Preface to The Great Replacement and the Islamisation of Britain

I’ve called this book a second edition, but it’s more accurately a new book, and to reflect that I’ve given it a new title. When I published the first edition of The Great Replacement in November 2024, my aim was to get the information and data it made public to as many readers as possible. I had written the book in four months of intense work between July and October, initially in response to the Southport attack by an Islamic terrorist that had killed three children and injured another 10 people in England. Over the following year, however, in which I watched the situation in the United Kingdom closely from my home in Hong Kong, I began to realise the inadequacy of the conclusions I had drawn from this data. The inadequacy, that is, not the inaccuracy. Everything I wrote in the first edition has been proved true, and everything I predicted is coming to pass. Indeed, over the past year replacement immigration has joined that growing list of conspiracy theories that are now accepted as reality by millions of people in Britain, Europe and across the West. However, on my return to Britain over the summer of 2025, during which I spent two months in London, it became apparent to me that I would have to add what I initially conceived as an addendum. I should have known better. I had begun this book with the intentions of writing a 5,000-word article on the Government’s response to the Southport attack, and it grew to a 150-page book. Similarly, the addendum has grown to 230 pages and what I have now titled Part Two (‘The Islamisation of Britain’) of this second edition; and in updating and expanding what is now Part One (‘Replacement Immigration’), I have extended it to 170 pages. My book, therefore, has more than doubled in length. It has also shifted its focus.

When I wrote the first edition of The Great Replacement: Conspiracy Theory or Immigration Policy? I wanted to show that replacement immigration was not a conspiracy theory but a United Nations policy that has been written into European Union compacts and implemented and enforced by the nation states of Europe and the West for at least 25 years and in some countries for longer. Additionally, I wanted to reveal the economic motivations for this policy, and how it benefitted the transnational corporations that lobbied the UN to adopt its implementation. With at least 60 million immigrants born in non-European countries living in the European Union and United Kingdom today (48 million in the EU, 12 million in the UK out of a combined population of 520 million or 11.5 percent), this has resulted in one of the great migrations of people across the planet.

This is equivalent to the 40-60 million refugees in Europe created by the catastrophe of the Second World War, though these were overwhelmingly Europeans who mostly returned to their home nations; nearly double the 32 million Europeans who migrated to the USA in the century between 1820 and 1930, many of whom (around 40 percent of English and Welsh and Italians) returned to their country of origin; three times the 20 million South Asians who moved after the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, while remaining within the cultures and landmass of the Indian subcontinent; and more than four times the 12.5 million Africans transported by the trans-Atlantic slave trade between the Sixteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. We have to go back to the Migration Period that, between roughly 375 and 600, saw the invasion within and into European territories by various Barbarian tribes and Huns from East Asia to find a movement of people with equivalent historical repercussions. Although the invaders then numbered at most a million in an overall population of around 40 million people, it led to the fall of the Western Roman Empire and in doing so laid the grounds for the rise of what came to be called Europe.

The two migrations, therefore — more accurately, the two invasions — have some claim to mark the beginning and end of the history of European civilisation. I’m not the first person to see comparisons between the decline and fall of the Roman Empire and that of the British Empire; and like the former, there were more than merely economic reasons for its death. But Britain lost its Empire in the Second World War, though it took another 50 years to return its colonies, terminate its mandates and withdraw from its protectorates. It is the fall of Britain as a nation state — a fate in which it leads and is a warning to the other nations of Europe — that is the subject of this book; and it is the depth of this fall and who and what is replacing the nation Britain once was, that has led me to retitle the first edition to its second, slightly cumbersome but more accurate title, The Great Replacement and the Islamisation of Britain.

Globally, the figures are even worse. In 2024, there were an estimated 155 million immigrants living in Europe and North America. This figure is only surpassed by the estimated 174 million Chinese who moved from rural to urban areas over a similar time-span between 1978 and 1999; but this was an internal migration of people of the same race, ethnicity and culture and within the same polity as their destination. What these new figures show is that the migration of peoples from Africa, the Middle East and South Asia into Europe over the last 3 decades — together with the movement of these and other immigrants into North America and Australasia under the same policy of replacement immigration — is by far the largest external migration of people in such a brief period of time in human history.

And yet, extraordinarily, it has been organised and implemented without any sort of mandate from, and almost entirely without the prior knowledge of, the peoples of the countries into which they are migrating. Worse still, anyone who dares to notice this world-historical event, let alone to voice a negative opinion about its consequences for the native populations, is censored and immediately denounced by an immense international apparatus of propaganda as racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic or simply as a conspiracy theorist. Anyone who persists or dares to try and oppose it risks being arrested, fired from their jobs, imprisoned or worse under the national and international legislation that has overseen this unprecedented criminal enterprise, compared to which recent comparable criminal enterprises like the Iraq War, the so-called War on Terror, the proxy-war in the Ukraine and even global lockdown, pale in comparison to the scale, impact, consequences and the sheer audacity of its architects.

When I published the first edition of The Great Replacement in November 2024, I had written it quickly over the summer of that year, convinced that, following the Southport terrorist attack and the mass arrests of protesters by the newly-elected government of Keir Starmer, this was the number one topic of interest and concern in Britain, and it was important that a short book clarifying the origins and aims of replacement immigration was available in paperback at the cheapest possible price. I was also convinced that such a book would sell well. I was wrong. We live, it seems, in a world in which the written word is confined to the length of a few swipes of a smartphone screen; and a book I hoped to sell in its thousands has sold, instead, in its hundreds.

This wasn’t helped by the fact that many of the self-styled ‘alternative’ journals in which I had been publishing since lockdown had already closed their pages to me, either over my response to the war in the Ukraine (Daily Sceptic, Conservative Woman and The Exposé), or over my critique of the accusation of racism to silence opposition to the Great Reset (Real Left). Unlike my previous four books, therefore, I did not hold a book launch for The Great Replacement, not only because the tenuous unity of the so-called ‘Freedom Movement’, from which my readers had largely been drawn since March 2020, had been pulled apart by the wars in the Ukraine and Gaza, but also because I no longer had access to a journal in which to advertise such a launch.

To my initial surprise, the same doors were closed on me when I approached other online journals to publish sections from my book in an attempt to disseminate its findings and improve my sales. I said that anyone daring to speak about replacement immigration is censored and denounced as racist, and such denunciations are not limited to the apparatuses of the state. In December 2024, when I offered chapter three of my book, ‘The Response’, to Off Guardian, with whom I’d published some 20 articles since December 2022, the editors responded that ‘suggestions that Islam itself represents some kind of ethical problem were just muddying what should be a strictly factual discussion with racist overtones’. Then, just as the editor of Real Left had done the year before, they set up a trolling platform against me on their website. Over many years I’ve learned never to underestimate the cowardice of the Left when it comes to facing reality, but it was Off Guardian’s refusal to address the Islamisation of Britain as anything other than a racist conspiracy theory that prompted my decision to add an addendum to my book on precisely this topic. In that respect, therefore, although these words will haunt them forever, I am indebted to them for sparking the second edition of this book.

Turning elsewhere, chapter one, ‘The Plan’, was published in two parts in January and February 2025 in UK Column, with whom I’d published half a dozen articles and several podcasts since December 2022; but having discussed with me their plans to serialise the entire book, the editors subsequently withdrew into a silence that they maintain to this day. Extraordinarily, given the journal’s claim to be ‘the antidote to mainstream propaganda’, UK Column has no section dedicated to immigration on their website, and my articles, published over a year ago, are the last ones to address what is easily the most important issue in Britain today. Perhaps that’s not surprising given that, in October 2025, UK Column published an article titled ‘Islam Is Not the Enemy of Christianity: An Arab Christian Perspective’ — which will be welcome if improbable news to the people of Britain and Europe. One is used to reading such affirmations of the dogma of woke in the organs of the Left, but it is surprising and more than disappointing to see it propagated on a platform otherwise opposed to the multiform programmes of the Great Reset.

Finally, Unity News Network, with whom I’d published half a dozen articles since April 2023, published chapter two, ‘The Impact’ and chapter three, ‘The Response’, in June and July 2025, for which I am grateful to its editor, David Clews. It is always instructive to find where the final taboo lies in as unlikely an alliance as the Freedom Movement, which in the removal of our rights and freedoms under lockdown found a common cause that drew together such disparate aspects of British society; but the recourse of so many of the alternative media platforms that emerged from those years either to self-censorship and silence or to the same childish insults and denunciations to which they are subjected by the UK state and mainstream media, has revealed almost all of them to have been merely playing at the rebellion that won them their readers, and that now, as the final battle for Britain is engaged, they have taken refuge in the old cliché that discretion is the better part of valour.

In the acknowledgements to the first edition of this book I thanked the podcasters who, in the summer and autumn of 2024, invited me to talk about the findings of my book to their audiences; and, fortunately, further interviewers invited me onto their podcasts to talk about the second edition as I was writing it. These include Jonny Hodl on his Staying Free Podcast in April 2025, John Laughland and Jeremy Nell on Forum for Democracy International in August, and Kerry Hopkins on her eponymous podcast in December. It’s a measure of their courage in having me on their shows that another podcaster, whom I won’t name here but who, having heard a clip from the last of these interviews, invited me onto his show this January to discuss ‘How to Get Our United Britain Back’; yet when I responded that I’d be happy to discuss replacement immigration and the Islamisation of Britain he promptly withdrew the offer, saying they’d been ‘advised not to participate in discussions on these topics’. One wonders from whom it is that we are supposed to take our country back if not immigrants and the influence of Islam. Unfortunately, these reactions are very much the norm and not the exception; so I’d like to take this opportunity, as I did in the first edition of this book, to thank those podcasters and editors who have had the courage to help me disseminate some of the findings in this book, which remains, for all these reasons, independently published.

It is, however, not only from the refusal of so-called ‘alternative’ platforms to publish my analysis of replacement immigration but also from questions I have received from readers about the goal of this policy that I decided to add a study of the Islamisation of Britain to the first edition. My focus, in the book I published in November 2024, was on the economic motivations for flooding Britain with unskilled and semi-skilled labourers from South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa; but as I watched the effects of this policy in what has appeared to more and more people to be the deliberate destruction of Britain under the current UK Government, I wasn’t alone in asking if that was all.

Just as the proxy-war in the Ukraine had seamlessly continued the political terror and public displays of compliance by which the British people had been governed for two years under lockdown, so the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip equally seamlessly became the object of what is now approaching two-and-a-half years of weekly protests in Britain. Having done nothing to stop the actions of the State of Israel, the primary purpose of this political theatre has been to elevate the Muslim and pro-Islam Members of Parliament elected and re-elected in the General Election of July 2024 to spokesmen for the large number of people and organisations constituting the unlikely but historically decisive alliance between Islamism and the woke-Left. At the same time, the vitriol, hatred and denunciations channelled through these MPs against Israel have just as readily been turned and targeted at a far larger but politically unrepresented British public, almost entirely from the White working class, who are fearful of both the immediate and long-term consequences for them and their children of being demographically replaced in a country that increasingly appears to be falling under the rule of Islam. The second part of this book, which repeats the structure of the first (‘Plan’, ‘Impact’, ‘Response’ and ‘Solutions’), provides the data, analyses and arguments to corroborate their fears, rather than dismissing them, as the Islamist-Woke Alliance does, as far-Right racists and Islamophobes. And like the first part, it also suggests what we can do in response.

This is the fifth book of political analysis I have published in as many years about the transformation of the United Kingdom since lockdown into the apartheid police state it is today and the totalitarian regime it is in the process of becoming, if indeed it isn’t one already. I hesitated to expand the original book into its current dimensions, because what it argues about the Islamisation of Britain appears to me to be obvious and all too apparent to anyone who lives here and retains the capacity to perceive the world beyond the cloud of ideology by which we are surrounded. I already doubt the effective purpose of publishing this book now, except to expose me to the censure of the enemies of Britain and prosecution by the state apparatuses over which they have taken control. It is not to placate these threats, however, but because I have nothing more to add to this long and wide-reaching book, that I do not anticipate publishing one like it in the future. Indeed, unless I am very wrong about the future of Britain, no-one will ever again publish a book like this.

Simon Elmer is the author of The Great Replacement and the Islamisation of Britain (2026), from whose preface this article is taken. His recent books include The Great Reset: Biopolitics for Stakeholder Capitalism (2023); The Road to Fascism: For a Critique of the Global Biosecurity State (2022);  Virtue and Terror: Selected Articles on the UK Biosecurity State, Vol. 1 (2023), which collects articles written between April and October 2020; and The New Normal: Selected Articles on the UK Biosecurity State, Vol. 2 (2023), which collects articles written between November 2020 and October 2021.