On Wednesday evening, Labour peer Lord George Foulkes told historian Rafe Heydel-Mankoo to be “a bit more careful with your history,” compared him to Donald Trump, and set out an account of England’s indigenous people that ran from the Celts and the Romans to the Normans — conveniently omitting the Anglo-Saxons. Heydel-Mankoo had none of it, however, asserting that the Maori, accepted as indigenous to New Zealand, arrived in the 1300s, while the Saxons arrived in the 600s.
In brief, the exchange was a “how to” in handling woke, talking-point, anti-English sentiments emanating from the political left.
The exchange came after Reform UK’s Joe Martin, the Member of the Senedd for Caerdydd Penarth, was barred from speaking in the Welsh Parliament until he apologises for daring to raise demographic shifts in his country. Former Tory MP Louise Mensch – a huge advocate of Tory leader Kemi Badenoch – was also on Dewberry’s panel, backing up the Labour peer in his anti-English diatribe.
WATCH:
‘You’re a bit like Trump, who thinks HE’S indigenous to that country. He forgets there were INDIANS there before.’
Lord Foulkes REACTS to Reform member being barred from speaking in the Senedd until he apologises for claiming white British people are being replaced in the UK. pic.twitter.com/1dI7Xv9eHJ
— GB News (@GBNEWS) November 11, 2026
Foulkes, a former Minister of State for Scotland, said he did not understand why “Mr Mankoo,” who is “supposed to be a historian,” did not understand history. “The indigenous people of this country were Celts. Then the Romans came in. Then the Normans. So there have been waves of people coming in. My family came in with the Normans from France.” He went on: “And you’re a bit like Donald Trump, who thinks that he’s indigenous in that country. He forgets that there were Indians there before, and they’re the indigenous people. In Australia, the indigenous people are not the white people. In New Zealand, they’re not the white people. So I think you should be a bit more careful with your history.”
Dewberry asked Heydel-Mankoo whether he needed to be “a bit more careful with your history.” He said he was “glad that my noble friend is not as good a historian as I am, because this is an old trope that’s brought out.” He did not claim to be indigenous, he said, “because I’m not ethnically English,” though he added that, via his Polish mother, he descends from William the Conqueror and King Harold. “Everybody accepts that the Maori are the indigenous peoples of New Zealand,” he said, “even though they only arrived there in the 1300s.” The Saxons, he said, “arrived here in the 600s, hundreds of years before the Maori.” The Normans “made a negligible demographic impact,” conquering the country but changing “only about 1 per cent of the population.” “The Celtic Britons and the Saxons were over a thousand years ago. They are the indigenous population by any definition of that term.”
Turning to present numbers, he answered what he described as the claim “that we have 73 per cent of the population is English, therefore it’s not a pressing issue.” That share, he said, “declined in my lifetime from 93 per cent to 76 per cent. That is shocking.” In 1901, he said, “only 1.5 per cent of the nation was foreign-born. Today it’s 20 per cent.” And “at the end of this century, the English are going to become an ethnic minority in their own homeland.”
In a post the following morning, Heydel-Mankoo wrote that Mensch had “told me that the fact that 73% of Britain is still White British means there’s nothing to worry about.” Between 1991 and today, he wrote, “the white British population has declined from 94% to 73%,” that “20% of people in Britain are foreign born,” and that “only 33% of Londoners are white British.” He called both Foulkes and Mensch “completely deluded.”
Lord Foulkes says I'm a bad historian for saying the Saxons are indigenous🤦♂️
Maori are accepted as indigenous to NZ. They arrived in 1300s
Saxons arrived in the 600s! England is named after the Angles!
The Celts & Saxons are indigenous due to 1,300+ yrs habitation with no… https://t.co/ocBp5y5ghd
— Rafe Heydel-Mankoo (@RafHM) November 12, 2026
On the programme, Foulkes said: “I don’t want to challenge your history, but I want to come in and say I agree with Louise.” “I think we should let all these people, particularly Reform MPs, say what they think at every opportunity. That’s why they are now plummeting in the opinion polls and Labour is top of the opinion polls.” “Plummeting” was his word. A YouGov voting-intention survey of 8–9 November had Labour on 27 per cent, the Conservatives on 21 and Reform on 20. “We will fight you at the ballot box,” Foulkes said. “I don’t want to shut you up.” Mensch also told Heydel-Mankoo, “we [the uniparty] will fight you at the ballot box.”
Dewberry called it “a very strange notion… that anyone can just identify as being English.” “You can identify however you want, but it’s factually inaccurate.” Mensch, closing, said Jude Bellingham “was born in this country,” that Rishi Sunak “was born in Southampton,” and that “he’s as English as I am, and my family were Saxons that… predates George’s family. That’s not what makes somebody English.” She added that Johnson Beharry, the Grenadian-born British soldier awarded the Victoria Cross in 2005, “has got the Victoria Cross,” before the clip ended mid-exchange.
