What’s in a name? Apart from members of my own family, the only other Littlejohn I have ever met was Johnny Littlejohn, a black blues guitarist I encountered in a Chicago nightclub.
With a grin as broad as his introduction, he presented me to his bandmates as “my brother, who came out underdone.”
I still have the T-shirt advertising his album, (Can’t Nobody Hurt You But Your) So-Called Friends.
That meeting took place more than 40 years ago. Whether many Littlejohns will still be around four decades from now is impossible to say.
DailyMail.com’s “Is Your Surname Dying Out?” search tool reports that just four babies born in Britain in 2025 were given the surname Littlejohn. As far as I know, none was related to me. That represents a 71 per cent decline since 1996.
My branch of the Littlejohn family originated in Essex and can be traced back to the Middle English period, which followed the Norman Conquest of 1066.
DailyMail.com’s “Is Your Surname Dying Out?” search tool reports that only four babies born in Britain in 2025 had the surname Littlejohn
Nine centuries later, Smith, Jones and Williams remain among Britain’s best-known surnames. Yet after three decades of substantial immigration, only three traditional names featured in the top 10 surnames recorded for children born in Britain last year.
They were joined by Khan, Ahmed, Singh and Hussein — a shift unlikely to surprise anyone familiar with the changing demographics of Britain’s larger towns and cities.
In the world of changing surnames, “Alas Smith and Jones” might now be recast as “Alas Singh and Khan.”
The arrival of millions of migrants, which the author attributes to policies introduced by Labour and accelerated during the period he calls the “Boriswave”, has permanently altered Britain’s social landscape.
I was reminded of that by an email from our residents’ association in North London. The names of the latest committee members looked like the answers to a Countdown conundrum. When we bought our house 30 years ago, I would have expected them all to have traditionally British surnames.
Before anyone accuses me of racism, I should make clear that I am describing a change, not condemning the people involved.
Richard Littlejohn says his concern is the speed and scale of recent legal and illegal immigration, along with what he describes as many migrants’ failure — or refusal — to assimilate
As I have written before, some of the old Isle of Wight pop-festival hippy in me still believes in the melting pot. Our new committee members are almost certainly from second- or third-generation migrant families, born and educated in Britain. Many have built successful businesses and want to contribute to their community.
My immediate neighbours have Pakistani, Jewish, Turkish Cypriot and Irish backgrounds. At Skewd, the excellent modern Turkish restaurant in Cockfosters, I am often the whitest person in the room. Yet we are all Londoners, with more shared interests than differences.
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Contrary to the views attributed to the Guardian and LBC presenter Jim O’Brien, I have consistently supported migration when it is legal and properly managed.
My own family history makes that position unsurprising. My uncle and grandparents were “Ten Pound Poms” who emigrated to Australia, while my parents and sister moved to the United States 50 years ago.
My objection is not to migration itself, but to what I see as the speed and scale of recent immigration, legal and illegal, and to the failure — or, in some cases, refusal — of many migrants to assimilate.
Nor is it necessary to agree with Falklands War veteran Major General Julian Thompson, who said at the weekend that he would open fire on boats crossing the Channel.
But he hit a raw nerve when he added: ‘It’s not Britain any more, it’s a funny sort of conglomeration of people.’
You don’t have to take his word for it either. My old friend Trevor Phillips, formerly head of the equalities commission and nobody’s idea of a ‘far-Right’ headbanger, warned years ago that we were sleepwalking to a segregated Britain, with Third World ghettoes in our major cities.
Who do you believe – the ‘nothing to see here’ open borders brigade or your lying eyes?
Those of us who ‘identify’ as white British/English are a minority in our capital city. Only this week, the Mail reported that four out of five net new jobs since 2014 have been filled by migrants. This is madness at a time when nine million British people are described as economically inactive and claiming benefits for a panoply of real and imagined afflictions.
Nor is this about race or skin colour. The truth is I had more in common with the late US bluesman Johnny Littlejohn than the recent arrivals in Britain from goodness-knows-where.
America is not without its own problems when it comes to race but does far more to encourage integration than the far-Left imbeciles who preach open borders in this country.
We’ve ended up with the ghettoes Trevor Phillips warned about. And more recently, thousands of undocumented military age foreign men who have come here illegally and been dumped on settled communities which, like the Littlejohns, can trace their origins as far back as Norman Conquest.
The real tragedy is that we can’t blame the migrants themselves, who have been attracted here by the bounty our country offers to all-comers.
No, the current crisis is entirely the fault of the politicians who have deliberately opened the floodgates to mass migration and the far-Left clowns determined to erase our history and traditions.
When you don’t have a shared culture and history, you don’t have a country any more. And this has been created not by accident but design by those we entrusted with defending our country and our borders.
As Johnny Littlejohn might have put it: Can’t Nobody Hurt You But Your So-Called Friends.
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