The Singapore model for talking about demographics

And ‘de-statting’

“I’ve been in contact with the Israeli competitors who were banned from attending the bowls championship in my constituency following a concerted hate campaign from the pro-Palestine mob.”

Private Godfrey

Restore have a great number of problems as a political entity. There is the fact that a political movement supported by stringent antisemites, in a Waughian twist, have chosen a committed Zionist as their figurehead. There is also the problem that some of its most prominent advocates are attempting to chase engagement by getting beaten up by Muslims and skinny left-wing activists. There is the also the problem that many of their followers are semi-literate at best. The only cogent criticism of yesterday’s article is that it was too long to read – this perhaps explains why so many of their aligned streamers (scarab munchers etc) produce content where they simply read out other people’s articles slowly and clearly for hours and hours whilst occasionally frowning.

But what is most glaringly ridiculous about the party is that an organisation which wants to establish itself as ‘based’ has not yet managed to come up with a coherent line on ethnic and civic identity. This seems to be that the very first thing I would do if I was preparing to go on television and make the argument for a ethnonationalist party – I would certainly come up with something better than ‘lets not go down that rabbit hole’.

It is precisely this unwillingness by senior figures at Restore to nail themselves to the mast of being racist which should make their racist followers pause for consideration. If now is not the right time to say that you believe Nana Akua is not ‘anglo-celtic’, when will it be? If they are hiding how secretly ‘based’ they are, how can you know that they are any different to Farage? Because they shared a sonnenrad edit in your little group chat? Give me a break.

Britain perhaps more than any other country in Western Europe, has an extremely strong historical and material basis for a popular ethnonationalist party. In no other country in the world are the ‘nationalists’ given a narrative as powerful as Pakistani rape gangs roaming being given free license to abuse children by state authorities. White flight from cities in the second half of the century in Britain was easily as bad as it was in the United States, if not worse, because its victims were forced to move to already densely populated parts of Essex, Kent etc instead of vast American suburbs.

Windrushers used intimidation and threats of physical violence to evict White residents in places like Notting Hill and Peckham – a process called de-statting - in effect ethnically cleansing several inner-London suburbs during the 1950s and 60s. Many educated people will have heard of Peter Rachman, the Polish-Jewish businessman who is synonymous with slum landlords, and have a vague idea that he was nasty to West Indian immigrants putting them in substandard accommodation, backed up by his enforcer Malcom X. That is the story told by Adam Curtis in Can’t Get You Out Of My Head.

In actual fact, ‘Rachmanism’ was a process by which landlords such as Rachman would intimidate White tenants, often elderly people, into abandoning their rent-controlled tenancies. This would often take the form of simply putting Caribbean families in their blocks of flats and shared houses, and letting their pugnacity and unpleasantness do its work. A contemporary anti-racist is recorded as writing ‘it may take time for [immigrants] to learn that too many calypsos [Carribean music/dancing] make for sleepless nights for the family next door’. It also took the form of physical threats of violence. As the Milner-Holland report sets out.

These thugs were threatening to cut their tenant’s throats, removing the roof from their properties, threatening to poison them, destroying their windows, blocking their access to toilets and kicking their doors in. There were even cases recorded in this report of black landlords spreading excrement in shared hallways – this being exactly what Enoch Powell said an old woman in his constituency had experienced in the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech (‘excreta pushed through her letterbox’), loudly denounced at the time as being a pack of lies.

Elderly women in London were driven to homelessness because of Carribean’s behaviour, in one case a 72-year-old ended up sleeping in Paddington station (Paddington Mercury, 12 August 1960). As with the rape gang crisis this was politically supressed in order to avoid ‘inflaming race relations’, contemporaries believed that it was responsible for the Notting Hill Race Riots in 1958 but you will not read about it as a causal factor in almost any modern history of the Windrush period. Note how the screenshot above ends with a disclaimer that the author has ‘no desire to produce sensational material’.

I set this all out because it is important to set out, as this Substack has for many years, how incredibly strong the historical and statistical evidence is for the argument that post-war immigration has been an unmitigated disaster for Britain. Constructing logical arguments for the points that senior members of Restore should be extremely easy because they cohere with the ‘lived experience’ of living people in every part of the country which has experienced immigration, from Rotheram to Jaywick. Surely the advocates of this position can do better than the ‘Anglo-celtic peoples’, high-trust and red squirrels.

It is not necessary for Nigel Farage to advance an ethnonationalist argument, indeed as yesterday’s article sets out, the British Parliamentary system is well set up for somebody to adopt the clothes of centrism until they are in power before implementing an invisible revolution. The effectiveness of this strategy is why people are still making documentaries about Tony Blair and not John Redwood.

Nonetheless, it is an interesting intellectual exercise to think about how one could push the Overton window past the barrier imposed by people like Sunder Katwala, Portes et al., where thinking about identity in racialised terms is verboten. My first observation about this issue is that many people, and this includes a proportion of immigrants and their descendants, do think that Britain should remain at the very least a White majority country, or at the very least would find the idea of Whites becoming a minority nationally shocking (there are also, of course, a group who would revel in this, and many people who do not care at all).

The problem, as with ‘EDI’, is that though they can be convinced on principle (we want a White boy to have the same opportunities as a black girl in life, Merit should be rewarded) they would abhor the outcome and the processes needed to achieve it, if it were to happen (Oxbridge becomes 95% White, graduate schemes are back to the ‘boys club’, vanishingly few women in engineering or programming, huge ethnic and gender income disparities open up). They cannot grasp just how deep the rot is, and how radical of a proposition it is to simply return to civilisation. The same is true of demographic change.

If you think that Whites should not become a minority in the country as a whole, that is one thing, but the actual steps needed to achieve demographic stabilisation are radical because birth rates last year were hovering around half non-white. It would include an immigration policy which was selective on the grounds of race, targeted fertility incentives and much more.

The tension I am describing sounds like a disadvantage, but the fact that people do not actually think through the logical outcomes of their political desires is not necessarily a problem in a Parliamentary system which functions as an elective dictatorship. A hypothetical ethnonationalistic party which was polling well could set a vague target like ‘demographic stabilisation’ and wait until they are in power to put the harder policies into practice.

How would this be presented politically? The good news is that there is already a very sensible country which Britain has been ashamedly comparing itself against for years. Singapore. Politicians have spoken about the need to crib things from Singapore for years, Blair even went there in 1996 to give a speech setting out his vision for a ‘stakeholder economy’. Britain’s centre-left has consistently seen it as a model for public sector reforms (Wes Streeting went there in 2023 for ‘ideas’ about the NHS), whilst Britain’s right admires it for its buccaneering free-trade and low-tax approach, best articulated in the phrase ‘Singapore-On-Thames’ of Brexit fame.

Because our political elite are mentally retarded they never learn the real lesson of Singapore, which is the real lesson of Britain as a historical entity, which is that the cult of human rights is an unwelcome impediment to technological and material progress. Whenever we are told that selective education, disenfranchising legal immigrants, hanging criminals or refusing to take ‘asylum seekers’ are reactionary positions, we can always point to the many obvious ways in which Singapore is a more developed country than Britain.

The same is true of demographic stabilisation. In 2013 the Singaporean government admitted that it deliberately engineers its demographics, through selective immigration policy, in order to preserve the Chinese at around 75% of the population. This is done, as Grace Fu says, because ‘we recognize the need to maintain the racial balance in Singapore’s population to preserve social stability’.

I do not believe that Singapore is the ‘end goal’, and I do not worship the country. I do not want to ‘stabilise’ what has happened to London or to other major urban conurbations. I would also not welcome, for obvious reasons, the many policies which Singapore has to maintain racial harmony including the criminalisation of ‘sectarian’ beliefs. As immigration happened without democratic consent, there is no democratic mandate for the repression needed to prevent racial disorder.

My argument is that there is a broaching point, just about within the Overton window, at which people who want to move beyond ‘Cheddar Gorge Man’, ‘what about our Euros team?’ and ‘U fink Ian Wright aint Bri’ish mate?’ can start saying – on television with their actual faces – ‘countries like Singapore actively manage their ethnic makeup to preserve social stability, we think we should do something similar in Britain’.

Easier on the eyes, I would think, than ‘this land belongs to the Anglo-celtic squirrels, uhh, ahhh, uhh, actually, actually we don’t have time to discuss that’.