Rupert Lowe, MP for Great Yarmouth, was a man too bigoted for the far-right Reform UK Party. Now sitting as an independent, his suspension has if anything accelerated the stream of bile the racist prick is rattling off on social media, presumably because he no longer has anyone to be racist to in person.
Yesterday, December 3, he tweeted:
I am sick of hearing that Britain was built by immigrants. No. No it was not. It was built by British men and women. We should be proud of that.
— Rupert Lowe MP (@RupertLowe10) December 3, 2025
This is, of course, false. Lowe knows that it’s false, as does anybody with access to the internet. He’s actually executing a political maneuver called ‘lying for clicks’.
It’s telling that a good deal of the replies agreeing with him post historical videos with “not an immigrant in sight”. Nobody is talking in the videos. You can’t tell who, if anybody, is an immigrant. Of course, they don’t mean ‘immigrant’ per se — they mean ‘not a brown person in sight’. They’ve just learned that saying ‘immigrant’ is a better Trojan horse for common-or-garden racism.
But let’s entertain the premise for a second. Was the UK built by immigrants? Was it built by British men and women? Should we be proud of that? Did Rupert Lowe simply never learn to Google shit for himself because he’s a terminally incurious waste of a cheap suit?
Let’s find out!
Rupert Lowe, what actually is ‘Britain’ anyway?
Now, be fair, we have to start from base principles here. If these racist cunts/poor uneducated souls never learned about immigrant labour in Britain, maybe they never actually learned what Britain is. Let’s learn together.
‘Britain’ is the name given to a small island off the west coast of mainland Europe. It’s made up of several places that used to be actual countries and are now only kind-of countries — England, Wales and Scotland. It officially became one country with the Act of Union 1707, forming ‘Great Britain’.
The Union with Ireland Act 1800 then created the country known as the United Kingdom. However, the Kingdom was not in fact particularly united, and the majority of Ireland was declared a free state in 1922. Now, the name ‘United Kingdom’ refers to Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Let’s assume that Rupert Lowe knows all this, being as he seems to like Britain so much. So, when he says ‘Britain’, we’ll take him to mean England, Wales and Scotland from 1707 onwards. Beidh Éire aontaithe arís.
This is fortunate because it saves me doing a ‘What did the Romans ever do for us?’ bit. It also means that I don’t have to talk about the Huguenots, French protestants who fled the mainland to England in the 1600s and had a massive influence on weaving in this country. Nobody cares, because they weren’t BRITISH yet.
Well, there was the slave trade
First up, it would be remiss of me not to mention slavery’s role in building Britain. While Somerset v Stewart (1772) proved that slavery had no basis in English law, the actual practice of slavery continued via indentured servitude in Britain well into the 1800s, mostly for domestic service labour.
(As a side note: slavery continues in the UK today in the form of modern slavery.)
However, those laws didn’t apply outside of British soil. As such, the transatlantic slave trade generated vast wealth from the sale and labour of kidnapped Africans. This in turn fuelled the industrial revolution in Britain. Whilst enslaved individuals didn’t build Britain per se, their labour certainly paid for it.
Plus, when the slave trade was nominally abolished in 1833, Britain instead started transporting indentured workers, often from India, to other colonised countries to plug the labour shortage left by the abolition of slavery. Many of the indentured workers didn’t know the conditions they were signing up for. Others were straight-up kidnapped, because we never actually stopped doing slavery.
But let’s assume that this isn’t what Lowe meant. Let’s take his tweet to be about voluntary immigration to Britain, specifically to do the work of building and maintaining British infrastructure.
Did immigrants build Britain?
First up, it doesn’t get much more British than railways and canals. Although it’s a stereotype that all navvies (navigational engineers) were Irish, around a third did immigrate from Ireland. They worked to dig the canals and lay the railroads that helped drive the industrial revolution.
From the late 1700s, Chinese sailors came to Britain to load ships in London’s docks, and elsewhere across the country. Many were hired by the East India Company or other other British shipping companies. From the 1880s onwards, Chinese migrants began to settle around Limehouse, established businesses like restaurants and laundries for sailors and locals.
At the tail-end of the 1800s, Italian immigrants began to settle in Ancoats, Manchester. They were particularly influential on the British taste for biscuits, wafers and ice cream.
Between 1880 and 1914, around 150,000 Eastern European and Russian Jewish refugees arrived in London. Around 70% settled in London’s East End, particularly Spitalfields and Whitechapel. Many worked in the clothing industry, and even lived in the houses previously occupied by the Huguenot weavers (BOOM BROUGHT IT FULL CIRCLE ON YOU). Jewish immigration in London also brought us fish and chips, because you know, immigrants built Britain.
Windrush onwards
You may be more familiar with the word ‘Windrush’ because of the Windrush scandal of more recent years. Because, you know, the UK is still finding fresh ways to do Black people dirty. But, just in case — in 1948, people from colonies gained the right to live and work in Britain through the British Nationality Act. The UK was desperate for people to plug the post-war Labour shortage.
The ship HMT Empire Windrush brought 1,027 people to the UK in 1948. Over 800 of the passengers listed a Caribbean country as their last place of residence. Many went on to work in the newly-founded NHS. In fact, the NHS and London Transport actively recruited in the Caribbean.
Other Windrush-era migrants worked on British Rail, or in car factories like Fords in Dagenham and British Leyland in Longbridge, Birmingham. As the UK continued to grow in the late 1950s and 1960s, migrants from India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Ghana and other Commonwealth countries found employment in the North’s textile factories.
Of course, the story of immigrant labour in Britain doesn’t end there. But, now that we’re up to the 1970s, we’re up to the point where most of the Canary’s readership was born. We’re also well past Rupert Lowe’s birth date, in 1957.
So, at this point, both he and you, dear reader, will have seen with your own eyes the work that immigrants do to build and maintain Britain. We know that fascist pricks like Rupert Lowe have seen it, because they keep complaining about immigrants coming over here and stealing our jobs.
But, there is one defence of Lowe’s fucking dire sentiment. Don’t worry though, he won’t like it.
Britain was built by immigrants. It was also built by British people. Many of the British people that built Britain weren’t born here, but chose to call it a home anyway. And for anyone who says those people aren’t British — we know what you are, we know what values you stand for, and it truly disgusts us.
Featured image via the Canary
This post was originally published on Canary.