For the first time in my lifetime, it is now possible to express a view in polite society that there should be *any* limit on immigration. Even the Brexit debate pretended to be about tariffs or some notion of control. I fear it is all to little too late though.
Wonderful post. I love these short recaps of where we are and how we got here. It enables me to see the wood for the trees. And understanding how we got here somehow makes me hate the progressive left, who are still pushing this broken social and economic model, a little less. It helps me see them as either the slowest in the class who have yet to catch up or as people who refuse to admit they were wrong. These are sprinkled with the ones that I really dislike, those who actually like the fractured, crime-ridden society we've become and who lobby for ever more low IQ, poorly educated, low-skilled immigrants, many of who will go straight into social housing and onto welfare. These lobbyists think this is exactly how things should be.
The lowest performing schoolboys in the UK fall in the “white British” category. The employment rate of the native lower classes is abysmal.
The “country” (minus immigrants) isn’t what the professional classes (let alone nostalgic boomers) imagine it is. The old map is not the territory, and it is due to culture as much as immigration.
A problem with social democracy is that charity, school quality, work, culture becomes the government’s responsibility- the taxpayers can wash their hands of it and increasing live in insular bubbles. That wasn’t how the old culture, the old country was built. We can blame the left for believing that all personal choices and lifestyles are equally valid, but really it is as much the selfishness of the professional and upper classes that have fed this. With social democracy the bottom half of the country is someone else’s problem- we pay our taxes and remove ourselves from affiliation with them. Read Charles Murray’s analysis of White America- “Coming Apart”.
Change the culture to one of hard work, family, self-improvement, community involvement- meaning us being involved - and maybe things improve. And, sure, invite those in who want to be a part of that culture and prove they can be, because if we had had to rely on the white British underclass to fix our homes, staff our Tescos and hospitals and small businesses over the past 30 years we’d have been well and truly f’d..
The old country and culture is long-dead. You have to build a new one. Anyone looking at demographics, a map, and a performing a cursory review of ancient history and classics will realize that immigration isn’t going away, but sure, try to stop it you like and see if that alone revives the green and pleasant land (where no doubt every wealthy nativist will spend the rest of their lives- who needs sunny climes in retirement?).
that's not quite right. for GCSE level, white British is at lower end but black Caribbean and some other groups do worse. At A-Level white British are much better, and for degree level even better.
On unemployment, the white British rate is lower than pretty much every other group
I don't deny there is a problem, with an underclass and with worklessness more generally. Our situation is also not quite the same as continental countries like Germany or Sweden, where the gap between natives and recent immigrants on most metrics is very large. There is also quite a firmly entrenched anti-education culture among working-class Brits.
But I think some roles would be taken up by unemployed native-born workers if wages rose and housing costs fell.
Re: There is also quite a firmly entrenched anti-education culture among working-class Brits.
This is something we share over here across the Pond. I've heard a couple of low income (white) guys who were quite able-bodied, one in his 20s the other in his 40s at the time, announce that they just couldn't deal with working. In both cases their solution consisted of milking the system as much as they could, though in the US that doesn't yield much, and also finding a woman with an income and a place to live to sponge off of.
Maybe. Though paying more for less productive people leads to slower growth and higher inflation, meaning it is harder to make housing affordable. In an open economy, cheaper goods would be imported.
I posted the link to GSCE results. You are correct when it comes to all boys (White British outperform Black Caribbean but not Black African or Pakistanis). When it comes to the poor (those on free lunches), White British boys underperform every immigrant group except Roma and Irish travelers (not that I consider them immigrants at this point).
Since I am talking about the working class and poor, A levels weren’t relevant for me.
I do think restricting immigration will increase employment amongst the white British poor and make the poor more capable and functional. But that won’t be done simply by turning off the immigration spigot. There had to be a focus on primary and secondary education, a cut in the dole, working requirements for parents who have children they can’t support and vocational training. In other words, change the culture to one of work, as I said
As I remember the worst performing group isn't 'white British schoolboys' but 'white working-class British schoolboys', which is rather different.
Also I disagree with your idea that if we didn't have immigrants, certain jobs wouldn't get done. I think the reason they don't get done by white British now is that there is a choice: either we do those jobs or we import willing immigrants to do them and lazy white people go on the dole instead. If that choice was no longer on the table I suspect what would happen is that the wages of those jobs would rise until it was tempting enough for white British to deign do them. It simply isn't true that the jobs wouldn't get done. And with higher wages the social stigma of those jobs would automatically fall away. After all, it's hard to look down on someone when they earn more than you do.
Apart from that white people often do do those jobs. When was the last time you saw an Asian dustman? The only people I ever see sweeping streets are white Brits.
In front of me now I have a book of photography called 'In England' by Don McCullin. Quite a few of the photos are from urban life in the 1960's and 1970's, a time before are streets were full of immigrants and I've got to say that the photos are grim. I was born in the 1950's so I remember those decades with their 3-day-weeks and black-outs and football hooliganism. I used to go to home and away games and as a slight, well-spoken middle-class lad I took my life in my hands. Fights would sometimes break out in pubs, the food was generally rubbish and grime and dirt were everywhere. And that pride in ignorance and oafishness which is a hallmark of the British underclass was thriving. To some extent I joined in, leaving school at 16 without an 'O' level to my name. Not for a minute do I blame immigrants for any of that.
Despite that, I don't believe mass immigration is the solution and that seems to be pretty clear now. You say, 'Change the culture to one of hard work, family, self-improvement, community involvement- meaning us being involved - and maybe things improve'. Well yes, I'm sure they would improve. But that's like saying, 'Just play better and you'll win the World Cup'. If things were that easy then I suspect every country in the world would follow your advice.
What a wonderful post, Keith. It is true, in my experience as well, that dustmen are overwhelmingly European. Same with builders. The white vans carrying plumbers and electricians also seem to be driven by white men as well.
I know what you mean about life in the 1970s: phone boxes out of order and smelling of urine is a scenario I’d add to the one’s you’ve described (Not the Nine O’Clock News did a memorable sketch of men queuing outside a red phone box, ostensibly wanting to make a phone call but actually waiting to have a slash). Good point about winning the World Cup ‘n’ all.
Damn, I wish I had remembered the urine-smelling phone boxes while writing that comment.
That sketch from 'Not The Nine O'Clock New' sounds very funny. From 1979 - 1982 I was living in Germany, which meant I missed every single episode of MTNON.
Speaking of 'tubes', when I was poor back in the mid-1980's I still had an old black and white TV that someone had given me. At some point one of the valves went, so I unscrewed it and went to the local electrical shop to get a replacement. The bloke in the shop looked at it, turned it over in his hand, and said, 'Where on earth did you get this from? A lighthouse?' He persuaded me it might be time to buy one of those new colour TVs that everyone was talking about.
here are the GSCE results by race and gender (attainment 8 score, out of 90)- this is for all white British boys. They are behind Pakistanis, Black Africans, though ahead of Black Caribbean and Roma at least.
When you look at students receiving free meals at school (so poorer students only), White British (all boys and girls combined) are behind all Black and Asian students receiving free meals, though manage to beat out the Irish travelers, at least.
It's kind of beside the overall point about migration (e.g. I'm not in favour of mass migration from China/India although they perform well academically) but it is close to impossible to discern anything from Attainment 8 because it is (a) a measure of achievement from one's initial starting point; and (b) because the bar is set SO low that anyone who tries (regardless of actual intelligence) will pass. One can probably say far more about the potential of groups from A level results because they are a truer measure of cognitive ability and the results can be extrapolated on a probability basis per group given intelligence is normally distributed.
The mood of the Fifties and Sixties, with Hitler gone, was one of almost insane optimism, despite the nuclear threat.
Many of our elders were even more light-headed than we were.
And this made the allowing of huge immigration seem wiser and less risky than in fact it was. Because if everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, why worry ?
The mood changed to guilt c.1970, when Christopher Caldwell was eight.
Before then the Brits regarded the Empire as a Good Thing, even though it was time to let it go.
Both here and in the USA, there was immense pride and complacency at being the Good Guys who had defeated the Nazis, and poverty and unemployment into the bargain.
Well done, Ed - you make me want to find my copy of the book and re-read it. Caldwell was highly prescient (and readable), as was Mark Steyn even earlier with America Alone.
I've always been relatively liberal on immigration. But, the last few years have definitely altered my view somewhat. The latest immigration figures that came out last week (or week before) are scandalous. And the reasons for such huge numbers don't really matter anymore. We live in such a volatile world that there will always be large numbers on the move. My annoyance isn't with immigrants. It's with politicians of all stripes insulting our intelligence. People can see the social and cultural changes all around us. Some immigration is good, remains my view, but what we've seen the last 20 years in particular has tipped the balance firmly the other way.
Post-war, Britain had no need of labour until the mid-1950s - when London Transport went to Barbados to recruit porters and clippies.
Britain had hundreds of thousands of troops coming home and dozens of thousands of German POWs, and Italians and Poles to pick up work.
The Empire Windrush passengers were largely RAF ground-crew men who had arrived in Britain in two batches in mid and late-1944 to engage in training schemes that would provide them with skills to take back to the Caribbean to stimulate the local economy.
They were not supposed to return, and they did…..but; they had enjoyed themselves in UK and saw better opportunities relative to what was going on at home. At the time, Britain had great shortages of housing and food, but we managed to accommodate them.
People like Diane Abbott might acknowledge that just as the Windrush was on its way, 12 Labour MPs wrote to Attlee to demand that the migrants be barred.
I shall be writing more about this on my own Stack in the new year (as soon as I get used to the software).
As you observe, the Windrush had made a detour to Tampico, Mexico to embark 80 Poles, the remnants of the east Polish diaspora severely persecuted by Stalin - until USSR became an ally that is. I’m sure you know the story.
They couldn’t go home because they no longer had one. The Polish Resettlement Act was passed and they were allowed to stay in UK. However most had to live in former military camps, many of them until the early-1970s.
I thought the consensus was that the Saxon Shore - a Roman term - referred to the shoreline of Britannia that was defended by the Saxons, against the Picts in their boats, and paid for by the later Romano-British in a kind of outsourcing contract? Not ‘the shore where the Saxons often attack’.
Yes, Windrush was a troopship, HMT Windrush. The photo usually used in the media features an RAF officer addressing young smartly dressed black men on the upper deck. I had assumed they were recruits; from what you say, they were more likely being demobbed and heading home. PS the vessel had a chequered past, having been a German ship used among other things in the invasion of Norway, I read.
Hello Greg - if it is the photo I am thinking of, there are two RAF officers (probably attached to the Colonial Office Welfare Team) - it was taken at Tilbury the morning after the Windrush docked. One of them is Flt. Lt. Johnny Smythe who did 28 missions over Germany, was shot down and was sent to Stalag Luft I.
These blokes had arrived back in UK, having decided that the Caribbean could not offer them sufficient opportunities. There were 492 of them: 204 had somewhere to go and were given a rail warrant, 236 had no plans at all and were taken to Brixton and put up in wartime underground accommodation, whilst 52 of them wanted to re-join the RAF.
I have about 75,000 words written about the Monte Rosa/Empire Windrush, and will publish them in the new year.
Fascinating. Only about 1 in 10 wanted to rejoin the RAF! I am intrigued by the underground accommodation in Brixton. I lived in Kennington for a bit. Do you know what it was - was it a conversion of something, or a purpose built bunker or what?
It does highlight an uncomfortable truth for people, like me, who worry a lot about mass immigration. In a case of Woke-more-Correct, pro-immigration people often blurt out things like, 'well, who's going to mow your lawn/clean your house/look after Granny in her care home without immigrants?'. Which reveals that this is, at least in part, about them not having to do difficult, dirty or low-status jobs themselves, and hang the longer-term consequences for social cohesion or broad-based prosperity. But it's also true, if I'm being perfectly honest, that I don't want to do those jobs either, and that I therefore seem to be committed to supporting a social order in which there are plenty of Brits whose economic situation more or less directs them into such unpopular but necessary work. Which implies the kind of economic inequality that the post-War welfare state was designed to do away with.
I still think that mass immigration is ruinous, and the laziest possible way to address these hard structural questions, but producing an alternative model along broadly liberal lines is very difficult, and involves all sorts of painful trade-offs. Automation fixes some it, possibly, as does a welfare model with fewer insane incentives, but it's still very tricky.
we're all in the same boat - we don't want to do the 3D jobs (dirty, demeaning or dangerous) and we're reluctant to pay more to get native-born people to do them. it is made more complicated by the existence of state monopolies in areas like healthcare, which artificially suppress wages. But in the long term, it's not great to rely on a Ponzi scheme...
The health care visa did seem to be the very worst example of Ponzi thinking. Rather than allow wages to rise, we imported many tens of thousands, plus dependants, who will almost certainly be fiscally negative over many decades. That's got to be much more expensive, hasn't it? Like, ruinously so?
One problem with health care is that there are, in fact, limits to how much can be spent on it without society collapsing. Modern medicine has figured out how to keep ever more frail people alive ever longer, but at high cost. The details will vary, but ultimately, this is likely to prove unsustainable, and we'll just go back to dying at earlier ages. This is not all bad. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't particularly want to spend a decade of my life demented. I'd rather just die a decade earlier, thanks.
The things that keep the elderly alive longer (like antibiotics) do not cost all that much, and some of them (like the major sanitary reforms of the late 19th and early 20th centuries) aren't even medical in nature and they have to work for everyone. Short of some almost unimaginable catastrophe we're not going to go back to dying younger.
I think you are right, Jon. Also, from my own experience in healthcare, there was a clear shift in the UK anyway in the late 1990s towards giving flu vaccine boosters and antibiotics to frail dependent elderly people, when before that, there was a view among nurses and doctors that there was no benefit to the patient in actively prolonging life when, say, a chest infection set in. “Let nature take its course”. Add in the post-war baby boom, and much less smoking nowadays, and the result is a lot of very old people in terrible health who are nevertheless still technically alive!
Right. And then they stopped letting nature take its course. Result? Calls for euthanasia, obviously. Because at some point, life simply stops being worth living. If you intervene to prolong such a life, then you end up getting asked to actively put an end to it.
Modern medical care has two types of costs: direct and indirect. Direct is just the cost of medical procedures (e.g. the cost of a hip replacement surgery). Then you have the indirect costs. For instance, a person's overall health is failing. His (let's say it's a he) immune system is getting weaker. He gets an infection, as we all do from time to time. Given the weakness of his immune system, you would expect him to die. Except that he lives because antibiotics (cheap enough) came to the rescue. So, he is still alive, but meanwhile, his natural decline continues. Rinse and repeat. Eventually, he is no longer able to take care of himself in basic ways. So, either he is given "social care" (someone to feed him, bathe him, change his diapers), or he dies of neglect. This social care is fairly simple, but it ends up costing quite a lot because it's so labor intensive. But here's the thing: if those antibiotics hadn't been available, he would have died of his infection, never having needed all this social care. Thus, the cheap antibiotics generated all the extra cost.
What I think is going to happen is that some things (such as antibiotics) will remain widely available, but you will see more and more neglect. That, plus increasingly patchy urgent care. As in: what happens if grandma suffers a stroke and you call an ambulance? Do they come? How quickly? Expect the wait to get longer and longer (on average, of course), meaning that some grandmas who would have lived with timely care end up dying.
We may very well be facing a future in which many bacteria become antibiotic resistant-- and then we will have to depend on high levels of sanitation and hygiene to protect ourselves. That does work partially (and non-trivially) as death rates fell quite a lot once food and water supplies were cleaned up and sterile surgeries and childbirths became the norm. But we will, alas, see a rise in death rates still.
Actual age of death averages in the US have dropped a few years for men. May be just a COVID hangover, but with vaccine fall-out, it may trend lower in many countries (but not more than 5 years overall).
Re: Actual age of death averages in the US have dropped a few years for men. May be just a COVID hangover
That drop began before the Pandemic, hence the "death of despair" meme. Also women, at least for a couple years, saw a drop too.
The age-adjusted death rate in the US did fall during the Pandemic but it's been rising again. (Age adjustment in these figures is necessary due to the overall aging of the population). There is no "vaccine fallout". That's disinformation spread by nutcases and maybe foreign disruption agents. Of course there were some few people who had bad, even fatal reactions to the vaccine-- that's true of any medication-- but there's no evidence of any long term effect in the general population.
"Who remembers proper binmen?" There is something to that - when being a dustman was a highly paid manual job you got a better class of person doing it See Coronation street. See the Sanitation dept in NYC,. Beyond that you'ns can pay more for your quinoa or slash HR jobs
The dirty part is not really fixable, the dangerous part can often be ameliorated to some extent, but the demeaning part is entirely optional and is effectively a societal choice. Take, for example, brain surgery. It's dirty, uncomfortable work that I most definitely wouldn't want to do. But it is very highly compensated, which means it's not demeaning in the slightest, and in fact, it's very difficult to get to do that job.
Basically: raise salaries of "demeaning" jobs, and they'll stop being demeaning. Simple as that.
‘The dominant moral mood of postwar Europe was one of repentance for two historic misdeeds, colonialism and Nazism.’
It wasn't I think until the capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, that the Holocaust started to really obtain the profound salience that it has today. Before then, the general mood among Europeans was one of relief at having recovered from the "Savage Continent" that their home was after the war (https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/04/01/savage-continent-keith-lowe/) and conviction that the Nazis and their allies were fanatics who imposed suffering on most of the continent.
The Eichmann trial really changed this because although Eichmann was one of the key architects of the Holocaust, he did not appear a cultish fanatic but a plain, dull, and ordinary fellow just "doing his duty". It largely forgotten how this trial really captured the imagination of the world as especially the growing sensibility of what might be called "1960s progressivism", the idea that ordinary people (above all ordinary Europeans) could complicit in great evil even when supposedly trying to just fit in to a "normative fellow" mood.
true. i think it's common for people to suppress a traumatic episode in its immediate aftermath - to just get on with life - for it to become almost more traumatic as time goes by. People were just too busy picking up their lives to really talk about the enormity of the suffering.
I disagree. The Holocaust was concealed even from most Germans during the war, with the result that people’s experiences, in Western Europe anyway, revolved around other things, such as soldiering or being bombed or rationing and blackouts. From 1945, the US focussed on rebuilding West Germany as a bulwark against the USSR and actively played down the treatment of the Jews and others. The Nuremberg trials led to a tiny number of judicial killings, with loads more very senior Nazis being given hefty prison sentences and then quietly let out after 5 years. Who was the architect of the USA’s post-war rocket programme? Step forward SS Sturmbannfuhrer Werner von Braun!!!
"But Europe had undergone a huge trauma and was not thinking straight - the immense tragedy of the Second World War was not only physically shattering to the continent but, as time went by, would come to be morally shattering too. It was the end of an old civilisation and the start of a new world, with the Holocaust coming to form a new origin story about the fall of western man."
One shouldn't forget that Europe as a whole was kind of a desolate wasteland immediately after WWII. All kinds of ethnic groups has been pitted against each other by the Nazis and their Allies and there was all kinds of nasty retaliation after the war. The general rule is that the further east one went, the more horrific it got.
There was massive immigration and forced expulsion of refugees after the war as borders were redrawn in Europe and old, often arbitrary colonial/imperal boundaries fell away.
Millions in Europe alone as parts of Germany and Prussia became Poland and Kalingrad, eastern Poland became Ukraine, etc. Think of the partition in India/Pakistan, new countries and civil wars in the Mideast, SE Asia, and across Africa.
Put against that backdrop, a lot of the voluntary immigration actions of the 40’s and 50’s are really nothing much.
EW: "only 45 per cent of Denmark’s immigrants work, and half of those earn a monthly salary within 100€ of what they could get on welfare"
The fact that only 45% of Denmark's immigrants work is obviously a problem, but the second part always rubs me the wrong way. (Not just on this 'stack: it's become quite common for people to cite earnings statistics of this sort.) When it comes to labor performed in the formal economy, a worker's contribution is their labor, and their salary is what they get back. Thus, a person changing grandma's diapers for very little money is providing a service far in excess of what he or she gets back for that service, whereas a highly compensated marketing expert convincing you to buy sugary drinks to your kids is a parasite. So, what kind of work are those people doing? Are they doing the kinds of jobs that need to get done, the kind that would cause society to collapse or at least seriously struggle if they didn't get done [though I suppose you could always "euthanize" grandma once she becomes incontinent], but just so happen to be poorly compensated? If so, then they are providing a vital service, and it is to their host country's shame that the people doing the work are so poorly compensated for it. On the other hand, maybe they are doing work that doesn't really need to get done if you cannot find the workers (hello, hospitality "industry"), which is a whole different matter. I don't have the data, but measuring a person's *contribution* by how much money they *get* is not what I would call honest bookkeeping. So, what jobs are these people actually doing?
I was also curious about this part: "while Turks in Germany on average are only net contributors for 29 years of their lives, compared to 45 for native Germans"
Were these Turks born in Germany, or did they immigrate (and at what age)? To make things very simple: you draw from the state when you're too young or too old to work (or unemployed, but as I said, I'm keeping things very simple). Those who immigrate as adults never took anything from their adopted country as children, though they will take from it as seniors. Think about it this way. A German is born in Germany, lives to the age of 85, works for 45 years, is a dependent for the remaining 40 years (ages 0-20 and 65-85). A Turk immigrates at age 30, works for 29 years, retires at 59 (perhaps he was doing hard labor), lives to age 79, having depended on the state for the last 20 years of life. So, the German contributed for 53% of his German existence (45/85 = 0.53), whereas the Turk lived in Germany for 49 years and contributed for 59% of that time (29/49 = 0.59). I mean, I just made up these numbers, but the point is, the state does, in fact, save itself some serious money by importing a ready-made adult, raised and educated at someone else's expense. It may or may not pay off in the end (it depends), but it is in fact costly to raise and educate a child.
think those figures of Germans and Turks include second-generation too, which is the real problem - and one which Europe's leaders are completely unable to contemplate.
It is debated - If Germany had its arm twisted with the Turks. Germany was not allowed to deport the Turks as they did with Italians - Which Italians and Portuguese remember
A noteworthy fact, the fragmentation of Europe into different "nation-states" as opposed to a hegemonic land-empire like in much of Asia was a key reason for that region developing greater freedom, prosperity, and influence due to the competitive pressure of rival states.
"In Asia they have always had great empires; in Europe these could never subsist. Asia has larger plains; it is cut out into much more extensive divisions by mountains and seas; and as it lies more to the south, its springs are more easily dried up; the mountains are less covered with snow; and the rivers being not so large, form smaller barriers."
Immanuel Kant objected to the idea
"that all the states should be merged into one under a power which has gained the ascendancy over its neighbours and gradually become a universal monarchy. For the wider the sphere of their jurisdiction, the more laws lose in force: and soulless despotism, when it has choked the seeds of good, at last sinks into anarchy.2"
Even Chairman Map (!!!) notes in 1951:
"One good thing about Europe is that all its countries are independent. Each of them does its own thing, which makes it possible for the economy of Europe to develop at a fast pace. Ever since China became an empire after the Qin dynasty, our country has been for the most part unified. One of its defects has been bureaucratism, and excessively tight control. The localities could not develop independently"
Colonialism wasn't such a 'guilt-driven cash cow' back in the early 2000's as is it now. The ultra-woke bureaucracies and administrations in the UK have funded many quangos who see it as their savior financially, and use it as a club to beat anyone who gets in their way. Addressing British colonial successes as well as failures is long overdue, from an institutional perspective.
Claremont is a great site for right wing thought. Some of the most recent articles may be paywalled but the vast majority of a 20 year archive can be read for free. It's American so most essays are on US subject matter, but the writers are talented enough to universalize their arguments. And their essays on Britain demonstrate that they know what they are talking about, unlike New York Times nonsense UK articles. Claremont seems to be not as well known as it ought to be, as I don't see it referenced much. Though it became briefly 'notorious' for the 'Flight 93 Election' piece in 2016, which was written by Michael Anton under a pseudonym.
Caldwell's 2019 essay on the site about Brexit: 'Why hasn't Brexit happened?' is the best summation of Theresa May's dismal premiership. And there is a particular line in that - re Britain ceding sovereignty to join the EEC - "This was a deadly serious thing if you reasoned the consequences to the end" that resonated for me. Our political classes never seem to 'reason the consequences to the end', on any of their projects, whether signing treaties, immigration, gender ideology and so on.
For the first time in my lifetime, it is now possible to express a view in polite society that there should be *any* limit on immigration. Even the Brexit debate pretended to be about tariffs or some notion of control. I fear it is all to little too late though.
Wonderful post. I love these short recaps of where we are and how we got here. It enables me to see the wood for the trees. And understanding how we got here somehow makes me hate the progressive left, who are still pushing this broken social and economic model, a little less. It helps me see them as either the slowest in the class who have yet to catch up or as people who refuse to admit they were wrong. These are sprinkled with the ones that I really dislike, those who actually like the fractured, crime-ridden society we've become and who lobby for ever more low IQ, poorly educated, low-skilled immigrants, many of who will go straight into social housing and onto welfare. These lobbyists think this is exactly how things should be.
The lowest performing schoolboys in the UK fall in the “white British” category. The employment rate of the native lower classes is abysmal.
The “country” (minus immigrants) isn’t what the professional classes (let alone nostalgic boomers) imagine it is. The old map is not the territory, and it is due to culture as much as immigration.
A problem with social democracy is that charity, school quality, work, culture becomes the government’s responsibility- the taxpayers can wash their hands of it and increasing live in insular bubbles. That wasn’t how the old culture, the old country was built. We can blame the left for believing that all personal choices and lifestyles are equally valid, but really it is as much the selfishness of the professional and upper classes that have fed this. With social democracy the bottom half of the country is someone else’s problem- we pay our taxes and remove ourselves from affiliation with them. Read Charles Murray’s analysis of White America- “Coming Apart”.
Change the culture to one of hard work, family, self-improvement, community involvement- meaning us being involved - and maybe things improve. And, sure, invite those in who want to be a part of that culture and prove they can be, because if we had had to rely on the white British underclass to fix our homes, staff our Tescos and hospitals and small businesses over the past 30 years we’d have been well and truly f’d..
The old country and culture is long-dead. You have to build a new one. Anyone looking at demographics, a map, and a performing a cursory review of ancient history and classics will realize that immigration isn’t going away, but sure, try to stop it you like and see if that alone revives the green and pleasant land (where no doubt every wealthy nativist will spend the rest of their lives- who needs sunny climes in retirement?).
that's not quite right. for GCSE level, white British is at lower end but black Caribbean and some other groups do worse. At A-Level white British are much better, and for degree level even better.
On unemployment, the white British rate is lower than pretty much every other group
https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/work-pay-and-benefits/unemployment-and-economic-inactivity/unemployment/latest/#by-ethnicity
I don't deny there is a problem, with an underclass and with worklessness more generally. Our situation is also not quite the same as continental countries like Germany or Sweden, where the gap between natives and recent immigrants on most metrics is very large. There is also quite a firmly entrenched anti-education culture among working-class Brits.
But I think some roles would be taken up by unemployed native-born workers if wages rose and housing costs fell.
Re: There is also quite a firmly entrenched anti-education culture among working-class Brits.
This is something we share over here across the Pond. I've heard a couple of low income (white) guys who were quite able-bodied, one in his 20s the other in his 40s at the time, announce that they just couldn't deal with working. In both cases their solution consisted of milking the system as much as they could, though in the US that doesn't yield much, and also finding a woman with an income and a place to live to sponge off of.
Maybe. Though paying more for less productive people leads to slower growth and higher inflation, meaning it is harder to make housing affordable. In an open economy, cheaper goods would be imported.
I posted the link to GSCE results. You are correct when it comes to all boys (White British outperform Black Caribbean but not Black African or Pakistanis). When it comes to the poor (those on free lunches), White British boys underperform every immigrant group except Roma and Irish travelers (not that I consider them immigrants at this point).
Since I am talking about the working class and poor, A levels weren’t relevant for me.
I do think restricting immigration will increase employment amongst the white British poor and make the poor more capable and functional. But that won’t be done simply by turning off the immigration spigot. There had to be a focus on primary and secondary education, a cut in the dole, working requirements for parents who have children they can’t support and vocational training. In other words, change the culture to one of work, as I said
As I remember the worst performing group isn't 'white British schoolboys' but 'white working-class British schoolboys', which is rather different.
Also I disagree with your idea that if we didn't have immigrants, certain jobs wouldn't get done. I think the reason they don't get done by white British now is that there is a choice: either we do those jobs or we import willing immigrants to do them and lazy white people go on the dole instead. If that choice was no longer on the table I suspect what would happen is that the wages of those jobs would rise until it was tempting enough for white British to deign do them. It simply isn't true that the jobs wouldn't get done. And with higher wages the social stigma of those jobs would automatically fall away. After all, it's hard to look down on someone when they earn more than you do.
Apart from that white people often do do those jobs. When was the last time you saw an Asian dustman? The only people I ever see sweeping streets are white Brits.
In front of me now I have a book of photography called 'In England' by Don McCullin. Quite a few of the photos are from urban life in the 1960's and 1970's, a time before are streets were full of immigrants and I've got to say that the photos are grim. I was born in the 1950's so I remember those decades with their 3-day-weeks and black-outs and football hooliganism. I used to go to home and away games and as a slight, well-spoken middle-class lad I took my life in my hands. Fights would sometimes break out in pubs, the food was generally rubbish and grime and dirt were everywhere. And that pride in ignorance and oafishness which is a hallmark of the British underclass was thriving. To some extent I joined in, leaving school at 16 without an 'O' level to my name. Not for a minute do I blame immigrants for any of that.
Despite that, I don't believe mass immigration is the solution and that seems to be pretty clear now. You say, 'Change the culture to one of hard work, family, self-improvement, community involvement- meaning us being involved - and maybe things improve'. Well yes, I'm sure they would improve. But that's like saying, 'Just play better and you'll win the World Cup'. If things were that easy then I suspect every country in the world would follow your advice.
What a wonderful post, Keith. It is true, in my experience as well, that dustmen are overwhelmingly European. Same with builders. The white vans carrying plumbers and electricians also seem to be driven by white men as well.
I know what you mean about life in the 1970s: phone boxes out of order and smelling of urine is a scenario I’d add to the one’s you’ve described (Not the Nine O’Clock News did a memorable sketch of men queuing outside a red phone box, ostensibly wanting to make a phone call but actually waiting to have a slash). Good point about winning the World Cup ‘n’ all.
Damn, I wish I had remembered the urine-smelling phone boxes while writing that comment.
That sketch from 'Not The Nine O'Clock New' sounds very funny. From 1979 - 1982 I was living in Germany, which meant I missed every single episode of MTNON.
The BBC brought out a DVD of it, in the days when people bought DVDs *Nostalgic sigh* You can also find them on that new-fangled YouTube I gather…
Yes, the U-Tube. I have indeed heard of this.
Speaking of 'tubes', when I was poor back in the mid-1980's I still had an old black and white TV that someone had given me. At some point one of the valves went, so I unscrewed it and went to the local electrical shop to get a replacement. The bloke in the shop looked at it, turned it over in his hand, and said, 'Where on earth did you get this from? A lighthouse?' He persuaded me it might be time to buy one of those new colour TVs that everyone was talking about.
here are the GSCE results by race and gender (attainment 8 score, out of 90)- this is for all white British boys. They are behind Pakistanis, Black Africans, though ahead of Black Caribbean and Roma at least.
When you look at students receiving free meals at school (so poorer students only), White British (all boys and girls combined) are behind all Black and Asian students receiving free meals, though manage to beat out the Irish travelers, at least.
https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/education-skills-and-training/11-to-16-years-old/gcse-results-attainment-8-for-children-aged-14-to-16-key-stage-4/latest/#by-ethnicity-and-gender
It's kind of beside the overall point about migration (e.g. I'm not in favour of mass migration from China/India although they perform well academically) but it is close to impossible to discern anything from Attainment 8 because it is (a) a measure of achievement from one's initial starting point; and (b) because the bar is set SO low that anyone who tries (regardless of actual intelligence) will pass. One can probably say far more about the potential of groups from A level results because they are a truer measure of cognitive ability and the results can be extrapolated on a probability basis per group given intelligence is normally distributed.
The mood of the Fifties and Sixties, with Hitler gone, was one of almost insane optimism, despite the nuclear threat.
Many of our elders were even more light-headed than we were.
And this made the allowing of huge immigration seem wiser and less risky than in fact it was. Because if everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, why worry ?
The mood changed to guilt c.1970, when Christopher Caldwell was eight.
Before then the Brits regarded the Empire as a Good Thing, even though it was time to let it go.
Both here and in the USA, there was immense pride and complacency at being the Good Guys who had defeated the Nazis, and poverty and unemployment into the bargain.
Dominic Sandbrook has recently made a YouTube production (based on a lecture he gave in summer) called "The Lost World of 1962."
The subject is unbearably poignant for me, twice over - the loss of that vastly better Britain, and the loss of my own youth and optimism.
Therefore I daren't listen to it. But the opening three minutes or so I did hear, and found it brilliant.
I will look that up!
Well done, Ed - you make me want to find my copy of the book and re-read it. Caldwell was highly prescient (and readable), as was Mark Steyn even earlier with America Alone.
It was a pleasure re-reading it
By the way, we are reaching the fifth anniversary of the Age of Entitlement:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Entitlement:_America_Since_the_Sixties
It would be interesting if Caldwell did an updated edition for the post-George Floyd world .
I've always been relatively liberal on immigration. But, the last few years have definitely altered my view somewhat. The latest immigration figures that came out last week (or week before) are scandalous. And the reasons for such huge numbers don't really matter anymore. We live in such a volatile world that there will always be large numbers on the move. My annoyance isn't with immigrants. It's with politicians of all stripes insulting our intelligence. People can see the social and cultural changes all around us. Some immigration is good, remains my view, but what we've seen the last 20 years in particular has tipped the balance firmly the other way.
yeah i don't think any reasonable people can blame anyone for wanting to move.
Post-war, Britain had no need of labour until the mid-1950s - when London Transport went to Barbados to recruit porters and clippies.
Britain had hundreds of thousands of troops coming home and dozens of thousands of German POWs, and Italians and Poles to pick up work.
The Empire Windrush passengers were largely RAF ground-crew men who had arrived in Britain in two batches in mid and late-1944 to engage in training schemes that would provide them with skills to take back to the Caribbean to stimulate the local economy.
They were not supposed to return, and they did…..but; they had enjoyed themselves in UK and saw better opportunities relative to what was going on at home. At the time, Britain had great shortages of housing and food, but we managed to accommodate them.
People like Diane Abbott might acknowledge that just as the Windrush was on its way, 12 Labour MPs wrote to Attlee to demand that the migrants be barred.
I shall be writing more about this on my own Stack in the new year (as soon as I get used to the software).
It's been genuinely fascinating watching a national myth being created in my own lifetime
https://www.edwest.co.uk/p/you-called-and-we-came
it's actually changed my mind about the Anglo-Saxon origin myth, that they were invited by the Britons. Maybe that was all made up too!
Yes indeed.
As you observe, the Windrush had made a detour to Tampico, Mexico to embark 80 Poles, the remnants of the east Polish diaspora severely persecuted by Stalin - until USSR became an ally that is. I’m sure you know the story.
They couldn’t go home because they no longer had one. The Polish Resettlement Act was passed and they were allowed to stay in UK. However most had to live in former military camps, many of them until the early-1970s.
They did not complain.
I thought the consensus was that the Saxon Shore - a Roman term - referred to the shoreline of Britannia that was defended by the Saxons, against the Picts in their boats, and paid for by the later Romano-British in a kind of outsourcing contract? Not ‘the shore where the Saxons often attack’.
Yes, Windrush was a troopship, HMT Windrush. The photo usually used in the media features an RAF officer addressing young smartly dressed black men on the upper deck. I had assumed they were recruits; from what you say, they were more likely being demobbed and heading home. PS the vessel had a chequered past, having been a German ship used among other things in the invasion of Norway, I read.
Hello Greg - if it is the photo I am thinking of, there are two RAF officers (probably attached to the Colonial Office Welfare Team) - it was taken at Tilbury the morning after the Windrush docked. One of them is Flt. Lt. Johnny Smythe who did 28 missions over Germany, was shot down and was sent to Stalag Luft I.
These blokes had arrived back in UK, having decided that the Caribbean could not offer them sufficient opportunities. There were 492 of them: 204 had somewhere to go and were given a rail warrant, 236 had no plans at all and were taken to Brixton and put up in wartime underground accommodation, whilst 52 of them wanted to re-join the RAF.
I have about 75,000 words written about the Monte Rosa/Empire Windrush, and will publish them in the new year.
Fascinating. Only about 1 in 10 wanted to rejoin the RAF! I am intrigued by the underground accommodation in Brixton. I lived in Kennington for a bit. Do you know what it was - was it a conversion of something, or a purpose built bunker or what?
It is indeed a great story……one which disavows the 21C version of our social history.
More to follow in the new year.
Apologies to Ed West if it appears that I am using his blog to plug my stuff - this was not intended (I have subscribed to him for a good few months).
Always happy for subscribers to plug their stuff!
Great article.
It does highlight an uncomfortable truth for people, like me, who worry a lot about mass immigration. In a case of Woke-more-Correct, pro-immigration people often blurt out things like, 'well, who's going to mow your lawn/clean your house/look after Granny in her care home without immigrants?'. Which reveals that this is, at least in part, about them not having to do difficult, dirty or low-status jobs themselves, and hang the longer-term consequences for social cohesion or broad-based prosperity. But it's also true, if I'm being perfectly honest, that I don't want to do those jobs either, and that I therefore seem to be committed to supporting a social order in which there are plenty of Brits whose economic situation more or less directs them into such unpopular but necessary work. Which implies the kind of economic inequality that the post-War welfare state was designed to do away with.
I still think that mass immigration is ruinous, and the laziest possible way to address these hard structural questions, but producing an alternative model along broadly liberal lines is very difficult, and involves all sorts of painful trade-offs. Automation fixes some it, possibly, as does a welfare model with fewer insane incentives, but it's still very tricky.
we're all in the same boat - we don't want to do the 3D jobs (dirty, demeaning or dangerous) and we're reluctant to pay more to get native-born people to do them. it is made more complicated by the existence of state monopolies in areas like healthcare, which artificially suppress wages. But in the long term, it's not great to rely on a Ponzi scheme...
The health care visa did seem to be the very worst example of Ponzi thinking. Rather than allow wages to rise, we imported many tens of thousands, plus dependants, who will almost certainly be fiscally negative over many decades. That's got to be much more expensive, hasn't it? Like, ruinously so?
One problem with health care is that there are, in fact, limits to how much can be spent on it without society collapsing. Modern medicine has figured out how to keep ever more frail people alive ever longer, but at high cost. The details will vary, but ultimately, this is likely to prove unsustainable, and we'll just go back to dying at earlier ages. This is not all bad. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't particularly want to spend a decade of my life demented. I'd rather just die a decade earlier, thanks.
The things that keep the elderly alive longer (like antibiotics) do not cost all that much, and some of them (like the major sanitary reforms of the late 19th and early 20th centuries) aren't even medical in nature and they have to work for everyone. Short of some almost unimaginable catastrophe we're not going to go back to dying younger.
I think you are right, Jon. Also, from my own experience in healthcare, there was a clear shift in the UK anyway in the late 1990s towards giving flu vaccine boosters and antibiotics to frail dependent elderly people, when before that, there was a view among nurses and doctors that there was no benefit to the patient in actively prolonging life when, say, a chest infection set in. “Let nature take its course”. Add in the post-war baby boom, and much less smoking nowadays, and the result is a lot of very old people in terrible health who are nevertheless still technically alive!
Right. And then they stopped letting nature take its course. Result? Calls for euthanasia, obviously. Because at some point, life simply stops being worth living. If you intervene to prolong such a life, then you end up getting asked to actively put an end to it.
Modern medical care has two types of costs: direct and indirect. Direct is just the cost of medical procedures (e.g. the cost of a hip replacement surgery). Then you have the indirect costs. For instance, a person's overall health is failing. His (let's say it's a he) immune system is getting weaker. He gets an infection, as we all do from time to time. Given the weakness of his immune system, you would expect him to die. Except that he lives because antibiotics (cheap enough) came to the rescue. So, he is still alive, but meanwhile, his natural decline continues. Rinse and repeat. Eventually, he is no longer able to take care of himself in basic ways. So, either he is given "social care" (someone to feed him, bathe him, change his diapers), or he dies of neglect. This social care is fairly simple, but it ends up costing quite a lot because it's so labor intensive. But here's the thing: if those antibiotics hadn't been available, he would have died of his infection, never having needed all this social care. Thus, the cheap antibiotics generated all the extra cost.
What I think is going to happen is that some things (such as antibiotics) will remain widely available, but you will see more and more neglect. That, plus increasingly patchy urgent care. As in: what happens if grandma suffers a stroke and you call an ambulance? Do they come? How quickly? Expect the wait to get longer and longer (on average, of course), meaning that some grandmas who would have lived with timely care end up dying.
We may very well be facing a future in which many bacteria become antibiotic resistant-- and then we will have to depend on high levels of sanitation and hygiene to protect ourselves. That does work partially (and non-trivially) as death rates fell quite a lot once food and water supplies were cleaned up and sterile surgeries and childbirths became the norm. But we will, alas, see a rise in death rates still.
Actual age of death averages in the US have dropped a few years for men. May be just a COVID hangover, but with vaccine fall-out, it may trend lower in many countries (but not more than 5 years overall).
Re: Actual age of death averages in the US have dropped a few years for men. May be just a COVID hangover
That drop began before the Pandemic, hence the "death of despair" meme. Also women, at least for a couple years, saw a drop too.
The age-adjusted death rate in the US did fall during the Pandemic but it's been rising again. (Age adjustment in these figures is necessary due to the overall aging of the population). There is no "vaccine fallout". That's disinformation spread by nutcases and maybe foreign disruption agents. Of course there were some few people who had bad, even fatal reactions to the vaccine-- that's true of any medication-- but there's no evidence of any long term effect in the general population.
"Who remembers proper binmen?" There is something to that - when being a dustman was a highly paid manual job you got a better class of person doing it See Coronation street. See the Sanitation dept in NYC,. Beyond that you'ns can pay more for your quinoa or slash HR jobs
Re: 3D jobs
The dirty part is not really fixable, the dangerous part can often be ameliorated to some extent, but the demeaning part is entirely optional and is effectively a societal choice. Take, for example, brain surgery. It's dirty, uncomfortable work that I most definitely wouldn't want to do. But it is very highly compensated, which means it's not demeaning in the slightest, and in fact, it's very difficult to get to do that job.
Basically: raise salaries of "demeaning" jobs, and they'll stop being demeaning. Simple as that.
‘The dominant moral mood of postwar Europe was one of repentance for two historic misdeeds, colonialism and Nazism.’
It wasn't I think until the capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, that the Holocaust started to really obtain the profound salience that it has today. Before then, the general mood among Europeans was one of relief at having recovered from the "Savage Continent" that their home was after the war (https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/04/01/savage-continent-keith-lowe/) and conviction that the Nazis and their allies were fanatics who imposed suffering on most of the continent.
The Eichmann trial really changed this because although Eichmann was one of the key architects of the Holocaust, he did not appear a cultish fanatic but a plain, dull, and ordinary fellow just "doing his duty". It largely forgotten how this trial really captured the imagination of the world as especially the growing sensibility of what might be called "1960s progressivism", the idea that ordinary people (above all ordinary Europeans) could complicit in great evil even when supposedly trying to just fit in to a "normative fellow" mood.
true. i think it's common for people to suppress a traumatic episode in its immediate aftermath - to just get on with life - for it to become almost more traumatic as time goes by. People were just too busy picking up their lives to really talk about the enormity of the suffering.
I disagree. The Holocaust was concealed even from most Germans during the war, with the result that people’s experiences, in Western Europe anyway, revolved around other things, such as soldiering or being bombed or rationing and blackouts. From 1945, the US focussed on rebuilding West Germany as a bulwark against the USSR and actively played down the treatment of the Jews and others. The Nuremberg trials led to a tiny number of judicial killings, with loads more very senior Nazis being given hefty prison sentences and then quietly let out after 5 years. Who was the architect of the USA’s post-war rocket programme? Step forward SS Sturmbannfuhrer Werner von Braun!!!
It is also worth noting that victimhood didn't have the profound moral salience that it does today in the immediate post-war period.
https://books.google.ca/books/about/The_Empire_of_Trauma.html?id=_fuxDwAAQBAJ&source=kp_book_description&redir_esc=y
"But Europe had undergone a huge trauma and was not thinking straight - the immense tragedy of the Second World War was not only physically shattering to the continent but, as time went by, would come to be morally shattering too. It was the end of an old civilisation and the start of a new world, with the Holocaust coming to form a new origin story about the fall of western man."
One shouldn't forget that Europe as a whole was kind of a desolate wasteland immediately after WWII. All kinds of ethnic groups has been pitted against each other by the Nazis and their Allies and there was all kinds of nasty retaliation after the war. The general rule is that the further east one went, the more horrific it got.
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/204538728
There was massive immigration and forced expulsion of refugees after the war as borders were redrawn in Europe and old, often arbitrary colonial/imperal boundaries fell away.
Millions in Europe alone as parts of Germany and Prussia became Poland and Kalingrad, eastern Poland became Ukraine, etc. Think of the partition in India/Pakistan, new countries and civil wars in the Mideast, SE Asia, and across Africa.
Put against that backdrop, a lot of the voluntary immigration actions of the 40’s and 50’s are really nothing much.
Indeed. At the time, it probably wasn't as salient and contemporaries didn't appreciate its long term significance.
EW: "only 45 per cent of Denmark’s immigrants work, and half of those earn a monthly salary within 100€ of what they could get on welfare"
The fact that only 45% of Denmark's immigrants work is obviously a problem, but the second part always rubs me the wrong way. (Not just on this 'stack: it's become quite common for people to cite earnings statistics of this sort.) When it comes to labor performed in the formal economy, a worker's contribution is their labor, and their salary is what they get back. Thus, a person changing grandma's diapers for very little money is providing a service far in excess of what he or she gets back for that service, whereas a highly compensated marketing expert convincing you to buy sugary drinks to your kids is a parasite. So, what kind of work are those people doing? Are they doing the kinds of jobs that need to get done, the kind that would cause society to collapse or at least seriously struggle if they didn't get done [though I suppose you could always "euthanize" grandma once she becomes incontinent], but just so happen to be poorly compensated? If so, then they are providing a vital service, and it is to their host country's shame that the people doing the work are so poorly compensated for it. On the other hand, maybe they are doing work that doesn't really need to get done if you cannot find the workers (hello, hospitality "industry"), which is a whole different matter. I don't have the data, but measuring a person's *contribution* by how much money they *get* is not what I would call honest bookkeeping. So, what jobs are these people actually doing?
I was also curious about this part: "while Turks in Germany on average are only net contributors for 29 years of their lives, compared to 45 for native Germans"
Were these Turks born in Germany, or did they immigrate (and at what age)? To make things very simple: you draw from the state when you're too young or too old to work (or unemployed, but as I said, I'm keeping things very simple). Those who immigrate as adults never took anything from their adopted country as children, though they will take from it as seniors. Think about it this way. A German is born in Germany, lives to the age of 85, works for 45 years, is a dependent for the remaining 40 years (ages 0-20 and 65-85). A Turk immigrates at age 30, works for 29 years, retires at 59 (perhaps he was doing hard labor), lives to age 79, having depended on the state for the last 20 years of life. So, the German contributed for 53% of his German existence (45/85 = 0.53), whereas the Turk lived in Germany for 49 years and contributed for 59% of that time (29/49 = 0.59). I mean, I just made up these numbers, but the point is, the state does, in fact, save itself some serious money by importing a ready-made adult, raised and educated at someone else's expense. It may or may not pay off in the end (it depends), but it is in fact costly to raise and educate a child.
think those figures of Germans and Turks include second-generation too, which is the real problem - and one which Europe's leaders are completely unable to contemplate.
It is debated - If Germany had its arm twisted with the Turks. Germany was not allowed to deport the Turks as they did with Italians - Which Italians and Portuguese remember
A noteworthy fact, the fragmentation of Europe into different "nation-states" as opposed to a hegemonic land-empire like in much of Asia was a key reason for that region developing greater freedom, prosperity, and influence due to the competitive pressure of rival states.
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691172187/escape-from-rome?srsltid=AfmBOoqIpJLHOt8MTcR61rHeEKiqH-7R63YXoXHUFsjPM2ymVJ_pp0A_
In the words of Montesquieu,
"In Asia they have always had great empires; in Europe these could never subsist. Asia has larger plains; it is cut out into much more extensive divisions by mountains and seas; and as it lies more to the south, its springs are more easily dried up; the mountains are less covered with snow; and the rivers being not so large, form smaller barriers."
Immanuel Kant objected to the idea
"that all the states should be merged into one under a power which has gained the ascendancy over its neighbours and gradually become a universal monarchy. For the wider the sphere of their jurisdiction, the more laws lose in force: and soulless despotism, when it has choked the seeds of good, at last sinks into anarchy.2"
Even Chairman Map (!!!) notes in 1951:
"One good thing about Europe is that all its countries are independent. Each of them does its own thing, which makes it possible for the economy of Europe to develop at a fast pace. Ever since China became an empire after the Qin dynasty, our country has been for the most part unified. One of its defects has been bureaucratism, and excessively tight control. The localities could not develop independently"
Colonialism wasn't such a 'guilt-driven cash cow' back in the early 2000's as is it now. The ultra-woke bureaucracies and administrations in the UK have funded many quangos who see it as their savior financially, and use it as a club to beat anyone who gets in their way. Addressing British colonial successes as well as failures is long overdue, from an institutional perspective.
I do agree on the brilliance of Christopher Caldwell!
I think the best place to find his writing for free is The Claremont Review Of Books.
https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/author/christopher-caldwell/
Claremont is a great site for right wing thought. Some of the most recent articles may be paywalled but the vast majority of a 20 year archive can be read for free. It's American so most essays are on US subject matter, but the writers are talented enough to universalize their arguments. And their essays on Britain demonstrate that they know what they are talking about, unlike New York Times nonsense UK articles. Claremont seems to be not as well known as it ought to be, as I don't see it referenced much. Though it became briefly 'notorious' for the 'Flight 93 Election' piece in 2016, which was written by Michael Anton under a pseudonym.
Caldwell's 2019 essay on the site about Brexit: 'Why hasn't Brexit happened?' is the best summation of Theresa May's dismal premiership. And there is a particular line in that - re Britain ceding sovereignty to join the EEC - "This was a deadly serious thing if you reasoned the consequences to the end" that resonated for me. Our political classes never seem to 'reason the consequences to the end', on any of their projects, whether signing treaties, immigration, gender ideology and so on.