On March 9th 1974, second lieutenant Hiroo Onoda finally surrendered his sword, after 29 years hiding in the jungles of the Philippines. Onoda was the last of the Japanese “holdouts” to surrender following the conclusion of the Second World War — having never received the news that the war had ended, he felt duty-bound to continue the struggle against the long-gone American military.

I’ve often wondered what life must have been like for Onoda — deep within that jungle, fighting a war that was already over, clinging to discredited ideas and obsolete slogans. What is life like for the man who fights the war which is already over?

Fortunately, my questions have been answered — albeit in a rather surprising way. Despite an increasing acceptance on the British right that our experiment with mass migration has been a resounding failure, Fraser Nelson used his final Telegraph column to insist that “Britain’s integration miracle is a beacon of hope amid instability.”

This could not be further from the truth; Britain is in the midst of an unprecedented breakdown in the social fabric. We are now a country with ethno-religious voting blocs, immigrant criminal gangs and religious courts.

At the last general election, “pro-Gaza” independent candidates picked up seats in four heavily Muslim areas, with campaigns which focused almost exclusively on the whims of Muslim voters. In half a dozen other seats, similar candidates came close — nearly unseating Labour heavyweights such as Wes Streeting, Shabana Mahmood, and Jess Phillips. Labour MPs in heavily Muslim seats, such as Birmingham’s Tahir Ali, have begun to respond to this new wave of sectarian politics with calls for blasphemy laws designed to prevent criticism of the Prophet Muhammad.

This wasn’t an exclusively Muslim phenomenon either, with dozens of Tory candidates signing the so-called “Hindu Manifesto”, which called for relaxed visa rules for Indians. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that despite a Tory wipeout at the national level, the party held on in heavily-Indian seats such as Harrow West and Leicester East. Sectarian voting blocs, representing communities with very different values to the British mainstream, doesn’t scream “integration success story” to me.

His mistake is not in assuming that Britons are united by common threads, but in assuming that these common threads are what make us Britons

Nelson’s arguments about falling crime don’t hold water either, as he insists that “our streets are now safer than they have perhaps ever been”. At a time when Britain’s crime rate should be falling, due to our aging population and advanced technology, it has actually remained stable — propped up by many foreign criminals, including those involved in organised crime rings. In diverse areas like London, crime has actually risen. Besides, it’s no surprise that crime reporting has fallen, given the failure of British police to solve some 90 percent of crimes. In 2023 alone, that included 30,000 unsolved sex offences, 330,000 unsolved violent crimes, 320,000 cases of unsolved criminal damage, and 1.5 million unsolved thefts.

Nelson’s most offensive claim was on the subject of national identity — “our concept of Britishness”, as he puts it, “a set of values that anyone can adopt”. His mistake is not in assuming that Britons are united by common threads, but in assuming that these common threads are what make us Britons. Rather, they are the observed habits of an organic national community, accrued over centuries like sediment at the bottom of a river. 

Nelson isn’t even talking about true assimilation, in which new arrivals become culturally indistinguishable from their peers — a la the Huguenots. The scale and heterogeneity of new arrivals plainly makes this impossible. He is essentially parroting the modish national values cooked up by Tony Blair in the early 2000s; most of our ancestors would undoubtedly fall short of his ideal citizenship test.

But more to the point, these values are a nonsensical way to define the British nation. Our small-family, high-mobility, high-trust settlement patterns, as described by historians such as Alan MacFarlane, are not propositional in character. They cannot be reduced to lazy shorthand in the mould of “hard work” and “family values”. There are a great many hard-working, family-oriented people around the world, but these facts alone do not make them British. Neither a fondness for fish and chips, nor deference to the King can turn somebody into a Briton. A British Stalinist is still more British than a foreigner who subscribes to the Blairite national values of tolerance, support for democracy, and pluralism.

If this is what an “integration miracle” looks like, how would Fraser define failed integration? Would he feel the same way after a day spent walking the streets of Bradford, Blackburn, or Whitechapel? Could he maintain this position after speaking to the Batley Grammar School teacher who was forced into hiding in 2021 for displaying a picture of the Prophet Muhammad during a lesson? What about the girls in Rotherham, Telford, Rochdale, and a dozen other cities, who were targeted by Pakistani grooming gangs?

I suspect that any of these experiences would shatter Nelson’s illusions — but his failure to explore these case studies of his own volition speaks to a deep incuriosity. I don’t think that Nelson is stupid. He is a capable journalist, who managed The Spectator to a reasonable degree of success. I would wager that his ignorance of our failures on immigration is driven by a deliberate desire to avoid the truth. Recognising the failure of British integration would force him to accept the limited nature of his own perspective, and may necessitate a reassessment of his support for political figures who have been complicit in the past thirty years of policy failure.

Unfortunately, most ordinary Britons don’t have this choice — and soon enough, even our metropolitan elite won’t enjoy this luxury. With millions of new arrivals landing on British shores each year, it is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the pace of change. If they want to preserve their ivory towers, commentators like Nelson should wise up about immigration and integration — eventually, even Hiroo Onoda had to accept Japan’s defeat.