When the Great Heathen Army rampaged across the English‑speaking world – then four small kingdoms on a modest Atlantic island – I am sure it did not feel like the end of the world. Though they spoke a foreign tongue and worshipped foreign gods, many among the natives sought to appease, accommodate, and welcome the new arrivals. Some were motivated by greed, others by ancient rivalries, yet the fate they shared was ultimately the same: subjugation and slavery.
Many more simply chose to leave. When first Northumbria fell, its army smashed to bloody pulp against the Roman walls of York, thousands of English refugees fled to surrounding Anglo‑Saxon kingdoms rather than live under the yoke of heathen barbarians. When East‑Anglia was crushed next, its last king, Edmund, strung up and used as target practice by Ivar the Boneless, many of his former subjects forded the River Stour and made new lives elsewhere. When Mercia, once the mightiest of them all, was destroyed, Alfred’s kingdom of Wessex suddenly stood alone.
Though this last kingdom was soon invaded and besieged – the heathen hordes eager to seal their conquest of all the precious plains of Britain, so fertile compared with the craggy mountain passes of their Scandinavian homelands – the English resolved to make a final stand. The result was the Battle of Edington, a close‑run thing in which yeomen and peasants rallied around Alfred’s banner to defeat a vast host of battle‑hardened Viking warriors. It is no accident that, even after more than a millennium of gallantry and glory, Alfred remains the only English king to earn the epithet “the Great”.
Yet it was his people who actually fought the battle: the certainty of death if defeated, and the knowledge that their wives and daughters would be raped and enslaved, doubtless lent strength to English arms. So, too, did the fact that they had nowhere left to run.
Now, faced with another heathen army, it is in the Kingdom of the East Saxons rather than the West that a new stand has been made. In the town where a Saxon chief named Eppa once founded a settlement, his descendants (Eppa‑ingas), after yet another of their children was sexually assaulted by an illegal immigrant – housed and fed at their expense in a local hotel – finally took to the streets in righteous anger.
I am not surprised it should happen here. After graduating medical school and starting work as a junior doctor in Stevenage, I was curious why so many in this North Hertfordshire city sounded like Dick Van Dyke from Mary Poppins. I was told it was because Stevenage was designated a New Town just after the War, and many working‑class English had moved from bombed‑out London for cheap social housing and new opportunities.
But something did not add up. One would not normally expect the cockney accent to remain so potent seven decades later, especially among the young. I also noticed that most young adults were actually born in London. I spoke with many in their forties and fifties: native East‑Enders who had moved to be closer to family and community. I scarcely needed to ask if this was because they no longer felt deep English communality in Bethnal Green.
The “New Town” explanation held too little water, and I quickly realised that to explain why there are so many cockneys in Stevenage today is to explain why so few remain in London. Since 1946, Stevenage and many other Home County towns – old and new – have been refuges for a steady stream of working‑class Londoners fleeing their native city as unrelenting hordes of third‑world immigrants displaced them, a stream that became a torrent from 1990 onwards.
Bear in mind, Japan also pursued a large‑scale New Town programme after the War, modelled on Britain’s own experiments. Doubtless many who moved to Senri New Town in 1962 retained their Tokyo accents. Yet, funnily enough, the proportion of Tokyo residents who identify as Japanese did not fall from nearly 100 per cent to single digits within a few generations, as has happened to poor old London.
Even in the past ten years, the number of people identifying simply as “English” in England’s capital fell from 37 per cent to 8 per cent, according to the latest ONS census. If one read that the Tutsi population in Rwanda had fallen by a similar margin so quickly, one would assume the Hutus had taken up their machetes again. By contrast, despite the gaijin who have flocked to Tokyo in recent years, those identifying as Japanese in the capital remain well over 95 per cent.
And there is the rub. Many so‑called intellectuals and commentators, desperate to ignore mass immigration as the cause of the cockney exodus, note that 59 per cent of Londoners were born in the UK. While this overlooks the obvious correlate that 40 per cent are foreign‑born, it misses the deeper point: among those born here, the vast majority do not identify as English – a prerequisite, one would think, for being a cockney.
I would urge you to watch a documentary sent to me by a close friend – born and raised on a London council estate to Syrian parents – after he moved to Rochester and wondered why all the English Londoners, so absent from his upbringing, were discovered in the Kentish countryside. When I met him at university, I was the first self-identifying Englishman he’d ever met… just let that sink in.
Filmed over a decade ago, it shows that the only cockneys left in East London are either in the graveyard or soon will be, their children and grandchildren already settled in the Home Counties, mostly Essex, urging them to give up and join the exodus, as most of their surviving friends already have.
The cultural dislocation from their youth to today is like dropping Pocahontas in the centre of Beijing, except it is more as though Beijing were dropped on Pocahontas and her entire Powhatan tribe.
Consider an octogenarian resident of 80 Whitechapel Road. Where once she heard the peal of bells each Sunday, emanating from the 14th-century, whitewashed church St Mary Matfelon (whence ‘Whitechapel’ gets its name) she now endures Islamic calls to prayer three times a day - broadcast from external loudspeakers on East London Mosque at 82 Whitechapel Road - calling her new neighbours to worship in its 7000 capacity prayer-room; built in-part with her own tax contributions (provided by Harold Wilson’s government) along with a generous £1 million donation from King Fahd of Saudi Arabia.
Despite local cockneys protesting at the time, citing noise pollution, their own Church of England clerics wrote an open letter to the East London Advertiser accusing objectors of racism; the broadcast adhan remains officially permitted. Ironically, many of their churches would later become mosques as congregations dwindled – sadly consequences their gullible, arrogant clergy never lived to witness.
Granted, a Luftwaffe fire raid destroyed the original White Chapel, left in disrepair until demolition and conversion to St Mary’s Park in 1966. Where cockney sparrows once sunbathed and drank ale during the “Summer of Love” the following year, the area – renamed Altab Ali Park in 1998 – is now crossed by sombre women in body-bags, pushing prams and conversing only in languages the few remaining English cannot comprehend.
Instead of passing along rubble-filled buckets in long lines to help rebuild her shattered country, as countless cockney teenagers did during the 1940s, contemporary Schoolgirls in Bethnal Green now flee to Arabia, passionately desirous of becoming child-brides for Islamic warriors, hell-bent on reproducing such destruction in the very nation which nurtured them. These girls belong to the “59 per cent of Londoners born in the UK”, yet none would dream of calling themselves English, let alone cockney; indeed, most despise the cross of St George and everything it represents.
More striking than this rapid demographic change is how relaxed many remain about it. If I return to the subject often, it is because so many bitter fruits grow from this poisonous tree. Middle‑class intellectuals, seeking to explain Britain’s manifest decline, desperately point to anything else: “We are not building enough houses”, “The NHS needs more funding”, “Schools must expand capacity”, or, as Idris Elba suggested, “We should sell kitchen knives with flat ends.” Anything to ignore the big, fat, foreign elephant in the room.
These critics are free to focus on individual trees, but that does not entitle them to deride those who decry the wider wood that produced them. For worse than ignoring the problem, they attack its primary victims. When not being lectured on how their own ancestors are uniquely responsible for all the evils in the world; good-natured, working-class English lads are today being forced to sit through school seminars on ‘toxic masculinity,’ or watch Netflix shows portraying them as the root cause of rising sexual violence - even as their little sisters are being gang-raped by fully grown Muslim men a few streets away.
Any attempt to make a causal connection to mass-immigration amongst so-called intellectuals is dismissed as ignorant and uninformed, with predictable eye rolls and “It’s a lot more complicated than that, dear boy”. Those of us who continue attempting to discuss it are then accused of being ‘obsessed’ or ‘overly emotional’.
In truth it’s hard not to get emotional about the most important subject of our age, especially when otherwise decent people are so intent on turning two blind eyes to it; demonstrating in the process, a callous disregard to those working-class English on the receiving end of this unprecedented transformation; as all those little girls in Rotherham, Telford, Newcastle, and now, Epping, could attest.
As recent days have demonstrated, there is still hope that the spark of English valour has not been fully extinguished, and that embers yet burn in this tinderbox nation of ours. Having abandoned their native town to its fate once already, the residents of Epping, bolstered in recent decades by many cockney refugees, are in no appetite to do so again; after all, there is nowhere left to run.