White Flight: Lawmaker Lifts Lid on ‘Balkanising’ Britain Amid Mass Migration

The massive influx of foreigners into Britain risks “Balkanising” the country as natives flee areas with high levels of migration, a leading Conservative politician has warned.

An analysis of government figures by Neil O’Brien, the Member of Parliament for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston, has suggested that migration is one of the chief factors in the growing “exodus” of native populations out of cities like Birmingham, Bradford, Coventry, Leicester, and London into more rural areas of the country.

While he noted that there was an obvious uptick associated with the Chinese coronavirus and the draconian lockdowns imposed on the public, the MP’s analysis found that the trend has continued.

“By 2023 the annual ‘escape to the country’ from our urban areas was more than twice as large as it was in 2012, and the population hadn’t doubled in that time,” O’Brien wrote.

In his report, the Tory MP said that there was little to no correlation between the movement of people and factors such as areas with higher wages, lower cost of living, or general deprivation.

However, O’Brien said that there does appear to be a link between immigration and the likelihood of natives relocating, writing: “We can see that places where the share of migrants and ethnic minority people is higher see larger net outflows, even if we were to only look at urban areas.”

He found that overall, if areas had at least a ten per cent higher or lower share of white Britons, those areas saw either a four per cent higher or lower level of internal migration. This, the MP argued, supports research by Canadian Professor Eric Kaufmann, who found similar results in Britain and other countries.

According to Kaufman, areas of Britain that comprised at least 85 per cent white Britons saw the highest influx of other white Britons in the decade following 2001. Conversely, the regions with the highest levels of ethnic diversity saw the sharpest declines in their white populations during the same time frame.

The professor said that “even when a range of socioeconomic controls are applied, own-group preference has a significant effect on neighbourhood destination choice.”

Although O’Brien acknowledged that such “patterns of movement are complex”, with other factors still playing some role in shaping internal movement — such as education level, age, and income — the findings appear to demonstrate that both native and minority groups appear to have a preference for living amongst their own or similar ethnicities, thereby increasing the effect.

In an age of increasing cultural divisions, with social media creating effective silos, the MP warned that if the similar “balkanising” continues to happen “in the real world too, then you start to compound these problems – you are less likely to be meeting people from outside your filter bubble offline.”

The apparent increase in Balkanisation in Britain has occurred in the wake of the open borders project imposed upon the country by the Westminster establishment, initially under Tony Blair’s Labour government in the early 2000s and further exacerbated by Boris Johnson’s Conservative government following Brexit.

This has resulted in around 11.4 million foreign-born people living in Britain as of 2023, or around 18 per cent of the population of England and Wales.

The rapid rate of demographic change will see the white British population become a minority in their own country by the year 2063, according to recent estimates from Professor Matt Goodwin.

The increasing multicultural nature of modern Britain has been cited by Professor David Betz of the Department of War Studies at King’s College London as one of the chief elements in eroding community cohesion and societal trust. Betz, who has become one of the leading figures warning of a potential civil war breaking out in Britain, said in a recent interview that among the contributing factors, multiculturalism “would be at the top and if we were to put some ranking on them, it’s like 90 per cent”.