This story caused some mirth on the right: Ukrainian refugees in Birmingham, a city where the British population is tiny, were overwhelmed by the racial and cultural diversity they found there. For the right, it’s an “I told you so” moment and it’s taken as vindication, but the story is actually fake—as all media stories are fake; and it doesn’t support a right-wing narrative at all—quite the contrary.
Doubtless the facts are correct, but it’s the metacontext that’s pernicious in the story. The story appeared on Channel 4 News and Channel 4 is the most left-wing residual TV channel in Britain—it was founded by the government with a brief to be “alternative” from the start (under Thatcher, as it happens—an indication that Conservatives have never been in charge, never had a handle on what the bureaucracy does).
The metacontext for the story is to establish the idea “whites are inherently racist, whites don’t belong in Britain”. The Ukrainians who come into Britain as refugees are coded as “white” for the story’s purposes and they come to Britain—and they hate what they find. Britain is, per the story, “multicultural”—that is what Britain *is* per the state belief system, a “nation of immigrants”.
In fact, white people are actually interlopers here—and that is why a false narrative was put about several years ago about an ancient corpse that *technically* maybe had black skin (even if he had black skin, he wasn’t black African). So “whites” are actually outsiders here, and they are also inherently “hateful” and cannot cope with diversity—hence they are “evil” by nature. This is the purpose behind the story, this is the metanarrative it creates—the viewer comes away with this idea implicitly encoded, “White people don’t belong in Britain, white people are inherently evil and hate other races for no reason.”
It’s why “white nationalism” is a terrible idea. The current system actually wants people to identify as “white” because they have set up a whole metacontext where “white people don’t exist”, “white people don’t have a history”, “white people don’t belong here”—and there is a certain factual reality to these assertions because, outside America, “white” does not mean anything other than a biological category (i.e. there is English history, Czech history).
For people to identify as deracinated “whites” is precisely what the system wants to happen—they can then be fitted into the metacontext pre-prepared by the system and suitably demonised. Anyway, for the unfortunate Ukrainians, once they have served the American empire’s purposes, their relatively homogeneous country will be re-made in the image of Birmingham—with Ukrainian “whites” told they belong nowhere. The system uses petty nationalisms—Scottish, Welsh, Ukrainian—to break up entities that stand in its way (the unitary British state, Russia); once it has finished with them, the process of dissolution is turned inwards.