My name is straightforward – one of the most common in Britain until recently, and just eight letters.Yet I frequently now find I have to spell it out to people.In London, more than 300 languages are spoken, according to the British Council. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) states that more than four per cent of the capital’s population, around 330,000 people, speak very little or no English at all.This is increasingly becoming a country without a common culture or even a common language: a country more divided, with more latent potential for conflict, than at any time in modern British history. We have all just watched, with horror, one outburst of that conflict on the streets of Belfast.The 2010s and in particular the 2020s saw rapid, uncontrolled demographic change sweep Britain. In the resulting maelstrom, having welcomed millions of people from very different cultures, our country is beginning to lose many of its historic collective rituals and, in particular, its shared beliefs in fundamentals such as democracy and the rule of law.Among the most basic of these, and one of our cultural foundation stones, is freedom of speech. This is under attack on many sides, most intensely from those who seek to introduce blasphemy laws – while those who attempt to defend it are often hounded and accused of racism or ‘Islamophobia’.Between 2001 and 2021, the Muslim population of the United Kingdom grew from about 1.6 million to about four million. About half of Britain’s Muslim population was born in this country, and the age profile of the Muslim population is very young: in the 2021 census, the average Muslim respondent in England and Wales was 27. The average Christian was nearly twice as old, at 51. Those figures are likely out of date now.The implications of this for free speech could not be clearer. Between 2001 and 2021, the Muslim population of the United Kingdom grew from about 1.6 million to about four million Islam expects that Britain will conform to its demands. The authorities know what the reaction will be if they do not comply, writes Ben JonesA 2024 study by the Henry Jackson Society found over half of British Muslims (52 per cent) think depicting Mohammed should be illegal, while 32 per cent ‘favour the implementation of sharia law’ and the same number wish to see ‘the declaration of Islam as a national religion’.One young Muslim man was asked in a viral video interview for his message to the ‘far-Right people’, a term which nowadays could mean almost anybody. His reply was: ‘We’re here to take over your country. You can’t stop us, you can try, but we’re here to uphold sharia law.’The scale of immigration this century, and the final years of the last Tory government in particular, is effectively beyond our comprehension. It is without precedent in the entirety of English history.By 2025, one in 30 people living in Britain had arrived as a migrant in the previous four years. From June 2021 to June 2025, approximately 4 million migrants came to Britain. According to the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory, more people moved to Britain in those four years than the entire population of Wales.That is comparable to England’s entire 17th-century population. The public voted for reducing migration consistently throughout the 2010s, yet by 2019/20 the foreign-born population of Great Britain was estimated at 9.25 million people.Curiously, the ONS stopped publishing data on population by country of birth in 2021. But before it did, it found that no fewer than 16 countries had more than 100,000 of their citizens living in Britain. According to 2021 census figures, 10 per cent of all residents of England do ‘not identify with any UK national identity’. Again, that figure is likely to have grown.In the immediate aftermath of Brexit, which many people saw as an opportunity to sharply reduce immigration, the Conservative governments of Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak admitted unprecedented numbers.In the year to June 2023, net migration was fully 906,000 people with another 728,000 in the year to June 2024, according to the ONS. The total for those two years alone is about half of England’s population at the time of the Norman Conquest. Muslims were angered by a teacher after they showed an image of Muhammad in a class on free speech. The backlash forced the teacher into hiding Martin Frost, from Trafford in Greater Manchester, was charged with ‘causing racially and religiously aggravated intentional harassment, alarm, distress’ for burning a KoranWe have become, in the words Sir Keir Starmer used in a speech last year, an ‘island of strangers’. He quickly recanted the phrase, saying: ‘I deeply regret using it.’ But for a moment, he appeared to have spoken for those who are horrified by the instability caused by state-sponsored multiculturalism that we see all around – the Islamist marches, the separatism of sizeable Islamic enclaves such as Tower Hamlets in east London, the growing contempt and segregation of women and girls (from veiled faces to segregated restaurants) and incidences of sickening crime – all made worse by the zealous policing and punishment of dissent.Half the population, according to a 2021 YouGov poll, believes its freedom of speech is under threat, and 57 per cent of Britons said they feel compelled to censor what they say and even their thoughts. The problems run deeper than ‘wokery’ or the unhinged cultural politics – from trans extremism to the Marxist Black Lives Matter movement – of the early 2020s. This is not a passing storm. Our society is being transformed into an unstable successor nation, one ridiculed online as ‘the Yookay’.Only certain kinds of societies, with very specific cultural traits, have generated democratic traditions and freedom of speech. Indeed, Europeans, Americans, the British and other English-speaking peoples do not seem to realise how ‘Weird’ they are: that is, ‘Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich and Democratic’.This is how the Harvard anthropologist Joseph Henrich has described Western culture, which emerged in part thanks to the Church’s teaching outlawing cousin marriage and polygamy.This, he argues, laid the groundwork for a European culture based upon individuals and nuclear families, engendering higher social trust with increased co-operation, rather than sprawling kinship networks with entrenched tribal loyalties, as still pertain throughout much of the developing world.Migrants inevitably bring underlying cultural attitudes with them. After all – despite the best wishes of technocrat liberals from Tony Blair to Angela Merkel – what chance is there that a new arrival, whether a legal migrant or a small-boat asylum seeker, will jettison a lifetime’s experience, values, cultural expectations and identity as soon as he crosses the border?He brings to his new home his own ideas about religion, how society should be ordered, liberty (or its antithesis) and freedom of expression (or its suppression).There is no concept more Weird than freedom of speech.In February last year, Keir Starmer – a man who doesn’t even seem to understand what he now represents – was in the White House. Criticised by US Vice President J.D. Vance about Britain’s record on free speech, Starmer said: ‘We’ve had free speech for a very, very long time in the United Kingdom and it will last for a very, very long time.’As it happened, the Prime Minister was speaking just three weeks after an English man named Martin Frost, from Trafford in Greater Manchester, had been charged with ‘causing racially and religiously aggravated intentional harassment, alarm, distress’. His alleged crime? Burning a Koran.Martin’s daughter had been killed in the Israel-Palestine conflict. He had reached a point of crisis. One Saturday he went to the Glade of Light memorial, which commemorates the 22 people, many of them young girls, murdered in the 2017 suicide bombing by a Libyan jihadist at the Manchester Arena – an attack that injured more than 1,000 people. Martin began to rip pages from the Islamic book and set them alight, live streaming his demonstration on social media, then threw the remaining pages into the river, saying: ‘Islam has no place in civil society.’What he did could not have been more provocative: many readers will find the burning of any book, for any reason, abhorrent. But in a free society, I would argue, it should be a permissible form of protest.When announcing the decision to charge Martin for this supposed crime, Greater Manchester Police released to the public his name, his date of birth, substantial parts of his address – and even identified him on their social media accounts.This was an exceptionally unusual measure to take against someone accused of committing a ‘hate crime’ – and it came in the context of innumerable killings, death threats and nearly fatal attacks on critics of Islam during the past 30 years. As a result, Martin was immediately made homeless and left to fend for himself on the streets. The police could hardly have been more helpful to those wishing this grieving father harm. In a so-called ‘victim’ impact statement read in court – where the defendant wept on the stand – a Muslim bystander said: ‘I was quite shocked, disgusted and offended... When he began to burn the Koran, my heart was about to break out. This is the most emotion I have ever felt.’ Other events in Manchester in the past 10 years were apparently surpassed by the burning of a book.Starmer, the former head of the Crown Prosecution Service, has spoken of how ‘awful’ Koran burning was, how it should be ‘condemned’ and equated it with ‘hatred and division’ and ‘Islamophobia’. This is the same man who, in 2001, successfully defended a woman’s right to desecrate a US flag.This and other cases show how blasphemy laws, or something very like them, are inexorably being re-instituted in Britain. Freedom of speech is being constricted, not because the authorities, or most of them anyway, believe in the Koran as literal truth – but because they fear that unless these beliefs are given special protection, the forces of Islam within Britain could summon forth horrendous violence.Take the notorious case of a Religious Studies (RS) teacher at a grammar school in Batley, West Yorkshire. He and his family have been forced to live in hiding since March 2021, when he gave a lesson about free speech and blasphemy. Images of Jesus, the Pope, and, fatefully, Mohammed were shown.I quote from Dame Sara Khan’s review into the incident: ‘Muslims both from Batley and outside the area who took offence to the lesson arranged protests outside the school gates. Almost immediately, the RS teacher began receiving threatening messages and an online campaign against him commenced.‘He and his partner’s name and picture were published on social media. Fearing for his and his family’s safety, the teacher moved out of his home and the area on the first day of the protests.’The fallout from this incident has settled like toxic ash over Britain. It has left behind a disfigured landscape, where pockets of lethal energy lie in wait, waiting to flare up and maim or kill any who stumble across them. In short, a precedent has been set: Islam expects that Britain will conform to its demands. The authorities know what the reaction will be if they do not comply.The suppression of free speech is a fundamental component of the experiment that is the Yookay.The transformation was brought about by means of the most profound violation of the democratic rights of the British people to choose their future. Indeed, that ‘project’ is so unpopular that repression is the last real hope of the managers of the state as they struggle to keep the show on the road.The police are engaged in a reactionary model of maintaining order by repression. The repression has been severe, but not severe enough to silence dissent. It has made people very angry. The British public have exhibited tolerance of racial and religious diversity. We do not hate all foreigners, immigrants or genuine refugees. We are not racist, despite being demeaned as such.In fact, I believe we are perhaps the most difficult people in the modern world to provoke to anger.But we will not accept the destruction of our tradition of liberty in the name of multiculturalism. An incalculable sum of damage will be done if the state attempts to make that choice for us.Ben Jones is Director of the Free Speech UnionIsland Of Strangers: Diversity, Decline and Free Speech in Crisis, by Ben Jones, is published by Constable