Tim Stanley is a historian by trade, and the author of Whatever Happened to Tradition? — a book subtitled History, Belonging and the Future of the West.
It was something of a surprise, then, to hear him tell attendees at a Conservative Party conference fringe event last week that “the country has changed”, and that “you are not going to reverse that”. Stanley went further still, declaring himself “pleased to see that the right accepts that change and has changed with it”; in his view, “it would be regressive and immoral to try to reverse what has happened.”
He was, of course, talking about the seismic demographic changes which have taken place in this country over the past few decades, against the express wishes of the British people. Indeed, the changes which have taken place over the past few decades represent the biggest demographic change in these islands since the migration of the Anglo-Saxons a millennium and a half ago.
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And nor has this change been obviously good for the people already living here. The supposed economic benefits of mass migration have failed to materialise. The overall size of our economy has grown, but we have not become more prosperous on a per person basis. In return for these illusory economic benefits, we’ve suffered near-unprecedented social fracturing, the growth of extremist elements within our society, and the reduction of our politics, in many towns and cities, to a grim, zero-sum sectarianism.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, nobody voted for it — in half a century of elections, not a single winning party promised either more immigration or sustained demographic change in their manifesto. Indeed, the opposite was almost always the case. In 2019, the Conservative Party built much of its landslide-inducing campaign on an explicit promise to restrict immigration.
The scale of the subsequent “Boriswave” is difficult to overstate. In the year to March 2023 alone, net migration reached 944,000 — more than the entire population of Leeds. By September 2025, according to the ONS, net migration since the new system came into force in 2021 stood at some 2.6 million. This was not gentle, organic change, but a demographic shock, delivered within a single Parliament by a Government which had promised the very opposite. Is it really “regressive” for voters to ask that a policy they never chose be undone? Is it really “immoral” to expect their Government to keep its word?
Reversal of the most recent waves of migration is not as fanciful as Stanley suggests, because a significant proportion of the Boriswave has not yet settled. Indefinite leave to remain is not a birthright — it is a status granted under the Immigration Rules, which ministers can amend with remarkably little ceremony. Under the old rules, the Home Office expected some 1.6 million people to settle between 2026 and 2030; even this Labour Government has balked at that prospect, proposing to double the qualifying period to ten years for everyone who has not already received ILR.
Citizenship, likewise, is a privilege rather than an entitlement; the British Nationality Act 1981 provides only that the Home Secretary “may, if he thinks fit” grant it. Raise the bar for settlement, tighten the conditions for naturalisation, and decline to renew visas as they expire, and there is a significant extent to which the clock can be turned back. Nothing about the Boriswave needs to be baked in forever, unless we choose to do so.
Yet it is also clearly true that the kind of doctrinaire ethnonationalism promoted by some of Stanley’s most vocal online critics is both categorically imperfect and practically unworkable.
After all, few of the purists could tell you which of their neighbours is descended from Huguenot refugees, Flemish wool merchants, or the Irish labourers who built our industrial cities — and many of them will have such ancestors themselves. Draw the boundaries of the nation by blood alone, and you quickly find yourself in absurd territory. While those who have arrived most recently can be asked, reasonably and sensibly, to leave, it is very different to do this with migrant cohorts who have been here for many generations. A less generous welfare state and a more assertive national culture may encourage some more opportunistic and sectarian people to leave of their own accord, but the idea of turning the country’s demographics back to the 1950s is plainly untenable. The past seventy years have taken place, and they will have an impact on our country’s future direction.
Fortunately, we need not choose between either of these two diagnoses. There is a path to be charted, cautiously and imperfectly, between the demographic indifference promoted by the likes of Tim Stanley and Fraser Nelson, and the fanatical purism of many of their critics.
That path is assimilation — a far more demanding standard than either Stanley or Nelson would set. Both are integrationists at heart; they ask only that newcomers live peaceably alongside the majority, and that the majority make room for them in return. Assimilation asks for something more — that newcomers adopt the customs, habits, and loyalties of the nation, until they become indistinguishable from their peers.
In a demographically secure society, this is entirely achievable; most people within such a country belong to a particular group, sharing its ancestry, its manners, and its history, while outlier cases are accommodated, and in time absorbed. Britain was once just such a country. A confident majority, whose own identity is never in doubt, can afford to be generous, and polite to those non-nationals who appear sincerely committed to the nation’s best interests.
Stanley once asked whatever happened to tradition. If we take his advice, we will know the answer — we gave it away
But assimilation has preconditions — it works when numbers are small, and when the majority is secure enough to insist upon it. It fails when newcomers arrive in their millions, surrounded by the similarly unassimilated, and when the majority is told that defending its own identity is “regressive”.
Stanley once asked whatever happened to tradition. If we take his advice, we will know the answer — we gave it away, and then accepted that it would be immoral to ask for it back.