The British dream is fading, replaced by a nightmare of sectarian division
The UK has been hugely successful at integration, but mass immigration elites have abused our openness
Britain is a wonderful, welcoming country that has embraced newcomers fleeing persecution or poverty for centuries. Our gradual affirmation of religious toleration after the English Reformation and the Scottish Enlightenment, our individualism, our early adoption of capitalism, our commitment to the rule of law, our pioneering role in the eradication of slavery, all helped forge a culture that to this day remains more open to outsiders than those of European neighbours.
It is a reason why so many first- and second-generation immigrants love this country, why so many are doing so well and contributing so much to politics, business, medicine, academia, sport and entertainment, and why it is entirely uncontroversial that Rishi Sunak is our first Hindu Prime Minister.
Visiting Britain in the 1720s, Voltaire was stunned. “Go into the London Stock Exchange… and you will see representatives from all nations gathered together for the utility of men,” he wrote in Lettres Philosophiques. “Here Jew, Mohammedan and Christian deal with each other as though they were all of the same faith, and only apply the word infidel to people who go bankrupt. Here the Presbyterian trusts the Anabaptist and the Anglican accepts a promise from the Quaker.”
Fast forward three centuries and we continue to integrate immigrants far better than the French or Germans, an ability dubbed Britain’s “superpower”. Across western Europe, the children of immigrants perform worse than those of the native-born; in the UK, children of immigrants are better at maths than the children of natives, and children born abroad do almost as well, the Pisa tests reveal.
British-chinese, Indian, black African, Pakistani and Bangladeshi children all get better marks at GCSES than their white British counterparts. Ethnic minorities are now in the majority in some of the best private schools in Britain – and, conversely, Muslim Bangladeshi children on free school meals do better at GCSES than the average white British child. White children are the least likely of any ethnic group to go to university. There even appears to be a reduction, on average, in geographical segregation of minority communities, an analysis of the past four censuses reveals.
Tragically, instead of building on this by embracing a controlled, rational immigration policy to forge a modern, united, multi-ethnic British nation, our ruling elites – first New Labour, and then the Tories, backed by the cultural and business establishment – have blundered so severely that the entire multicultural edifice could now come tumbling down. What could have been a model for others to follow has been ruined by insouciance.
The first fraudulent claim was that we could cope with net figures of hundreds of thousands of migrants, year in, year out. On what planet? The staggering inability of the state to build infrastructure, or to allow free enterprise to do so, means that largescale immigration is inflicting huge costs on the existing population (including earlier migrants) via congestion, rationed healthcare and smaller, prohibitively expensive homes.
Robert Jenrick and Neil O’brien crunch the data in their brilliant Taking Back Control, from the Centre for Policy Studies. England’s population surged 6.6 per cent between 2011 and 2021 (it would have grown 2.7 per cent without migration) yet during that time the major roads network grew by just 2.3 per cent, the rail network by 1 per cent, GP surgeries by 4 per cent (at a time of ageing population), the number of secondary schools by 4.9 per cent, the net capital stock of machinery and equipment by 4 per cent and, maddeningly, our electricity generation capacity collapsed 14.2 per cent.
High immigration has diluted our per capita capital stock: we have effectively become poorer. Housing has grown faster – by 9.6 per cent – but even that isn’t enough to cope with the massive pent-up demand from years of underbuilding and the concentrated geography of immigration. Home ownership is collapsing, quality of life is deteriorating and the institutional underpinnings of conservatism and capitalism are lethally undermined.
The second falsehood was that large volumes of migration – as opposed to smaller-scale, targeted, high-skilled migration – would turbocharge productivity growth and insulate us from the baby bust. Yet productivity has flatlined, even though the UK now has more foreign-born residents than the US; the availability of labour may have discouraged automation.
Many immigrants contribute far more than they take out in government spending, but some do not, especially if they don’t work or don’t earn enough. Meaningful data doesn’t exist to perform a proper cost-benefit analysis of mass migration as a whole, or even for different nationalities. But we desperately need to be much more discerning, and only bring in migrants whose skills and values are such that they are likely to be net contributors to the Exchequer over their lifetimes.
The third error was to leverage mass immigration to camouflage other problems. More foreign students – many of whom stay permanently – subsidise domestic fees. Foreign care workers allow the authorities to grossly underpay staff. We don’t train enough doctors and health workers, or anybody else for that matter: it’s easier to import ready-made workers. The 5.5 million people on out-of-work benefits have been consigned to the memory hole. The success of migrant children allows the complacent to disregard the atrocious educational performance of the white working class.
The Government’s final blunder was to ignore the rise of Islamist extremism, out of cowardice and stupidity, while tolerating woke critical race theory (CRT), an ideology that rejects colourblind integrationism and pits racial groups against one another.
Yes, Britain’s superpower is integration, but it turns out that Islamism and CRT are its kryptonite. The authorities did nothing in Batley to protect a teacher chased away by extremists. They haven’t tackled radical preachers and have been useless at promoting moderate, reformist Muslim voices. A toxic anti-semitism that had been largely eradicated from British life is spreading again. The return of Israelophobic sectarian parties – including the Greens – is the final straw.
We need to drastically reduce migration. We need to be much more discerning about who we let in. We can no longer allow our righteous openness to immigration to be perverted and manipulated.
Productivity has flatlined, even though the UK now has more foreignborn residents than the US