The “great replacement” – the conspiracy theory that globalist elites are planning to supplant the white population of Europe with Muslim and/or black migrants – was originally formulated by the French white nationalist writer Renaud Camus. Not unusually, what French history turns into tragedy – the theory inspired the Christchurch mass murderer, Brenton Tarrant – British history prefigures as farce. As far back as the end of the 19th century, the Conservative MP Arthur Brookfield’s “political satire” Simiocracy described how a Liberal government, determined to entrench itself in power, extended the franchise to gorillas, millions of whom arrived from Borneo. But this wasn’t just a joke; it reflected contemporary debates. “East of Aldgate one walks into a foreign town,” complained William Evans-Gordon, the Conservative MP for Stepney, in 1903, noting that “it is a fact that the settlement of large aggregations of Hebrews in a Christian land has never been successful”. A century on, The Strange Death of Europe, by the British author and commentator Douglas Murray, is essentially an attenuated version of the great replacement theory for the Telegraph-reading classes. Murray, while distancing himself from Enoch Powell’s inflammatory rhetoric, has long argued that Powell understated the demographic implications of immigration, and repeats Evans-Gordon’s claim, saying: “London has become a foreign country. In 23 of London’s 33 boroughs ‘white Britons’ are now in a minority.” Black or Asian Britons, then, are foreign, even if born here, and whether or not they identify as British – a sentiment Powell also endorsed, of course. Nevertheless, the argument is still made that being concerned about ethnic and demographic change is somehow not about race: instead it’s about numbers, or the “pace of change”, or “culture”. For example, Lionel Shriver, writing in the Spectator this week, asserted: “This is not all about race … Anywhere, when the proportion of the ‘other’, however they might be defined, crosses a critical and perhaps even quantifiable statistical line, people who were born in a place stop getting excited about all the new ethnic restaurants and start getting pissed off.” Except that, when it comes down to it, Shriver’s definition of the “other”, is indeed based on race. As she puts it, amid a long litany of complaints about the growing share of the population that is from an ethnic minority background: “The lineages of white Britons in their homeland commonly go back hundreds of years. Yet for the country’s original inhabitants to confront becoming a minority in the UK (perhaps in the 2060s) with any hint of mournfulness, much less consternation, is now racist and beyond the pale.” Similarly, Sir Paul Collier, an eminent development economist, wrote: “The 2011 census revealed that the indigenous British had become a minority in their own capital.” By “indigenous”, he, like Shriver and Murray, means those classified as “white British”, which includes me, but not, for example, my partner, although our respective immigrant parents arrived in London within a couple of years of each other. For an intellectual defence of this view we can look to Eric Kaufmann, a professor of politics at Birkbeck College, who, together with David Goodhart, now a commissioner at the Equality and Human Rights Commission, argues that “racial self-interest”, when it comes to immigration and its impact on demographic change, is not necessarily “racist”. For Kaufmann, that means that it would be rational and legitimate for the UK to give explicit preference to white immigrants, on the grounds that they’d be more acceptable to Shriver’s “original inhabitants”. Meanwhile, his book Whiteshift has a chapter entitled, apparently without irony, Is the White Genocide Theory Entirely False?. He concludes that there is indeed “truth to the white nationalists’ transformationist charge”, and that the liberal elite is indeed responsible – but it’s not actually a plot to change the country’s racial makeup. Shriver, however, goes all-in on the conspiracy theory, arguing that “for today’s left, non-white cultures must be protected, preserved and promoted, while evil European cultures deserve to be subsumed”. All of these arguments share a fundamental underpinning: that what we, as citizens, care about when it comes to our fellow citizens is their ethnic background or ancestry; there is something fundamental or innate we get from our ancestors that makes us British, or not; and correspondingly, immigration will, over time, mean that we are (both as individuals and as a country) somehow “less British”. Even leaving aside conspiracist paranoia, the evidence for this is close to nonexistent. Shriver’s bizarre statistics seem to apply a “one drop of blood” rule to say that if any of your ancestors wasn’t white British, you aren’t one of the “original inhabitants”, whatever that is supposed to mean. In fact, the vast majority of people living here (of whatever background) identify as British (or English, Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish); and social attitudes have generally been converging, not diverging. Over the last few years, the British public has become steadily more positive about immigration and its impacts on the UK, as evidenced by the almost complete lack of any backlash against the government’s genuinely courageous decision to offer visas to British national overseas citizens from Hong Kong and their dependents, and, in more recent weeks, by the outpouring of support and sympathy for Afghans seeking refuge here. So it’s no coincidence that articles such as Shriver’s, and an equally incoherent, albeit slightly less overtly xenophobic example from Clare Foges in the Times, are appearing now, in the midst of the Afghan crisis. Both pay lip-service to the idea of “good” Afghan refugees, but warn that we’ll also have lots more, who “won’t wait to be invited” but instead will be crammed into “smugglers’ lorries and boats”. Generosity, in other words, is just weakness, and openness makes us vulnerable; xenophobia, by contrast, is simply natural and human. As history shows, there will always be some people who think like this, but that does not mean the rest of us have to. Jonathan Portes is professor of economics and public policy at King’s College London