It was ten years ago today

Did we win? No. Did we win the deeper moral argument? Also no

It’s my anniversary today: exactly ten years since the publication of my book The Diversity Illusion, which has just gone on special offer on Kindle for 99p.

The book has done okay, I think, not a bestseller by any means, although it didn’t come out with much fanfare, being by a fairly unknown writer and a small publishing house. It was also published in the same week as David Goodhart’s The British Dream, and I was perfectly happy for David to get all the attention and stress.

Goodhart ended up being snubbed by the Hay Festival for a book which dared to suggest that huge levels of immigration weren’t entirely a fantastic idea. His book was more of a broader history of this great change, thoughtful and comprehensive, while mine was a polemic; Goodhart came from the Left and really tried to be fair, but his tribe is credal, and belief number one is that diversity is good, always and everywhere… and while you might disagree. You might even have some evidence to the contrary… you have to ask yourself: is this really worth losing my job over?

Writing a book violating the central taboo of our age probably wasn’t a good idea on my part, either, but being someone who values perceived correctness over social harmony, I thought it was worth pointing out that our recent levels of migration were unprecedented and probably unwise. At any rate, the potential upsides are real but fairly limited, while the possible downsides are enormous – the same with any massive change. 

I was partly inspired by reading Goodhart’s ‘Too Diverse?’ article in Prospect, which suggested that the more multicultural a society became, the harder it would be to maintain commonly-held resources like a welfare state. People at the time spoke of this progressive dilemma as being the choice between Brazil and Sweden, although Sweden has since become the most extreme example of the experiment.

Being a heartless Tory, I wasn’t as avid a supporter of the welfare system as Goodhart, but I was keen on the high levels of social capital and trust which made it possible; and there the evidence of diversity’s corrosive effect has repeatedly been found in study after study.

I also came to believe that people confused cause and effect. The anti-racist norm is part of a wider package of high trust towards outsiders found in the most pleasant parts of the world. Most of the things which people attribute to the benefits of diversity are actually due to the benefits of the conditions that allowed for diversity: liberalism, a free labour market, wealth, tolerance, trust towards outsiders. These are all conditions for liberal immigration policies, they are not created by immigration. Where there is selective immigration, either from countries of similar wealth, or people with particular qualifications, and where there are financial incentives in place, immigration may augment these qualities (the US, for example, attracts huge numbers of entrepreneurs). But with less restrictive – ‘mass’ – immigration, greater diversity tends to erode those high trust norms.

The trust issue contradicted the most popular slogan of the time, ‘Diversity is our strength’, which I thought was clearly not true. Diversity of opinion might be a strength, but this didn’t correlate with ethnic diversity; if anything the opposite. I knew from history that liberalism had failed to establish itself in diverse societies, because it required a level of trust that just wasn’t possible, and politics too often fell along tribal lines.

Similarly, the idea promoted from around 2000 that Britain was a ‘nation of immigrants’, when the number of migrants between 1066 and 1947 was very small; even the most well-known examples, the arrival of French Huguenots and eastern Europe Jews, were miniscule by today’s standards. On some naïve level, I think it’s wrong for the authorities to lie to people about their own history – a trend that became far more extreme in the decade since.

I don’t think the trends are all negative, by any means. It’s a complicated story, as you’d expect in a country of 60 million 65 million 70 million people. In London the pleasant bits are in many ways even more pleasant than when I was growing up, in part because they enjoy gentle diversity.

Upper-middle-class London applaud themselves for the cosmopolitanism of their neighbourhoods, which contrast with the monotone towns and villages they grew up in, but upmarket areas are largely insulated against unsettling change by high housing costs and the distribution of social housing. 

Elsewhere, though, the story is different. Immigrants tend to bring their culture with them, even beyond the second generation, and so parts of the city heavily populated with people from other countries start to resemble those countries. Our moral leaders consider being unhappy about this to be some huge personal failing, yet the fact that minority status is a risk factor for mental illness suggests that this supposed moral failing is part of human nature. Being around people unlike us is often stressful (that includes being around people of the same ethnic origins but who have very different values and opinions).

That means that, if you wish to make your country more diverse, you will impose that sort of stress on a certain number of people, and those people will tend to be the poorest, least powerful and least articulate. The wealthy and educated turn diversity into a morality play in which they are the goodies, but wealth just maximises its benefits and insulates against the downsides. The educated are also better at negotiating and understanding social taboos, and dissembling on delicate issues. This is not to sound like a faux populist class warrior; conservatives have a habit of hiding behind working-class concerns when they want to oppose immigration, and I’ve been guilty of it too, but if you came from Newham you’ve clearly experienced this change in a different way to people who live in areas with demographic stability.

My basic premise was — and still is – that diversity is like most things, good in moderation but beyond a certain point bringing more downsides than benefits. And because it has become such a sacred topic, moralised like no other, diversity was inevitably going to increase beyond that point; there is no taboo on saying that Britain should be ‘more diverse’ as there is on saying it should be ‘more white’. There is no end point, where it is permissible to say ‘enough’; it is an unstoppable force meeting a moveable object.

The strange thing is that you’d think this argument would attract people who relish conflict and debate, but I dislike this change for the opposite reason. I’m quite agreeable in temperament: I hate conflict and bickering, and multicultural politics means conflict and bickering, forever; endless hours, days and years spent listening to people complain about the tiniest things, each gripe and perceived injustice slowing down the smooth running of government and society, wasting more money and time. This is made far worse by the ‘presumption of good faith’ norm we’ve now developed around claims of injustice, while at the same time offering huge incentives for people to claim them.

The book was written around the time of the 2011 census, and as of the 2021 headcount the capital of England is now 36.8% white British, down from 44% ten years ago, following a rapid transformation in the past five decades; England as a whole is under 75% white British, down from 87.5% in 2001. Even without vastly accelerated immigration under the Tories, that trend is going to accelerate. This is the greatest transformation in British history for centuries; for better or worse, its impact will be vastly more important than that of Brexit. And it is one that most opinion-formers treat with either glee or insouciance, and to which even the Conservative Party’s response is ‘so what?’ 

Even in the years since I wrote the book, the strength of taboo and sacralisation has only got stronger (imagine this appearing in the Guardian now) and multiculturalism has become much more ingrained into the British establishment’s idea of who we are. Public opinion has become more liberal on the issue, and will continue to do so if the United States is any guide (in part because the percentage of people of recent immigration descent will increase). Did we win the debate? No. But did we win the moral argument on some deeper level? Also no.