It is good that the social, economic, and cultural problems associated with immigration are being more widely aired but we need to understand that there is in fact a moral case to be made against mass immigration. It is that, in the theft of a country's national identity, in the theft of its national community where people have things in common - the demos so vital for democracy - and in the theft of its social solidarity and social capital, we have a wrongful and real reverse racism against the White British. How can we deny this or gloss over it? In a country for everyone, we have a country for no one. We become just a convenient economic platform for global capitalism with a bit of Disney like heritage thrown in. In the ensuing social liquefication citizens just become consumers. The fact that our own trash liberal elite - the economic right for cheap labour and the cultural left for the rainbow society - has engineered this - without our consent and mostly for their benefit is of no excuse. Prof Eric Kaufmann in his book, 'White Shift' predicts there will be no White British left in the later part of the next century - depending on rates of immigration.
The justification for all this immigration is that we are all part of a common humanity (true) and that therefore any restriction on the grounds of ethnicity - a product of history, culture and race - is wrong (false). Our ethnicity, the people group we broadly belong to and feel at home with and wish to share citizenship with, deserves recognition as part of our rights. We accept this for the rest of the world so don't object to Japan remaining Japanese, so why not for ourselves? Part of the problem is due to a Western individualistic liberalism where the rights of the individual - the immigrant who will otherwise be discriminated against - trumps the collective, the society and its common good. So the theft of national identity is licensed despite its immorality and folly. Please note that in insisting on the reality and rights of ethnicity and to peoples to their country and against immigration, I am not suggesting any ethnic inferiorities or superiorities - we are all as bad and good as each other - but am insisting on the legitimacy of difference which ought to be mutually respected. Those who have demonised this approach as racist have in fact engaged in a reverse racism.
One of the fascinating things to observe in the era of rapid mass migration to Britain the last 20 years is the stubborn refusal to connect it with the equally rapid explosion of housing costs. Or to connect the shortage of social services with that there is now many more people needing social services. Mass migration obviously has a major role in both sets of headaches but as Lionel Shriver effectively said in her article in the Spectator last week, you can point this out and people will only look politely at you and pretend they never heard it.
For all the economic claims, is Britain better off today than it was in 1997? Really quite hard to see that. More expensive and more crowded? Yes. But better off?
One of the things I find odd about the demographic arguments is that, on the one hand demographers are quite open about how surprising and often rapid the changes are (eg, no one in the 1990s was predicting India would be below replacement by the 2020s, while they're puzzling that Israel is so high still, etc), which indicates that it's very hard to know how things will pan out over even relatively short timescales. On the other hand, many of the same people seem to believe that it's a cast-iron certainty that low birthrates in the West can't ever be altered, that we're either doomed to extinction or must import millions from elsewhere to fund our welfare systems. It's such a massive call to make, based on such an uncertain set of projections. It's compounded by the bizarre refusal to consider any other possible solutions to the dependency issue (making raising families cheaper/easier, encouraging automation, etc). Which makes me think that mass immigration is being pursued for its own sake, really, rather than as a genuine solution to the birth rate issue.
Fecundity is just being selected for at the moment. We're in a bottleneck. No one will be complaining about low birth rates in 2500 when there are hundreds of million of Amish in the American Midwest and a very populous Mormon nation state in what is now Nevada. In addition, weird biotech coming along rather soon might make all of this irrelevant.
Arguing about immigration on practical grounds would only work if everyone saw it as a practical question. It's a moral issue for a very large minority, who also happen to be the most influential. These pieces by Ed et al are knives being brought to a gunfight.
But it is only perceived as such because of endless anti instinct propoganda of the sort that can persuade people to cheer rather than gag when a man (who should be in prison or a mental hospital) puts his nipple into the mouth of an actual baby and claims he is breastfeeding it
The thing I really don't understand is how the Conservative party don't understand this basic point. They're casting around for tax cuts as if they think that will win back the voters they have lost, or that a few more months of plans from Sunak are going to make a difference? Even this new cons group pledge is far more than the general public want.
I think a large number of Conservative MPs think about the issue as a moral one (ie, mass immigration is a good in itself, diversity is always good, international human rights instruments are good, and any opposition to any of these is simply bigotry). Even if Sunak wanted to leave the ECHR, say, he wouldn't have the votes for it in his own party, let alone in parliament. They're absolutely wedded to the policy, however ruinous it ends up being for them or the country - the really shameful aspect of this is that they've explicitly pretended otherwise.
Because central London has largely fallen but London remains quite successful MPs also struggle to comprehend the harm, failing to see that London is an outlier (I mean they never go to Slough, Bradford or Leicester and they certainly don’t live their) made productive entirety by it’s largely homogenous suburbs. Plus controlling immigration is anti entropic and so takes will, effort and competence. It’s akin to thatcher taking on the unions
imho I think its much harder than the fight with the unions because it in part will require a rejection of the American culture that has become western orthodoxy. Ed touches on it with this piece. There is so much faith in globalisation that neither academics or policy makers are willing to question it. The economic argument for trade deals and immigration rest on similar non-ergodic principles. A developing economy with huge trade barriers, a closed economy, lots of protectionism and bureaucracy, obviously benefits a lot from opening its economy and trade deals. Whereas a developed economy doesn't. Its the same with immigration, a closed country with a shortage of highly skilled people will benefit from a small amount of immigration of high skilled entrepreneurs. If we look at the evidence of the eurozone, economist would predict a huge boost in growth over the last three decades, it should leap off the page. But you can't see it at all when compared with other developing nations. The orthodoxy never gets questioned, they retreat to more complex models with more parameters and appeal to authority.
I agree with you to an extent. I think for a lot of MPs and a minority of members there is that value system. I agree completely that it is shameful that they've lied and promised otherwise as well. Maybe it's my complete naivety but I still expect political parties to not want to get annihilated and MPs to want to keep their jobs. Here in the Netherlands the cabinet has fallen and there will be new elections precisely because of this issue. Rutte doesn't want to solve these problems here either but he's realised he has to act or face oblivion.
Good article, Ed. There is indeed a growing number of voices like yours that are putting mass immigration under the spotlight and exposing it for the Ponzi scheme-cum-addiction it has become. The articles you link to are also excellent.
It might not be immediately obvious, but the people our economy needs, en masse, are those fleeing economically and socially chaotic countries because they don't fancy trying to fix them, especially young men abandoning their women, children and communities in a zero sum calculation, whilst bearing no better than ambivalent feelings about Britain which progressives can later leverage against the racist majority.
I think it's actually worse than that, and that the various economic arguments for and against -- or at least most of them, though just wanting cheap labor is also a big factor -- are a sublimation of other things that can't be said openly in public, though that one Blair advisor came close to the mark when he said that the point of mass immigration was to "rub the right's nose in diversity." No one really cares that "sub-replacement birth rates will diminish our country's economic dynamism in 2100" or whatever. We'll never see mass immigration ended in the West because it's a way to import people and deploy them as bioweapons to ruin the good time of your perceived cultural foes, with this being an expression of top-down hostility by a university-educated upper stratum of society for their country's indigenous lower orders. The economic arguments in favor of mass immigration are a sublimation of enthusiasm for what I've just described, and the economic arguments against it are a sublimation of just not wanting to be flooded by third-world types.
It's really that bad.
Editing to add that it's interesting how the business-right and the cultural-left have dovetailed on this issue. Personally I think these two factions are a match made in heaven, and we will be seeing more and more of this as the cultural left further sheds any interest it had in economic egalitarianism, opting instead for what "Lomez" terms "Gay Race Communism", with this combination manifesting in the form of things like the Woke Capital phenomenon.
I was recently having a discussion with a liberal friend of mine about the migration question. He was appalled by my claim that Britain had not, historically speaking, experienced high levels of migration compared to its incumbent population. I made Konstantin Kisin's point that, after '97, we experienced more migration in 9 years that we had in 900. Is there any good historical data on this to confirm that comparison?
I used that a fair bit for my book on diversity. I was planning to take the chapter on the history of diversity and turn it into a substack after some editing and updating.
But yes historically immigration to Britain has been pretty small.
What's an acceptable level of net migration to you? Zero? 100k? The 600k figure is a one off due to a couple of unusual factors (200k Ukrainian refugees plus an imbalance in student numbers due to pandemic as fewer arrived in 2020/2021 so fewer left in 2022); the normal rate is around 250/300k. Is that too much?
Second point - this goes back to my criticism of National Conservativsm from the other week - there's no coherent theory of economics here. You want higher pay for social care workers and teachers so we don't need to bring in as many on visas? Me too! But that means higher taxes and Cates/Kruger and co keep demanding lower taxes. There's just a huge contradiction between the socially conservative and economically liberal philosophies they're trying to meld. It doesn't work.
I think we will have to pay higher taxes, yes, which is why I think an alternative will not come from the Tory party, because they are largely unable to accept that reality. But either way we will have to 'pay' for it some way or the other, whether now or later.
The demand for carers is going up as our population ages, so it feels right from a basic free-market pov, even taking aside a moral one, that those wages go up.
There be other ways we could ease the economic problems; liberalising house building and infrastructure would reduce housing and energy costs which would take some of the strain. (but that's an even more difficult political conundrum)
And 250k is not 'normal' to many of us, it's what we've become used to. we should absolutely be returning to tens of thousands. Numbers are not the absolute issue, because the social impact of migration depends on who comes, but they are a big issue.
Putting aside the policy challenges of getting to 10s of thousands, unless birth rates go up a lot that would really unbalance the population age wise. I know you want birth rates to go up a lot but that seems largely resistant to any policy programme in rich western (or Asian) countries.
I think TFR of 2.1 is ideal but I would still prefer an ageing population to one completely transformed by immigration. I didn't mention fertility measures this time because the article was too long and I've written about it quite recently and don't want to feel I'm haranguing single people.
‘The benefits of Globalism’ are not at all obvious to many people, particularly native-born poor and working classes in all western countries. Mass immigration is also not a gain except for the top tier of the business, corporate, and banking classes who massively benefit from compliant cheap labor. We need radical solutions to these issues not moderate centrism.
In 1498, Vasco de Gama discovered a sea route to the Indies around
the Cape of Good Hope. The Venetian Republic sent an envoy to the Sultan proposing that a canal be dug between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. It was unsuccessful. Although not immediately obvious, Venice inevitably declined until the Republic was snuffed out by Napoleon in 1797.
All discussions of current British problems seem to assume, inferentially, that some solution is possible. Perhaps, like Venice confronted with the emergence of a sea route between the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans, Britain has simply lost relevance due to global factors almost entirely beyond its control and its decline is incapable of solution. I think this is particularly true of those parts of Britain which were supposed to be levelled up. In a global economy what is the rationale of any of those places having any sort of industry etc. in the way they did in the 19th and early-20th centuries.
Attempts to stave off the inevitable decline through London's leading position in international banking from the 1970s through to 2008 coupled with creating a kind of Venetian carnival for the super-rich centred on the capital have largely run out of puff and the country is naturally poorer and more inequitable as a result and will continue to become so. Like Venice, the long tail of English cultural products and the physical remains of that former grandeur remain as a stage set for an international clientele, but the everyday Brit is living a life that is nastier, poorer, more Brutish and shorter.
“The unprecedented migration of the Blair years benefited the overall economy, at least in the short term, but it also helped create a society that was more stratified.”
Did it? Unlike Sweden, Britain was incredibly stratified in the (even recent) past. By class, of course, but also by a geographic divide.
Is the UK more stratified now that it was at any time in its history from feudalism through John Major? Or is it, in fact, less so? Wasn’t class always a very, very big deal?
This isn’t just a debating point. Both the UK’s business elite and center-right party often seem to be working on the unspoken assumption that vast numbers of native-born Brits (men especially) are largely unemployable in most facets of a 21st century economy. That might be a taboo worth discussing.
Britain never had the egalitarian culture of the mid-century US but its class divide now is in some ways more bitter than before, marked by genuine contempt for the university educated for those further down the scale. Partly this is geographical - if you're an upper-middle-class Londoner you may have little to no contact with working-class English people in your daily life. My children went to the same primary school as my wife and my father-in-law once remarked that while it was far more culturally diverse than when he used to pick up, it was socially far more homogenous.
The contempt with which the liberal middle class hold the indigenous poor is evidence that they can survive each other and also that liberals see this underclass as sufficiently related to them. The reverence with which the liberal middle class hold the immigrant poor is evidence that they cannot survive each other (i.e. be real) and that liberals see this underclass (despite all protestations) as insufficiently related and quite alien actually - but useful as a way to distinguish them from the people they regard as truly theirs.
That’s a really interesting take, your father-in-law’s. Thanks. (I apologize for my inexplicable inability to consistently summon the “edit” function. It only seems to work after a comment has been up for a bit or I am responding to something. No doubt I’m mistaken and simply missing something.)
I am often struck not by a leftwing woke contempt for the working-class in the UK (though I’m sure that exists) but by an almost poignant sympathy from more rightwing and affluent Brits for, say, a “hospitality” industry that would much rather hire Polish girls than surly natives to deal with the public. They seem frustrated that they can’t just blurt out what a no-brainer (Yank term) this preference would be for any business. Perhaps I’m imagining or exaggerating the extent of this.
Here in the USA, labor shortages are often cited to justify record high immigration levels yet the labor force participation rates of natives and especially prime age (25-54) men have never been lower. This makes me wonder if the welfare state is helping many downscale men to avoid steady work and immigrants are in part filling that gap?
It is good that the social, economic, and cultural problems associated with immigration are being more widely aired but we need to understand that there is in fact a moral case to be made against mass immigration. It is that, in the theft of a country's national identity, in the theft of its national community where people have things in common - the demos so vital for democracy - and in the theft of its social solidarity and social capital, we have a wrongful and real reverse racism against the White British. How can we deny this or gloss over it? In a country for everyone, we have a country for no one. We become just a convenient economic platform for global capitalism with a bit of Disney like heritage thrown in. In the ensuing social liquefication citizens just become consumers. The fact that our own trash liberal elite - the economic right for cheap labour and the cultural left for the rainbow society - has engineered this - without our consent and mostly for their benefit is of no excuse. Prof Eric Kaufmann in his book, 'White Shift' predicts there will be no White British left in the later part of the next century - depending on rates of immigration.
The justification for all this immigration is that we are all part of a common humanity (true) and that therefore any restriction on the grounds of ethnicity - a product of history, culture and race - is wrong (false). Our ethnicity, the people group we broadly belong to and feel at home with and wish to share citizenship with, deserves recognition as part of our rights. We accept this for the rest of the world so don't object to Japan remaining Japanese, so why not for ourselves? Part of the problem is due to a Western individualistic liberalism where the rights of the individual - the immigrant who will otherwise be discriminated against - trumps the collective, the society and its common good. So the theft of national identity is licensed despite its immorality and folly. Please note that in insisting on the reality and rights of ethnicity and to peoples to their country and against immigration, I am not suggesting any ethnic inferiorities or superiorities - we are all as bad and good as each other - but am insisting on the legitimacy of difference which ought to be mutually respected. Those who have demonised this approach as racist have in fact engaged in a reverse racism.
One of the fascinating things to observe in the era of rapid mass migration to Britain the last 20 years is the stubborn refusal to connect it with the equally rapid explosion of housing costs. Or to connect the shortage of social services with that there is now many more people needing social services. Mass migration obviously has a major role in both sets of headaches but as Lionel Shriver effectively said in her article in the Spectator last week, you can point this out and people will only look politely at you and pretend they never heard it.
For all the economic claims, is Britain better off today than it was in 1997? Really quite hard to see that. More expensive and more crowded? Yes. But better off?
Supply and demand equals price. Basic math must be censored in the UK.
One of the things I find odd about the demographic arguments is that, on the one hand demographers are quite open about how surprising and often rapid the changes are (eg, no one in the 1990s was predicting India would be below replacement by the 2020s, while they're puzzling that Israel is so high still, etc), which indicates that it's very hard to know how things will pan out over even relatively short timescales. On the other hand, many of the same people seem to believe that it's a cast-iron certainty that low birthrates in the West can't ever be altered, that we're either doomed to extinction or must import millions from elsewhere to fund our welfare systems. It's such a massive call to make, based on such an uncertain set of projections. It's compounded by the bizarre refusal to consider any other possible solutions to the dependency issue (making raising families cheaper/easier, encouraging automation, etc). Which makes me think that mass immigration is being pursued for its own sake, really, rather than as a genuine solution to the birth rate issue.
Fecundity is just being selected for at the moment. We're in a bottleneck. No one will be complaining about low birth rates in 2500 when there are hundreds of million of Amish in the American Midwest and a very populous Mormon nation state in what is now Nevada. In addition, weird biotech coming along rather soon might make all of this irrelevant.
Arguing about immigration on practical grounds would only work if everyone saw it as a practical question. It's a moral issue for a very large minority, who also happen to be the most influential. These pieces by Ed et al are knives being brought to a gunfight.
But it is only perceived as such because of endless anti instinct propoganda of the sort that can persuade people to cheer rather than gag when a man (who should be in prison or a mental hospital) puts his nipple into the mouth of an actual baby and claims he is breastfeeding it
The thing I really don't understand is how the Conservative party don't understand this basic point. They're casting around for tax cuts as if they think that will win back the voters they have lost, or that a few more months of plans from Sunak are going to make a difference? Even this new cons group pledge is far more than the general public want.
I think a large number of Conservative MPs think about the issue as a moral one (ie, mass immigration is a good in itself, diversity is always good, international human rights instruments are good, and any opposition to any of these is simply bigotry). Even if Sunak wanted to leave the ECHR, say, he wouldn't have the votes for it in his own party, let alone in parliament. They're absolutely wedded to the policy, however ruinous it ends up being for them or the country - the really shameful aspect of this is that they've explicitly pretended otherwise.
Because central London has largely fallen but London remains quite successful MPs also struggle to comprehend the harm, failing to see that London is an outlier (I mean they never go to Slough, Bradford or Leicester and they certainly don’t live their) made productive entirety by it’s largely homogenous suburbs. Plus controlling immigration is anti entropic and so takes will, effort and competence. It’s akin to thatcher taking on the unions
imho I think its much harder than the fight with the unions because it in part will require a rejection of the American culture that has become western orthodoxy. Ed touches on it with this piece. There is so much faith in globalisation that neither academics or policy makers are willing to question it. The economic argument for trade deals and immigration rest on similar non-ergodic principles. A developing economy with huge trade barriers, a closed economy, lots of protectionism and bureaucracy, obviously benefits a lot from opening its economy and trade deals. Whereas a developed economy doesn't. Its the same with immigration, a closed country with a shortage of highly skilled people will benefit from a small amount of immigration of high skilled entrepreneurs. If we look at the evidence of the eurozone, economist would predict a huge boost in growth over the last three decades, it should leap off the page. But you can't see it at all when compared with other developing nations. The orthodoxy never gets questioned, they retreat to more complex models with more parameters and appeal to authority.
I agree with you to an extent. I think for a lot of MPs and a minority of members there is that value system. I agree completely that it is shameful that they've lied and promised otherwise as well. Maybe it's my complete naivety but I still expect political parties to not want to get annihilated and MPs to want to keep their jobs. Here in the Netherlands the cabinet has fallen and there will be new elections precisely because of this issue. Rutte doesn't want to solve these problems here either but he's realised he has to act or face oblivion.
Good article, Ed. There is indeed a growing number of voices like yours that are putting mass immigration under the spotlight and exposing it for the Ponzi scheme-cum-addiction it has become. The articles you link to are also excellent.
It might not be immediately obvious, but the people our economy needs, en masse, are those fleeing economically and socially chaotic countries because they don't fancy trying to fix them, especially young men abandoning their women, children and communities in a zero sum calculation, whilst bearing no better than ambivalent feelings about Britain which progressives can later leverage against the racist majority.
I think it's actually worse than that, and that the various economic arguments for and against -- or at least most of them, though just wanting cheap labor is also a big factor -- are a sublimation of other things that can't be said openly in public, though that one Blair advisor came close to the mark when he said that the point of mass immigration was to "rub the right's nose in diversity." No one really cares that "sub-replacement birth rates will diminish our country's economic dynamism in 2100" or whatever. We'll never see mass immigration ended in the West because it's a way to import people and deploy them as bioweapons to ruin the good time of your perceived cultural foes, with this being an expression of top-down hostility by a university-educated upper stratum of society for their country's indigenous lower orders. The economic arguments in favor of mass immigration are a sublimation of enthusiasm for what I've just described, and the economic arguments against it are a sublimation of just not wanting to be flooded by third-world types.
It's really that bad.
Editing to add that it's interesting how the business-right and the cultural-left have dovetailed on this issue. Personally I think these two factions are a match made in heaven, and we will be seeing more and more of this as the cultural left further sheds any interest it had in economic egalitarianism, opting instead for what "Lomez" terms "Gay Race Communism", with this combination manifesting in the form of things like the Woke Capital phenomenon.
Consumerism and progressiveness centre the atomised individual and promise to him and her salvation via various forms of snake oil
I was recently having a discussion with a liberal friend of mine about the migration question. He was appalled by my claim that Britain had not, historically speaking, experienced high levels of migration compared to its incumbent population. I made Konstantin Kisin's point that, after '97, we experienced more migration in 9 years that we had in 900. Is there any good historical data on this to confirm that comparison?
David Conway's Civitas study is available online.
https://civitas.org.uk/pdf/ANationOfImmigrants2007.pdf
I used that a fair bit for my book on diversity. I was planning to take the chapter on the history of diversity and turn it into a substack after some editing and updating.
But yes historically immigration to Britain has been pretty small.
What's an acceptable level of net migration to you? Zero? 100k? The 600k figure is a one off due to a couple of unusual factors (200k Ukrainian refugees plus an imbalance in student numbers due to pandemic as fewer arrived in 2020/2021 so fewer left in 2022); the normal rate is around 250/300k. Is that too much?
Second point - this goes back to my criticism of National Conservativsm from the other week - there's no coherent theory of economics here. You want higher pay for social care workers and teachers so we don't need to bring in as many on visas? Me too! But that means higher taxes and Cates/Kruger and co keep demanding lower taxes. There's just a huge contradiction between the socially conservative and economically liberal philosophies they're trying to meld. It doesn't work.
I think we will have to pay higher taxes, yes, which is why I think an alternative will not come from the Tory party, because they are largely unable to accept that reality. But either way we will have to 'pay' for it some way or the other, whether now or later.
The demand for carers is going up as our population ages, so it feels right from a basic free-market pov, even taking aside a moral one, that those wages go up.
There be other ways we could ease the economic problems; liberalising house building and infrastructure would reduce housing and energy costs which would take some of the strain. (but that's an even more difficult political conundrum)
And 250k is not 'normal' to many of us, it's what we've become used to. we should absolutely be returning to tens of thousands. Numbers are not the absolute issue, because the social impact of migration depends on who comes, but they are a big issue.
Putting aside the policy challenges of getting to 10s of thousands, unless birth rates go up a lot that would really unbalance the population age wise. I know you want birth rates to go up a lot but that seems largely resistant to any policy programme in rich western (or Asian) countries.
I think TFR of 2.1 is ideal but I would still prefer an ageing population to one completely transformed by immigration. I didn't mention fertility measures this time because the article was too long and I've written about it quite recently and don't want to feel I'm haranguing single people.
Ha! I've had three so I've done my bit...
‘The benefits of Globalism’ are not at all obvious to many people, particularly native-born poor and working classes in all western countries. Mass immigration is also not a gain except for the top tier of the business, corporate, and banking classes who massively benefit from compliant cheap labor. We need radical solutions to these issues not moderate centrism.
In 1498, Vasco de Gama discovered a sea route to the Indies around
the Cape of Good Hope. The Venetian Republic sent an envoy to the Sultan proposing that a canal be dug between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. It was unsuccessful. Although not immediately obvious, Venice inevitably declined until the Republic was snuffed out by Napoleon in 1797.
All discussions of current British problems seem to assume, inferentially, that some solution is possible. Perhaps, like Venice confronted with the emergence of a sea route between the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans, Britain has simply lost relevance due to global factors almost entirely beyond its control and its decline is incapable of solution. I think this is particularly true of those parts of Britain which were supposed to be levelled up. In a global economy what is the rationale of any of those places having any sort of industry etc. in the way they did in the 19th and early-20th centuries.
Attempts to stave off the inevitable decline through London's leading position in international banking from the 1970s through to 2008 coupled with creating a kind of Venetian carnival for the super-rich centred on the capital have largely run out of puff and the country is naturally poorer and more inequitable as a result and will continue to become so. Like Venice, the long tail of English cultural products and the physical remains of that former grandeur remain as a stage set for an international clientele, but the everyday Brit is living a life that is nastier, poorer, more Brutish and shorter.
The welfare state destroyed your will to greatness.
“The unprecedented migration of the Blair years benefited the overall economy, at least in the short term, but it also helped create a society that was more stratified.”
Did it? Unlike Sweden, Britain was incredibly stratified in the (even recent) past. By class, of course, but also by a geographic divide.
Is the UK more stratified now that it was at any time in its history from feudalism through John Major? Or is it, in fact, less so? Wasn’t class always a very, very big deal?
This isn’t just a debating point. Both the UK’s business elite and center-right party often seem to be working on the unspoken assumption that vast numbers of native-born Brits (men especially) are largely unemployable in most facets of a 21st century economy. That might be a taboo worth discussing.
Britain never had the egalitarian culture of the mid-century US but its class divide now is in some ways more bitter than before, marked by genuine contempt for the university educated for those further down the scale. Partly this is geographical - if you're an upper-middle-class Londoner you may have little to no contact with working-class English people in your daily life. My children went to the same primary school as my wife and my father-in-law once remarked that while it was far more culturally diverse than when he used to pick up, it was socially far more homogenous.
The contempt with which the liberal middle class hold the indigenous poor is evidence that they can survive each other and also that liberals see this underclass as sufficiently related to them. The reverence with which the liberal middle class hold the immigrant poor is evidence that they cannot survive each other (i.e. be real) and that liberals see this underclass (despite all protestations) as insufficiently related and quite alien actually - but useful as a way to distinguish them from the people they regard as truly theirs.
That’s a really interesting take, your father-in-law’s. Thanks. (I apologize for my inexplicable inability to consistently summon the “edit” function. It only seems to work after a comment has been up for a bit or I am responding to something. No doubt I’m mistaken and simply missing something.)
I am often struck not by a leftwing woke contempt for the working-class in the UK (though I’m sure that exists) but by an almost poignant sympathy from more rightwing and affluent Brits for, say, a “hospitality” industry that would much rather hire Polish girls than surly natives to deal with the public. They seem frustrated that they can’t just blurt out what a no-brainer (Yank term) this preference would be for any business. Perhaps I’m imagining or exaggerating the extent of this.
"You seem cheerful honey. Are you looking forward to the weekend? Time for some Ed West to change all that."
hahaha
Here in the USA, labor shortages are often cited to justify record high immigration levels yet the labor force participation rates of natives and especially prime age (25-54) men have never been lower. This makes me wonder if the welfare state is helping many downscale men to avoid steady work and immigrants are in part filling that gap?
“Besides which, social care is not exactly ‘highly dependent on foreign workers’, 85 per cent of care staff being British.”
Certainly true of nearly everywhere outside London. Out of interest, where did you get those stats from?
Excellent article, thanks
from here
https://twitter.com/surplustakes/status/1675837043522383872
obviously that's going to change soon.