Reform UK’s pledge to prioritise British-born workers for social housing has proven predictably provocative. Announced this week, Reform has said that it would look to move working people under 35 and married couples with children up the social-housing queue. This comes hot on the heels of a previously announced policy to exclude foreign nationals from social housing altogether.

Reform appears to have crossed a significant new line. Britain may already discriminate between ‘British citizen by descent’ and otherwise. But up to now, no major party has mooted creating two kinds of citizens – British-born and foreign-born – for the purpose of allocating public services.

Reform’s potential creation of ‘two tiers’ of citizenship could have drastic implications across the British state. After all, once a distinction is made for social housing, why stop there? Perhaps other rights, entitlements or welfare policies could be similarly affected. Even voting could be, in principle, restricted.

The unintended consequences could be just as impactful. The category of ‘foreign-born’ casts a wide net. It could apply to those who arrived as small children who consider themselves, and would be considered by others, totally British. It could even apply to children of British citizens who happened to be out of the country when their child was born. Both in theory and in practice, this policy proposal needs proper scrutiny.

But the underlying impetus behind Reform’s proposal is clear. It is a part of an attempt to undo the tremendous damage that has been done to the social contract in this country by the total devaluation of the concept of citizenship.

This devaluation has been carried out by successive governments, each deeply suspicious of, and often hostile to, patriotic and national sentiments – the very things that give meaning to a nation. Anything connected to the peculiarly British national experience – from the Magna Carta to the British Empire – has either been downplayed or denigrated. As a result, citizenship has been hollowed out, reduced to a legal, administrative category – open to anyone and not conferring any special rights or obligations. Just about the only special privilege open to citizens is the right to vote (and even this is extended to Irish and Commonwealth citizens who are in the UK legally).

At the same time, the state has actively devalued British citizenship by engaging in a de facto open-borders experiment. This has made a mockery of one of the most fundamental features of citizenship – the right to share in the decision as to who enters your territory. And it has practically undermined citizenship by making it available to increasingly large numbers of people.

Indeed, Britain has recently been handing out citizenship on an unprecedented scale. In 2024 alone, 269,621 people became British citizens – the highest number since the Home Office began collecting data in 2005. In 2025, 236,512 people became British citizens. Those numbers will likely rise further should any government set about reforming ‘indefinite leave to remain’ – a permanent resident status currently given to anyone who has lived here for five years or more.

Many British people now intuit that this mass devaluation of citizenship has changed the rules of the game – that being a British citizen ain’t what it used to be. They feel that newcomers are able to game the system. The stats substantiate this feeling. According to the 2021 Census, 48 per cent of household heads in social housing in London, and 19 per cent nationwide, were born outside the UK. That over half of these household heads are British passport holders and have lived in the UK for a long time does not diminish the sense of unfairness felt by many members of the general public.

It certainly doesn’t seem right that we have a social-housing system, especially in London, that seems to prioritise the interests of new or recent arrivals over those of citizens with deep historical ties to this country.

Indeed, local councils seem to be prioritising ever newer groups of arrivals for social housing. A regeneration project in Tower Hamlets is aimed almost exclusively at Bangladeshis. Even more incredibly, it is not just a regeneration project that happens to benefit people who happen to be Bangladeshi – the planning application is shot through with references to the supposed specific needs of the Bangladeshi community and has been ‘specifically arranged for Bangladeshi families’.

Britain is now in the position of trying to operate a national welfare state while becoming increasingly reluctant to say that the national community itself has any distinctive claim on it. That contradiction could perhaps be ignored when immigration was limited and ‘naturalisation’ was rare. It is much harder to ignore after an era of mass migration and historically high levels of citizenship grants.

It is in the context of the hollowing out of citizenship that Reform’s creation of a potential two-tier citizenship needs to be understood. We are facing a near-unprecedented challenge. Our political elites, by opening Britain’s borders and devaluing citizenship, have caused enormous damage. Undoing it is going to require us to think creatively, and we are going to sometimes need to step outside the straitjacket of recent policy.

Of course, we need to be very careful. The implications of such a policy, if handled badly, could be dire. But at the very least, Reform’s proposal should be the start of a widespread conversation about what British citizenship means and whether the policies of the past decades have cheapened or strengthened it. One thing is certain: the status quo cannot continue.

The Jason Arday saga unfolded like a fable: the allegations of plagiarism, staged racist attacks and fabricated achievements captivated the world before his tragic and premature death. In the weeks since, one thing has bothered me: the media’s relative lack of curiosity about the man who helped spearhead the crusade against him, Nathan Cofnas.

Cofnas is a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University and a former fellow at Cambridge. His trajectory has been extraordinary. The Jewish-American academic built his early reputation dismantling Kevin MacDonald’s pseudoscientific anti-Semitic theories, arguing that sweeping evolutionary claims about Jewish power were methodologically dubious, heavily cherry-picked and fundamentally incapable of proving causation.

He then went on to establish his own biological explanation for Jewish exceptionalism, based on a hereditary, above-average IQ in Jewish populations. Intentionally or not, this move flattered his own ancestry while edging close to granting scientific legitimacy to one of anti-Semitism’s oldest tropes.

Cofnas has since deployed theories of ‘race realism’ against black populations. In a display of pure hubris, he compares his banal ideas in ‘A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution’ – which advocates rolling back 20th-century civil-rights advances – to Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, a claim as absurd as Jason Arday’s wildest myths.

Across both mainstream and alternative media, interviewers have proved completely incapable of challenging Cofnas. On LBC, Nick Ferrari pressed him on his assertion that, in a meritocracy, ‘blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment’. Yet Ferrari flinched when Cofnas laundered the claim through a Harvard study on undergraduate admissions, which projected black enrolment dropping to 0.7 per cent under strict academic criteria and without a DEI leg up. This let Cofnas falsely attribute his own sweeping generalisations about race to Harvard itself.

Even within the national context of the United States, Cofnas’s defence collapses. Extrapolating the 0.7 per cent figure, referring to graduates at one elite Ivy League institution, to claim there would be no high-profile, high-achieving black people in a nation of 330million people is statistically unsound.

I do not deny the heritability of individual human traits. While studying education and economic development at the London School of Economics, I examined Nordic adoption studies showing that some children’s educational outcomes align more closely with their biological parents than their adoptive ones. Individual heritability is a documented scientific reality.

However, it is absurd to extrapolate narrow, localised datasets into sweeping pronouncements about billions of people based on race, especially when two populations in sub-Saharan Africa can share as much genetic distance as an African and a European – a point argued by Angela Saini in Superior: The Return of Race Science. What’s more, working in finance has taught me a fundamental truth: statistics are easily massaged, whether to cover up a bad balance sheet or to promote abject nonsense. Asserting an intrinsic biological hierarchy across entire continents based on sparse data from developing regions or a single Ivy League admissions projection is lazy at best and farcical at worst.

Crucially, the assumption that IQ tests measure raw intelligence independent of environment is fundamentally flawed, as Joseph Henrich has demonstrated. If we accept Cofnas’s rigid hereditarian logic, how do we account for the birth-order effect, where older siblings consistently score higher on IQ tests than younger siblings born to the exact same parents? Furthermore, the 20th-century surge in global IQ scores – the Flynn effect – was largely driven by expanded schooling, public health and cognitive enrichment, not by rapid genetic selection. To isolate a true biological racial IQ gap, one would need to control for every conceivable cultural, socioeconomic and environmental variable, a task that remains virtually impossible.

Indeed, every metric Cofnas uses to infer black cognitive inferiority – including lower test scores and higher crime rates – is routinely documented among white working-class populations in post-industrial Britain and America. If group-level disparities proved biological unfitness, Cofnas would be forced to conclude that the white working class is genetically unsuited for modern society.

White British pupils rank among the lowest-performing demographics in the UK, trailing almost every ethnic minority group. In fact, low-income ethnic minority students on free school meals regularly outperform white British children who are not economically disadvantaged. Some of the top-performing state schools in England educate a disproportionate number of black students, such as Katherine Birbalsingh’s Michaela Community School, Brampton Manor Academy and St Olave’s, to name a few. Across the Atlantic, historical precedents tell a similar story. Under Jim Crow segregation, black schools like Dunbar High School, in Washington, DC, regularly outperformed white schools despite receiving significantly less funding and facing systemic discrimination.

Do conservatives who uncritically endorse Cofnas’s claims about black capability also accept the logical conclusion of his framework, that white working-class families are also ‘biologically hardwired’ for failure? I should hope not.

Let’s be frank, there is nothing ‘real’ about Cofnas’s so-called race realism. If I’d submitted an essay with methodology this porous, my tutors would have picked it apart line by line. He has relied on flawed methodologies to construct a rigid racial hierarchy, one that conveniently places people of his own Jewish ancestry near the top and people of my black ancestry near the bottom. I worry about the broader ramifications of such appalling scholarship gaining mainstream currency – for Jews, for black people and for everyone else.

If our media class cannot dismantle arguments this banal and structurally unsound, we are leaving the door wide open for more batty ideas to permeate through society unchallenged.