Event: England

Most people will have been shocked, but not surprised, to read last week’s data comparing the most common surnames given to newborn babies in England and Wales today to the same names of 30 years ago. According to the Office for National Statistics, in 1996, the Top10 were Smith, Jones, Williams, Taylor, Brown, Davies, Evans, Thomas, Johnson and Wilson. In 2026, the same list includes Khan, Ahmed, Ali, Hussain, Singh, Patel and Kaur. Although the list is somewhat misleading in that Asians have a smaller pool of surnames, the contrast unquestionably mirrors what the Census statistics and our eyes have been telling us in recent years. This island has undergone, and is still undergoing, a convulsive demographic transition, the scale of which hasn’t been seen since 1066 – in 2026, one-fifth of this country’s population is foreign-born – and the substance of which has never been witnessed at all. It confirms what many have felt in their bones: that England and its people are gradually and inexorably vanishing. This sense of loss has been echoed in the popularity of the YouTube documentary, Britain Before Migration, by Steven Edginton, in which the 26-year-old journalist speaks to the generation who remembered this country before such turbulent upheaval. As Edginton elaborated in an essay for the Daily Mail at the weekend, what he heard repeatedly from interviewees was a sense ‘that the Britain they loved is slipping away’. This feeling of loss is not confined to the elderly and Boomers. It’s felt among us middle-age types who grew up in a more settled, reasonably multi-racial Britain. To judge by Edginton, it is also felt by an even younger cohort. This loss sometimes feels like anticipatory bereavement, sometimes like alarm and panic. Undoubtedly, it’s the main reason for the surge in support for Reform…