it linked the rain-sodden valleys of Wales with the First World.  A demi-luminary of Welsh local government called for him to be prosecuted for hate crime.)  Climate is demography, and demography is the future.

“The Two Nations” was Disraeli’s phrase.  It was the subtitle of his novel, Sybil.  He meant by it the social divisions between rich and poor in England, and the term led to a Tory badge, still in existence: one-nation conservatism.  The title was dreamed up in 1950 by some leading Tories in opposition, making it a brand name for progressive conservatism.  That was before mass immigration started.  But one-nation looks to be a shredding ideal, as much of the nation prefers not to live alongside some other members of the nation.  It is not a matter of social class, but of identity.  The differences take the form not of overt complaint or protest, but are registered, simply, in geography, meaning that the two nations are increasingly visible and barely compatible.  One nation is traditional, white, living outside the great cities and in the countryside.  The other is very considerably nonwhite, Muslim, and dominates those cities.  These are parallel societies: Disraeli’s two nations have not disappeared; they have taken on a different complexion.