With the debate about Rupert Lowe’s Restore and its purported ethno-nationalism’ currently exploding on the right, it seems fitting to re-publish this powerful and deeply personal article by Alp Mehmet, the Chairman of Migration Watch, which appeared in the Winter 2025 edition of The Salisbury Review. In it, Alp Mehmet, who arrived in this country in 1956 at the age of 8 from Cyprus, explains what is really needed if you are to assimilate into another culture.
Some five years ago, I bumped into the good editor of this august journal at a mutual friend’s summer drinks party. We chatted, as one does on such occasions. There was little need to be overly cautious about what we said or how we said it, given all the guests were, inevitably, right-leaning; indeed, that was why we had all been invited, as regular contributors to the excellent TCW (formerly The Conservative Woman). It was not the sort of event at which you would find many progressive left-wingers.
We enjoyed a convivial, if serious, discussion about immigration, with me, no doubt, going on about the lack of control, the scale and impact of migration (while adding that I was, myself, a first-generation migrant), and my co-contributor gently probing for what might make reasonable copy. Perhaps it was his journalist’s instinct that prompted him to ask, ‘How English do you feel?’ What a good question, I thought.
This, I should point out, was some time before the Ngozi Fulani (née Marlene Headley) – Lady Susan Hussey incident. You will recall that Lady Hussey was unceremoniously, some might say brutally, thrown under the proverbial bus in December 2022 by the new team at the Palace, for having shown polite interest and friendliness, by asking a question not unlike my co-contributor’s to me.
How did I answer? ‘I feel totally English’, I said, adding, ‘Clearly, I am not English, nor am I White British, despite being Mediterranean white and being born a ‘British Subject, Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies’.’ I still have the passport bearing that endorsement, with which my mother and I arrived in ‘England’ in July 1956, before Cyprus gained independence in 1960. My father had come in 1950. We arrived as British subjects and remained so after independence, never acquiring any other citizenship. We were part of the Windrush generation of Commonwealth migrants.
Why do I feel English? How did I integrate – or should that be assimilate? Be it one or the other, it is a two-way process. While any host country ought to help things along, by the same token, migrants must also want to become a part of the society they or their parents have chosen to join. In my case, it began the day I first set foot on English soil at Dover – not realising that just thirteen years later I would be an immigration officer, sitting at that very desk examining passports like the one my mother handed to the officer that day.
It is not for the host country to place migrants on a conveyor belt leading to assimilation. Nor is assimilation about adopting a set of empty slogans or embracing clichés like cricket, warm beer, fish and chips, Paddington Bear, or the words of Rule, Britannia!
The key to integration is, first and foremost, learning the language and doing so quickly. And if you are coming to settle, being able to speak it on arrival. In the longer term, integration depends on the education of children. I remember my world opening up once I could understand what the teacher was saying. What a joy it was to tell and laugh at the smutty jokes nine and ten-year-olds told in the playground. There were also the hymns and prayers of morning assembly – the New Testament from Monday to Thursday and the Old Testament on Fridays, when the homily was delivered by Mr Casselov, the Jewish member of staff.
We would walk into assembly in twos to the strains of Vaughan Williams, Mozart and Handel. Not that we knew who these people were. We learned sea shanties and English folk songs. Our headmaster, who had served in Malaya, loved to sing ‘On the Road to Mandalay’ and recite Kipling poems – ‘Mandalay’, ‘Gunga Din’, and ‘If’. National pride and what had been achieved oozed out of every pore.
Mr Cass, as we knew him, taught me chess. He also caned me once for writing was instead of were, having warned me of what he would do if I persisted in making the mistake. I never did it again, but to this day I still take a second look when writing either word.
I took part in morning assembly despite coming from another faith. As Turkish Cypriots, my family were fairly secular, non-practising Sunni Muslims. Our teachers were mostly young men who had served in the war. The snuff-taking deputy head had served in the Great War. The only (fearsome) female teacher, Mrs Gough, retired at the end of my second year, at the age of seventy-five; she had taught not only the parents of many of the children but some grandparents too.
Once I learned to read, I read avidly. Books like Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass and Oliver Twist.
In the classroom we learned English proverbs and sayings, and we had quizzes and competitions on boys’ names beginning with particular letters of the alphabet, girls’ names, makes of car, football teams, cricket and football players. In what is now Year 4, I recall fondly the prayer at the end of the day, when Sir would tell us to put our upturned chairs on our desks, hands together and eyes shut, and say:
Lord, keep us safe tonight, safe from all our fears; may angels guard us while we sleep, till morning light appears. Amen.
Although I could recite the prayer, I didn’t fully understand it. But it was these early experiences at my all-boys primary school in East London, and my growing understanding of the local community, that was the foundation of my future assimilation. It also helped me pass the Eleven Plus and gain a place at the local grammar school, something Mum and Dad had been told by other Cypriots was impossible for a ‘foreigner’. For the next seven years, my inculcation into Englishness continued with English history, English language and literature, including Chaucer and Shakespeare. Ever the showman, I loved drama, I much enjoyed debating, and I joined the choir. And sport – lots of sport, especially football, cricket and gymnastics.
Then there were the ‘masters’, as teachers were now to be called, many of whom had also fought in the war, some even being dropped behind enemy lines. They were a tough bunch and needed to be. It was 1950s East London.
I followed my little East London football club, Leyton Orient (I still do), and went to whichever major club was at home when the Os were away – West Ham, Arsenal, Spurs, and even Chelsea. I was at Wembley for FA Cup matches, and I was there with my father for the World Cup semi-final against Portugal, perhaps the best match of the tournament – apart from the final, obviously. And then there were the Ashes series. I loved the Oval Test.
After school, I ended up head boy in my final year, I went to Bristol Poly (now the University of the West of England), where life continued much the same: sport, drinking, and the odd bit of studying. I was also introduced to Elgar and the Three Choirs Festival, much to the amusement of my Cockney friends.
But the life-defining moment in Bristol, and what truly cemented my sense of Englishness, was meeting Elaine, my future wife – a Welsh girl from Caerphilly and a Church of England communicant. We had been married for fifty-four years when she died two years ago. Whatever I have achieved is entirely down to her. How I miss her. We married in Cardiff and lived in Caerphilly for a while before I was posted to Dover on joining the immigration service. Our elder daughter was born in the Miners’ Hospital – our younger daughter was born in Dover.
As my knowledge of South Wales grew over the years and the coal tips, spoil and slag heaps became more familiar, I began to understand better what England was about. The 1966 Aberfan disaster was still fresh in everyone’s mind. Life, and death, in Caerphilly were invariably linked to coal. Elaine’s paternal grandfather was killed in a pit accident in the 1930s, leaving a widow and five children. Her maternal grandfather was medically retired following a pit accident in the mid-1960s.
The more I learned about South Wales – its mines, iron and steel works, and its docks – the more I realised that what I saw there was replicated many times over across England, Scotland and Northern Ireland, where in addition to coal, iron and steel, there were linen mills, textile factories, shipyards, engineering works, car production, shoe factories and, of course, farming. The workforce of Great Britain and Northern Ireland not only fought against and defeated tyranny but rebuilt the country after the war. And it is worth remembering that it was the forebears of those same people who, a century earlier, had been the backbone of the Industrial Revolution. My father-in-law, Berwyn, and my mother-in-law both served in the RAF during the war, while Pa’s two brothers served in the Welsh Guards. At 5 feet 11 inches, Berwyn was too short for the Guards. Mum-in-law lost two fiancés in the war, one an Australian.
Is it any wonder that communities around the Kingdom bristle when they hear that it was the Windrush generation of Commonwealth immigrants who saved and rebuilt the country after 1945? No, it was the Tommys and Brendas of England, the Hamishes and Agneses of Scotland, the Berwyns and Nancys of Wales, and the Paddys and Mollys of Belfast.
Having left Cyprus in 1956 and returned only once, for a holiday in 1962, I did not go back again until 2003. It was Elaine’s first visit. Seeing the village of my birth was, of course, emotional – as much for Elaine as for me. But eight years of childhood had been buried beneath the immense weight of forty-seven years of living and evolving in England, thirty-six of those years with Elaine at my side, with two daughters and six grandchildren the result. England was Mother Earth to us both. Elaine had no desire to return to Caerphilly any more than I wanted to go back to Louroujina. Did I feel English while in the village I was born in, and where I attended two years at the village school? I not only felt English but I sensed that was how my relations saw me, pleased as they were to see me and my wife.
If I could assimilate into British society, why can’t those arriving today? The problem is scale and speed. Until the mid-1990s, net migration was modest, and for many years it was net negative. However, from the late 1990s onwards, pace and scale of immigration picked up and rose to unprecedented levels. Between 2001 and 2018, the foreign-born population doubled from 4.6 million to more than 9 million, and by mid-2023 it had risen to 11.4 million.
Between 1991 and 2021, the proportion of census respondents declaring their ethnicity as White British in the UK fell from 95% to just under 75%, while the ethnic minority proportion quintupled. In the twenty years between the 2001 and 2021 census, the overall population increased by 8 million, of which nearly seven million was due to migrants and their children.
Meanwhile, in early August (2025), we learned from the ONS that in the year to mid-2024, 755,000 people were added to the population of England and Wales, almost entirely (98%) due to immigration. That is getting on for the population of Leeds metropolitan area in 2021 and needing something like 350,000 homes.
Every local authority in England, except South Holland in Lincolnshire, saw an increase in its population in the year to mid-2024. Just look at the Migration Watch website (www.migrationwatchuk.org), click on ‘latest news’ and look at the report ‘Migration is changing your area’. How on earth do we integrate that number of people, even if they wanted to integrate? Of course, not all do, with ever more second and third generation migrants withdrawing into monoethnic huddles. When I arrived in 1956, I was the only non-English speaking child in the school. The same school now comprises almost wholly ethnic minorities.
In July this year, we learned that more than 2,000 schools in England have a majority of pupils who do not speak English as their first language. Another report suggested that in over 107 schools, ‘nine in ten pupils don’t speak only English at home’, while two primary schools, one in Tower Hamlets where I live and attended primary school in the 1950s, have no pupils who speak English as their first language.
David Coleman has now revised his 2010 projections. In 2010, the UK-wide total fertility rate (TFR) was just under 2 children per woman, and net migration was 250,000 a year. Today, the UK’s TFR has fallen to 1.4, and the ONS expects net migration to stabilise at 340,000 a year, having peaked at 903,000 in 2022-23. With these new assumptions, an unpublished projection by Coleman suggests that the tipping point of the ethnic minority proportion of the population equalling the historic majority would be reached in 2061-62 – in agreement with Goodwin and Kaufmann. These projections are, inevitably, tentative, as migration trends are very volatile at present and available migration data are very inadequate. But I fear for the future stability of our society.
Alp Mehmet is the chairman of Migration Watch UK. A former diplomat, he became one of the UK’s first two ethnic minority ambassadors when appointed ambassador to Iceland in 2004.
