‘White Flight’ from the angle of an indigenous British perspective
ELOISE HURREN
NCF Locals Presentation Talk on Saturday 7th February at 2pm on the subject of ‘White flight’
by Elly Hurren, resident of Scotby Village, Carlisle.
‘White Flight’: What is it? it’s background and a story of a Personal and Cultural Journey and Reflection from an Indigenous British Citizen…
What do we understand by the meaning of the term White Flight?
Well, to give some historical context, not surprisingly, this term originates from across the pond in America and is explained by the departure of white residents in neighbourhoods in response to the arrival of non-European racial, ethnic, or cultural groups. The term ‘white flight’ was originally coined to describe the exodus of white households from school districts in the United States that began admitting Black students but is now most closely associated with the mass migration of white people in the United States from urban to suburban environments during the mid-20th century. The phenomenon of white flight is still identifiable in the 21st century. The process of voluntary segregation through relocation is not limited to the United States and has appeared in many countries where communities of European descent have resisted racial integration.
So, I hear you ask, when did this phenomenon first begin to take place on our shores and start to be talked about? Well, U.K. National newspapers at any rate, first began to report on this back in 2013. There was an article in The Sunday Times by Nicholas Hellen, Social Affairs Editor, titled: Britons ‘self segregate’ as white flight soars. He begins the article by explaining; A FLIGHT of white people to the countryside and outer suburbs is creating an “ethnic cliff” dividing them from communities in cities. Later on in the article he gives an example of one young white British couple in their late twenties, leaving central Reading to move to the suburb of Calcot, West Berkshire, explaining it was due to the fear of crime and there being a lot of people hanging around on the streets – (sound familiar?)…
In contrast, an example of an Afghanee lady in her late twenties and family who moved into central Reading observed and commented that during their two years of living there, white British people are leaving the area and foreigners are moving in. Where there were two or three Asian halal shops, there are now five or six close by. In the article, the most dramatic exodus of white Britons at the time is given for the northeast London borough of Redbridge, where their number fell by 40,844 in a decade. The article also goes onto point out that a House of Commons answer obtained back then by MP David Davis, the then former shadow Home Secretary, stated that one million pupils do not have English as a first language and the article finishes with a quote from then professor of politics at Birkbeck, University of London, Eric Kaufmann who even then was stating “If your country doesn’t have hard borders, you may get people creating their own boundaries below the level of the state.” Again, ring any bells?
Other explanations, such as economic and educational ones, aside from racial differences are offered up in various published articles. For example, again in 2013, the BBC published one such article titled: “Why have the white British left London?” In it they offer up the explanation and frame this phenomenon as e.g. white working class families escaping the slums and bombed-out East End in the middle of the last century to London’s outer boroughs, then in the past decade (so early 2000s) having prospered from both the housing boom and the capital’s economic growth, cashed in their assets and bought themselves a cottage in the countryside or by the sea. The BBC article then finishes with the words, which comfort them at any rate! “It is a story of aspiration. It is a story of success”. How ironic.
I would now like to tell you about my own story of White Flight, not as a statistic, or a headline, or indeed a policy problem — but from the perspective of an Indigenous British citizen trying to describe my own personal cultural experience and journey since the early 2000s, which to date I have not heard many of my fellow countrymen talk about publicly.
For many people like me, what is called “White Flight” is not first felt in housing data or census tables.
It is felt strongly, culturally, and emotionally — something familiar is slipping, and speaking about it became far too risky and not permitted.
I first began to feel this phenomenon in my home city of London way back in the early 2000s. This was when Blair first began his fatal experiment of mass immigration into the U.K. from the former Eastern Communist block countries, namely, Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the then former Yugoslavia.
I was fortunate enough to be living and working in central London and at the time this experiment began was still living there. Almost overnight I began to hear and see dramatic changes in my area, where for example more and more non-English speakers, most noticeably at the time Polish plumbers and builders, would walk around the streets talking in Polish on their mobile phones and also you would suddenly hear cafe waitresses speaking with Eastern European accents, replacing the traditional 1st generation cockney or sometimes 2nd or 3rd generation Italian or Spanish Brit, who up until then I had grown up with.
The numbers proceeded to accelerate year on year, so in around 2003 I would get on my local bus and hardly hear any native English person. The mix of people had become a mass of ethnic minorities.
Next came the Islamist reign of terror attacks, which began in earnest in 2005, with the 4 coordinated 7/7 bombings in central London. I was 8 months pregnant at the time with our first son and used to commute every day to my place of work at a large office, based in Putney. Looking back now, this incident was beyond doubt a key contributing factor in our life-changing decision to leave London in our mid-thirties. Along with our first child, we trialled a new life away from our home city and also as it turned out in the end, for a time away from England. We felt we had become estranged from it and it in turn, estranged from us.
In 2006, we decided to move with our then one year old to experience a new life in Scotland, near to where close family lived at the time and we had also got married in 1998. I think it’s important to note at this juncture that I am from a long line of Scots on my maternal side. This move proved to be an eye opening new life experience in lots of ways, because although genetically I was part Scottish, I was soon to experience what it was really like to live full time amongst native Scots, as someone who had grown up in England, especially in a small commuter town under SNP rule, at a time when the Scottish referendum was rearing its ugly head!
Looking back, there was definitely a cohort of British and English cases of ‘White Flight,’ both who had escaped from London and the South of England, whether that was young families or retirees. I distinctly remember though there always being a palpable tension and under current with a feeling of ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ between the native Scots and ‘The Incomers,’ as we were called. One practical example to illustrate this was a well known local trades practice at the time, where e.g. plumbers, electricians and builders businesses operated a two tariff price charging system, so we soon discovered that we were being charged about twice the rate for a call out, compared to one of the locals, so I guess you could argue that we were in part subsidising their lifestyle.
Did we feel we belonged culturally and fitted in to this part of the United Kingdom and were at ease raising our young family? Yes, to a greater degree but not completely of course, despite my Scottish ancestry (from the clans of the Coopers, Goughs and Macleods) and also taking into account my family and economic ties to the area. Understandably though from the Scots perspective, it is interesting to observe that they too like the English naturally wanted to preserve their own clan trademarks, both tribally, culturally and historically…frankly, who could blame them?
Staying on the Scottish theme and how White Flight is seriously beginning to impact them, I fast forward 20 years to 2025, when last year I took my 18 year old middle son to a Camp America recruitment event in Edinburgh. Whilst waiting for him to come and meet me after the event, I ended up getting into a conversation while queuing for a cup of tea in a nearby cafe with a lovely local elderly lady from Edinburgh. She began to open up and tell me about the depressing personal impact on her of mass immigration into her home city. She shared with me for example how few people now spoke any English on her local bus route. I was able to completely empathise and commiserate with her about this, explaining how I had been through exactly the same experience in London back in the early 2000s. I also shared with her an historic experience with my late mother when at a conference in Glasgow, she bravely dared to raise the subject and warn of the effects that she had already had firsthand experience of, from mass uncontrolled immigration into London during the early 2000s. Needless to say back then, she was immediately shut down and told to stop being ‘racist.’ So, all those years ago what she was simply trying to warn the Scots about has now come back to haunt them.
Why did we end up relocating back to England, our cultural country of birth, to settle in Carlisle in 2016? Well, there were various reasons for this. One reason was the toxic atmosphere we lived through during the first SNP referendum in 2014 but it was mainly so our children would be able to attend a far better local school. We also wanted to live close to a Cathedral and University city with more going on.
We have definitely felt more at home living here and have on the whole been happy and settled in Cumbria, from a cultural, educational and lifestyle perspective. We have always been sensitive to, aware and appreciative of Cumbria’s own unique and distinctive way of life, tribe, culture and history, which of course it is understandably very proud of and wishes to preserve.
However, very tragically, Carlisle and the county of Cumbria are now themselves only just properly beginning to experience what me and my family have already lived through; The appalling and destructive mass immigration experiment, which I first went through in London over two decades ago. A poignant example of this is the local council’s recent decision for voting in and adopting the ‘City and wider region of Sanctuary status.’
I was present during the very first years of the mass Eastern European immigration experiment which flooded London during the early 2000s. Now, twenty six years later, I find myself and my family settled in the furthest Northern city in England. The nightmare Boris wave of mass immigration, from the third world, is currently moving en masse up here and across the rest of England and the U.K. These migrants are holding the country to ransom, both economically and culturally.
To make the ‘White Flight’ situation even worse, we now have a lot of significant wealth creators and some of the youngest and brightest of our country, who are now fleeing abroad.
Only last week, Alp Mehmet from the excellent organisation Migration Watch, of which I am a member, had an article published in both the Telegraph and The Conservative Woman, titled:
‘Don’t believe the media spin: immigration is still out of control – and young Brits are fleeing’
In part of the article, he states:
THERE has been a lot in the press recently saying that the migration crisis is history. The Telegraph: ‘Managed migration now under control, says former border tsar’; Fraser Nelson in the Times: ‘The prospect of net-zero immigration is good news for the PM’; UnHerd: ‘Falling numbers spell trouble for Reform’; the London Standard: ‘UK visa applications down by over 100,000 amid stricter immigration rules’.
Of note in relation to another kind of ‘White Flight’, Alp goes onto explain during the piece that:
Net immigration is down, for sure, but it is still massive. The most recent migration stats, for the 12 months ending June 2025, showed a fall in net immigration to 204,000 due to lower immigration and higher emigration, with 693,000 people leaving Britain, an increase of 40 per cent on 2022. Of those leaving, 230,000 were British nationals under 45 years of age. Additionally, we learned that there has been an undercount of British nationals leaving the UK since 2012. Total British net emigration in the period 2012 to 2021 was 790,000, more than double the previous estimate. Total net emigration 2012-2021 was 2.25million.
This exodus of the able young is very worrying. The problem is that the gaps they leave are filled by less able people who are less committed to Britain. They are then able to bring in others of the same ilk. Over time, they proceed to shape a Britain that bears little resemblance to the one that used to exist.
There is no big clampdown. Migration levels remain catastrophically high. The inflow is still massive (900,000 in the year ending June 2025). This is not going to reduce by much any time soon without radical policy changes, of which there are none in view. And you won’t find them in the White Paper announced by Sir Keir Starmer last May. Numbers are unlikely to fall because:
- Universities will go on recruiting as many foreign students as they need to keep afloat. Of the nearly 2 million who came in the years 2022-25 more than half will stay beyond the expiration of their visas, and many will switch to work visas or claim asylum, as increasing numbers are.
- There is no limit to the number of skilled workers, or where a claimed shortage of workers exists, who can come. With no cap, foreign workers will simply keep coming.
- Family visas will stay on an upward trajectory, not least as Boriswavers (the 4 million or so who came after Johnson loosened controls) start to bring dependents, if they haven’t already. The impact of higher income and other thresholds will prove limited and temporary, as has happened with previous increases.
Let’s also keep an eye on Iran: how many migrants will the current turmoil there push in our direction?
As for emigration, we don’t expect many migrants here for temporary stays to return willingly to, say, South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East or Ukraine for that matter.
Deaths (mainly of native Brits) are now exceeding births (more than a third are to non-UK born mothers.) This all means that we are still heading relentlessly towards ever greater demographic change, when the native British majority becomes a minority. Indeed, it has already happened in many areas, and even more widely in classrooms around the country.
I will never be able to forgive or forget the complete betrayal of both Blair and Brown under their Marxist, Fabian Society New Labour banner or indeed on the other side of the political traitors aisle, Cameron, Teresa May and Boris, under their Globalist One Nation Conservatives banner. The universal damage, displacement and destruction the political class has inflicted on this country and the British people, should serve as a warning to future generations. The foreign and domestic policies of both parties going back decades, have been completely devastating and life changing, particularly for the indigenous Brit. Our tiny, extremely precious and beautiful gem of an island we call home is notably our ONLY home. Once our home is gone for good, there will be no turning back.
I don’t know whether in my lifetime me, my children or hopefully one day my grandchildren will ever experience the country which I grew up in and was once truly proud to call home.
What I do know is that I will continue doing whatever I can to try and return this country to its once former glory, for the sake of future generations to come.
This article (‘White Flight’ from the angle of an indigenous British perspective) was created and published by Eloise Hurren and is republished here under “Fair Use”
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