Brief: Scottish Demographics

On May 21st the Scottish government finally released its long-anticipated data on ethnicity, national identity, language, and religion. This data comes from the Scottish Census of 2022 and paints a very mixed picture from a nationalist perspective.

The 2022 ethnicity data tells us that:

Scotland remains a British supermajority country, with native Britons and Europeans comprising 92.9% of the 5,439,842 strong Scottish population. In total 5,051,875 Westerners reside in Scotland against 387,967 people of non-Western origin. And while this British share of the population is encouraging it is far from secure. In 1981 Scotland was 99.1% British/Western while in 2001 the country was 97.99% British/Western and in 2011 Scotland had a British/Western share of the population which stood at 96.02%.

In the 30-year timespan between 1981 and 1991, the British/Western population of Scotland shrank by 3%. In the 11-year span between 2011 and 2022, the British/Western population share in Scotland shrank by 3.1%.

Demographic change in Scotland is accelerating.

More important than the overall British/Western share of the population in Scotland is the Scottish share of the population. Scotland is, after all, a nation-state that belongs to one particular group of people: The Scots.

Here the data is not encouraging. In 2011 native Scots were 83.95% of the Scottish population, but this share has since fallen. The 2022 Census shows that native Scots are just 77.7% of the Scottish population, a drop of 6.25 percentage points in just over a decade.

Perhaps more concerning is that the population of native Scots is in numeric decline. There were 4,459,071 Scots in 2001, 4,445,678 Scots in the 2011 Census, and just 4,226,965 native Scots in the 2022 datasets.

Meanwhile, the population of Africans in Scotland doubled from 29,000 to 58,000 between 2011 and 2022. The population of Asians in Scotland increased from 140,768 to 212,022 with the overall Asian population share increasing from 2.66% in 2011 to 3.9% in the 2022 data.

The mixed-race population of Scotland increased by more than threefold. Increasing from just 20,000 individuals comprising 0.37% of the Scottish population in 2011 to nearly 61,000 individuals comprising 1.22% of the Scottish population in 2022.

In total the ethnic minority population of Scotland increased by 177,000 between 2011 and 2022 while the ethnic Scottish population decreased by 200,000 people.

In Scottish schools, the situation has deteriorated even further. Western descended children comprise 88.7% of Scotland’s school pupil population (4.2 percentage points lower than the overall Western share of the population). Scottish pupils, the inheritors of the Scottish nation-state, comprise 76.2% of the school population. This share of the school pupil population is 1.5 percentage points lower than the overall Scottish population share in the country.

Jon Wroth-Smith, Director of Census Statistics, National Records of Scotland notes that without migration, both from abroad and the rest of the United Kingdom, Scotland’s population would have decreased by 90,400 between 2011 and 2022, but instead the population of Scotland increased by 144,400 individuals (or 2.7%).

And while the data thus far has been negative, not all of the trends in Scotland are so. The number of Gaelic and Scots speakers increased by 43,100 people between 2011 and 2022. In terms of percentages the share of Gaelic and Scots speakers in the Scottish population increased from 1.7% in 2011 to 2.5% of all people above the age of three in 2022.

Then there is the distribution of the Scottish population, which remains overwhelmingly positive. There are more Scots aged 5-14 than there are Scots aged 30-39. If Scottish and British policymakers were to take action to repatriate migrants and to increase the Scottish birthrate modestly then Scotland would be on a healthy demographic footing in a matter of years. We understand that these policy changes and a reorientation to nationalism are not an easy task, but Scotland is already going through race-based political change as the population revolts against the SNP, its former Pakistani leader Hamza Yousef, and his anti-White hate crime laws.

Demographic change will continue to accelerate in the country unless the Scottish people embrace a real form of nationalism. Breaking up the United Kingdom must be placed on the backburner and priority must be placed on the demographic health of Scotland and its future as a nation-state.

We have before outlined how Scotland could use tax policy, housing policy, and property law to restrict the number of foreigners who can settle in the country. Scotland could, with a dedicated nationalist administration in Holyrood, put Scots first and ensure that social services, housing, and state benefits are available only to British people, effectively freezing out the large share of recent immigrants in the country.

The Scottish parliament may not be able to prevent the issuance of visas or close its airports and ferry terminals to the millions of migrants admitted to the United Kingdom by Westminster, but the Scottish government could – if under the influence of nationalists – make it near-impossible for any foreigner to take advantage of the native Scots and the wonderful land they call home.

The Scottish people must decide to put their demographic interests, and the interests of their children, first. The faux-nationalism of the SNP has only damaged the Scottish nation, but that damage is not yet irreversible.