‘If Anyone Can Become an Englishman, What is an Englishman?’: Reform UK’s James Orr on the ‘Great Replacement’

Last December James Orr stood on stage at the annual AmericaFest conference in Phoenix, organised by Turning Point USA, and rebranded the event “a tribute to Charlie Kirk”.

Kirk, Turning Point’s co-founder and chief executive, had been shot dead three months earlier on 10 September, on a stage at Utah Valley University by a sniper on a nearby rooftop.

More than 30,000 people turned up for the first event organised to commemorate Kirk’s murder. A replica of the tent in which he was shot was erected inside the convention centre, flanked by ring lights for attendee selfies. 

Erika Kirk, Charlie Kirk’s widow, opened the conference and used it to endorse JD Vance for United States President in 2028. Vance later gave the closing keynote speech.  

The speaker roster included a who’s who of ‘MAGA’ luminaries: Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, Ben Shapiro, Donald Trump Jr, Robert F Kennedy Jr – and James Orr.

When he walked out on stage to a standing ovation from an audience of thousands in front of blazing lights and blaring music, the attendees might have been hard-pressed to imagine that this Orr was an academic, an Associate Professor of the Philosophy of Religion at the Faculty of Divinity, at the world-renowned Cambridge University.

But Orr was also more than that. Two months earlier, he had been appointed as a senior advisor to Nigel Farage, Leader of Reform UK.

As Orr emerged before the audience, a recording of one of his previous speeches was played: “What we recognise is that… freedom without constraints descends into tyranny, the tyranny very often of the minority over the majority. Freedom without fairness leaves people at the mercy of forces that divide a nation against itself.”

The audience roared as sparks and pyrotechnics surrounded Orr, who approached the podium and waved regally to his fans.

Why was he there?

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Kirk on Race

Orr was well-acquainted with Charlie Kirk, having previously made appearances on his podcast show.

One of his most consequential contributions occurred on a show titled “Why is Europe choosing to replace itself?”, shortly before Kirk was killed. The interview was not published until January of this year.

Through Turning Point, Kirk had built a conservative youth empire on a particular kind of racial politics. On his own podcast, he had declared that, if he saw a black pilot, “I’m going to be like, ‘boy, I hope he’s qualified’.” He described George Floyd, the African American truck driver murdered by a white police officer in Minnesota, as a “scumbag”; and called Martin Luther King “awful” and “not a good person”. 

Kirk said the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – which provided equal rights to black Americans and outlawed racial segregation and discrimination – had been a “huge mistake”. He alleged that “prowling blacks go around for fun to go target white people”. He said black women in prominent positions – Ketanji Brown Jackson, Joy Reid, Michelle Obama – owed their status to having “stolen a white person’s slot”.

On Jewish donors, Kirk told his podcast audience that they were “the number one funding mechanism of radical, open-border, neoliberal, quasi-Marxist policies” and that “the philosophical foundation of anti-whiteness has been largely financed by Jewish donors in the country”. He called on American Jews to stop “subsidising your own demise”, and accused Jewish philanthropy of controlling “the non-profits, the movies, Hollywood, all of it”. 

Kirk also sympathised with scientific racism. 

In October 2023, he hosted leading ‘race science’ advocate Steve Sailer, who coined the term ‘noticing’ to describe the act of recognising that racial disparities are rooted in biological and genetic differences, rather than social policies. Kirk described Sailer, who used Kirk’s show to promote white nationalist Charles Murray – co-author of The Bell Curve which claimed that black people are cognitively inferior to white people – as “one of the most talented noticers in the country”.

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The Far-Right ‘Comintern’

Orr’s sit-down with Kirk was not merely friendly, but deferential. 

The Reform advisor began by telling Kirk that American conservatism was “changing the world”, that he admired the scale of what Kirk had built, and that he had flown in to learn. 

He also told Kirk something more specific.

“You’re doing extraordinary things in transforming America, recalling it to its founding ideals, promoting people of calibre and character and courage, particularly among the young,” Orr said. “This is a huge problem for us on the right in Britain. We’re working very hard on it. I felt both envious but also excited, because I thought: we can bottle some of that Kirk juice and take it over to Britain. We need to work out what the DNA is and try to replicate it as best we can.”

As a statement of Orr’s intent to import Kirk’s ideology into UK politics, his comments speak for themselves.

The interview, recorded before Kirk’s death, contained four crucial admissions.

The first – the most consequential – was in response to Kirk’s question on whether 2016 marked a real historical turn. Orr agreed, then widened the frame.

“It’s not just Brexit and Trump,” he said. “It’s also the rise of national conservative movements all across Europe. You’re seeing it with Vox in Spain, with Chega in Portugal, with the AfD in Germany, with the Rassemblement National in France, with Fratelli d’Italia in Italy, and in Austria and Hungary, all going at different speeds.”

He then highlighted his own role as a key lever in this network.

“One of the challenges conservatives always have is conserving what is our own,” Orr told Kirk. “So it’s very difficult to form what the communists used to call a Comintern. Marx could say ‘workers of the world, unite’ – progressives can say ‘wokesters of the world, unite’ – because it’s a fundamentally transnational ideology. Conserving our own nations means it’s much harder to have that sense of international solidarity. But various movements are trying to catalyse that. The National Conservatism movement – of which I’m proudly the UK chair – is helping to do that.”

National Conservatism, for Orr, is the transnational coordinating infrastructure for the European far-right. The seven movements he named include four parties with direct fascist lineage or formal extremist classification.

The AfD in Germany was classified by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution –  the BfV, Germany’s democratic immune system – as a “confirmed right-wing extremist endeavour” in May 2025, following a three-year investigation. 

The BfV’s 1,100-page finding described the party as a racist and anti-Muslim organisation incompatible with the German constitution. More than 10,000 AfD members are on the BfV’s register of far-right extremists. The party’s Thuringia leader, Björn Höcke, has been legally ruled by German courts to be accurately describable as a fascist. AfD-connected figures attended the January 2024 Potsdam meeting, exposed by Correctiv, at which the mass deportation of millions of people from Germany – including naturalised German citizens – was discussed.

Fratelli d’Italia is the living institutional continuation of Italian fascism. 

It occupies the same Rome headquarters as the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), the neo-fascist party founded in 1946 by veterans of Mussolini’s Nazi-collaborationist Salò Republic. Its tricolour flame emblem is said by party tradition to represent the flame on Mussolini’s tomb at Predappio. Its leader – now Italy’s Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni – joined the MSI youth wing as a teenager and publicly praised Mussolini. Its co-founder, now President of the Italian Senate, has reportedly described himself and his colleagues as heirs of ‘Il Duce’.

Austria’s Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ) was founded in 1956 by Anton Reinthaller, an SS-Brigadeführer and former Nazi Reichstag deputy. His successor, Friedrich Peter, had served in the 1st SS Infantry Brigade – a unit responsible for the murder of civilians in the occupied Soviet Union. The party harbours intimate ties to neo-Nazi networks and German nationalist fraternities.

France’s Rassemblement National is the renamed Front National, founded in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen, a convicted Holocaust denier who described the Nazi gas chambers as “a detail” of the Second World War. The party drew on Waffen-SS veterans, the neo-fascist Ordre Nouveau, and veterans of the Algerian OAS.

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‘Reversing’ the Great Replacement

Orr’s second significant admission was on migration, in a response to a question framed by Kirk in the language of the far-right ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory. 

Popularised by French writer Renaud Camus, it baselessly suggests white European populations are being systematically replaced by non-white immigrants through engineered mass migration. It has been cited in the manifestos of the terrorists who carried out the mass shootings at Christchurch, Buffalo, El Paso, and Poway.

The previous year, Kirk had declared on his show: “The Great Replacement strategy, which is well under way every single day in our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different.”

The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism describes it as “one of the most dangerous white supremacist conspiracy theories out there” and notes that the conspiracy “often blames the ‘elite’ and Jews for orchestrating these changing demographics”.

In Kirk’s interview with Orr, he asked: “Why is Europe continually importing people who will replace core European identity and culture? Who is voting for this? What is the argument?”

Orr accepted the framing.

“In the last five years, one in 27 people in Britain has arrived,” he said. “One in 60 arrived in the last 18 months. In the first 25 years of this century, gross immigration has been somewhere between 12 and 15 million people – roughly four to five times as many people as arrived on our shores in the first thousand years of our history. This has had a profoundly traumatic shock on us Brits. A tectonic effect on the landscape of British politics.”

Then, speaking about free speech, he said: “Once you go through this extraordinary, unprecedented experiment in mass demographic reconfiguration – all the norms are dissolved.”

Orr had already told GB News that the task is now to “arrest and preferably reverse mass unvetted immigration” from countries such as Pakistan and Afghanistan with “backward moral cultures”.

The Kirk interview underlined that stance and paired it with a specific figure. The UK cannot “reverse” 12 to 15 million arrivals since 2000 simply by closing its borders to new ones. Any reversal on that scale would, it appears, require the removal of long-settled residents, naturalised British citizens, UK-born children of migrants who are British from birth, and the breaking up of mixed-citizenship families.

This is the programme the Austrian far-right leader of the Identitarian Movement, Martin Sellner, calls ‘remigration’. It explicitly includes the expulsion of ethnic minority citizens deemed insufficiently assimilated. 

Orr closed his answer to Kirk by saying that the biblical model he offered for the integration of migrants is the Book of Ruth. “Even at the end of the book,” he said, “she’s still Ruth the Moabitess – her identity is still there. She’s incorporated into the people of Israel, but she remains a Moabitess.”

Ruth is incorporated but never becomes ‘an Israelite’. A few minutes later, Orr made the architecture explicit: “If anyone can become a woman, what is a woman? If anyone can become an Englishman, what is an Englishman?” 

An Englishman, in the analogy he draws, is presumably a biological person; a thing you are at birth. The suggestion that is reasonable to infer from Orr’s comment is that the nation belongs to the Englishman as one of the white – native – race.

“We’re not an idea,” Orr told Kirk. “We’re not a proposition. We’re people with a home, a history, a heritage.” This is the precondition for claiming that some people, regardless of citizenship, cannot truly belong.

On why he felt at home in Phoenix, Arizona, Orr added: “I can land somewhere like Phoenix and be surrounded by the English-speaking peoples – be in the Anglosphere – and that now carries an almost nostalgic quality. A sense of homecoming, a strange homecoming, because I can see glimpses of the old world in the new. Glimpses of the old world that are beginning to fade in the old world itself.”

On why British Muslims, in his telling, fail to integrate, he said: “There’s a wonderful book by my Cambridge colleague, Alan Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism, which shows that the English from the 12th and 13th Centuries onwards were constantly moving around, not very clan-based. Whereas our newer arrivals don’t take that approach at all.”

On whether a country’s claims require reasoned defence, Orr said: “I don’t owe you an argument for why my country is the best country in the world any more than I owe you an argument for why my mum is the best mum in the world.”

Taken together, these passages suggest a doctrine of the nation as lineage rather than idea; one that requires no reasoned justification. Englishness reaches back eight centuries and cannot be acquired by incomers. The Anglosphere is a civilisational community in which Phoenix is presumably more home than contemporary multi-ethnic England; and Englishness, like biological sex, is what you were born as.

This is ethno-nationalism.

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The ‘Net Drains Myth’

Orr told Kirk that the claim that migrants are “net drains” on the British economy, has “been one of the myths” 

But the Office for Budget Responsibility’s 2024 modelling found that a migrant arriving at age 25 on UK average earnings contributes approximately £341,000 to public finances over their lifetime – more than a UK-born worker on the same salary, because the UK has not paid for their education. 

OBR forecasts consistently show higher net migration reducing the deficit and the national debt. Home Office earnings data for 1.7 million migrants who arrived on work visas between 2019 and 2023 show them earning, on average, slightly more than UK-born workers aged 16 to 64.

Orr also told Kirk that “something like 80 to 85% of Muslims vote Labour”, and used this as evidence that bloc voting had delivered the UK five MPs loyal to a foreign cause. The 80% figure was accurate in 2019. But, by the 2024 General Election, according to analysis by the UK in a Changing Europe group, Labour’s share of the Muslim vote collapsed to just more than 60%. In the 28 constituencies where more than a quarter of residents are Muslim, Labour’s vote share fell from 63.7% to 37.1%. Ironically, those five MPs ran as independents precisely due to their opposition to Labour’s policies on Gaza.

Orr did not respond to requests for comment.

A month after this interview was published by the Charlie Kirk Show, Farage promoted Orr to be his head of policy at Reform, where he sits in prime position to unleash “Kirk juice” into Westminster.

Following in his footsteps, as of April, his son Godfrey Orr – who accompanied his father on his Phoenix trip last year and watched him on stage at AmFest’s Charlie Kirk tribute event – is standing as a Reform candidate in East Chesterton in next month’s local elections.