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Tanja Bueltmann @tanjabueltmann.net · 06/08/2026

The far right agenda is not a grievance that can ever be settled. That is why we are where we are now, a place where there is a live conversation about who is a 'white Briton' as per below. I am not clear what it will take for people to understand the seriousness of the situation because ...

Restore Britain's Rupert Lowe declines to say whether King is a 'white Briton'

Restore Britain leader Rupert Lowe has declined to say, when asked, whether he thinks the King is a “white Briton”.

It comes after Lowe said “white Britons will become a minority by 2063” in a video in which he offered to work with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.

The BBC’s Nick Robinson asked Lowe about the issue on the Today programme on Thursday, noting that the forecast he referred to defines a white Briton as someone whose parents were both born in the UK.

Robinson told the Restore Britain leader that “because Prince Philip was born in Greece, King Charles is not, under your definition, treated as a white Briton”.

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Tanja Bueltmann @tanjabueltmann.net · 11/06/2026

By way of an update: this is how this should be described. I am glad this is clear to some, and it’s esp good to see in policing context. But unfortunately those ‘some’ do not currently include most of our media. Many continue to go with the immensely dangerous ‘legitimate concerns’ protest line.

Screenshot from the Belfast Telegraph. It says: Police Federation for Northern Ireland condemns 'violent fascist law-breakers'
The Police Federation for Northern Ireland says twelve officers injured during disturbances last night is down to ‘violent fascist law-breakers’ who want to wreck Northern Ireland.

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Tanja Bueltmann @tanjabueltmann.net · 16/05/2026

How else could we accept the Home Secretary casually telling a member of the public who challenged her in a perfectly normal way to ‘f*ck off’? This should have meant the end of her tenure. As an aside: I pitched a piece about this at the time but without success, so might as well add it here.

Ten years of ‘fuck off’: Mahmood’s outburst is not where this ends—and that is what should terrify us all
In the immediate aftermath of the EU referendum result in 2016, I was walking down the street speaking German on the phone to my mother when a stranger told me to ‘fuck off back to where I come from’. It was a visceral reminder that the referendum had not just been a vote, it had been a signal. A permission structure. Ten years on, it is the Home Secretary employing the same register, from a stage and into a microphone. Shabana Mahmood told a critic of her migration policies to ‘fuck right off’, dismissing those who question her approach as ‘white liberals’ trying to delegitimise what politicians have come to refer to as ‘legitimate concerns’.
This is being treated as a minor controversy. In fact: it has already disappeared out of the news. But it is not minor in any way. It is a marker on a trajectory—and what makes it so alarming is that there is no endpoint in sight.
I am a migration historian and a German migrant to the UK. I fit squarely into Mahmood’s ‘white liberal’ caricature, and I have spent nearly a decade since the referendum campaigning for migrant rights, watching this escalation at close quarters. What I have seen is a consistent pattern: each cycle of extreme positions normalises the next. The Overton window does not just shift, it gets dismantled, piece by piece.

Consider the language now routinely used about people seeking sanctuary. Mahmood has spoken of refugees receiving a ‘golden ticket’ as though the context were Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory rather than countries torn apart by war and famine. She has described the UK’s asylum system ‘out of control’ and dividing the country—a framing that is both factually wrong and deliberately dehumanising. There are 42.5 million refugees globally. The UK hosts 548,000 of them. That is 0.78% of the population. The idea that this constitutes an existential crisis is not a policy position. It is a political choice to stoke fear.
And it is a choice with consequences, not just for refugees and migrants most immediately impacted, but for all of us.
Politicians justify this approach by pointing to polls showing voter concern about immigration. I am not suggesting those concerns mean nothing. But polling on immigration is almost always reductive. Ask people whether they want fewer immigrants and many will say yes. Ask them whether they want fewer care workers, fewer NHS staff, fewer people paying the taxes that fund their communities, and the answer likely looks rather different. It is the job of politicians to make the case for the latter—real improvements in our communities. Most choose not to, because it is harder. So instead we get an endless cycle: problems in communities, blame immigrants, more restrictive policies, fewer doctors and care workers, more problems in communities, blame immigrants etc. The actual issues never get addressed because immigration is not their root cause but it has become the only answer anyone in Westminster seems willing to offer.

This is not just ineffective. It is actively dangerous. Because mainstreaming extremist positions on immigration does not neutralise the far right. It legitimises them. Every step Labour takes towards Reform’s territory gives Reform more power. Every time a cabinet minister reaches for the language of the street xenophobe, the threshold for what is considered acceptable moves a little further. Stephen Yaxley-Lennon has spoken jubilantly of the Overton window having been obliterated. He is not wrong.
What comes next is the question nobody in government seems willing to ask. I first made these arguments about the UK’s general trajectory, and how it would be enabled by anti-immigration extremism, over a decade ago. I have watched them unfold with a mixture of fury and despair. We have the knowledge. The historical record is clear: when extremist policies are mainstreamed, they do not stop where you set them. The reach expands. The targets multiply. And once you accept that rights can be qualified for one group, you have built a tool that can be used against anyone.
That is why Mahmood’s ‘fuck off’ matters beyond the headlines it generated. It is not an aberration. It is the logical expression of a decade in which anti-migrant rhetoric has been allowed to escalate unchecked, in which speaking German on a British street made me a target, in which refugees are cast as chancers gaming a system, in which a Home Secretary can dismiss her critics with an expletive and expect applause rather than censure.

I am a dual national now. British, as well as German. This is my country too, even if, for many, I will never be quite the right kind of British, even as a white person. That stranger in 2016 told me to go back to where I came from. I didn’t. I stayed, became a citizen, and keep arguing for a different kind of Britain: one that understands what migrants contribute, what the historical record shows, and what is at stake when hatred is normalised from the top down.
So I say: the real ‘fuck off’ belongs elsewhere. To bigoted policies that cause harm; to approaches that pit us against each other while doing absolutely nothing for our communities. It belongs to another decade of escalation, if we allow it.
Better choices are possible; there are politicians and policies that prove it. But more of us need to make those choices and say so, loudly and without apology. I sure will keep fighting for those better choices in my country. Which is also, now, this one.

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Tanja Bueltmann @tanjabueltmann.net · 23/02/2025

Finally a lesson for Labour: recognise that cosplaying AfD didn’t help the CDU. Merz set out to halve AfD support. Instead, he helped further normalise AfD and they landed on over 20% … gaining nearly 1 million votes *from* CDU. Voters pick the original, not the copycat. Don’t cosplay Reform!

Screenshot of a graph showing voter movements to the AfD. It gained most from those who didn’t previously vote — 1.8 million voters as previously noted, but then also 910k from the CDU.

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Tanja Bueltmann @tanjabueltmann.net · 23/02/2025

I’ll leave you with these maps, missing constituencies won’t change the overall pattern much. Light blue = AfD Last map = AfD % for second vote (party vote). If you really think that these maps show the far right has been defeated, then I honestly don’t know what else to say.

Map of Germany showing first vote result >> vote for a specific candidate, basically like first past the post (black = CDU; dark blue = CSU; red = SPD; green = Green; dark pink = Die Linke; grey areas shown = no result yet).

Map of Germany showing second vote result >> vote for a party (black = CDU; dark blue = CSU; red = SPD; green = Green; dark pink = Die Linke; grey areas shown = no result yet).

Map of Germany showing second vote breakdown for the AfD; while the % highest in the East, this shows significant % across most of Germany (grey areas shown = no result yet).

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Tanja Bueltmann @tanjabueltmann.net · 24/11/2024

Twitter being even less of the force it once was is one way in which to lessen that influence. But until then, this here is just one example of it: he is being taken seriously and staying on X tacitly helps with that as it suggests it’s still a usable platform that plays an important role.

And people take him seriously. Last week the Telegraph splashed on a single tweet from Musk criticising Rachel Reeves’s proposed changes to inheritance tax on some farmland, even though Musk’s real understanding of almost anything about British life or politics could barely stretch to 280 characters.

More worrying is his tendency to act as a freelance operator in international politics, blurring all lines between national security, faux-diplomacy and personal gain.

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Tanja Bueltmann @tanjabueltmann.net · 04/12/2023

The Conservatives — limiting your future further every single day.

Screenshot of a news headline about the new immigration rules. It says: ‘Most UK nationals unable to bring home a foreign spouse under new migration rules’

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Tanja Bueltmann @tanjabueltmann.net · 01/11/2023

Aw thank you Chris! I am currently spending evenings sorting through photos and this happened to be one that popped up only yesterday and I did then think that I’d have to check if you’re here. Lovely memory.

Photo of Chris and me sat at a table in a restaurant in Brussels.

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Tanja Bueltmann @tanjabueltmann.net · 01/11/2023

This morning I wrote to UKRI to inform them of my resignation from the UKRI Talent PRC with immediate effect. My decision to resign is a direct result of the letter from the UKRI CEO published here www.ukri.org/news/respons... yesterday. I attach my resignation letter for information.

Full text of my letter unfortunately too long to fully copy for all images, so here is a summary that captures the essence; I am having to spread this across the images as not enough space here:

I argue that I expected UKRI to express concern in terms of wellbeing and safety issues that the public singling out of two academics might cause, and to confirm EDI as a core mission of UKRI.

I then say that the UKRI CEO's response is anything but, setting a chilling precent that precedent that documents that UKRI is prepared not only to bow to government pressure, but to identify EDI as immediately dispensable in the process.

I then continue to explain why I think this is so concerning. I note that such developments are not happening in isolation given the recent pledge at the Conservative Party conference to to ‘kick woke ideology out of science’, and examples from elsewhere that document that the government is moniroting those critical of government policy.

I end by asking about where this will end and saying that I cannot serve in an org that makes such choices.

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Tanja Bueltmann @tanjabueltmann.net · 23/10/2023

Still ‘living’ in the alternate universe that is book writing, so not much from me here yet. But this wee robin (no hidden nod to birdsite!) I managed to capture is too lovely not to share. Birds are of course also a great symbol of migration, so very fitting. Anyway: hello folks …more coming soon!

Photograph of a European robin in a tree. The robin is sitting on a small branch and looks quite “puffy” and round. There are some green and yellow-ish leaves on the branches around the bird.

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