Revenger

35

The maps and numbers had vanished from the screens beside the O2 stage and Mark Adams’s face had taken their place again: ‘For fourteen straight years from 1996 to 2009 the most popular boy’s name in this country was Jack,’ he said. ‘Then in 2010 a new name hit the top, and it’s stayed there ever since. It wasn’t William or Harry or Charlie or Jim… It certainly wasn’t Mark… no, the most common new boy’s name in Britain for the past five years has been… Mohammed.’

There was a wordless murmur in the crowd, a sense of bodies shifting, a palpable unease.

‘If you want to know how Britain has changed, and will continue to change unless something is done, then Jack giving way to Mohammed is all you need to be told,’ said Adams.

‘The change began about twenty-five years ago. In the 1990s the British population rose by about 2.2 million. According to official National Census figures, some six hundred thousand of those 2.2 million new Britons were white. And 1.6 million — almost three-quarters of the entire new growth — belonged to ethnic minorities.’

He paused for a while to let the facts sink in. Assuming that they were facts, which many in the media covering the event seriously doubted.

‘That can’t be right… can it?’ asked one.

‘No, it’s Far Right,’ another replied. ‘Just listen to him. He might as well be reading an editorial from Der Stürmer…’

Yet if Adams really was the Hitler he was accused of being, he wasn’t screaming at his audience, or shaking his fist as the original version had done. He was sticking to his tone of reasonable, factual, logical analysis.

‘Over the first decade of the new century the population kept growing, and the growth was overwhelmingly among the ethnic population. In London, for example, roughly three out of ten people are immigrants. But six out of ten children have at least one parent who was born outside this country. So thirty per cent of the people are having sixty per cent of the children… and the people who were born here aren’t having many children at all.

‘You can see the same pattern all over the country. For several years, the majority of schoolkids in cities including Leicester, Birmingham and great swathes of London have been from ethnic communities. Now that applies to grown-ups as well. Leicester recently became the first city in Britain in which whites are officially the minority of the population. Others will follow very soon.

‘Now, let’s not forget that these islands have always been a destination for immigrants. We’ve always had a mixture of Celtic, Viking, Roman and Saxon blood. But even allowing for that, there is such a thing as the British people. And until very recently it was possible to say who they were and what they were like.

‘They were white. They were overwhelmingly Christian. They were united by the world’s most magnificent language, by the kings and queens who ruled over them and the parliament that gave them their voice. They were courageous in battle, extraordinarily inventive in industry and science, and creative in the arts. They had a profound belief in fairness, free speech and the rule of law. They fought for what they believed in, even when the cause seemed lost.

‘But what’s happening to the British now?’ Adams asked. ‘Just by seeing the massive change in school populations, it’s clear that they are reproducing much less quickly than the rest of the population. In fact, one hundred average native British produce just eighty babies between them.’

New graphics appeared on the screen: a cluster of white figures like the male and female symbols on toilet doors, set against a dark-grey background, with the number 100 next to it. Beneath that cluster was a vertical white line down to a second, slightly smaller group of figures and another number: 80.

‘Now that next generation reproduces at the same rate, and they produce sixty-four babies,’ Adams said.

Now there was a third cluster, somewhat smaller than the one directly above it, but appreciably diminished from the very first.

Adams picked up on that difference. ‘So you started with one hundred adults, and now you’ve got just sixty-four grandchildren. That’s down by more than a third. And if they keep reproducing just like their parents and grandparents, well, they’ll produce just fifty-one great-grandchildren. So the native British population has halved in three generations.’

Up on the screen, a fourth, much smaller cluster of little white figures made the point impossible to miss or ignore. And more clusters, each smaller than the last appeared as Adams intoned, ‘And forty-one great-great-grandchildren… And thirty-three great-great-great-grandchildren: just a third as many native English people as we started out with… And there’s just a quarter left by the next generation: twenty-six descendants of the one hundred British we started out with. That is what is going to happen to the British race unless something is done to reverse the trend before it’s too late.

‘Now there will be people watching this who will say that I am being racist, just by mentioning this fact. But how on earth is it racist to be concerned about the future of one’s own people? No other nation feels this shame. Russians, Japanese, Jews, Italians — they all talk about the crisis in their own populations, and what can be done to reverse it. But not the British.

‘So I ask you: do we really hate ourselves so much that we won’t do anything to ensure our self-preservation? Is it racist now to care about oneself, one’s children and one’s grandchildren? I do not deny anyone else the right to maintain their nation, their race and their culture. All I ask is the right to maintain my own.

‘Once again: I have no hostility whatsoever towards anyone, of any colour or religion, who wants to commit himself or herself to this country, work hard, make a contribution and share in our culture. All I’m saying is that if we don’t wake up and start dealing with our self-preservation now, then it’s going to be too late.’