When Everything Becomes Race

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Many of you will not know who Simon Elmer is. Until fairly recently, neither did I. I came across him on X while researching Restore Britain. What caught my attention was not initially his name but his habit. A subject would dominate politics for a day or a week and somewhere underneath one of the posts about it Elmer would appear with another enormous reply, often running to several thousand words, turning whatever had happened into an argument about immigration, race, Islam or demographic replacement. Jason Arday became one such occasion. Immigration provided another. Eventually I started reading the posts rather than simply scrolling past them.

Simon Elmer@SimonElmer2022

Following the awarding of his fraudulent academic credentials, Jason Arday was appointed to a bewildering succession of positions, including, in 2018, a senior lectureship at the University of Roehampton before he had published a single academic paper; an associate professorship,

7:30 PM · Aug 17, 2026 · 33.7K Views

170 Replies · 285 Reposts · 1.01K Likes

None of this is hidden or particularly difficult to uncover. Elmer has put the record in public himself, across social media, books, websites and interviews stretching back years. There is no need to infer a secret ideology or attribute views to him that he has not expressed. The journey can be followed in his own words, from the housing campaigns and historical materialism of Architects for Social Housing to the Great Replacement, racial hierarchy and his membership of Restore Britain.

In 2015 Elmer co-founded Architects for Social Housing. Its politics were recognisably of the left. Council estates were being demolished, working-class tenants displaced and valuable public land transferred into redevelopment schemes designed around private capital. Elmer wrote about land values, property developers, planning policy, financialisation and Labour councils that talked about regeneration while helping to remove poorer residents from increasingly valuable parts of London. In ‘The London Clearances’ he opened with Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach and described what was happening as the “social cleansing of an entire class from our city”.1

Race was present in that work because race is present in British class society. Black and Asian households were disproportionately represented in social housing and therefore disproportionately affected by demolition. But race did not supply the explanation. Writing about St Raphael’s estate years later, Elmer and Geraldine Dening made the distinction explicitly: Black and Asian residents were disproportionately affected, but “whatever their race” the people subjected to estate demolition were overwhelmingly working class.2 The people being cleared were tenants; the land had acquired exchange value; developers wanted it; councils facilitated redevelopment. Capital was doing the cleansing.

Elmer could be abrasive, doctrinaire and given to large claims even then, but the object under examination was usually material. In 2019 he could still write: “We’re not interested in identities … but in practices.” A socialist architecture, he argued, meant placing residents before developers’ profits and changing social relations rather than merely adopting a socialist identity.3 It is difficult to read that now without noticing how completely the terms have reversed.

The pandemic seems to have been a hinge. Elmer became consumed by what he called the “biosecurity state”, drawing on Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault to interpret lockdown, vaccination and the extension of state power. Yet he continued for a time to describe himself as a historical materialist. In a long interview in 2021 he explicitly rejected the proposition that history could be explained by a group of powerful people sitting down and deciding what would happen. “That’s not the way the world works,” he said. Capitalism generated imperatives, institutions organised themselves around those imperatives, and historical materialism began from “the material necessities of life”.4

Over the next few years that distinction became harder to maintain. Capitalism remained in the prose, as did neoliberalism, corporations and the state, but structural explanations increasingly acquired intentional authors. In The Great Reset: Biopolitics for Stakeholder Capitalism, published in 2023, Elmer wrote of manufactured crises being used by “transnational technocracies” moving towards a World Government and a new totalitarian system of stakeholder capitalism.5 Crisis was becoming design.

By late 2024 the change was visible in the books themselves. Architecture Is Always Political: A Communist History collected work written between 2016 and 2019 and still described itself as a “historical-materialist critique” grounded in the relationship between finance capitalism, housing policy and property development. Elmer wrote that architecture should house the “global working class” and contrasted the use-value of homes with their exchange-value to investors.6 Almost alongside it came The Great Replacement: Conspiracy Theory or Immigration Policy?, in which the political problem had become mass immigration from Africa and the Indian subcontinent. The older politics had not disappeared.7 It had been joined by another one.

Describing Elmer as somebody who simply travelled from left to right does not get us very far. He retained much of the old vocabulary. Capital is still corrupt, neoliberalism still destructive, corporations still powerful and the state still coercive. What changed was the collective subject of the politics. The working class slowly gave way to “the British”, “Europeans” and ultimately “White people”. Exploitation became displacement. Migrants ceased primarily to appear as workers occupying positions within British capitalism and increasingly became an incoming population.

Elmer made the substitution unusually clear in August 2025. In an essay that still announced historical materialism as its method, he argued that the “end-game” of the Great Reset was the “ethnic cleansing” and eventual demographic replacement of Europeans. He claimed that Blair’s governments had transformed immigration from a means of weakening the industrial organisation of British workers into “an instrument of ethnic cleansing”.8 The similarity with his old language about the social cleansing of council tenants conceals how large the political movement has been. The first argument asks what capital is doing to a class. The second asks what one population is supposedly doing to another.

Simon Elmer@SimonElmer2022

The movement of 60 million immigrants from South Asia, Africa and the Middle East into Europe in a single generation is the largest external migration of people over such a brief period of time in human history. And yet, extraordinarily, it has been organised and implemented

8:39 AM · Jun 18, 2026 · 51.4K Views

21 Replies · 183 Reposts · 508 Likes

By February this year the argument had become The Great Replacement and the Islamisation of Britain. Elmer describes the book as an attempt to demonstrate that “replacement immigration” is a United Nations policy implemented by European states, while the expanded edition shifts heavily towards what he calls the Islamisation of Britain.9 His current social-media biography describes him as an author writing about “the UN programme of replacement immigration and the Islamisation of Britain” and as a member of Restore Britain.10

The three recent posts are useful because they show what happens once race becomes the organising category. The first concerned Jason Arday. There were serious questions surrounding Arday’s academic record and some of the claims he had made about his life. Cambridge had opened investigations into his qualifications and academic misconduct, while Liverpool John Moores University had previously upheld the award of his doctorate after examining plagiarism allegations.11 Arday resigned before Cambridge’s work was completed and died shortly afterwards. The Metropolitan Police said his death was unexpected but not believed to be suspicious. None of this amounted to a criminal conviction for fraud.

Simon Elmer@SimonElmer2022

Jason Arday wasn’t a fantasist or serial liar. He wasn’t a poster boy for the woke-Left or an unfairly hounded victim of the far-Right. Jason Arday was a criminal, and he chose suicide rather than face the consequences of his crimes. In the UK, fraud is formally prosecuted under

12:06 PM · Aug 15, 2026 · 224K Views

372 Replies · 1.05K Reposts · 4.2K Likes

Elmer nevertheless supplied the verdict. On 15 August he declared that Arday was a “criminal” who had “chosen suicide rather than face the consequences of his crimes”, before proceeding through the provisions of the Fraud Act as though accusation, investigation, prosecution and conviction had already occurred.12 The argument soon ceased to be about Arday himself. His supposed offences became evidence of institutions promoting Black people, discriminating against White people and rewarding racial grievance, until Elmer described Arday’s final alleged offence as one committed against White people.

Within days he had travelled from Arday to Africans as a group. “African people are essentially pack animals,” Elmer wrote, before moving through anthropology, genetics and national IQ statistics towards supposedly inherited characteristics of African societies.13 Europeans produced civilisation; Africans were assigned a genetically rooted “pack mentality” that migration and education supposedly could not remove. Whatever else this is, it is no longer an argument about immigration policy. It is a racial hierarchy presented with the borrowed vocabulary of evolutionary science.

Simon Elmer@SimonElmer2022

As the response to the suicide of Jason Arday has shown, African people are essentially pack animals. That’s not only because, in historical terms, they were the last race to enter into the modern world, but also because the vast majority of them still live in environments in

12:45 PM · Aug 21, 2026 · 41.8K Views

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The national IQ figures used in arguments of this kind deserve particular caution. The European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association has issued an unusually strong warning about the datasets assembled by Richard Lynn and collaborators. Samples were sometimes tiny or unrepresentative, sometimes consisted of children, occasionally involved people who did not even live in the country supposedly being measured, and in some cases countries with no data were assigned scores derived from neighbouring states. The association concludes that analyses based on the datasets cannot yield reliable conclusions.14

A few days later Elmer was outside a pub in Soho having a cigarette when he noticed people gathered for a launch at a record shop across the road. He thought most of the men were African and the women White. From that observation he asked why “more and more White girls” were attracted to African men, particularly immigrants.15 By the time he had finished answering his own question, he was writing about conquest, effeminised White men, the sexual submission of White women and British girls being turned into “sex slaves for our conquerors”. Almost nothing of political significance had happened outside that shop. Some people had attended a launch. Yet Elmer already possessed the theory before he looked across the street. The people outside did not generate the argument. They were sorted into categories that allowed the argument to confirm itself.

Simon Elmer@SimonElmer2022

Why are more and more White girls attracted to African men, and particularly to immigrants? On friday night I was in a pub in Soho, and across the road there was a launch for a record shop. I went for a fag and had a good look at the people attending. There were about 50-60 both

7:01 PM · Aug 24, 2026 · 53.9K Views

152 Replies · 117 Reposts · 528 Likes

Even the initial factual premise is uncertain. Inter-ethnic relationships have certainly become more common in England and Wales over the long term. Between the 2001 and 2011 censuses, the proportion of people living as couples who were in an inter-ethnic relationship rose from 7 to 9 per cent. Among people identifying as African, however, the proportion living in an inter-ethnic relationship actually moved slightly down, from 23 to 22 per cent.16 That does not prove the reverse of Elmer’s contention either. It simply means the available evidence does not establish the very specific phenomenon he thinks he observed during a cigarette break in Soho.

Official statistics do show comparatively high levels of lone parenthood among some Black ethnic groups. Again, what happens to the statistic after Elmer gets hold of it is more interesting than the figure itself. He says that “over half” of African families in Britain are raised by single mothers. An analysis of the Annual Population Survey by the Children’s Commissioner put Black African lone-parent families at 44 per cent and Black Caribbean families at 57 per cent. A separate government review gave the Black African figure as 43 per cent.17 “Lone parent” is not synonymous with “single mother” either. None of those distinctions survives because the statistic is merely the launch pad. Elmer explains the supposed figure through the behaviour of African men, whom he portrays as impregnating women, abandoning children and moving on to other partners. The household data contain no such causal explanation. A demographic statistic has become a racial story about male sexual behaviour.

Britain really did spend £46.7 billion on advertising in 2025. The figure comes from the Advertising Association and WARC.18 From that genuine number Elmer reaches a wholly different proposition: that advertising conditions White women to desire African men. Nothing in the expenditure data can establish anything about the sexual preferences of White women.

Nor does the available evidence support his assertion that films, television, advertisements and billboards “always and without exception” present African men and White women as the model couple. Research commissioned by the Advertising Standards Authority found that advertising had become more diverse, but respondents from Black, Asian and other minority ethnic groups were almost three times more likely than White respondents to believe they remained under-represented or not represented at all. Participants specifically complained about a lack of portrayals of Black families.19 Greater diversity in advertising is observable. A coordinated programme for directing the sexual preferences of White women is not.

Low fertility receives the same treatment. Fertility really has fallen. The provisional total fertility rate for England and Wales dropped from 1.41 children per woman in 2024 to 1.39 in 2025.20 Elmer converts falling fertility into evidence that White women are no longer having sex, then folds that into the emasculation of White men and demographic replacement. Fertility is not a measurement of sexual activity. Contraception, the age at which people form families, housing costs, childcare, employment insecurity and decisions not to have children all intervene between sex and the birth rate. Material explanation disappears precisely where it might be most useful.

The grooming-gang material is more serious because the underlying crimes were real and the institutional failures enormous. Baroness Casey’s national audit found enough evidence in several local police datasets to conclude that Asian and Pakistani-heritage suspects were disproportionately represented in some areas. It also stated that national datasets did not provide a complete picture and called for much better recording and investigation of ethnicity.21 Neither finding should be buried because it makes somebody’s politics inconvenient.

Elmer instead repeats the Restore Britain claim that upwards of 250,000 British girls have been groomed, raped or trafficked by Muslim gangs and expands the proposition until it becomes evidence of racial conquest. Full Fact traced the number in July. It found that the estimate depends on unsupported extrapolation from particular towns and partly uses figures referring to child sexual exploitation generally rather than group-based offending specifically. Its verdict was straightforward: the 250,000 figure “is not calculated reliably”.22 None of that minimises what happened in Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford or elsewhere. Crimes this serious do not need invented precision. The failures of police, councils, social services and other institutions should be investigated without turning an unknown number into a racial statistic because the larger number better serves a political narrative.

Evidence concerning predominantly Pakistani Muslim perpetrators in particular grooming networks gradually becomes a proposition about African and South Asian men generally. At one point Elmer writes that every African and South Asian man is no longer merely a potential rapist but a likely one.23 The category has expanded from offenders, to an ethnic group disproportionately represented in some offences, to Muslims, to South Asians, to Africans, until vast populations of men have acquired a presumed sexual threat.

The racial categories throughout the posts are remarkably unstable. African, Black, Caribbean, Muslim, South Asian and immigrant move in and out of one another. Dawn Butler, born and raised in East London to Jamaican parents, becomes an “African MP”. Her own biography describes her as the first elected African-Caribbean woman to become a UK government minister.24 David Lammy, born in London to Guyanese parents, can be recruited into the same African category.25 Pakistani grooming offenders help establish propositions about Africans. These are not careful demographic categories. They are variations on the role the theory requires: the racial outsider.

“Replacement migration” undergoes a comparable transformation. The phrase is real. A United Nations Population Division report published in 2000 asked what levels of international migration would theoretically be required to offset population decline and population ageing in low-fertility countries. At the report’s launch, the director of the Population Division explicitly said that the study “did not make recommendations or provide a demographic recipe for countries to follow”.26 Within Great Replacement politics, the title itself becomes evidence. A technical demographic term becomes a policy. The policy acquires intention. The intention becomes a programme to replace Europeans. The existence of a document called Replacement Migration then appears to prove what the theory had already asserted.

Elmer often begins close enough to reality. Britain has low fertility. Immigration has been historically high. Some grooming-gang cases involved a disproportionate number of Pakistani-heritage perpetrators. Some Black family groups have high rates of lone parenthood. Advertising has become more ethnically diverse. The UN did publish a document containing the words “replacement migration”. Each fact is then forced to bear a causal or political meaning it cannot sustain. A percentage describing households becomes evidence about African sexual behaviour. An advertising budget becomes evidence of sexual programming. A demographic modelling exercise becomes the blueprint for ethnic replacement. Particular criminal networks become representative of whole racial populations. A handful of couples outside a record shop becomes evidence that Britain has been conquered.

The numbers still matter to Elmer because numbers retain the prestige of materialism. They make the prose look empirical. But they no longer discipline the argument. The argument disciplines them.

That reversal helps explain why the latest post becomes so strange around women. White women possess almost no independent agency in Elmer’s account. If they choose African partners, advertising may have programmed them, feminism may have damaged them, evolutionary psychology may have directed them towards stronger males or fear may have made them accommodate their conquerors. If they volunteer to help migrants, even their compassion can acquire an imagined sexual dimension. Their own explanation of whom they love, sleep with or marry is the one explanation that barely matters.

White men occupy the opposite role. They have supposedly been “effeminised”, weakened by feminism and homosexuality and rendered incapable of defending “our women”. Women become reproductive resources belonging implicitly to a racial group, while men become responsible for protecting both territory and reproduction. It is why interracial relationships acquire such significance. If the nation is essentially biological, sex is no longer private. It determines whether the nation reproduces itself.

The language of conquest then falls into place. Immigration becomes invasion. Interracial sex becomes submission. Falling fertility becomes demographic defeat. African and Muslim men become rival males taking possession of women whom White men have failed to protect. Institutions become collaborators because they permit migration, condemn racial discrimination and represent mixed relationships as ordinary.

There is a long history to this politics. Fear about racial mixing, the protection of White women and the sexual potency of racial outsiders runs through segregationist politics in the United States, colonial racial ideology and European fascism. The obsession with the sexuality of the outsider is not some peculiar new discovery made outside a Soho record shop. Once nationality is understood biologically, reproductive boundaries become political borders.

Elmer’s trajectory is more than biographical curiosity because he once possessed analytical tools that ought to have made the weaknesses of this argument obvious. Britain has a housing crisis. Wages have stagnated. Public services struggle. Wealth and property are heavily concentrated. Governments have encouraged labour migration while frequently failing to invest in the housing, transport, schools and health provision required by a growing population. Employers can exploit differences in immigration status to weaken workers. Landlords can profit from scarcity regardless of the nationality of the person paying the rent. Migrants arrive inside those relations; they do not abolish them.

A historical materialist would ask how those interests fit together. Which employers benefit from an enlarged labour supply? Who owns the housing? Who captures rising rents? Why has capital investment remained weak? Why has social housing construction failed to keep pace with need? How does immigration status alter bargaining power in the workplace? Where do the interests of a migrant worker coincide with those of a British-born worker and where might they conflict?

Racial theory collapses those distinctions before the inquiry starts. The migrant landlord and migrant warehouse worker enter the same demographic category. The British landlord and British warehouse worker enter another. People whose material interests may be directly opposed are turned into members of the same racial bloc, while workers who share an employer can be turned into demographic antagonists.

Elmer once followed money through planning documents to discover who benefited when a council estate disappeared. That method could produce an answer he did not know in advance. It might lead to a developer, an investment vehicle, a housing association or a Labour council. His recently republished communist history still describes its method as arising from “a decade’s political practice opposing the assault of capital on working-class homes and communities”.27 The investigation was capable, at least in principle, of surprising the investigator.

The racial method increasingly knows the answer beforehand. Europe is being replaced. Institutions facilitate the replacement. African and Muslim men embody it. White women demonstrate it through their sexual choices and White men demonstrate it through their failure to prevent those choices. Contrary evidence does not necessarily threaten the theory because it can usually be incorporated into another part of it.

Simon Elmer@SimonElmer2022

The psyche of the African male, no matter how successful the individual may be, remains branded with the inferiority of his race. Even when rich enough to escape into the White world, he retains their adolescent behaviour. For the African male, White women are the sign of his

9:29 AM · Aug 25, 2026 · 3.23K Views

2 Replies · 1 Repost · 36 Likes

Elmer now describes himself as a member of Restore Britain. That matters, although not because membership makes Restore responsible for every sentence he writes. Nor have I found an online Searchlight article specifically profiling Simon Elmer. Searchlight has, however, documented the attraction of Restore Britain to activists from Patriotic Alternative, Homeland and older British far-right formations, including Steve Laws, Callum Barker, Eddy Butler and others.28 It has described an internal struggle between more conventional right-wing elements and an ethnonationalist faction around the party.

Calling Elmer’s recent posts racist is accurate, but it does not finish the job. Racism can describe prejudice, discriminatory behaviour or an insult. What Elmer is constructing is more systematic. Racial populations possess collective interests. Behavioural differences become inherited characteristics. Demographic change becomes conquest. Women carry the reproductive future of the group. Institutions can be judged by whether they protect or betray that future. Equal citizenship becomes difficult to sustain because a citizen who belongs to the wrong demographic group remains, at some deeper level, an outsider.

The most instructive thing about Simon Elmer may therefore be where he started. He once argued that politics had to look beneath appearances to material relations. Who owns? Who profits? Who works? Who pays? Those questions did not become obsolete when immigration increased. They became more necessary. Somewhere along the journey, however, the questions changed. Who owns the building became who belongs in the country. Who profits became who is replacing whom. Class gave way to race, and a man who once wrote about the financialisation of council housing can now look across a Soho street at a few couples outside a record shop and see the conquest of Britain. The world has not become easier to explain. His theory has simply become capable of explaining everything.