How a Clique of Demographic Vandals Betrayed Britain

It seems that a great many of the ‘right-wing’ politicians who led the Brexit charge back in 2016 did so more out of a desire to make Britain a GDP-obsessed nowhere-land than to secure the interests of its people. Sold as a restoration of borders, our departure from the European Union served in practice to empower globalist drones like Boris Johnson, who saw fit to subject the nation he professes to love to further torrents of replacement migration from the Third World. Self-serving business elites and rogue landlords have been the sole beneficiaries.

Strictly speaking, such measures run contrary to the preferences of liberals with more classical tastes. At their best, free marketers have tended to valorise buccaneering entrepreneurship and frame-breaking creativity over small-minded tactics aimed at plugging otherwise dysfunctional business models with cheap foreign labour. What we have on our hands is not economic liberalism as such, but a more decadent imposter: corporate cronyism. For this reason, even the stalwart Thatcherites at the Adam Smith Institute— though still resistant to any nationalism that threatens to interfere with the free-play of global markets—now acknowledge that low-skilled immigrants act as a drag on innovation, productivity, and other signs of economic dynamism. This is before we even consider the more important demographic, cultural, and social costs. Nevertheless, Montesquieu had it right when he observed in De l’esprit des loix (1748) that, as far as the interests of commerce go, the whole world “comprises but a single state, of which all societies are members.”

Many self-described conservatives, from the Bush dynasty in the United States to the post-Brexit globalists led by Johnson, have fallen for the idea that their task is to conserve only the interests of such a state, which naturally must run on the ideological software of a rootless, unbridled, anti-cultural liberalism. One such figure is Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, perhaps Johnson’s most reliable, longstanding hero-worshipper. Very much a lover of theatre, he also enjoys cosplaying as a bespectacled, patriotic Tory from the late 18th century, even as he pushes an agenda more consistent with the deracinated, anti-traditionalist daydreams of Ayn Rand. At the London National Conservatism conference in 2023, Rees-Mogg tried to reframe tax cuts, deregulation, and free trade as stimulants to national renewal. And in their proper place, of course, such policies can make us richer. But conservatives should recover the original Greek meaning of economy. We must first have a home (oikos) before we discuss the rules (nomos) best suited to its material flourishing.

Showing no interest in such quaint notions, Rees-Mogg has more recently taken to arguing that we should thank Brexit for the new trade agreement negotiated with India by Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government. Given Narendra Modi’s geo-strategic desire to expand the Indian diaspora overseas and afford greater freedom of movement to his 1.4 billion people, this will open Britain’s doors to yet more truckloads of immigrants from the subcontinent, many of whom are due under the terms of the deal to be spared the National Insurance tax that the rest of us are forced to pay to a state that increasingly gives us nothing in return. And what do we get for this latest acceleration of our demographic displacement? According to Rees-Mogg, more than enough to make it worthwhile: “cheaper food and drink including rice and tea, footwear and clothing.” If we continue to pretend that vandals like Johnson and Rees-Mogg have anything worth saying, we shall soon find ourselves in nations that more closely resemble airports than meaningful homes: rich in opportunities for consumption, but at their core just alien, unlovable zones with nothing but quarterly GDP statistics in common.

This essay appears in the Summer 2025 issue of The European Conservative, Number 35:20-21.