Every few decades there is a violent episode - a riot or a murder - that highlights an issue and comes to be seen as a political turning point. In Britain there were race riots in Notting Hill, London, in 1958 that helped to end the open-door immigration policy from the Empire and Commonwealth. In 1993 the black teenager Stephen Lawrence was murdered in South London by young whites and the police failure to bring the killers to justice led to the Macpherson report of 1999 and a complete reappraisal of the police approach to ethnic minorities.

The George Floyd case is slightly different because, at least in Britain, the reaction here to the murder of a black American 4,000 miles away in Minneapolis in 2020 is now generally seen as excessive, one might even say a kind of pandemic-related progressive hysteria. So, there has been no lasting legacy of BLM beyond a sense that we might need to calm down and think more rationally about race.

I think, and hope, that Henry Nowak’s murder will be a trigger for just such a common-sense course correction on race in Britain. Nowak was stabbed when walking home in Southampton by a British Sikh man who then falsely claimed to police that he had been racially abused by Nowak. The police then arrested the innocent Nowak who was lying on the ground dying from the stab wounds.

The roots of this failure go back to the Macpherson report I just mentioned. The report focused on the racist attitudes of some police officers, which was a serious issue at the time, but applied a blanket definition of “institutional racism” to the whole British police force, an epithet that other organisations - the NHS, the civil service - soon adopted too. More damagingly the report also declared that if someone perceived themselves to be a victim of racism then it must be accepted as fact. No presumption of innocence, no need to carefully establish the evidence. You can see how this led to the Nowak outrage.

Question 2: Is there any truth to the claim of bias against the white majority in the police and other institutions? Is there really two-tier policing as Nigel Farage of Reform is claiming?

In recent decades, at the same time that British society has become markedly less racist and far more comfortable with ethnic differences, an intrusive apparatus of DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) policies has been established in many larger public and private institutions, partly building on the Macpherson assumptions. (The UK has twice as many diversity officers as any other country according to the Government’s own equality hub.)

Instead of allowing the scars of the racist past to gradually heal and for a broadly colour-blind society to emerge DEI has enforced an excessive racial sensitivity. In DEI-land any group differences in outcome of a negative kind - minority over-representation in crime or poverty statistics, for example - is assumed to be the result of discrimination. Moreover, the DEI idea of equity rather than equality requires groups to be treated differently, because of past and current injustices, in order for fair outcomes to be achieved.

This is not a far-right fantasy as some people on the left are now claiming. This is official policy. The National Police Chiefs’ Council (the committee of the most senior police officers) and the College of Policing (a kind of policing think-tank) produced in 2022 a Police Race Action Plan. The 2025 update included the following statement: “Our commitment to racial equity means producing equality of policing outcomes for people from different ethnic groups by responding to individuals and communities according to their specific needs, circumstances and experiences, with the understanding that these will be racialised and with the aim of reducing harm. It does not mean treating everyone ‘the same’ or being ‘colour blind’.”

Another recent example was Britain’s official Sentencing Council which advises judges and magistrates on prison sentences. It produced guidance saying that in the case of ethnic or religious minorities judges and magistrates should seek Pre-Sentence Reports to better understand the background of offenders before passing sentence. Similarly, the Judicial College’s Equal Treatment Bench Book has a whole chapter on race that concludes “treating everyone the same does not always ensure true equality”. It is not unreasonable to assume that both of these aspects of official advice will lead to more lenient sentences for minorities.

Positive discrimination, as such, is only legal in very rare circumstances in the UK, and even the pro-minority equity premise in large areas of public life only very rarely leads to direct bias against whites.

However, it is also quite clear that excessive racial sensitivity and fear of the accusation of racism has played a role in several recent disasters. The most serious, of course, that many of your readers will have heard about is the so-called grooming gangs scandal in which over several decades tens of thousands of young white girls were raped and sexually abused by predominantly British Pakistani men. The official report by Louise Casey showed that fear of the racism accusation was central to the failure of police, social workers and local politicians to intervene.

There are three other examples that are often cited, and presumably many more cases that did not create headlines.

It emerged that the Manchester Arena pop concert bomb in May 2017 that killed 22 people and injured around 1,000 might have been prevented if one of the security guards had intervened when he saw Salman Abedi, the bomber, behaving suspiciously. He did not do so for fear of the racism accusation.

In June 2023 a mentally ill black man Valdo Calocane fatally stabbed two students and an older man in Nottingham in a case that was riddled with warning signs that both the police and the mental health services failed to act upon, in part because of racial sensitivities. Black men are far more likely to be detained under the UK’s Mental Health Act something that the mental health establishment believes may be partly a product of discrimination and is therefore keen to reduce.

A final recent example of special treatment for minorities came in the case of the banning of Israeli (Maccabi Tel Aviv) football fans from a match against the Birmingham side Aston Villa in which the West Midlands Police officials were unduly influenced by local Muslim organisations which did not want Jewish fans on their patch.

Question 3: Is all this evidence for the failure of the British model of multiculturalism based on the idea of separate but equal? Does the Nowak affair illustrate the failure of this model? Can it still evolve?

I think too much is made of the difference between Britain’s multicultural model and France’s integrationist model. The differences are mainly in rhetoric, in practice we’ve had quite similar experiences. It’s true that back in the 1970s and 1980s British rhetoric was more laissez-faire than in France, in effect we said to minorities “so long as you obey the law and contribute you can come here and remain largely within your own culture”. There was also a multicultural asymmetry in play: minorities were encouraged to express their ethnic traditions, majorities were discouraged from doing so in case it made the country seem unwelcoming.

But in more recent decades we have worried much more about integrating people, we introduced language and citizenship tests and ceremonies for newcomers more than 20 years ago and we constantly worry about social cohesion. That worry, as in much of Europe, is focused primarily on Britain’s Muslim minority, who came originally from poor, traditional, communities in Pakistan, Bangladesh and, more recently, Somalia, and remain more distant from the mainstream than other large minorities, when it comes to religiosity, attitudes to women and sexuality, free speech, and so on. As the historian Tom Holland has put it: “Islam is uniquely indigestible in secular societies.”

Integration itself is something intangible, it takes time, and it’s hard to be prescriptive about it in liberal societies that are partly based on the individual right to be different. Obviously, people from some nations/cultures are easier to integrate than others. The Italians and Spaniards who arrived in France in the 1920s and 1930s were easier to integrate than the North Africans who arrived in the 1960s and 1970s.

This is not just about race or visible difference. British Indians (Hindu and Sikh) are one of the most successful groups in British society and, along with the Chinese, do far better on average in both the education system and in the economy than the white British. British multiculturalism worked well for some groups, it provided a kind of soft-landing in a new society, but for other groups, particularly Pakistanis, it has left them in parallel societies, especially in the former industrial towns in the north of England.

Part of the problem in Britain is the political backdrop. When the mainstream left in the 1990s under Tony Blair largely accepted the economic reforms of the Thatcher period they needed something to distinguish themselves from, and feel morally superior to, conservatives, and they found that mainly in the cultural sphere, and in particular in being more open towards immigration and giving a special priority to race equality issues.

Just as the majority was beginning to feel more comfortable about Britain’s ethnic minorities, thanks in part to much lower immigration in the 1980s and 1990s, a large part of the political class - increasingly dominated by progressive university graduates - decided to liberalise immigration and embrace diversity as an unqualified good, creating new legal and linguistic protections for minorities that left many less well educated people feeling anxious and confused around race.

Instead of embracing colour-blindness, progressives began to absorb critical race theory ideas from America about white privilege, systemic racism and how minorities cannot themselves be racist. Clumsy remarks became micro-aggressions or even hate crimes (many were jailed for comments on social media or reprimanded for non-crime hate incidents).

This overshoot in attitudes to discrimination and equality should not be exaggerated. It is important to recognise that certain groups do still suffer from negative stereotypes and discrimination that can impact on life chances, especially young black men and traditionally dressed Muslims. And complaints about racism should not now be ignored because the claim is sometimes invented or exaggerated. We do not want to throw away the great progress we have made since the 1960s.

Nonetheless, the overshoot is real and the Nowak case may help us to address it. One, apparently trivial, but very real manifestation is the enormous over-representation of people of colour in UK television advertising. This reflects not just an un-thinking diversity bias among the overwhelmingly progressive creative classes, but also the over-influence of a London-centred media where the population is now less than half white and only about one-third white British. Indeed, the relevant context to this whole story is an unsettlingly fast change in British demography; the country was still about 90% white British as recently as 2000 and it is now less than 70% white British (the number of white British children in British schools has recently fallen below 60%).

We may be in for a bumpy ride on these issues, but one advantage that Britain has in seeking a course correction on race equality issues is the fact that we now have a cohort of very successful visible minority politicians on the conservative side of politics, including in Reform. People such as Rishi Sunak, the former Conservative Prime Minister, or Kemi Badenoch, the current Conservative leader, are sympathetic to the argument I’ve made here and want a more common-sense attitude to equality. Badenoch is now calling for the Public Sector Equality Duty, a requirement on public bodies to make positive efforts to promote race and other forms of equality, to be scrapped.

Question 4: The political scientist John Curtice has shown that the geography of Reform’s vote in the local elections of 7 May largely overlaps with that of the Brexit vote in 2016. Will Reform voters be further radicalised by the Nowak incident? Do you expect more riots this summer?

We now have a genuine multi-party system in the UK, five significant parties rather than just two, thanks in large part to Brexit but even more to the failure of the realignment that looked like it might happen after Boris Johnson’s big “get Brexit done” victory in the 2019 election. This failure opened the door to Britain’s big populist party Reform.

Across Europe politics now revolves as much around education-based values divides - attitudes to immigration, national identity, authority and tradition - as it does around the old socio-economic divides. This is one reason, along with polarising social media algorithms, that politics feels angrier than it used to. It is harder to compromise on the more emotional value issues.

I wrote a book in 2017 about populism in which I talked about the people from Anywhere - the highly educated, mobile, people who are happy with openness and comfortable with social change - and the people from Somewhere - who are less well educated and tend to have identities more based around place and group and are therefore more discomforted by social change. Both worldviews are perfectly decent, the problem for our politics in Europe is that the Anywheres, even though representing only around one quarter to one third of the population, have completely dominated politics and culture for more than 30 years.

Voting for Brexit (and Trump) was a Somewhere protest vote against Anywhere hegemony. Their protest achieved Brexit, despite the attempts to thwart it, but it was Brexit without a plan. Boris Johnson had a chance to capture a large part of the old working-class, especially in the de-industrialised parts of the country, for a new Conservative centre-right coalition. But he delivered neither on the Brexit promise of controlling immigration, which in 2022/23 hit the highest levels ever, nor on so-called “levelling up”, investing more in the left behind parts of the country.

This gave Nigel Farage’s populist Reform party their chance and at the 2024 election they received 14% of the national vote, reducing the Conservatives to 23% and splitting the right-wing vote, leaving Labour with a “loveless landslide” of nearly two-thirds of the seats in Parliament on just one third of the votes. And since the election Reform have consistently topped the opinion polls, with support just under 30%.

Reform voters are mainly, but not only, older, lower income people who backed Brexit, want much less immigration, and often feel looked down upon by the London-based political and media class. After the election victory in 2024 the Labour Government initially tried to win back such voters under the influence of the socially conservative Blue Labour grouping in the party. It persisted with the restrictionist about-turn on immigration introduced by the departing Conservatives and also talked tough on stopping the illegal Channel boats, despite scrapping the Rwanda off-shoring plan. But it soon realised it was losing voters to the Green party on its left so has shifted back to trying to appeal more to its core vote of liberal graduates, minorities and the welfare-dependent.

Whoever replaces the failed Keir Starmer as Labour Prime Minister, Andy Burnham current mayor of Manchester is the favourite, will try to turn politics into an anti-populist crusade. Labour have tried to characterise Farage’s response to the Nowak death - he said he felt “pure, cold rage” - and the claim of two-tier policing, as extreme. But there is too much evidence of two-tier justice for it to be dismissed in that way and a recent opinion poll found that 34% of people agreed that the police treat ethnic minorities more favourably than white people (25 % think they are treated equally and 25% think that whites are treated better).

Farage may have taken the relatively outspoken stance he did on Nowak because of the small grouping called Restore Britain, led by a former Reform MP Rupert Lowe, that is biting at his heels from the right (a kind of Eric Zemmour party). Many Restore Britain activists are overtly white nationalists. Restore is a small party with quite a big online presence but it could win enough votes in a key upcoming by-election to deny Reform victory and allow Burnham back into Parliament.

There is a lot of anger with establishment politics in parts of left-behind Britain as we saw with the Southport riots in 2024 after three young girls were fatally stabbed by the unbalanced son of Rwandan immigrants. (It was initially believed that the killer was a Channel-crossing asylum seeker.) In one of Keir Starmer’s first acts as Prime Minister he ensured a swift and draconian response and more than 1,000 people have been jailed for their part in the riots.

We do not have your traditions of rioting as an essential part of political life and the number of people willing to risk a jail sentence for the thrill of throwing a brick at a police officer is smaller than in France. However, the apparent inability of any British Government to stop the continuing flow of illegal asylum seekers across the Channel is a major source of simmering anger. (It is also an extraordinary failure of international cooperation, as the crossings would stop tomorrow if France agreed to accept back anyone who made the journey, something that is also in France’s interests given how many people are now making the journey to northern France simply to try to cross the Channel.)

And if word gets out of a murder or serious assault by an asylum seeker, especially a Channel-crossing asylum seeker, there could be more serious trouble this summer. Whether an even greater sense of disorder in British politics would benefit the populist Reform party or the old Labour and Conservative parties, now on less than 40% combined in the opinion polls, remains to be seen. But whichever party, or parties, holds power in the next few years it seems likely that the death of Henry Nowak will lead to some kind of course correction for Britain’s post-Macpherson race policies.

It is often said that we are living in an interregnum. An old way of doing politics and economics is dying but the new one is yet to be born. I’m not so sure, I think the new order is already here. Since 2016, in much of the West, we have been stepping into a post-liberal era.

This may, currently, seem counter-intuitive when Donald Trump, the global figure most associated with post-liberalism, is alienating electorates across the West and Victor Orban the leading European post-liberal has just been ejected from office.

Meanwhile in the UK, Nigel Farage’s insurgency, despite local election success, seems to have hit a ceiling just below 30%, and many mainstream politicians still refuse to accept Reform as a legitimate opponent.

Yet even as Keir Starmer, in his recent last-chance-saloon speech, cast Reform as “dark” and “dangerous”, he was also embracing several post-liberal themes: celebrating immigration restriction, regretting the graduate-only route to status and reward, nationalising British Steel as an insurance policy in a post-free trade world.

The backdrop to politics for most of my adult life has been metropolitan openness – the market deregulation of the Right plus the moral deregulation of the Left. This combination is now disappearing in the rear-view mirror while a new post-liberal political landscape looms up ahead in which centrist liberals and national populists battle it out (with a noisy sub-plot from a green Left).

That era of openness, sometimes called hyper-liberalism or neo-liberalism, began in the UK with the Thatcher revolt against a broken post-war social democracy. The first step was a loosening of controls on labour and capital at home and then a further opening of the global economy, especially after China joined the WTO in 2001.

Rapid growth in China and some other parts of the developing world was accompanied by decent, if unspectacular, growth in most of the West, but also by a sharp rise in de-industrialisation, regional imbalances, and education-based status divides in many rich countries.

From the 1980s, to the end of the hyper-liberalisation era in 2016, politics here was best summed up in the slogan that the Right won the economic argument but the Left won the social argument on equality and rights entrenching the values of the 1960s reforms (and as politics, and ultimately economics, is downstream of culture the latter victory was the most important).

One of the key social trends, in the UK and similar countries, was the doubling in size of the professional and managerial class from the 1960s until the 2010s (to around one third of all jobs), with a related expansion of higher education. This produced a light-bulb shaped social structure and a new higher class that merged the traditional elites and asset-rich with the cognitive meritocracy - the exam passing classes - from all levels of society.

This expanded baby boomer elite, that partly overlaps with what I have elsewhere labelled the Anywhere class, oversaw, and in many cases advocated for, a rapid liberalisation of social norms.

In 1980s Britain around half of adults still thought homosexuality was wrong, agreed with the statement ‘a man’s role is to go out to work and a woman’s role is to look after the household’, a super-majority expressed a belief in Christianity and pride in country, fertility levels were still close to the replacement rate of 2.1, most professional people did not have degrees and net immigration was running at less than 5,000 a year.

Forty years later things look very different. One result is that politics has come to revolve as much around education-based liberal/conservative value divides as around the old left-right socio-economic divides.

From the early 1990s until the Brexit vote in 2016 it is fair to say that what the populists call the uniparty in Britain (meaning both the Labour and Conservative parties) agreed on many things: the market reforms of the Thatcher era were largely left in place; residential higher education was expanded and technical/vocational training neglected; industry shrank and professional services (especially finance) became the heart of a regionally imbalanced economy centred on London and the South-East; race, sex, and sexuality, equality and a new rights-based culture advanced, and the social state expanded; immigration rose sharply after 1997; local government was hollowed out and national democratic sovereignty in parliament was increasingly dispersed to the judiciary, regulators and transnational organisations such as the EU.

There were some differences between centre-Left and centre-Right on the size of the state and levels of re-distribution and immigration but also a broad consensus on how to prosper in the age of hyper-liberalism.

Globalism in economics and legalism in politics, meant a sacrifice of democratic control. But this consensus brought many benefits too. Most people became richer and society became fairer, especially if you were a woman or a member of a minority group or a clever child from a lower income family. The expansion of higher education produced a bigger and more open elite than in the post-war period (the 1957 Cabinet was entirely male/public school and more than half Etonian). The gradual disappearance of the industrial working class meant many dirty and dangerous jobs in heavy industries were replaced with knowledge economy jobs in comfortable offices.

There were also many losers from the hyper-liberal consensus, especially outside the greater South East, and their number grew after the financial crash in 2007-8. This was not just about inequality, de-industrialisation, and the loss of well-paid jobs for men of average or below average academic ability.

For three deeper trends, trends that have defined Western liberal modernity, also accelerated during the decades of metropolitan openness. The further loss of religion is one. It is only in the past couple of generations that mass secularisation has taken hold in most Western countries. Notwithstanding the strong traces of Christian belief that still animate public and private life this has removed a handrail of collective ritual and moral guidance.

The changing relationship between the sexes is another. Women’s financial autonomy and mass entry into paid work and public life represents the biggest increase in Western freedom since 1945. But, as Helen Andrews has pointed out, the new female domination of key institutions such as education and the law is unprecedented, while many men have lost their role as main provider and found nothing satisfactory in its place. At the same time, fertility has fallen well below replacement.

There is a third deeper shift. Within the lifetime of today’s young adults the ethnic majority in many Western countries will fall below half of the population. In Britain the post-1997 opening to immigration means that today nearly 20% of the population is foreign born and the White British core has shrunk from almost 90% in 2000 to around 70% today (lower in England alone). Just 53% of births in 2025 were to White British mothers. Britain is on track to become majority-minority in the 2060s.

The Brexit vote of 2016, and the first Trump vote too, was a raucous and disorganised No! A protest vote from not only those who felt they had suffered the economic consequences of hyper or neo-liberalism but also those who experienced a sense of loss and disorientation from some of those big cultural shifts.

Democracy worked, people could challenge the double liberal consensus at the ballot box. It worked imperfectly, of course. After the Brexit vote a large section of the political class tried to reverse the vote. When the impasse was finally broken by Boris Johnson with his decisive election victory in 2019, Brexit was indeed done but the two further promises to reduce immigration and to start “levelling up” the country—a direct response to the Brexit vote—were both dramatically broken.

Nonetheless, in 2026 we have shifted some way towards a new small-c conservative consensus in British politics and culture, much of which even a Labour Government is forced to adapt to.

The loose coalition behind it comprises older, non-graduates from left-behind, “Somewhere” Britain, combined with the many people of all classes and regions who feel the Blair/Cameron settlement is no longer working economically or culturally.

After nearly 40 years of metropolitan openness the backdrop is now provincial insecurity and a new set of priorities: wanting the national interest, and national citizen preference, pursued more vigorously; deep anxiety about free riding hence the need for much tighter control of immigration and welfare spending; more orderly neighbourhoods; rejection of progressive excess; scepticism about both big business and state capacity, but a strong desire to see the latter repaired.

The new consensus is not just the result of reaching a tipping point in the number of losers. There has also been a loss of momentum in the previous settlement. The growth of the professional and managerial class (PMC), the “lanyard class” in Maurice Glasman’s witty formulation, has stalled. It now accounts for about 33% of all jobs (13% higher PMC, 20% lower PMC) but that number has increased only six percentage points since 1991, despite the production of ever more graduates with generalist academic qualifications and unrealisable expectations. And that is even before AI replaces the more routine knowledge economy jobs.

This has been accompanied by a loss of confidence in the system of government that has grown up since the 1970s when what Michael Moran called light-touch “club governance” was replaced with the “regulatory state”. There were good reasons for more accountability and greater legal regulation but we have over-shot and ended up with the bat tunnel/fish disco Britain in which nothing gets built.

After 20 years of stagnant economic growth, the political class, Left and Right, is being forced to think much harder about state capacity and the gridlock that the liberal reflex to disperse more power to courts and regulators can cause.

The emerging cross-party policy consensus (minus some parts of the Left) echoes the priorities I described above: a permanent low level of legal immigration, and a goal of zero illegal immigration; ongoing attempts to understand and hack back the regulatory state; acknowledgement that higher education has over-expanded and that an apprenticeship is as good a start in working life for most young people; the recognition that the triple lock is unaffordable and welfare spending is out of control with too many people dropping out of the labour market (only four in 10 households are net contributors); the need for a rethink on net zero, a regional rebalancing to the economy, an openness towards some degree of re-industrialisation/friend-shoring, more national control over critical assets, and limits to free trade in the coming bloc-based global economy; more investment in innovation, defence, and the application of AI, including by UK pension funds; greater push-back against the progressive activist class’s permanent war on tradition and authority; more concern about polarisation, anomie and loss of meaning, especially among young people, a concern now focused on social media regulation.

This new consensus tilts more towards the Right bloc in British politics (Conservative and Reform) than the Left bloc (Labour, Greens and Liberal Democrats), but this does not mean the Right bloc will prevail. Minus the scepticism about net zero and welfarism, plenty of the above could align with the economics of Andy Burnham’s Manchesterism. Nevertheless, in the short-term, internal Labour politics, with or without Starmer, is likely to require a further shift to the old-school, statist, tax-the-rich, Left (despite the fact that we already have the most progressive income tax regime in the developed world).

But is the new consensus post-liberal? There are many schools of post-liberalism defined by their distinct critiques of liberalism. Matt Sleat, in one of several recent books on post-liberalism, complains that it is often little more than an immature rage against liberalism. And it is certainly young and unformed as a distinct ideology by contrast with older rivals like socialism, conservatism or liberalism itself.

Yet there are family resemblances between most of the writers who claim the mantle. Liberalism, in most critiques, is seen as a bloodless ideology focusing too much on individual rights and freedoms, constraints on power and value neutrality. Post-liberal critics argue that is stifles democratic governance and dispatches the human needs for community, belonging and meaning to the private sphere.

The American version, associated with some people in the Trump court, tends to be more religious and militantly hostile towards liberalism. Writers like Patrick Deneen, and the even more radical Adrian Vermeule, regard liberalism as a form of nihilism that encourages our worst selves, especially when combined with free markets. The answer of the religious post-liberals is that the good society requires virtue to precede freedom and, implicitly, demands a return to faith, usually Catholicism. This sounds more pre-liberal than post-liberal.

The more mainstream post-liberal critique of liberalism is that it is hard to derive a galvanising idea of the public or national interest from it because it is designed to accommodate an endless variety of individual beliefs and priorities, and to disperse power as widely as possible. Modus Vivendi liberalism demands that if you pay your taxes and obey the law you must be tolerated even if you are an Islamic separatist preaching hatred of the West.

Not only is this, say the post-liberals, a recipe for parallel societies but for stasis too. Liberalism makes it hard to challenge existing power structures, controlled by the highly educated Anywheres, whose priorities continue to dominate regardless of election results.

Post-liberalism’s answer is to pursue the ‘common good’ but that begs the question of who defines it? Maurice Glasman’s Blue Labour, the best-known variant of post-liberalism in the UK, is more a vibe—left on economics, right on culture—than a political philosophy or policy programme. Glasman’s last book is subtitled The Politics of the Common Good but provides no clear answer to the question of how we can arrive at a consensus on the common good in modern societies with diverse interests and values.

The answer of Patrick Deneen, the pre-eminent American post-liberal, is that a more virtuous and responsive elite will derive a sense of the common good from the common people. How the post-liberal society actually comes into being is left a bit hazy. His colleague Gladden Pappin recently explained to me that “the common good is defined through partisan political struggle.” This could just mean multi-party democratic competition but, to my ear, it also has echoes of Carl Schmitt’s famous friend/enemy political frame, which now seems to define US politics in the Trump era.*

This is one of several post-liberal dead ends. In today’s Britain there is no significant appetite for the illiberalism and religious authoritarianism of some strands of US post-liberalism, nor for Blue Labour’s hard-core socialist economics and the quaint idea that working class people long to go back to working in factories.

Nostalgia is not always a sin but as Samuel Rubinstein has written: “To recreate thick communities in an age of global supply chains, digital media, and geographic mobility, in societies characterised by deep pluralism and heterogeneity… seems like a pretty tall order.”

Another dead end is nostalgia for a mainly white Britain now to be found on the ethno-nationalist fringe of the post-liberal universe among people who also toy with extreme forms of re-migration, even for citizens with settlement rights.

Of course, English ethnicity exists and should be allowed to breathe. Ethnicity simply means shared ancestry and the shared habits and history connected to that ancestry. The English ethnicity has always been a relatively open one, as befits a once sea-going people. If it can absorb millions of Irish people over two centuries then it can certainly absorb people of different racial and religious backgrounds if they come in manageable numbers and assimilate into the national culture, (people such as Rishi Sunak, who is stereotypically English in the modern, self-deprecating, patrician manner).

It is true that having been semi-submerged for a couple of centuries within a broader British and imperial identity, Englishness has a more fuzzy feel to it than say French identity. And then the asymmetrical multi-culturalism that emerged in the 1960s, encouraging minority ethnic expression but discouraging that of the majority, further muddied the water. The re-emergence of English ethnicity over the last couple of decades as a normal identity is to be welcomed not feared, flags and all.

And post-liberals are right to stress the enduring importance of both ethnic and broader national identities. In more fragmented societies a critical mass of the population sharing a strong fellow-citizen attachment, regardless of race or ethnicity, is essential to navigating future collective action problems.

Too many liberals deepen this fragmentation with confected outrage over common sense beliefs such as the fact that even people with British passports can be more and less British or English depending on length of time in the country, language, habits, and so on. It is also a failure of empathy and imagination not to recognise that people can feel discomfort about ethnic change without being racist.

In any case, no political party will get elected in modern Britain without accepting, at least in broad outline, both of the post-war social revolutions: the welfare revolution of the 1940s and 1950s and the race and sex equality revolution of the 1960s and 1970s.

It is also true, on the conservative side of the ledger, that a big reason for post-liberalism’s appeal is widespread regret at the loss of community and national solidarity, and the accompanying sharp reductions in trust and volunteering. People regret, too, the loss of stable family life: nearly half of British children are not living with both their biological parents at the age of 16, disproportionately in the bottom half of the income spectrum. The epidemic of mental fragility and the collapse of birth rates speaks to a malaise—it is tempting to label it a spiritual one—that liberalism, by design, has no answer to.

But modern electorates are both liberal and conservative in complex combinations. The weakening of community and family often happens because people place their own individual freedom and desires first. People want community but many of them want wealth, freedom and mobility more. We might regret losing the sense of a single national conversation when there were only three television channels but few of us want to give up the choice of entertainment we now enjoy. Most of us moderns have been happy, in Yuval Noah Harari’s memorable phrase, to “give up meaning in exchange for power” or, he might have said, for comfort.

People don’t want to abandon liberalism, they want a better version stripped of its excesses and silences, economic and cultural. Focusing on liberalism itself as the main problem—rather than the recent marriage of economic neo-liberalism and progressivism—opens the door to the reactionary post-liberals who think everything went wrong with Luther or Locke.

We don’t need a revolution we need a course correction, as Adrian Pabst and other more moderate post-liberal voices have argued, a politics that speaks to the priorities of the Somewheres at least as much as the Anywheres, without jettisoning pluralism and the essentials of historic liberalism.

Adrian Wooldridge makes a similar argument in his recent book Centrists of the World Unite! He frames his argument as a re-invention of liberalism but it’s one that overlaps substantially with the kind of post-liberalism advocated here: a decidedly un-centrist challenge to the bourgeois-bohemian economic and moral de-regulation of the past 40 years.

One way of thinking about post-liberalism as a course correction is seeing it as a political force that seeks to reinvigorate some of the background factors that helped liberalism to work better in earlier decades. Tyler Cowen has defined the liberalism of the relatively stable post-war era as: “A blend of a capitalist mixed economy, largely democratic institutions and a fair but not complete degree of value neutrality across competing lifestyles.”

Post-liberalism cannot mean a return to the 1950s and any version that promotes it will fail. But it is one of post-liberalism’s most effective criticisms of liberalism that it is parasitic on other forces to function properly. Freedom and value neutrality work best in a context of individual restraint, broadly shared norms and demographic stability.

Post-1945 liberalism in the West certainly benefitted from many underlying factors that are now either absent or weakened: a young, growing population; rapidly rising incomes for most people; the moral constraints provided by residual religious belief and deference to experts and leaders; stable family life; a single national media-led public conversation; large ethnic majorities with a pre-political solidarity (reinforced by the recent experience of war) creating a strong “imagined community” and common norms across social classes.

Today, by contrast, we live in low-growth, ageing societies, with an archipelago of competing value and interest groups consuming individualised media, with weakened families and national attachments, and with faith in our political class badly dented. Liberalism is under strain and needs a helping hand from post-liberal priorities, (even if the term itself remains too obscure for mainstream political debate).

My own version, that I would categorise as belonging to the Left-conservative school of post-liberalism—a synthesis of moderate social democracy and moderate cultural conservatism—has three main elements.

1. Small-c conservative common-sense.

· Acceptance of the moral equality of all humans but rejection of the moral universalism and post-nationalism of the liberal Left, (promoted in some aspects of international law).

· Restoring authority to elected politicians.

· An immigration pause, plus the understanding that a society with a shrinking ethnic core needs an attractive, broad-based national identity more than ever.

· A belief in personal responsibility and reciprocity, entailing a shift to a more contributory welfare state.

· Money alone is not the answer to poverty and social dysfunction, family structure/upbringing matter.

· More support for stable families, marriage and higher fertility by minimising the motherhood penalty but also by making it easier for one parent to remain at home when children are pre-school.

2. Market-friendly, national social democracy.

· A national business preference in public procurement.

· Tougher paternalistic regulation of industries with power to poison bodies (food) and minds (tech).

· Less market in some key public utilities but more market in areas where competition is weak.

· Transition to Dutch-style social insurance model for health and social care.

· An end to this version of net-zero, and lowest possible energy costs for businesses and households.

· Limited use of subsidies and tariffs to prioritise national industry, reshoring and innovation, and national control over critical infrastructure/utilities.

· Incentivisation of a more patriotic business elite, and clearer distinction in the tax system between the productive and unproductive rich (a land tax?).

· Reduction in the tax/regulatory burden on small business.

· Promoting higher levels of home ownership and entrepreneurship, especially among young people.

3. A regional settlement to tackle the crisis of demoralisation in Somewhere Britain.

· Tackle extreme regional divides by promoting not just public investment and growth companies in left-behind places but investing in grass-roots institutions: sports clubs, youth clubs, pubs.

· We need our elite universities but must reverse the over-production of people with generalist academic qualifications and under-production of skilled workers and technicians.

· Create more outlets for public spiritedness. In a more dangerous world, with more erratic climate, we need an expanded military reserve plus a civic and environmental taskforce. We also need an easy-to-use online national volunteering platform.

This is not a radical manifesto but it cuts across still powerful liberal assumptions in key areas: the reluctance to accept discomfort at rapid ethnic change as legitimate; the economism of so much social policy that focuses almost exclusively on higher welfare payments; the persistent belief that more graduates is good for the economy and society; reluctance to re-think rights legislation or international conventions even when they thwart democratic common sense.

There are policies here borrowed from Right and Left traditions but the Right bloc in British politics would be most comfortable with it. To turn the cultural dominance of the Right bloc into political power requires, as well as some kind of accommodation between Reform and the Conservatives at the next election, two things that it currently lacks: an ability to reach out to centrist voters and a coherent political economy.

Both of these failings are especially, and perhaps unavoidably, true of the insurgent Reform. As Nigel Farage tacks to the centre, with Restore Britain nibbling at his right flank, he may be able to reduce his unpopularity at the local tennis club. A balanced political economy that is able to combine some of the productive, de-regulatory spirit of the Thatcher years while also protecting, and reforming, the social state and reviving the left-behind parts of the country, remains a work in progress.

One of post-liberalism’s favourite themes (shared by Wooldridge) is the need for a better elite. Britain certainly needs a new generation of politicians who can speak across that Anywhere-Somewhere divide, and maybe a Prime Minister who can capture the new national mood in the way that Tony Blair briefly managed. We do not want to replace an Anywhere hegemony with a Somewhere one, even in the era of provincial insecurity.

The Anywhere worldview, comfortable with social and demographic change, was once the ideology of the confident, meritocratic professional and managerial class, designed for the new age of metropolitan openness, with its challenge to old hierarchies at the end of the 20^th century. But it curdled into a self-interested professional class reflex that imposed itself on a Somewhere majority who have identities based more around place and group than academic achievement and are, therefore, more discomforted by rapid change.

Both worldviews are needed in our complex societies and they are less binary than they sometimes seem. We saw in the pandemic that there was overwhelming support for draconian restrictions on liberty for what was perceived to be the common good. Most people place a very high value on security and familiarity. But in a different context the same is true about individual freedom and autonomy.

It is part of the post-liberal critique of modern liberalism that it promotes a shallow understanding of freedom: an idea of freedom as lack of constraint on our individual desires and projects of self-actualisation (that saw its apotheosis in the Epstein files).

Whether that is true of liberalism it is certainly true of the human condition that we often prioritise short-term desires over our longer-term best interests. Most of us would welcome institutions and cultural norms that nudge us to make better choices but woe betide anyone who thinks they know our own best interests better than we do.

Liberalism, as Wooldridge points out, has had several course corrections in its long history. The late 19^th/early 20^th century course correction, via the New Liberals in Britain and Teddy Roosevelt in the US, jettisoned laissez-faire and the sanctity of private property.

Today’s course correction requires nothing more dramatic from liberalism than accepting a new balance between the dispersal of power and the need for effective democratic governance. Even the raffishly liberal Financial Times commentator, Janan Ganesh, has recognised that liberal democracy needs to be a bit less liberal and a bit more democratic.

One aspect of traditional liberalism that we should all cling to is a sensibility more than an idea or institution: reasonableness, open-mindedness, not seeing opponents as enemies, good faith argument, ability to change when the facts change, and so on.

This sensibility can no longer be taken for granted and some variants of post-liberalism that I described earlier have contributed to that. But this is a problem that afflicts all political traditions, exacerbated by identity politics on the Left and ethno-nationalism on the Right.

Tribalism is on the rise not just because of the social media algorithms but because it’s harder to find compromises when politics is more about culture, values and emotions than about the size of the state and the level of redistribution.

It is therefore all the more important that The Rest is Politics centrists learn to accept the new more cultural terrain of politics and the legitimacy of populist parties like Reform that eschew racism and ethno-nationalism. Rather than demonising opponents as bigots or elitists from our respective trenches we need a more expansive and representative centre ground that can accommodate both liberals and ‘decent populists’.

After the relative calm of the second half of the 20^th century, at least in most of the West, huge challenges are now piling up while the political ability to manage them is confronted by democratic electorates more demanding and divided than ever, hence our revolving door of Prime Ministers.

And if some strands of post-liberalism are part of the problem, the broader intuitions of the movement are a necessary part of the solution.

* Both Deneen and Pappin complained about how I represented their views in the original version of this essay. I have more sympathy with the complaint from Deneen, who often sounds like a moderate Burkean conservative, and have adjusted accordingly. Pappin claims not have said what I quote him as saying. I stand by the quote but accept that it does not necessarily imply Schmittian authoritarianism. I also accept the point, made by Deneen, that many American post-liberals, including him, do not support Donald Trump.

An edited version of this essay was published by Unherd on Sunday May 24th. I now have a website where I store most of my recent work, written and spoken, at davidgoodhart.com

London is arguably the first great western capital city to pass this landmark, though that depends on where you draw the boundaries around Washington and on excluding Brussels as an “embassy capital” special case.

In any case, it is a remarkable event for London and one that was unexpected. However, the London Evening Standard, the capital’s main evening paper, tucked it away on page 10 on the day of the announcement, and the BBC London television news had it as the seventh item that evening. London mayor Boris Johnson’s usually ubiquitous blond bob was nowhere to be seen.

Two days later I met a senior official from his Greater London Authority who, when asked about the figures, said “What’s the fuss?”

This studied indifference of London’s political and media elite appears to be in sharp contrast to the feelings of many of the white British people who live in less salubrious parts of the city. For it is important to understand that the proportion of white British Londoners fell so dramatically – from 60 per cent in 2001 to 44.9 per cent in 2011 – not only due to high levels of immigration but also because of a mass exodus of white Britons.

Over the decade between the 2001 and 2011 censuses, the number of white British Londoners fell by more than 600,000 (17 per cent). That is around three times the fall over the previous census period, 1991 to 2001.

“Most of the leading academic geographers did not expect London to become a majority minority city for another 20 or 30 years, they underestimated the extent to which White British people have opted to leave an increasingly diverse London,” says Eric Kaufmann an academic at Birkbeck College who is leading a project on “white flight” at Demos, the think tank I lead.

White flight is an emotive term which suggests discomfort with the changing racial composition of a neighbourhood. Clearly there are many other reasons why white British people might want to leave London – house prices, schools, fresh air and so on – but there appears to be prima facie evidence that white flight has played a role merely by considering where it is happening.

In Barking and Dagenham, for example, notorious for the brief success of the far-right British National Party in the late 2000s, the white British population fell by 40,000, almost one-third, between 2001 and 2011. Other increasingly diverse outer London boroughs such as Redbridge and Hillingdon have also experienced large falls in their white British population.

Does white flight always have to be the other side of the coin of large-scale immigration? It is a remarkably understudied phenomenon, perhaps because it is based on a notion of group identities and affinities that most liberal, individualistic academics do not feel or understand and tend to stigmatise as “racist,” at least when expressed by white people. But one of the interesting things about white flight is that it has continued, and in the case of London apparently increased, at a time when racist attitudes have been in sharp decline.

Some of the blame for this must lie with a modern political mind – of both left and right wingers – which has failed to understand some quite normal human feelings about rapid change and the unfamiliar, and has failed, too, to think more carefully about how to make it easier for different kinds of people to live alongside each other sharing common spaces in mutual trust.

So noisily have London’s political leaders been celebrating the diversity of their multiracial city that they have forgotten to see what is happening under their noses. If you walk around the city centre you see racially mixed pavements, shops, buses, tubes and even workplaces. But there is also a great deal of what the Americans call “sundown segregation”: if you followed people home you would find yourself in some of the most ethnically segregated places in Britain.

In large parts of the city white British people who can move are doing so: already less than one-third of the population is white British in Tower Hamlets, Harrow, Ealing, Brent and Newham. And London’s state schools are increasingly segregated too: although about 60 per cent of London’s south Asian population live in majority white areas, only about one-third of south Asian primary school pupils attend a majority white school.

The story is not all separation and segregation. The census revealed that the mixed race population of Britain, a large proportion of which lives in London, is now 1.2m. There is also, as in many of America’s biggest cities, some reverse white flight with middle class young people moving back into parts of the ethnic minority inner city.

The census data on the white exodus from London underlines just how remarkable Boris Johnson’s re-election was given the fact that most minority groups still overwhelmingly prefer Labour, at least in national elections. Perhaps his election is a sign of things to come with socially conservative urban ethnic minority voters switching to the Conservatives and the Godless, liberal suburbs turning to the red of Labour.

This piece was published around Christmas 2012 when I was director of the think tank Demos and had just launched a major “integration hub” project. There is much continuity between the indifference shown then and now towards the majority-minority transition. One change, the FT worldview is more overtly progressive and I think it highly unlikely that an equivalent piece would be published today (do prove me wrong if anyone from the FT reads this!).

Since history speeded up in the 18th/19th century after the industrial revolution and the emergence of modern nation states there have been few periods of relative calm. Consider the first half of the 20th century. But maybe the second half of the 20th century will, in retrospect, be regarded as one such period of calm. It was reflected in our politics by a stable two-party system that for all the sharp economic divides reflected widespread agreement on basic values and Britain’s place in the world. That system is now breaking up in response to some of those forces listed above.

But there are also deeper trends beneath the surface that are eroding centuries and even millennia-long certainties and contributing to a sense of disorientation for many. The loss of religion is one. It is only in the past couple of generations that mass secularisation has taken hold in most Western countries. Notwithstanding the strong traces of Christian belief that still animate public and private life this has removed a handrail of daily ritual and moral guidance. The changing relationship between the sexes is another. Women’s financial autonomy and mass entry into work (outside the home) and public life represents the biggest increase in human freedom since 1945, at least in the West. But, as Helen Andrews has pointed out, female domination of institutions such as education and the law is historically unprecedented and meanwhile many men have lost their role as main family provider and found nothing satisfactory in its place.

There is a third deeper shift. Within the life-time of today’s young adults the ethnic majority in many democratic nation states in Europe and North America will fall below half of the population. For most of human history people did not live in nation states but generally lived in relatively homogenous groupings, often within bigger imperial structures. Over the past 150 years, and much longer in the case of older nations like England/Britain and France, most European nations have crystallised, sometimes bloodily, around ethnic cores. (There are exceptions and caveats such as the dual or multiple ethnicity Belgians and Swiss, and immigrant lands such as the US, where the WASP core lost its majority more than a century ago but expanded its self-conception to include others of European descent.)

These ethnic cores are now diluting fast. Whether from colonial obligation, appetite for workers or generosity to refugees, the second half of the 20th century saw most big European states become multi-ethnic, not without some friction, but with visible (ie not white) ethnic minorities generally accounting for just single figure percentages of the population by the end of the century. Yet in Britain today nearly 20% of the population is foreign born and the White British core has shrunk from almost 90% in 2000 to around 70% today (lower in England alone). Just 53% of births in 2025 were to White British mothers. Britain is on track to become majority-minority some time in the 2060s, though that depends on levels of immigration and also on how quickly the mixed-race population, now around 3%, grows (the grandchildren of mixed-race couples usually identify as White British).

London, Birmingham, Manchester, Leicester and Luton are already majority-minority, not always happily, and many other cities and larger towns are getting close. In the capital only around one third of the population remains White British and just 20% of school children. Around one fifth of the total White British population are probably already living in majority-minority towns or cities.

In many places this transition will have happened without overt friction and in some places without people even noticing, especially younger people in sprawling metropolitan centres. In other places, especially less affluent places with other stresses and strains, it has become associated with decline, neglect and low level disorder, especially by a white working class that carried most of the initial burden of adjustment to new arrivals. It is surely a big factor behind the ‘raising the colours’ movement and the recent noise around British ethno-nationalism, for and against.

It is hard to ascertain just how much the ethnic shift is impacting the consciousness of the average member of the White British majority, partly because it remains a semi-taboo subject. Yet the rise of Trump in America and populist parties in Europe is usually assumed to be driven in part by those who are discomforted by the transition, fear the loss of a common life and blame elites for minority favouritism.

In public, the preference for lower levels of immigration is generally framed in the language of pressures on infrastructure and public services rather than the more intangible desire to continue living in places dominated by people who look like you or at least broadly share your way of life. But significant numbers also complain in polls of feeling a stranger in their own land and if one observes patterns of settlement and segregation it is clear that members of the majority (of all political persuasions) tend to move to areas where their group is dominant just as minorities tend to cluster together.

So what? Was the famous response of former Tory cabinet minister Sajid Javid to the advance of majority-minority Britain. Most politicians and commentators have little sympathy for expressions of anxiety about the transition. Those like Nigel Farage and Robert Jenrick, who have drawn attention to it, are damned as divisive.

But it is surely a very big social fact that must be possible to discuss in a rational manner without either promoting bigotry or assuming that those who do admit to anxiety about the big changes to their town or neighbourhood are themselves bigots. It is a failure of imagination and empathy on the part of liberal Britain to struggle to accept that a White British person can feel no personal prejudice against minorities, indeed can have workmates, friends and even spouses from other races and ethnicities, yet also have a strong preference to preserve the majority way of life where they live and in the country as a whole.

A word about language. Ethnicity just means shared ancestry, and often shared myths/symbols of that ancestry, it is not the same as race. The English, Spanish and Bulgarians are the same race but different ethnicities. The official ONS label of White British may not be an entity that many people feel they belong to but there is nothing sinister, let alone ‘ethno-nationalist’, about it, and it is already a multi-ethnic category including the English, Scottish, Welsh and some Northern Irish. In my view Englishness should also be regarded as an ‘open’ ethnicity (in other words civic, like Britishness, as well as strictly ethnic), and one that includes people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds, such as the India-descent Rishi Sunak or the Persian-Indian-descent Freddie Mercury.

Of course, most of us, especially if we live in a high-churn metropolitan centre, are largely oblivious to ethnicity in our daily lives, and only a small minority from the White British ethnic majority continue to feel racial antipathy or fear. Such obliviousness is often seen as a marker of what it is to be a sophisticated, modern citizen.

In mass societies you cannot see at an individual level whether a stranger from a minority race or ethnicity (or indeed someone from the majority) feels comfortably part of mainstream British society. You cannot assume that fellow-citizen solidarity is at least as important to any given individual than more particular co-ethnic, religious, regional or other attachments. Indeed, it is clearly not as important for some religious minorities, particularly many Muslims and also, but in far fewer numbers, Orthodox Jews and Roma.

Yet when you move from the individual level to that of the town or neighbourhood patterns of settlement and attachment become visible. And in Britain today there are, broadly, three kinds of demographic zones: places that remain heavily White British, mixed areas with a shrinking majority, and minority dominated areas, in some places dominated by one minority, ie British Bangladeshis in Tower Hamlets.

From this demographic pattern two main models for the majority-minority future are now emerging, an integration model and a segregation one. Even many middle England towns that are still heavily dominated by the White British, for example Abingdon in Oxfordshire, will typically now have a significant ethnic minority population of around 15%, most of whom are second or third generation immigrants, tend to speak with local accents, are largely absorbed into the majority way of life, with some cultural and religious distinctions, and often inter-marry with the majority. There is no single minority dominating (the biggest in Abingdon are East Europeans and South Asians) and little neighbourhood segregation. In the next few decades the minority population there, and in similar relatively affluent places (say Warwick in the Midlands, Sale in the North), will grow to 30 or 35% but in a manner that is set to be comfortably accommodated by the majority.

At the other end of the spectrum is a place like Bradford which is 40% minority and has distinct minority zones, where most people dress differently, often speak a different language, consume different media and often follow politics more closely in countries of ancestry, partner only within their minority, go to largely mono-ethnic schools, and live by significantly different norms (religiosity, sex equality) to the White British majority, especially in the Pakistani areas. In the next few decades Bradford will become not just majority-minority but majority Pakistani, as the White British population dies or moves out.

The future will be a mix of Abingdons and Bradfords, with more affluent places leaning towards the former and less affluent, especially those with significant Muslim populations, towards the latter (some poorer regions like the North-East and Cornwall will remain overwhelmingly White British).

All the evidence we have from surveys and observation makes it clear that most people from the majority are happy to live in mixed places where their group continues to dominate numerically and minorities broadly fit in with majority ways of life. This can also happen in places far more diverse than Abingdon where the minority population is already more than one third—Reading, Watford, Milton Keynes and parts of Manchester might fit this description—places with large minorities and relatively comfortable levels of integration that could be the model for a future soft-landing.

What is meant by that phrase majority way of life—open to all comers—is hard to pin down but would include, as a minimum, common language (meaning fluent, idiomatic English), dress, and norms of public behaviour, some local attachments through sport/ media consumption, and easy mixing across lines of class and ethnicity in so-called third spaces (meaning neither home, nor work) such as pubs and cafes. At a national level it would include some sense of a shared history and Britain as a secular democracy but with a continuing attachment to Christian-influenced symbols and rituals, such as Remembrance Day or the 2023 Coronation, and some degree of emotional citizenship, with people feeling part of a common team and national story.

This majority way of life is something shaped by the White British but is fluid and evolving and open to people of all races and ethnicities who are also increasingly coming to mould it too.

Rapid ethnic change impacts the majority way of life and hence politics in many, often subterranean, ways as we move from an era of metropolitan openness to one of provincial insecurity. In Britain the US’s red state/blue state fault-line takes the shape of blue state big cities, ethnically diverse (often with single minority enclaves) and full of the highly educated and politically liberal, and red state towns and the countryside, that are older, less diverse and more conservative. (The Gorton and Denton by-election constituency in Manchester is an intriguing combination of the two.)

National identity remains important to most people, both majority and minority, but strong national allegiance has been in decline as has social solidarity, in 1989 61% of people thought spending on the poor should be higher even if it meant higher taxes, today the figure is 37%.

Other negative trends such as the decline in trust and volunteering—regular volunteering is down from 27% to 16% of the population in the past decade—and the closure of pubs and other third spaces have many causes, but population churn and demographic change is one of them. Civic pride is lowest in areas of high diversity and deprivation. (Muslims volunteer more than average but much of it is in-group.)

These declines are probably the inevitable consequences of a more diverse and individualistic society, which brings many benefits too, but they do not bode well for dealing with the big collective challenges we face.

Rights or Interests?

If politics is now increasingly impacted by ethnic majority decline, and attempts to slow it down, then it begs the question: should we think of shrinking majorities, as well as minorities, as having rights?

Constraints on majoritarianism is one of the basics of ‘essential liberalism’ and the rule of law. If majorities favour themselves, minorities will potentially suffer, hence the need for minority rights and anti-discrimination laws. But as majorities shrink in size and the common norms they have forged over time are no longer taken for granted, do majorities themselves need protection? This is the implicit promise of many populist parties.

Academics such as Ruud Koopmans, Liav Orgad and Eric Kaufmann argue that majorities are the absent centre in liberal democratic thinking. Political progress and much liberal political theorising for the past two centuries has focused on limiting and spreading power and thus, in part, on preventing majorities from abusing their dominance.

But two of the great progressive causes of the late 19th century were extending the franchise to all classes and to women—so creating the modern democratic majority—while also securing the equal rights of minorities: Catholics, Jews and non-conformists in Britain. So, historically speaking, majority and minority rights were not in conflict.

Yet, once the right of minorities to join the majority in full citizenship had been achieved, the focus shifted in the mid and later 20th century, in the shadow of war and genocide, to the right of minorities to be different from the majority. The universalist shift of the mid-20th century, codified in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (1948), proclaimed the moral equality of all human beings and, implicitly, the right of individuals to practice a religion or a distinct way of life wherever they might find themselves.

In the context of significant non-Western immigration into Western societies in the 1960s and 1970s, the message of liberal or laissez-faire multiculturalism was often “come here and remain yourself”. The mainly progressive-minded people who were managing immigration at local level believed that because all cultures are worthy of respect it was wrong to force newcomers to adopt the common norms and way of life of the majority society beyond obeying the law and paying your taxes.

This may have provided a psychological soft landing to minority groups, especially from traditional societies, arriving in increasingly pluralistic and liberal Western societies but it was also a recipe for ethnic Balkanisation—see the Bradford, Leicester or Luton segregation model—and majority resentment, underpinned, in Eric Kaufmann’s memorable phrase, by “asymmetrical multiculturalism”.

This means that minorities have a way of life and a culture—an ethno-nationalism even—that is usually important to them, indeed is part of their identity as human beings, and this needs legal protection and recognition in liberal democracies, but majorities do not need the same protection for their way of life.

Two reasons are usually given in defence of this asymmetry. First, majorities do not need special rights or protections in the way that minorities do because their culture and way of life is already pervasive: the language that is spoken everywhere, the national ceremonies and rituals, the culture and history that is transmitted through the school system, and so on.

Second, while ethnic majorities may share common ancestry in a rather fuzzy sense, there is no identifiable majority culture or single way of life any more, there is too much value and life-style diversity, too many different tribes in today’s Britain.

Christian Joppke, an academic on the other side of the argument to Kaufmann, rejects the idea that there is a dominant ethnicity in a country like France or Germany but then also argues that majorities do not in any case need protection. “Majorities by definition have the democratic process at their disposal, they do not need the legal process which is the domain of rights”.

It is true that the forces that make integrating minorities harder—live and let live individualism, multiculturalism, personalisation of media consumption, identity politics and so on—also increasingly fragment the majority. Think of the gulf between a Reform-voting 65-year-old grandfather living in a small town in the north of England and a Green-voting, lesbian, web designer living in Hoxton. But do we still recognize something in common behind our different accents and life-styles?

It seems that many of us do. We may no longer think ethnically, or at least use the language of ethnicity, and most of us would be horrified if Robert Jenrick started talking about promoting white British values (even though his critics claim that is just what he is dog-whistling). But large majorities continue to value the idea of national solidarity and want newcomers, and established minorities, to commit to this society beyond an instrumental relationship to the evident benefits on offer.

Moreover, the main defence of asymmetrical multiculturalism, that the culture and way of life of the majority is too pervasive to require protection, has been weakened by the demographic facts, some of which I pointed to above. In an increasing number of neighbourhoods, the majority way of life and its language and institutions—the shops, pubs, churches and so on—is no longer dominant. Moreover, there is a rising tide of complaint about two-tier justice and unfair privileging of some minorities in the name of social peace, especially Muslims (see the grooming gangs scandal and the latest Maccabi Tel Aviv row).

If there was no such thing as an ethnic majority way of life, however varied and hard to define, then nobody would care about its disappearance. Yet it is clear, as noted above, that a large minority or even a majority of citizens of the majority group do care about this erosion. And a smaller, radicalising number feel it as an existential threat, arguing that unlike many ethnic minorities with ancestral connections elsewhere they have nowhere else to go.

The claim that majorities are already protected is also weakened by the fact that majorities are not self-conscious agents in the democratic process. Apart from the new Muslim parties there are, thankfully, few religion or ethnicity-based political parties in the UK (though Sinn Fein, the SNP and Plaid Cymru all flirt with ethnicity, one reason they feel obliged to talk the language of universal progressivism so loudly). Majorities, especially the English, have a low political self-awareness, albeit one that is rising as their majority status is threatened in many places.

How should that rising self-awareness be channelled? Should liberal societies think harder about how to defend majority cultures or at least slow their decline? Can there be a right to remain a majority?

Legal rights for majorities are not practical or desirable. The state does not belong to the ethnic majority and the legal system, although granting group rights to minorities in some rather exceptional cases (for example, the Sikh motorcycle helmet exemption), should remain broadly indifferent to majority or minority status.

It is possible to imagine laws to protect the majority language from being over-shadowed in certain places and even to protect certain national rituals, but a more general right to lock in majority status would be divisive and impossible to enforce. It is more appropriate to think of concerns about majority decline as interests rather than legal rights, interests to which mainstream democratic politics should give voice to more than is usually the case at present.

What shape those interests should take will be worked out as part of national democratic conversations that depend on local circumstances. The right to remain the dominant, tone-setting group in any particular neighbourhood is not a right that any liberal society could easily grant as it would require restrictions on where people live, something that smacks of China or apartheid South Africa, though both Denmark and Singapore do try to enforce it.

Yet the idea of a stable and predictable life and a degree of control over one’s environment is precisely the promise that modern politics does hold out to citizens, of all backgrounds. And it is the promise that is most egregiously broken by indifference to high levels of immigration.

Stability need not mean ethnic homogeneity and stability is not only desired by majorities—consider the resentment among British Caribbeans at the way they are being driven out of their Brixton by affluent whites or Shabana Mahmood’s anger at queue-jumping illegal immigrants on behalf of her British Pakistani constituents.

Multi-ethnic, not Multi-cultural

So, what policies could reassure people that where they live will end up more like Abingdon than Bradford? Here are a few: much lower immigration for many years to ensure a degree of demographic stability; manage settlement to favour skilled/educated minorities more likely to mix easily with the majority; more emphasis from public authorities on integration of newcomers into common norms than on diversity and difference, and the phasing out of any affirmative action; insistence on English alone being the language of the state and public services; encouragement in the public sphere (including schools) to celebrate a non-chauvinistic version of the national story; prioritising the claims of citizens, and long-term residency, in social housing and welfare (and in the longer run returning to a more contributory welfare system); public subsidy of pubs and other traditional majority institutions that are disappearing; proper records of who is in the country and moving across its borders with rigorous inflow and outflow checks, and a household register or national identity scheme.

A bigger theme (too big for here), stressed by David Willetts and others, is that Brexit’s global turn in geo-politics and immigration was also the wrong direction demographically and should be reversed. We should be more open to Poles or Romanians than Somalis or Pakistanis.

Not all these things are easily subject to legislation, and some would be expensive, but there are other ways of promoting desirable things than through law. Well-designed “nudges” may be more effective than legislation in encouraging people to integrate around broad common norms and think of each other as sharing common interests as citizens, perhaps above all the common interest in a better life for one’s children.

Jonathan Haidt, talking about race in the US, puts it like this: “You can make people care less about race by drowning race differences in a sea of similarities, shared goals and mutual interdependencies.”

Many of the proposals above have been the stuff of debates and commissions on integration and social cohesion for many decades, yet hardly any have come to pass (will the current Together Coalition’s commission be any different?). That is partly because of legal obstacles and partly because of a liberal politics that takes as its starting point individual rights. Societies are not, however, just random collections of rights-bearing individuals but feature group attachments, including among the majority, that politicians struggle to articulate for fear of disadvantaging minorities.

Yet the desire to retain a majority way of life is usually a defensive not an assertive sentiment and is not in principle hostile to settled minority groups and minority rights. Indeed, majorities and most minorities usually want broadly the same thing on mixing, the big exception being more separatist Muslims.

The failure of mainstream politics to recognize majority feelings is a political mistake that has created a space for the extreme right to exploit. And would Donald Trump be US President today if not for the demographic anxiety of lower-status whites—non-Hispanic whites now make up just 55 percent of the US population—people who are irked to have to press one for English on automated phone systems?

On the other hand, maybe this whole argument is old hat and the concern for majority rights is a swan song for a dying idea of national identity in super-diverse, hyper-individualistic countries. Perhaps as people become more educated and mobile, they will draw their identities less from place and group and history and more from inside themselves, from their distinct personalities and temperaments, making them less concerned with maintaining stable communities. This is already true for some highly educated, mobile Anywheres. I doubt it will spread to majorities any time soon.

But if ethnic majorities are destined to lose their majority status and become just the largest minority among others, we are left with another question. Is it possible to retain a strong sense of common interest and mutual regard in a society not grounded in an ethnic majority? Will it be possible to demand high levels of tax and redistribution in welfare states—already faced with a squeeze on productive workers thanks to falling fertility—without the reflex of solidarity provided by the backdrop of an ethnic majority? Will there instead be more overt communalism, already evident in places like Tower Hamlets, and ethnic conflict over resources? Even a return to overt racism already increasingly evident on social media?

In parts of Britain today the secular, individualistic culture of the majority is being supplanted by tight-knit, high-solidarity, religious cultures. Biraderi-style clannishness is the unwelcome underbelly of multi-ethnic Britain. And our future challenge is how to reconcile a reviving majority identity, in some places with an ugly ethno-nationalist face, with an assertive Islamic conservatism.

No one knows how this well evolve, though we do know from history that declining majorities can lash out (see Russians, Serbs and Ulster Protestants in recent decades). So, it is best to move with caution and hope that a majority-friendly, but multi-ethnic, sense of national community can take root replicating some of the effects of a majority ethnicity even as it is leaving the stage.

For many people, especially on the left, the very idea of the national feels dowdy, old-fashioned and uninspiring, if not downright reactionary. On the contrary, an over-arching national story that can appeal to the widest possible range of British lives with vivid language and symbols, a story that respects and celebrates the historic ethnic core but is not limited to it, remains a permanent and ambitious, maybe even utopian, project, and one that has hitherto eluded our politicians (remember Gordon Brown on Britishness?) and other meaning-creators.

As the author Lorenzo Warby puts it, it should be a multi-ethnic story but not a multicultural one. His local cafe in Melbourne provides a template for what we need.

“The local cafe I go to most regularly is very Western Melbourne. It is an ordinary cafe in a local suburban mall. Its clientele represents the enormous ethnic diversity of the area. It is run by a Chinese-Australian family some of whom have very Australian accents. Its customers include East Africans, South Asians (Sikh, Hindu, Muslim), East Asians, Pacific Islanders, Central Europeans, Anglo-Celts.

“So, the cafe is very multi-ethnic. It is, however, not multi-cultural. Folk may come from several continents and island chains, but they all follow Anglo-Celtic norms. They queue, they interact, they show courtesies, according to Anglo-Celtic norms. Going about their business, they do not spit on the ground. They do not litter. The place and its surrounds feels very Australian.

“How so? Because of how Australian migration policy works. Migrants to Australia are, on average, better educated than native-born Australians. They are also split among lots of small groups. Anglo-Celts may not be a majority in the area, or even of the customers, but they are by far the biggest group. So, the varied groups of migrants gravitate towards the norms of the Anglo-Celts.”

That’s a template worth reaching for and it could unite both those who think it unbecoming to worry about the decline of the White British majority and those who think it peculiar not to. For this is Britain’s increasingly central, though largely unspoken, political divide.

This piece is adapted from an essay in the collection ‘Majorities, Minorities and the Future of Nationhood’ (CUP 2023), edited by Liav Orgad and Ruud Koopmans

I don’t wish to be too harsh on Andrew. He wrote some excellent essays for me when I edited Prospect magazine, including an updating of George Orwell’s famous essay Politics and the English Language. I admired him as the BBC Political Editor though found his subsequent journalism a wee bit too centre-left group think.

Andrew is 66 years old, so would have become a politically conscious young adult in the late 1970s just as Labour was giving way to the new Thatcher era. So he lived through the Thatcher and Major years. And we are now more right-wing?

After I stopped giggling, my immediate thought was that this is wrong on almost any dimension you care to consider, (bar one that might have prompted Marr’s peculiar statement, which I will consider later). The size of the state; levels of tax and redistribution; public spending on health, welfare and disabilities; income and wealth inequality, poverty levels; the level of the minimum wage; regulation of business; representation of women and minorities in the professions and political class; social mobility/openness of the elite; proportion of school-leavers going to university; protection of human rights (including the rights of those who are not British citizens); scale and speed of immigration; levels of value and ethnic diversity; investment in de-carbonisation.

What would one expect the most right-wing Britain since the late 1970s to look like? For convenience one might divide the answer into economic and socio-cultural. On the economic side one would expect the size of the state to be below 40%; the tax burden overall, and especially on the rich, to be relatively light; social spending to be lower than the 1980s, probably thanks to private insurance having increasingly replaced the NHS and other once publicly-funded services among the middle class; levels of inequality and poverty to be at all time highs with a privately educated elite more entrenched than ever; the minimum wage to have fallen sharply relative to average earnings, and an easy hire and fire business culture.

Is this an accurate picture of modern Britain? No it is not. The size of the state is currently 45% and heading north. As Robert Colvile put it recently we have had “one-way Keynesianism” in which Chancellors are happy to run deficits when times are tough but don’t then pay them down when recovery comes. The overall tax burden is on track to reach 38% of GDP the highest level since the war and a full 11 percentage points higher than in 1993. And believe it or not Britain has the most progressive tax system in Europe, with high earners paying more relative to the average than anywhere else (the top 0.1% of earners pay more income tax than the bottom 50%).

Social spending, depending on how you count it and partly thanks to the historic decline in defence spending, has never been higher in both absolute and per capita terms. Nearly 25% of GDP is spent on health and welfare, the highest proportion ever. There are many benefits, especially those associated with disability, that didn’t exist at all through much of Andrew’s adult life, and others such as housing benefit and SEN that now pay out many multiples of what was being paid in the 1980s and 1990s. To give just one example, on current trends we will be spending £30bn a year on personal independence payments at the end of the decade compared with £12.5bn at the start.

Income inequality has been high by international standards since the Thatcher/Lawson reforms of the late 1980s but the Gini co-efficient inequality metric at 32.9% is now significantly lower than it was during most of the New Labour era, peaking at 38% in 2008. Wealth inequality is low by international standards because of home ownership and private pensions being widely spread but has not changed much in relative terms in recent years, despite asset price rises. The poverty rate - a relative measure, so it is really a measure of how compressed incomes are - is around 21% but markedly lower than in the 1980s and 1990s, partly thanks to a reduction in pensioner poverty.

The minimum wage is now two-thirds of median hourly earnings, the highest it has ever been, and one of the highest in Europe. Meanwhile, the regulatory burden on business has never been higher and the relative ease of hiring and firing established during the Thatcher era has been substantially reversed, even before the current employment legislation is enacted.

Considering the two economic crises of recent times, the financial crash and the pandemic, what one might call the “right wing” one caused by complacent and greedy bankers (albeit abetted by governments) has been far less costly than the “left wing” one caused by the need to protect people from harm and pay people not to work. The first crisis is estimated to have cost a bit more than 1% of GDP, the pandemic closer to 15%.

How about the socio-cultural sphere? What would the most right-wing Britain of the past 40 years look like here? It would not have an Equalities Act and extensive anti-discrimination legislation, nor a Human Rights Act, both of which are the product of the last 25 years. Women and minorities would be barely visible in politics and the higher professions and there would be large ethnic and gender pay gaps. Only about 15% of the population would go to university and elite universities and most institutions, including Parliament, would be dominated by those educated at public school. This is more or less how Britain looked in the 1980s.

Does it look anything like today’s Britain? Of course not. The forward march of women and minorities has accelerated fast since the 1980s in both the higher professions and the political class. Ethnic and gender pay gaps are at all time lows. Women represent 47% of public appointments and 40% of MPs, both records. In the past decade ethnic minority individuals have occupied all the great political offices of state, including PM.

The elite is also more socially open than most people think, thanks in part to the unfortunate coincidence of two Etonian PMs in quick succession. The privately educated are still over-represented but they have less of a grip on the higher echelons of British society than was the case in the 1980s/1990s. When Andrew went to Cambridge in the late 1970s, the public school educated like him (and me) were around 50% or more of the intake at both Cambridge and Oxford, it is now down to 25% or lower. And in the House of Commons the change, though little noticed, has been even more dramatic. The Commons was majority privately educated through much of the 1980s until the Tory party switched to being majority state educated in the 2010s. Today’s huge Labour majority means the Commons is now 23% privately educated, but even after the 2019 Tory victory the overall proportion was 29%. Moreover, today’s percentage does not represent a huge public school over-representation as the 7% figure usually quoted of the cohort privately educated is a significant under-estimate if you include those who have spent two years or more in private education which pushes the number up to around 12 or even 15%. (And judging by opinion polls and from the personal experience of giving political talks at public schools, never have the children of privilege been more woke in worldview. I literally made pupils cry on one occasion by pointing to some of the facts cited earlier.)

Social mobility is notoriously difficult to measure and it is probably true that movement into the professional and managerial class by people from lower status backgrounds has slowed somewhat in recent decades. That is caused primarily by the slowdown in the expansion of those professional and managerial jobs which expanded rapidly from the 1960s to the 1990s. There is now less room at the top but that does not mean that mobility does not still happen. A further contribution to the slow-down is probably attributable to the expansion of a higher education system dominated by the middle and upper-middle classes, whose children, even those of very average abilities, have acquired credentials to prevent the downward mobility that might otherwise have been their fate. But that is an unintended “right wing” outcome from what is still usually regarded as a “left wing” development, the expansion of HE. When Andrew went to university less that 10% of school leavers did so, meaning that most professional people acquired qualifications on the job, while today nearly 50% of school leavers go to college, and substantially more women than men.

Looking at education more broadly, the explicit and central goal of the Department for Education, under governments of all stripes, has been to reduce the social class gap in educational outcomes. There has been limited success in achieving this goal but the Gove reforms contributed to some progress towards narrowing the gap, at least until the pandemic. And Britain has one of the best records in Europe for the educational outcomes of ethnic minorities.

The incorporation of the Human Rights Act into UK law in 1998, notwithstanding its failings and unintended consequences, has undoubtedly given more rights and protections to both British people and anyone in the legal space of the UK. To take just one example, until the late 1980s illegal immigrants were simply detained and removed. Then a series of ECHR judgements made that harder until the incorporation of the HRA made it impossible. And we live with the all too visible consequences today.

Assuming being open to immigration is more left-wing than right-wing then Britain has swung substantially to the left since 1997 when the immigration “pause” of the 1980/90s came to an end. Since 2000 around 18m immigrants have come to Britain, that translates into a net total of 7m, a large proportion of whom will be here permanently. The ethnic composition of the UK has changed dramatically since the turn of the century when almost 90% of the population was white British, that has now fallen to around 70%, and maybe as low as 66/67% in England alone, meaning an increasing number of cities, towns and neighbourhoods are now majority-minority. In London only 20% of school-children are white British. Also, the foreign-born share of the UK population has risen from 8.3% in 2001 to around 20% now.

Diversity has trumped solidarity out of a mixture of path dependency and active political decisions such as the 2004 New Labour decision to open the UK labour market to the new arrivals into the EU from eastern/central Europe seven years before necessary.

Finally, assuming environmentalism and tackling climate change counts as an idea with its roots on the left, then again the UK has swung substantially to the left in the past 20 years. The country boasts the fastest reduction in emissions of any large country and has disincentivised oil extraction in the UK North Sea, though we now merely import our emissions and bear crushingly high energy prices, especially for industry.

Taking into account all of the above it would be far more plausible to argue the opposite of Marr’s claim - that Britain has never been more left-wing in his lifetime - though that doesn’t feel quite right either. The continuing widening of the North-South divide and the detachment of London from the rest of the country plus the decline of international connection and collaboration - consider the grotesque failure of cooperation between the UK and France on Channel boats - might be classified as right-wing failings. The latter is partly the result of Brexit, though it is often forgotten that nearly two-thirds of Tory MPs voted remain in 2016. The former is a failure of both major parties and it was the Tories who came up with the most concerted plan for levelling up in 2019 before it was de-railed by the pandemic.

British society currently feels blocked and gloomy, and low growth makes society feel less fair than in, say, the higher growth 1990s/2000s, even if by most objective measures it isn’t. Yet, applying the famous veil of ignorance test - meaning if you had no idea what position in society you were going to be born into when would you choose to be born in recent decades - it would be hard not to choose the present.

Marr made his statement in the context of a discussion of the minor differences in outlook between the two candidates for Labour deputy leader - Bridget Phillipson and Lucy Powell. He was comparing the dullness and conformism of that contest with the romantic days of his leftist youth and the Healey v Benn battle for the Labour deputy leadership in 1981. There was then a real ideological battle between the mixed economy status quo represented by Healey and the socialist Alternative Economic Plan of import controls and state ownership. It is true that proposals for public ownership - with the exception of trains and water - do not feature much today in mainstream politics, though the former Bennite Jeremy Corbyn is still with us and his party, along with the Greens, speak for at least 15% of the electorate.

I suspect the main inspiration for Marr’s claim, however, is the way that rhetoric on immigration has shifted in recent months, so that the mass deportation of immigrants is now part of mainstream debate. It is an emotional response, a kind of Anywhere lament, to flags, Reform riding high in the polls etc. But this movement in the Overton window has come in response to big changes in the real world, notably the truly astonishing inflows of the so-called Boriswave. It is true that the small number of real racists in British society seem to have been emboldened by this shift - as Shabana Mahmood reported so dramatically in the House of Commons - and it is a sad fact that thanks to the amplification effect of social media a small number of bad actors can have an outsize effect. This is not, however, a good reason to reject robust measures, and language, to deal with unprecedented levels of legal and illegal migration, as Mahmood so powerfully argued. Suppressing discussion about things that people can see in their daily lives does not make peoples’ fears and resentments disappear, rather it magnifies them. Considering the damage that has been caused by excessive sensitivity to the racism accusation - from the grooming gangs to the Manchester arena bomb - more honesty and direct language is welcome.

A final reflection. The fact that two leading members of the centre-left establishment should apparently agree on such an outlandish assertion does tell us something interesting about these times, and maybe about the failure of the current Labour Government. Marr, I think, reflects the damaging effect of the hyper-partisan rhetoric that surrounded the long period of Tory rule, and especially its declining years.

The reality of British politics is that there is a high degree of consensus across the two main parties on everything from the need to control immigration more effectively, to slashing regulation in order to build more houses and boost economic growth, to reining in welfare spending and promoting more public and private investment. Yet commentators, especially on the left, instead of seeing the large degree of continuity between the New Labour years and the 14 years of Tory rule have focused ovewhelmingly on austerity, the limited attempt to hold back public spending, and an imaginary increase in inequality. (I have lost count of the number of times I have read or heard people on the left confidently asserting that inequality has increased sharply in recent years.)

We live in a somewhat social democratic liberal democracy, and 14 years of Tory rule did little to dent it. The fact that so few people appear to believe that may be a function of the so-called De Toqueville paradox. The idea that when social conditions improve, expectations of further improvement become more powerful than satisfaction with what has been achieved. This might be said to describe the state of mind of a fair number of Labour MPs, and voters.

Judging by their preferred rhetoric about the Tories and the rich, Labour leaders seem to genuinely believe that they are rebalancing the country in the interests of “working people”—more workers rights, more NHS spending—after a period in which their interests have been ignored by a hard-nosed, right-wing Government.

This collective mis-reading of the recent past has left Labour psychologically ill-equipped to tackle so many of our current problems, most of which are the unintended consequence, or overshoots, of centre-left priorities established in the New Labour era: unsustainable welfare/disability spending, erosion of work ethic, over-regulation of business and crippling energy costs, declining productivity in the NHS and elsewhere in the public sector, an education/training system that over-produces people with generalist academic qualifications and under produces people with the manual and technical skills to build houses and power stations, unpopular levels of both legal and illegal immigration.

A disinclination to consider that its own past policy priorities may have contributed to Britain’s torpor is one reason Labour was so poorly prepared for office. Prior to the election little thought was given to, among other things, how to reduce welfare spending in a humane way or how to distinguish the productive from the unproductive rich in the tax system and increase the tax burden fairly on the average earner.

It is rightly said that in the 1980s the right won the economic argument but the left won the social and cultural argument. This was both cause and consequence of two generations of middle class professionals turning to the left. But it turns out that winning the social and cultural argument is the more important of the two for it places strict limits on right-wing, or even just sensible, economics. The capacity failure of the modern state, ever rising social spending, the crisis of the family, the epidemic of mental fragility among young people, the proliferation of bull-shit jobs for the academically credentialised, computer-says-no regulatory overkill, the excesses of progressive liberalism, could all be seen as the unintended consequences, the costly invoices, attached to the genuine progress that Andrew seems so reluctant to recognise.

The cultural adjustment our country needs does not require reversing either of the two great post-war revolutions - the welfare/redistribution revolution of the 1940s/50s or the equality revolution of the 1960/70s - and no government would get elected that proposed to do so. But both revolutions have also delivered us to this point: a low growth social democratic equilibrium that is not sustainable in its current form. A clear eyed programme of adjustment untethered from shibboleths of left or right is badly needed. It will not be delivered by people who still believe we are living in the 1980s.

Are men and women completely interchangeable? This is obviously an enormous subject, with many dimensions and nuances. One side in the debate, the care egalitarians, generally see biological differences as relatively unimportant and the big differences in behaviour as largely the product of social conditioning, reinforced by powerful norms, and therefore reformable. Androgyny still sometimes feels like the default position of official Britain with the goal of equal representation in all institutions and circumstances. (Though many feminists have abandoned the blank slate position of the 1970s and are now much more willing to accept the reality of significant average differences, reinforced by feminism’s reinvigoration around the immutability of sex differences in its battle with militant trans women.)

The care balancers, on the other hand, accept that differences are strongly reinforced by culture but argue that our different evolutionary roles have also bequeathed us some important innate differences. Women have babies and men don’t. Men are on average bigger and stronger than women. These two differences alone have a powerful influence on average behaviours.

Men and women have been under many of the same, but also many different, selection pressures over the course of history, and their bodies have evolved to do somewhat different things, as Caroline Criado Perez points out in her 2019 book Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, a critique of a world designed for the male body. Men are typically more aggressive, more risk taking and have a stronger sex drive than women. Men are a bit more interested in things and women in people. Sex differences in spatial intelligence are real, though not enormous.

All these things should not be controversial, especially when one introduces the important caveat that they are also ‘dimorphic’ differences, meaning different but overlapping, rather than binary. Think of two overlapping bell curves, side by side. Although men are on average more aggressive than women in aggregate, some individual women are more aggressive than some individual men. But also bear in mind that relatively modest average differences are often associated with much larger differences at the extremes. There are many more very aggressive men, who are disproportionately represented in prison and among domestic abusers, than very aggressive women.

Aggression differences are substantially driven by the hormone testosterone, which men have more of than women, as Harvard biologist Carole Hooven explains in her 2019 book Testosterone: The Story of the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us. It is also well established that levels of testosterone and aggression track each other over a lifetime, with both spiking in young adulthood and then trailing away. She notes, too, that women who transition to being men and who take testosterone as part of their transition report that they have higher sex drives and don’t cry as easily.

There are physiological differences everywhere in the body, including in the brain, which generally matures earlier in girls – one reason for the gender gap in education. And it is from these differences that some different behavioural traits arise. For example, two common female traits are higher levels of anxiety and greater agreeableness, and both are thought to stem from the basic one of women’s greater physical vulnerability.

The sex trade is another often-cited indicator of a big average difference, with around 99% of buyers of sex with strangers being men. This points to higher levels of socio-sexuality in men, meaning a desire for sexual variety and a greater ease of separating sex from emotional attachment.

In his discussion of sex differences in his book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It, Richard Reeves has a useful three-point list of how to think about these differences in an era of sex equality, embracing equality while acknowledging difference where relevant.

First, even if differences are innate (in the sense of arising from a biological difference), they can be magnified or muted by culture. And, indeed, the impact of sex differences on our comfortable, technology enhanced lives in the 21st century is diminishing: traditional masculine virtues such as physical courage and stoicism are less required in a mainly peaceful, post-industrial society, and women’s nurturing qualities count for less if they are not having children and are exercising a much wider range of emotions and aptitudes.

Second, many of the differences are only modest. On spatial intelligence, perhaps the most clearly established sex difference in all cognitive abilities, 70% of men are better than the average woman (meaning that 30% of men are worse than the average woman).

Third, average differences should not colour our view of individuals. Even if women are on average hardwired to be more nurturing than men – as they are – that does not prevent my youngest son from being a caring primary school teacher, and there are some women I know with no interest in children at all.

What does all this mean? Bearing in mind that there are only trivial differences on some of the most important things, like IQ, it is nevertheless the case that masculine traits can be more useful in some contexts and female ones in others. (On IQ there are more men found at the tails of stupidity and genius, with women clustering more around the middle.)

It also implies that there are limits to how far sex differences can simply be ignored. Young women should certainly continue to be encouraged into STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) jobs as there may well be cultural norms that cause underrepresentation, and also advantages in including women’s perspectives in those roles (given that girls do just as well if not better than boys in maths exams). However, that does not necessarily mean that a 50:50 balance is either possible or even desirable. The situation is similar for men moving into female-majority care jobs.

The same principle of openness to women should apply to all jobs requiring a high degree of typical male traits such as aggression and risk-taking. American feminist and Nobel prize-winning economist Claudia Goldin says that even though ‘there is lots of evidence that women on average take fewer risks and are less pushy’ than men, there are more women who are now competitive in high-risk financial market type jobs.

Reasonable people will disagree about when the barriers to equality have been sufficiently removed. In the UK, even when girls get good A-level grades in maths and physics, they are less likely to study them at university, while young women are hugely over-represented in the ‘caring’ sciences: almost two thirds of medical students are now women, almost all veterinary students and about 80% of psychology students.

The so-called gender equality paradox reinforces this point. The paradox states that in societies with deep gender equality norms, especially Nordic countries like Sweden, women are more likely to choose caring professions and less likely to be well represented in STEM disciplines. Highly patriarchal countries like Algeria, Tunisia and Turkey have a higher percentage of female STEM graduates (around 40%) than the Nordic countries (25% or less).

A famous paper by Gijsbert Stoet and David Geary found that looking at test scores across 67 countries girls performed just as well in science as boys, but in relative performance boys performed better in science overall compared with other subjects whereas girls were even stronger in their other subjects. Stoet/Geary argue that countries that empower women also empower them to pick whatever career they’ll enjoy most and perform best in.

The Stoet/Geary paper and, indeed, the idea that low STEM representation is an expression of women’s true preferences, has not gone unchallenged. Critics argue that gender norms remain strong even in egalitarian places like Sweden and that bright young women in poorer countries are more motivated to maximise income on behalf of families and hence choose higher-paying STEM careers.

But in Sweden there is sharp gender segregation not only in STEM versus care professions but also in the private sector, which is heavily male, versus the public sector, which is 75% female. The story is similar in other Nordic countries. By 2035 only 6 out of 35 Swedish professions are expected to be gender balanced. Swedish politics, at most levels, has an almost equal representation of men and women, but in leadership positions in the private sector women are much rarer. The US has a much higher share of female senior managers (43%) than the Nordic countries (31%).

Claudia Goldin, who is also one of the leading researchers of persistent labour market disadvantage for women, reckons that only about 20% of the residual pay gap is down to discrimination, with most of it based on women’s choices, reflecting the fact that they often choose jobs and careers that are better suited to combining with motherhood (part-time or easier to travel to) or offer more intrinsic satisfaction but lower pay.

In any case, this evidence supports a less dogmatic care balancer approach to the gender division of labour. What matters is not whether different choices are driven by innate differences or socialisation but the democratic honouring of people’s actual expressed preferences. No choices are completely free from social norms, but choices are not delegitimised simply because they are always constrained in some way. The alternative is a kind of Leninist assumption that care egalitarian policymakers know your true interests better than you do.

Moreover, there is a tension in the justifications for equal representation. Is it because men and women are the same, or is it because they are different? Is it that sex differences are irrelevant for almost all human functions so equal representation should be the natural state of affairs in a world without discrimination? Or, on the contrary, is it that women have a distinctively different perspective that is needed from the boardroom to the battlefield?

Both of these equality claims can be true in different contexts. But in other contexts neither of them are convincing and a gender divide still makes some sense. No one is campaigning for a gender balance among refuse collectors or prisoners. Likewise, there is no distinctively female approach to quantity surveying or nuclear engineering.

Gender roles, based on sex differences, have evidently become more elastic in recent decades, but they still exist. Most people experience them as positive things, as welcome parts of their identity. Some people at the most atypical end of their sex’s common characteristics are more likely to feel them as oppressive, most notoriously in the case of those who wish to transition. But this reinforces the case for flexibility in the way that gender roles are perceived, not for pretending they don’t (or shouldn’t) exist.

Sociologist Catherine Hakim describes three types of women in modern Britain—the work-centred (20%), the home-centred (20%) and the adaptive (60%) meaning those who wish to combine the two but when children are young prefer to work part-time or not at all for a few years. The three groups have different priorities, and probably different views of how to be a woman, but they have all benefited from greater opportunities and the shift in the balance of power and authority.

Patriarchy in the technical anthropological sense, meaning male control over women’s fertility and sexual behaviour, has not existed in a country like the UK for many generations. And in the more everyday sense of men having more power than women in the public sphere, we are probably in a transitional phase out of patriarchy.

Finnish demographer Anna Rotkirch describes this transition: “Traditional patriarchal societies are characterized by early and universal marriage, early and high fertility, and deference of the younger generations to the older generations and of women to men… More liberal and individualised societies have later and lower rates of marriage, later and lower fertility, more equality between both the generations and the two sexes, and much greater leeway for individual sexual behaviours and gender identities. These changes in power relations… shape the lives of many contemporary couples.”

Is it appropriate to talk about a shifting balance of power between men and women? Maybe a tangled dance of love and conflict, dependence and autonomy, is closer to the perplexing reality. Conservative feminist writer Louise Perry argues that because women (on average) are weaker and temperamentally more agreeable than men, there will always be a need for a women’s movement to protect their interests. After all, the most brutal form of power of men over women is evident in the murder and rape statistics.

But Perry also says that even before the big increase in female presence in the public realm in recent decades women have always wielded a kind of parallel power in the domestic realm. As one guest on her podcast put it: ‘Was your grandmother really powerless?’

As a young reporter on the York Evening Press in the early 1980s, one of my favourite jobs was interviewing older couples for the golden wedding anniversary page. These couples had married in the early 1930s, a few years after women had achieved political equality, and it was fascinating hearing their stories of courtship in the Depression years and then, often, wartime separation when children were young. They lived in an era of very different public gender norms and more constrained opportunities for ordinary women, but in most cases it was the woman who spoke for the couple and more often than not seemed the dominant (and certainly the most articulate) figure in the household. That may have been partly because the men, by then in their mid 70s, were often the physically weaker of the two. But abstract questions of gender power, while not irrelevant, seemed too crude to apply to such couples; they invariably agreed, in response to my stock question, that the secret of a long marriage was ‘give and take on both sides’.

Power or authority or agency in the private realm is rarely taken into account in discussions of gender power, maybe partly because it is harder to quantify than, say, the number of women in Parliament (now up to 40%) or FTSE 100 boardrooms. But after the initial surge of women into positions of power in the professional world in recent decades, the next wave can, perhaps, weigh up the options more objectively and appreciate that what often accompanies the under-esteeming of the domestic realm is the over-esteeming of the workplace.

Anne-Marie Slaughter, the American academic who once worked for Hilary Clinton at the State Department, expresses this scepticism, in her book Unfinished Business, about what one might call ‘male default feminism’. “My generation of feminists was raised to think the competitive work our fathers did was much more important than the caring work our mothers did… Women first had to gain power and independence by emulating men, but as we attain that power we must not automatically accept the traditional man’s view, actually the view of a minority of men, about what matters.”

Eliza Filby runs regular focus groups and finds that young women in their 20s, Generation Z, are increasingly shunning the committed career paths that their professional mothers took. And here is Jess Butcher, a tech entrepreneur in her early 40s, speaking in a TED Talk: “I am seeing a number of the highest professional flyers in my circle quietly ‘leaning out’ of ambitions of ‘making partner’… so as not to miss out on those precious early years of family life. Two years ago after losing two close friends to cancer I realised too that if I wasn’t careful I was going to miss those early years too, years I will never get back. So I made the decision to step back from the day-to-day-running of my business.”

Why does this seem an unusual, even countercultural thing to do? It is partly because most of the women who have dominated the public conversation about what women want are strongly public realm-orientated. Here is Joeli Brearley, founder of lobby group Pregnant Then Screwed: “Maternity leave can be desperately, achingly lonely… And at times being stuck at home with a tiny baby who needs you 24/7 can feel like staring straight into despair.” She cites a Pregnant Then Screwed survey that found 19% of mothers wish they had gone back to work earlier, a proportion roughly coinciding with Catherine Hakim’s work-focused women. This is an attitude that many male politicians can easily identify with.

But Louise Perry again: “Women with more masculine temperaments, women who are less inclined to have children, who are less agreeable and so on, are more likely to end up in senior positions in politics. And there is, therefore, a tendency to assume that this is a universal tendency among women and to make decisions accordingly. But it isn’t.” Many of the most successful female politicians are childless, as are about half of female academics.

Many women, in the words of podcaster Chris Williamson, have been encouraged to ‘work like your father and have sex like your brother’. This tendency of the dominant strand of feminism to promote more traditionally masculine traits like aggression and competitiveness and to downplay traditionally female traits such as nurture and agreeableness has been noted by many feminist writers including Ruby Warrington and Camille Paglia. It seems to suit some women, but not all.

Perry now also regrets the libertarian turn that feminism took in the 1970s and sees aspects of the sexual revolution as regressive. The arrival of the pill in the 1960s, as a safe and secure way for women to control their own fertility, was, at the time, seen as a great step forward. It led to a big expansion in female professional employment, especially in the US, as college-educated women began to push back their age of marriage (which was still 23 in 1960) and could establish themselves in careers before marrying and having children.

However, as author Mary Eberstadt has pointed out, the pill also made pregnancy a woman’s responsibility rather than a joint responsibility. The old norms (that generally disapproved of sex separated from long-term commitment) existed in part to protect women from the risk asymmetry in sexual intercourse – the fact that it has much bigger potential consequences for a woman than a man – and locked in men, via the shotgun wedding, to mutual responsibility if a child was conceived.

After the pill, and as part of the wider idea that obstacles to sexual pleasure belonged to a repressive ancien régime, the norms were turned upside down. As women became, potentially, always available for consequence-free sex, so long as the principle of consent was respected, it reduced their bargaining power in the mating game. It also led to an increase in both abortion – around 30% of conceptions in the UK led to an abortion in 2022 – and single parenthood, as men declined to take responsibility for children that, in their view, women could have prevented. Separating sex even more from marriage and family also meant that men no longer had to be at least potentially responsible providers to get sex.

This pill-driven shift in norms helped to tilt society further in the direction of the hook-up culture and away from the harder-won happiness of committed relationships, towards Milan Kundera’s lightness: living, like one of his unfaithful characters, for fleeting moments of passion and beauty.

When 1970s progressives were battling for women’s equality in the workplace and the home, this is not what they had in mind. Those progressives might be happier when surveying the feminisation of the public realm, though some would note with dismay that the traditional areas of female concern in the family, childcare, and care work more generally, remain of low status and visibility.

The UK, like most of the developed world, is therefore caught in a fiscal pincer movement that will make the bond market a major player in UK politics for years to come. On the one hand we face sharply rising public spending from an ageing society and rising welfare/disability bills, while on the other hand 50 years of below replacement fertility means a shrinking tax-payer base that immigration can do little to reverse.

There is no way to avoid this coming crunch and there are many ideas about how to mitigate it, from further increases to the retirement age, radical cuts to public spending, and more selective (ie economically productive) immigration. All of these, and more, may be required in some form but I want here to focus on the need for a broader rebalancing of energy and resources from the realm of production to reproduction, otherwise known as home and family.

For the one-sided concentration on GDP growth in recent decades - including the mass movement of women from the home into the money economy - has blinded us to the erosion of the taken-for-granted preconditions for such growth found in the domestic realm, preconditions which within living memory enabled something close to replacement rate fertility and relatively stable family life.

Consider it an investment problem: how can we invest enough in the things we say we still want—having and caring for children, and decent care for the disabled and the growing army of the elderly—while honouring the newly acquired freedoms and choices of recent decades, especially for women? This is what I called in my recent book the care dilemma.

Women’s autonomy and financial independence is the biggest step forward in freedom since 1945. But the fact that both men and women are now primarily focused on the GDP economy, along with a more general relaxation of constraints on personal behaviour, has had unintended consequences for family life and the care economy.

The ever-rising cost of the welfare state; the mental fragility epidemic among young people; the recruitment crisis in face-to-face care jobs, thanks to the low status of emotional labour, and the fall in fertility to 1.4 children per woman, can all be traced to the undervaluing of the reproductive realm.

There is no ‘golden age’ of family to restore, and very few want to return to the old breadwinner-homemaker model, but similarly few people welcome the fact that by their early teens nearly half of children in the UK, and mainly poorer ones, no longer live with both biological parents. We are the family breakdown and single parent family champions of Europe. The Treasury model maximises workforce, GDP and tax income today, only by making it harder to raise the families of the future. Yet our employment rate at 75% is already high by both historical and international standards.

There are many reasons for weaker families and falling fertility, shared across the rich world, from housing insecurity to the crisis of intimacy between young men and women. But the UK is an outlier in the miserliness of its family policy, which amounts to little more than childcare subsidies, making it easier for both parents to spend less time in the family.

So, what would a family policy look like that actually supports the family, rather than just helping to channel people more swiftly back into the GDP economy workforce?

We would build a family-friendly, part-time work culture during the reproductive years in which both parents, with the help of grandparents and state-supported nursery care, could combine childcare with varying levels of paid work, keeping career progression alive.

Yes, men need to step up more, and should be encouraged to do so with paternity leave of three months, rather than today’s two weeks, and ungenerous statutory maternity pay needs upgrading too. The family should be properly recognised in the tax system and the two-child limit in the welfare system removed, in both cases bringing us into line with other rich countries.

But the best idea for reducing stress in the early years of parenthood, when relationship breakdown is so common, is to make it financially easier for one parent—mother or father—to stay at home supported by a Home Care Allowance (HCA) as in Finland. Paying childcare subsidies (now totalling £9bn a year) direct to families, and front-ending child benefit on the early years, could produce an HCA of almost £10,000 a year per child, and mainly by re-directing existing payments.

Such a programme would be popular. Around two-thirds of working mothers with pre-school children say they would like to work fewer hours if they could afford it and one-third say they would not work at all. Only 9% of the public support both parents working full-time when children are pre-school, though more than one third of couples are doing so.

You might not be aware of this opinion data because support for the domestic sphere represents one of the biggest divergences between the priorities of the average voter and the career focused professional class that dominates the public conversation.

The family also needs support in order to play a vital role at the other end of life. There will be an additional 3.3m people over the age of 65 in the next 10 years, needing an extra 500,000 full-time care workers, and by 2030 2m of the over 65s will be childless. The 5m plus informal family carers, who now help to keep old people out of the care system, are already saving the state billions a year and they need more formal recognition.

A more generous carers allowance for the 1.5m who care for more than 35 hours a week, along with raising the threshold of what they can earn elsewhere, is a necessary investment. Making it easier for families to house elderly relatives with them in ‘granny annexes’ and providing more specialist housing close to families would also help to reduce the burden on the taxpayer.

A more supportive family policy, for the beginning and end of life, may be popular but it is also expensive. An HCA might largely be paid for by redirecting existing subsidies but that still leaves tens of billions needed to fund the rest of the family programme.

There is only one place that this money can come from: better off pensioners. As Mariam Cates puts it: “We have socialised the cost of old age but privatised the cost of children.” The triple lock must end and an income-related social care levy must be imposed on the over 40s, as in Germany and Japan.

The levy should fund a care system analogous with the pension system, a decent basic provision for most people but topped up with private funds from those who have benefitted most from the great uplift in property prices over the past 50 years.

A levy could fund a more generous means test for basic care support – both in care homes and in home visit support - and a special higher minimum wage for care workers. Social care, in alliance with families (where they exist), has an ongoing and intimate relationship with the old and disabled, unlike the more transactional NHS, and needs to be rebranded as the preventative service. The NHS should fix you and get you out of the back door of the hospital as quickly as possible, the job of social care is to stop you entering the front door in the first place.

One way to do that is for care packages and residential homes to focus much more on exercise, the key to a healthier and less dependent old age. This could also help reduce the falls that limit peoples’ ability to look after themselves and cost the NHS £3bn a year.

The rhetoric around the social care sector is too pessimistic, reinforced by the constant postponement of central government reform. The introduction of private equity know-how into care home chains is almost universally viewed negatively. It is true there has been some profiteering, especially at the higher end, but in some places it is also introducing greater efficiency and better use of digital technology than in the NHS.

Social care is dominated by thousands of small family-run firms which tend not to be innovation friendly. It also suffers from rigid demarcation lines between professional and non-professional staff. I have a cousin in receipt of domiciliary care whose carers are not allowed to cut her toe nails, that is the job of a chiropodist. A carer can wash and cream legs but not do any wound care.

Creating an enhanced carer role, someone trained to undertake minor medical interventions - injecting insulin, taking blood, checking vital signs, basic wound dressing – could save the system billions.

A final point. To repair the institutions of reproduction we must re-think the GDP metric. Policy makers are fixated on a metric that is increasingly distorting our decisions and priorities. In an ageing society more and more productive care work is happening outside the GDP economy and we must find ways of capturing that in our economic statistics, as well as the productive work of raising stable, well-balanced young children who represent the GDP of tomorrow.

Imagine you are in your late 50s in a well-paid job, earning say £80,000 a year, but you decide to go part-time to look after your elderly mother who desperately doesn’t want to go into a home. You are increasing your mother’s well-being, and quite likely your own, and maybe saving the state some of the cost of domiciliary care, yet GDP falls by £40,000. (It is estimated that 400,000 people gave up work completely in 2021-2 to care for elderly relatives.)

Our politicians have long been averse to talking about support for the family and have assumed that reproduction can magically look after itself. How do we explain this? Maybe it has roots in our protestant individual self-reliance combined with a kind of ‘male default’ feminism that colludes in devaluing the domestic realm. It may also be connected to an admirable desire on the part of politicians, many of whom have even more chaotic private lives than their voters, not to be hypocritical when talking about the importance of stable families. Remember John Major’s ‘back to basics’?

Yet something is shifting. Nigel Farage used to echo the whole political class in regarding the family and relationships as something beyond politics. He insisted: “I can’t go there, I’m twice divorced.”

Then, suddenly, in mid-2025, with his acute nose for a political opening Farage changed his mind and decided his divorces shouldn’t prevent him addressing our family instability crisis. Reform now has the best family policy of any party. It wants a transferable tax allowance for those bringing up children together, it is proposing to front-end child benefit so couples can use the money when they most need it, and it wants to remove the two-child benefit cap. There is a decent chance that other parties will follow this Reform lead before the next election.

Moreover, Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, to her great credit, recently became the first front rank British politician in decades to say something mildly pro-natalist: “I want more young people to have children, if they so choose; to realise the ordinary aspiration so many share to create the moments and memories that make our lives fulfilling.”

Progressives, irrationally terrified that The Handmaid’s Tale dystopia might become a reality, tend to conflate the reasonable idea that the modern state should not tell individuals whether to have children, or how many to have, with the unreasonable idea that the state has no interest at all in society’s fertility level.

Moreover, repairing the institutions of reproduction is potentially an issue that can unite conservatives and liberals. If increasing fertility is regarded as a conservative goal then it is best achieved with liberal means: giving parents more choice via decent, low-cost formal childcare or the option of staying at home when children are pre-school, plus a fairer sharing of domestic labour between men and women. Similarly, promoting more stable families in the bottom half of the income spectrum is only possible with more good jobs for non-graduates, especially men, and properly targeted support in the tax and welfare system that incentivises partnerships.

In a society with decades of sub-replacement fertility and the terrifying fiscal pincer movement I mentioned at the start it is obvious that having children is a public as well as a private good, and something that the childless too have an interest in.

If it became common for British politicians to say in public, like Phillipson, that having children is a good thing, and even something to be encouraged, it would represent an important first step towards embracing some of the ideas sketched out here.

This is adapted from an essay in the collection ‘Mending the Net’ for the Bright Blue think tank https://www.brightblue.org.uk/portfolio/mending-the-net The Care Dilemma: Freedom, Family, Fertility is now out in paperback here https://tinyurl.com/38s8hwzj

My own very partial view of the magazine scene is that the energy and interest is coming overwhelmingly from the right, or at least the non-left, as in politics itself. There are the substacks like that of the ever-engaging Ed West, the optimistic Anglo-Futurists/Work in Progress people, or the sharp and transgressive Pimlico Journal, (even read by Cowdery he tells me). There is the readable and often surprising The Critic magazine, described as ‘dyspeptic’ in a Prospect piece on who is funding Reform, one of the few in the last year that I learned something from.

But at the other end of the street in Westminster from Prospect’s offices sits the great recent success story of online political journalism, Unherd. Despite leaning rightwards it does make some effort to ‘escape the echo chamber’, Prospect’s marketing slogan which I can only assume is some sort of in-joke, given the narrowness of its political range.

Unherd editor Sally Chatterton has discovered or nurtured new writers, avoided over-reliance on the clickbait contrarianism of a Douglas Murray or Peter Hitchens and found space for prominent figures of the left like Yanis Varoufakis and Terry Eagleton. Freddie Sayers's TV interviews are slick, intelligent and well-prepared. The now defunct internationally-minded political podcast with Helen Thompson and Tom McTague was the most serious available.

The Unherd stable retains a freshness and curiosity about ideas and a sense that it has its ear to the ground. Everyone is now writing pieces about the eccentric American conservative Curtis Yarvin, Sayers first interviewed him in May 2022.

By contrast, the progressive media - the New Statesman, Prospect, podcasts like The News Agents, the Guardian - has been flat and predictable. Well, predictable may not be the right word for a Guardian group that backed Nick Clegg in 2010, swung behind Corbyn in 2017, failed to develop the Observer or follow The Times’s successful journey into radio.

It is tempting to suggest that the cluelessness, to date, of Labour in office can be blamed partly on the torpor of its surrounding journalistic and think tank networks. Maybe too many people in that world really did believe that Labour were the good/competent people and the Tories were the bad/incompetent people, so all that was required was to change the personnel around the Cabinet table and all would be well.

It is telling that when, at the Prospect editorial meeting after the 2024 Labour landslide, someone suggested a piece on why the country still needed the Tory party the general response was that it didn’t. The magazine sneers at Farageism as representing the prejudice of the saloon bar (including in some witty portraits of leading populists), but displaying the parallel prejudice of the senior common room it has made insufficient effort to get under the skin of its appeal.

[Me, handing a copy of Prospect to Bill Clinton at the 2001 Hay Literary Festival. My hair is now the same colour as Bill’s.]

Since I vacated the editor’s chair in 2010 I have taken a different political path from today’s Prospect. But it is more than its politics and there are several things I still appreciate about it. It continues to fly the flag for substantial essay length writing and in the past few months I have read several essays with profit, for example on the future of aircraft carriers and the connection between the video game industry and AI, and the Lives section at the back is always diverting especially the regular bulletin from a sex worker.

The echo chamber is a problem with most political magazines but it can sometimes be put to creative use if attached to a like-minded political project, like Starmer’s Labour. Yet there was little sense of an inside track for Prospect as Labour cruised to victory.

Prospect should now be furious that Labour was so poorly prepared for office. But why was it not contributing more itself to the ideas bank? Why no essay series on how to reform the state; deal with the ballooning benefits bill in a humane way; sort out the continuing failure of apprenticeships and technical training; work out how a land tax might function or find some other way of increasing income from unproductive wealth; and so on. In the right hands all such subjects can be turned into engaging prose.

Cowdery might reasonably point to his other creation for such policy work: the Resolution Foundation think tank founded in 2005 focusing on the interests of those on low incomes. (Torsten Bell, the former chief executive, is one of Labour’s rising Treasury stars and other RF graduates are scattered around the top of Government.) But he told me, in a conversation for this piece, that he does see Prospect as somewhere to float ideas, a place of sustained “thinking aloud”. It’s certainly not a place you would turn to for the sheer enjoyment of a good read about current affairs, with tight editing and silky prose, like The Spectator.

Magazine essays do not make Government policy but, unlike more news cycle-focused newspapers or blogs, they can help drum up support for original solutions to big policy problems and act as a kind of link between the informed public and politicians. And there is such a thing as the “scoop of ideas” that can trigger a national debate.

Rusbridger, however, seems more interested in the messenger than the message and at Prospect has continued to pursue his favourite hobby of exposing the real or imagined iniquities of right-wing press barons. One such baron he placed under the microscope was Paul Marshall, the evangelical Christian owner of Unherd, big backer of GB News and now owner of The Spectator, which with its world-weary wit and heterodox conservatism continues to thrive.

In Rusbridger’s recent profile of Marshall he writes: “Here is a man who hates tribalism; says he likes his own biases to be challenged; and admires the ‘open-minded centrist ground’ represented by The Times. And who then thinks the answer is to create a monocultural TV channel representing every political view on a spectrum from Jacob Rees-Mogg… via Nigel Farage to Laurence Fox.”

Much the same could be said of Cowdery and Prospect’s (rather less influential) monoculture replacing the names above with Ben Ansell, Andew Adonis, David Aaronovitch, Peter Kellner, Philippe Sands etc

Marshall is currently out-gunning Cowdery, but the Prospect owner is also an investor in the Observer and has a seat on the board of Tortoise media which now owns the venerable Sunday as well as producing, among other things, the quirky, left-leaning Slow News podcast, which has indeed been slow to make an impact.

It’s too early to tell whether the Observer can provide a morale boosting impetus to the progressive/remainer/anti-populist cause, which is, after all, now running the country again. The early issues still feature old stalwarts like Andrew Rawnsley, Will Hutton and Bill Keegan, repeating what they’ve been saying for decades.

The New Statesman, too, has a new editor in the authoritative figure of Tom McTague but as neither he nor even less his deputy, Will Lloyd, are obviously on the left it is likely to confirm my hunch that the drive and energy is coming from elsewhere.

Maybe that is because the centre-left has remained in command across most areas of public life, even during the 14 years of Tory rule. The progressive media is caught between defending a status quo substantially of its own creation – on say immigration or the growth of the welfare state – and an oppositional mentality that wants to blame the rich, or the Tories or populism for our current failures

Cowdery has deep pockets, which the Observer might need, and a remarkable back-story. At age nine he was one of five children taken away from their struggling mother and placed with a Christian group outside Bristol. He later became a leader of that group but one day woke to find his faith had dissolved so left the church, and his young family, and started at the bottom of the insurance industry selling door to door.

He now sits somewhere close to the top of that industry and is worth hundreds of millions. But remembering his welfare-dependent start in life he funds many charitable endeavours aside from Prospect and the Resolution Foundation.

Clive is a likeable man, full of youthful enthusiasm and curiosity, a voracious reader and collector of Soviet art. When he first became an investor in Prospect during my time he said that he had received his university education from reading the magazine, the nicest thing that anyone ever said to me about it. Soon after I ceased being editor, replaced by Bronwen Maddox, he became the sole owner of Prospect and folded it into his Resolution charity.

As with many people, even the most cerebral, his politics comes not from the head but from the entrails of his own biography. When I asked him why he was on the left he said he disliked how life chances are still decided too much in the womb. But this is a dislike shared by many people not remotely on the left. He also seems quite blinkered about how narrowly parti pris Prospect has become, citing contributions from a couple of liberal Tories.

Cowdery remains loyal to Rusbridger but he surely cannot be happy with the lack of progress, both politically and financially—the magazine has a circulation of 40,000, mainly online, but loses even more than the £500,000 a year in my day—especially compared with his highly regarded think tank. McTague’s New Statesman will provide new competition with a taste for Prospect-style long form journalism and a more eye-catching version of progressivism. And another attempt to revive Encounter, the original post-war political essay magazine, is rumoured to be in the wings.

I suspect Rusbridger’s days are numbered. He’s nearly 72 and is probably looking forward to stepping down after more than four years. Next time, if there is to be one, I would like to modestly suggest that Cowdery should opt for someone who represents the more youthful, open-minded spirit of Prospect’s founding era.

(Goodhart’s revenge? This is a sightly amended version of a piece I wrote for the current issue of The Critic. The day after the magazine was officially published on September 17th Prospect announced that Rusbridger was retiring to be replaced by Phil Collins, ex-Blair speechwriter and Times columnist.)

Meanwhile, Labour happily ran with the £4bn annual increase to the subsidy for nursery care for children as young as nine months announced by the Conservative Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, in 2023, who said at the time that young mothers should not “waste their talents” by staying at home to look after their children.

This is despite the fact that in trying, with difficulty, to attract people to work in nursery care the same Government declared that there is no job more important than helping to raise the next generation – yet apparently only if it is other people’s children, and you are doing it for money in the GDP economy. It’s a good example of one of the main themes of this book: the undervaluing of the productive work done in the home.

While an extra £4bn a year would not be enough definitively to solve the social care crisis, it would allow for both a more generous means test, and funding for a special social care minimum wage of at least £1 an hour above the current one, easing the recruitment crisis without recourse to immigration.

So why have recent governments been happy to promote nursery care but continue to neglect social care? One reason is that governments believe getting more young mothers into the workforce will contribute to GDP growth and tax income, even though the extra £4bn is estimated to create only 60,000 full-time equivalent jobs (out of a total of 25 million).

But there is a less visible reason. A few years ago the sociologist Catherine Hakim divided British women into three groups: the very work-focused and mainly highly-educated, professional women (about 20%); the more traditional family-focused women (another 20%); and the so-called ‘adaptive’ women (about 60%) who want to combine both work and family, but when their children are small are happy to give work a lower priority for a few years.

It is the first group – professional women wanting to return to work full-time as soon as reasonably possible – who are most likely to be working and socialising alongside Jeremy Hunt or Keir Starmer, and whose concerns are most likely to be heard at the top of government, Whitehall and media.

The result is that the political class tends to think that the childcare subsidy represents the future for women, enabling them to escape stifling domesticity and, as Hunt declared, contribute their full talents to society and career in the same way as men. By contrast, social care represents women’s past of invisibly carrying the emotional and physical burden of face-to-face care for the old and the sick.

Nursery care versus social care should not be an either/or. But at a time of fiscal stringency, partly caused by our low fertility (and now exacerbated by Trumpian global insecurity), choices have to be made.

The political class has made its choice and it’s not the one the public would have made. There is no appetite to return to the breadwinner/home-maker model of the 1950s. According to the British Social Attitudes survey, only 9% of the population agree with the statement ‘a man’s job is to earn money and a woman’s job is to look after the home and family’, down from nearly 50% in the late 1980s. But when people are asked what their ideal arrangements are for raising pre-school children, the proportion who choose both parents working full-time is also just 9%, though the actual proportion with this arrangement is 35%.

So did the wrong kind of feminism win in the 1970s, as one woman argued at a talk I gave at a book festival? It is certainly true that the dominant strand (what Fiona Mackenzie of The Other Half calls the ‘male default’) has focused on equal competition with men in the public realm, and has often been ambivalent about raising the status of the traditionally female realms of care in both the domestic realm and the GDP economy. But again, this should not be an either/or, as feminists like Anne-Marie Slaughter in the US and Madeleine Bunting in the UK have insisted.

The current weakness of this more expansive perspective on women’s interests in the UK is evident not just in that nursery care versus social care decision, but in the continuing miserliness of our family policy. Unlike most rich countries, we do not recognise the family properly in the tax system, our maternity and paternity provision is among the least generous in the rich world, both parents have to be working to qualify for most childcare subsidies, and we currently restrict welfare benefits to just two children (though the lifting of this restriction looks possible as I write this introduction).

There are a couple of recent signs of movement in the right direction. The care dilemma – the tension between our new freedoms, especially for women, and the continuing need both for babies and for decent care for the dependent young and old – is here to stay, but it can be mitigated by public policy.

Whether Labour or the Tories are in power, family policy in the UK has largely been about nursery subsidies and so about making it easier for both parents to spend less time in the family. It has therefore left a gap in the political marketplace. Some of the continental populist parties, which tend to lean left on economics and right on culture, occupy this pro-family space but, until recently, Nigel Farage’s Reform had not followed them. “I can’t go there, I’m twice divorced,” he used to say, reflecting the broader political class view that the family and relationships is a private realm beyond politics.

Then, suddenly, in mid-2025, with his acute nose for a political opening Farage changed his mind and decided his divorces shouldn’t prevent him addressing our family instability crisis –nearly half of UK children are not living with both biological parents at age 14. Reform now has the best family policy of any party. It wants a transferable tax allowance for those bringing up children together, it is proposing to front-end child benefit so couples can use the money when they most need it, and it wants to remove the two-child benefit cap. There is a decent chance that other parties will follow this Reform lead before the next election.

There is another shift in the public debate that has gone surprisingly unremarked upon. It used to be one of the foundational beliefs of feminism, certainly in its more radical forms, that men and women were not only equal but essentially the same – the so-called blank slate view. For leading feminists such as Helen Lewis and Caroline Criado-Perez this is no longer the case, and the feminist revival triggered by a defence of all-women spaces against the militant trans movement is also premised on the importance of irreducible sex differences.

The recognition of average sex differences opens the way to something more encompassing than mere male default feminism. It should also make possible a sober, rational discussion of the impact of feminisation on politics and institutions, a discussion we have barely begun and one that I only point towards in the Care Dilemma. Feminisation has arguably not gone far enough in some respects – the persistent undervaluing of family and motherhood, the failure to count productive home-based care in economic statistics, the perpetual postponement of social care reform – but it may have gone too far in others, such as in the safetyism, precautionary principle and over-regulation of modern life embodied in the overwhelmingly female HR department.

This book attempts to weave together a number of huge themes – family, fertility, childcare, parenting, the mental fragility epidemic, social care, sex differences – and it is therefore hard to summarise. And a man writing about some of the unintended consequences of sex equality inevitably attracts knee-jerk hostility in some quarters. Considering all that the book received a pretty decent reception in the media and review sections.

And, I like to think, it has made a small contribution to the detectable shift in public awareness of the collapse in the fertility rate (now just 1.41 in England and Wales) and its economic consequences, already acting as a drag-anchor on economic growth and well-being. Alarm about climate change went from the fringes to the mainstream in 25 years, could it be the same for fertility?

It is a contest between two perspectives on freedom. The apparent desire of a growing number of young people to place individual freedom and autonomy before the responsibilities of parenthood; and the more collective challenge to freedom arising from the social anomie and economic dislocation if not enough of us take on those responsibilities.

Ideally, more of us would start to think of freedom in a way that is compatible with the longer-term, stressful joys of parenthood. But the short-term has a way of winning out and when having children becomes a choice it is one that is easy to avoid if life provides so many other attractive options.

I leave the pithy summary of our fate to a wise young woman, the science writer Ellen Pasternack: “Now women are in a stronger bargaining position with their fertility than at any point in history. But the private incentives to have children are in decline. If we want fertility to increase, we will have to offer better incentives than we currently do.”

It’s only natural that some liberal minded people are alarmed by this, especially those who have built their politics around openness and diversity. It is also only natural to seek out bad actors as the explanation for the shift in rhetoric and opinion which is said to have inspired last year’s Southport riots and this year’s hotel protests and fly the flag movement.

But those riots and protests are also a response, sometimes ugly, to new realities. I recently challenged Sam Freedman and Ben Ansell (see earlier post Polarising Liberals) for blaming critics of recent trends for the new mood rather than the trends themselves: unprecedented unselective legal immigration (despite repeated votes for restriction), large and highly visible illegal asylum flows, the sense of disorder, free-riding and criminality associated with some recent arrivals, the dramatic shift in Britain’s ethnic balance in just 25 years, and maybe also the return of the grooming gangs scandal over recent months highlighting both the parallel lives of some Muslims and the double standards of parts of official Britain when it comes to race.

An even more alarmist example of blaming the messenger was just published (September 5^th) in Tom McTague’s new New Statesman with an accompanying podcast. The Age of Deportation by Tanjil Rashid asserts that the idea of mass deportation changes what it means to be British, pursues a left conspiracy theory that claims ex-MP Douglas Carswell—who does indeed say crazy things about how all British Muslims should be deported—is “driving the agenda” of a Right which is once more worshipping at the shrine of Enoch Powell’s ethno-nationalism.

It is true that Nigel Farage’s aim of deporting 600,000 people who are here illegally, rather more than half of the estimated illegal population, is not something that would have been said a year ago, and is unlikely to happen. He is learning from his friend Donald Trump whose success in radically cutting immigration is about vibe and rhetoric as well as action.

But why does sheer scale change the meaning of being British unless you think that deportation of illegals is itself unBritish (beyond the current tiny numbers)? Rashid’s answer turns out to be a quaintly old-fashioned one—his definition of Britain/England is that it’s not really a place at all but “a grand confluence” a cross-roads-cum-melting pot with a “global identity”.

This takes us back to the 1970s and publications like Race and Class, whose writers and editor Ambalavander Sivanandan (quoted by Rashid) took Britain's pre-national imperial family identity, still strong enough to inform the 1948 Act that granted citizenship to all people of the Empire and Commonwealth, and flipped it into a post-national, multicultural one. Under both regimes people become interchangeable units outside of any particular national history.

And these ideas did not just remain in left-wing journals. Through Labour politicians like Roy Jenkins they became part of the mainstream. The late great sociologist Geoff Dench describes the emergence of a post-imperial idealism that was popular with the left and centre of British politics in the 1960s and 1970s.

“Borrowing Whig pride in Britain’s imperial legacy of tolerance and respect for indigenous cultures, Labour devised a new world role for Britain. Empire imposed on other nations had been wrong. But Britain could still show the world how to foster a peaceful, multicultural and open metropolitan society. A progressive national mission was drafted around a new empire that would atone for the old… Britain’s national interest now required cosmopolitanism and disdain for narrow expressions of identity or destiny. What was truly British now was to be global and inclusive.”

No other modern nation thinks like this. It helps to explain the famous diffidence of England’s national identity, at least at elite level, for so long submerged into both Britain and Empire. But we need a uniting national story more than ever. And we have moved in recent decades, with some success, to establish a more normal national identity, that speaks to the historic majority and the newer minorities, extending beyond Britishness to include Englishness, increasingly now seen as a civic as well as ancestry-based identity. Trying to revive a global identity, attached to everywhere and so nowhere, would be a big step back.

Rashid, like Freedman and Ansell, sees racism driving the new politics of restriction and national assertion. Others might see it as a normal yearning for a national home with controlled borders that places the interests of national citizens first but remains open to moderate inflows and contributing immigrants who merge their own traditions with British ones.

Unlike France, we are not a country known for spontaneous street protest. But many of Chesterton’s people of England “that never have spoken yet” are growling, and they are easier than in the past to organise online.

Meanwhile, progressive ideology, as Louise Perry has pointed out, is caught in a paranoid bind of its own making. It is permanently anxious about the nativism it fears lurking just beneath the surface among ordinary people and yet it remains completely relaxed about the very things that might trigger this nativism such as the mass Channel crossings—“a moral panic about not very much” says FT columnist Philip Stephens—or the growing number of places where the White British majority (now barely 70% of the population in England) are in the minority.

It is true that real racists are noisier and bolder than in the recent past and far-right activists have played a role in recent protests. Nevertheless, the anti-racism taboo remains one of the strongest in British society and the claim that it has collapsed on the Right is not sustainable. Carswell’s deport all Muslims rhetoric is a weird exception and Rashid does not tell us who with influence on the Right wants an “ethno-national state” or a “pure English nation”: Kemi Badenoch, Zia Yusuf? I think not.

A country in which only 3% of the population (https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/attitudes-race-and-inequality-great-britain) say you have to be white to be British - yes there are still some racists - is hardly returning to the Powellite late 1960s. I interviewed Farage in 2018 on the 50th anniversary of Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/enoch-powell-the-prophet-of-doom-who-clutches-at-us-still-23rx06l62 . He said that though he had been a Powellite in his youth he now believed Ted Heath had been right to sack him from the Tory front bench and that the polarising brutality of his rhetoric prevented a serious, clear-eyed debate about immigration for three decades.

Rashid blurs the lines between racism and legitimate concerns about the scale and speed of change, gives succour to a naïve universalist idea of the country that is uncomfortable with a confident English identity and clings to international laws on asylum and migration that, as almost all of Europe’s political classes now recognise, were not designed for a world of mass movement.

The rise of Reform and the hardening rhetoric that alarms Rashid is a response to the failures of mainstream politics, especially over immigration and issues of national sovereignty and identity, not some Powellite monster in the basement that has awoken from its slumber.

(This is a longer version of a short comment that appeared Sept 10th on Unherd)

This not only induces what could be an unnecessary and self-reinforcing sense of economic failure but also incentivises GDP-fixated politicians to pursue policies that appease the idol at the expense of human flourishing. As GDP sends increasingly wonky signals, we are setting ourselves up to fail.

GDP was invented to facilitate the macroeconomic management that emerged from the Keynesian revolution, and it was never designed as a measure of wellbeing. Nevertheless, its historic shortcomings — the fact that it does not count productive care work carried out in the home, fails to account for environmental damage and externalities and undervalues many innovations — are now supplemented by a host of new problems.

Indeed, according to the economist Zvi Griliches, about 80 per cent of the modern Western economy is “hard to measure” using conventional GDP. There is an international convention on how the metric works that is laid down in the System of National Accounts (SNA) overseen and regularly adjusted by a United Nations committee that has, says Diane Coyle, become a “distorting lens or even a set of blinkers. A new one is needed.”

It is widely understood that productivity in services, and particularly public services, is harder to measure than manufacturing, which still accounted for around 40 per cent of the UK economy at the birth of GDP. But we now have the extra measurement problems described in the middle four chapters of the book entitled “Dematerialisation”, “Disintermediation”, “Free” and “Borders”.

The iPhone, which has replaced the jumbo jet as the most profitable product of all time, illustrates most of these new phenomena. Apple manufactures no part of the phone; rather it designs, brands and sells it. How is the value produced by hundreds of agents in 43 countries in the supply chain to be accurately counted and distributed? And when a finished phone is shipped from, say, India to Japan to be sold, should it still count as a US export? Moreover, on your phone or Apple laptop, you will receive many services now essential to modern life — email, social media, internet search, conference calls — for free.

It seems daft that these are not counted properly in the growth metric and, according to Coyle, cloud computing actually causes GDP to fall. “The most valuable businesses in the world, ever, are giving away services. They are driven by a fuel nobody knows how to value,” as Coyle puts it.

On the other side of the balance sheet, we are now providing our own DIY services online, say in banking or booking a holiday, that used to be provided by high street institutions. These services have, in the jargon, moved across the production boundary from paid to unpaid activities and so are also invisible to GDP even though they have increased efficiency and convenience.

The slow-down in productivity in most developed economies at the same time that our lives have been transformed by technology is a paradox that surely points to a measurement problem. Indeed, some Dutch economists have argued that counting the free stuff properly would mean a 3.4 per cent increase to GDP and a 7.8 per cent increase to household consumption.

There is also the problem of comparing ourselves unfavourably today with past growth spurts artificially boosted by the current GDP metric. The movement of women into the full-time paid workforce at all levels over the past 60 years, from around 25 per cent in the late 1950s to over 70 per cent by the late 1990s did, of course, provide a significant, and unrepeatable, increase to growth and productivity (boosted further by the rapid expansion of the white goods industry).

But because GDP does not count productive work done in the home, it was also the subject of an accounting sleight of hand. It was registered as a simple plus to the workforce, to the income of our economies and families and to women themselves. We did not account on the other side of the ledger for the loss of work being done by women in the family and community in the old breadwinner-homemaker economy.

If you shift from a single income household with a homemaker to one with two breadwinners and a third person who’s a childcarer, you have three paid jobs instead of one and therefore more GDP — but not necessarily a corresponding increase in human welfare. Similarly, just as the rise in female employment in the GDP economy was trailing off, the post big-bang financial sector provided another boost, arguably an artificially impressive one, to both GDP and productivity.

Thanks to a change in the way that financial services sector output was measured in 1993, it is estimated that the UK sector’s share of GDP in 2008 of 9 per cent was between 25 and 50 per cent higher than it should have been. And thanks to the same measurement quirk, the sector made its biggest ever contribution to UK GDP in 2008, just as banks were folding and huge taxpayer bailouts were required.

There is a geopolitical aspect to the GDP metric too in the way that it reinforces Europe’s inferiority complex in relation to the US. Using conventional GDP per capita, the average European standard of living is about two thirds that of the US; however, a metric that includes leisure time and longevity (and inequality) narrows the gap to about 15 per cent. In France it is estimated at just 8 per cent.

No metric will ever be perfect, but the current one has drifted too far away from painting an accurate picture of economic progress, especially when it comes to the failure to account for our use of natural resources and digital technologies.

And this builds on the long-standing problem of struggling to measure innovation. Coyle cites the case of new treatments for Parkinson’s using ultrasound that will potentially eliminate the Parkinson’s drug industry, causing GDP to fall.

I would add that the failure to capture productive work done in the family has become an even bigger problem in our ageing, low-fertility societies, something that Coyle surprisingly underplays. Not only does the continuing failure to count this essential work — raising productive, well-balanced children or looking after the growing army of the frail elderly — contribute to its low status, but an ageing society necessarily directs more useful care work into a GDP void.

Consider a well-paid middle-aged person who stops working full-time to look after an elderly relative at home. The GDP economy loses part of the contribution of the middle-aged person plus the demand of the elderly person for care in a private care home. Yet in most cases that elderly person is much happier staying in their own home and the state saves around £50,000 a year on their care (assuming they qualified for support).

Lower GDP, yes, but higher wellbeing and less demand on the state. As more productive time is spent in the home, thanks both to technology making homeworking easier and there being more housebound old people, its place in the measurement system demands an overhaul.

GDP is in fact regularly tweaked by the UN committee that oversees it. Coyle says that the latest tweaks were disappointing, and the accumulation of barnacles on the GDP boat now requires more ambitious reform. She reports, reassuringly, that an increasing number of the hard-headed experts in the field are coming to the same conclusion. Finding alternatives to GDP is no longer a slightly new-agey footnote in economics.

There is currently no consensus on what the alternative would look like, and I confess I did not fully understand Coyle’s own proposal — large parts of the book are very technical. I would have preferred something aimed more at the general reader, something politicians could grasp, as with her earlier excellent book GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History.

This remains a vital argument and one that is feeding into a more general anxiety about the reliability of our economic statistics. The government has so far shown little interest in the subject, but, when it fails to raise the level of our increasingly misleading GDP metric, it might see the value of acquiring a new one.

PS Some of the ideas (and sentences) in the above are borrowed from a piece on the same subject I wrote for the Spectator with my very hard-headed financial economist uncle Charles Goodhart (he of Goodhart’s Law). You can find it here, if links work on Substack: https://www.spectator.co.uk/writer/charles-and-david-goodhart/

I think on the contrary this is a classic case of imputing the worst possible motives to your opponents, turning politics into a contest between good people (my friends on Bluesky) and bad people, and trying to close down legitimate conversations relating to hugely significant changes in the real world. This liberal censoriousness is influential, both men have significant voices (Ansell a recent Reith lecturer) and their polemics have been echoed in the mainstream media. I believe this attitude plays some role in driving support for populists.

I cannot speak for all the people they attack - and clearly the Douglas Carswell quote about the need for the mass deportation of Pakistanis, cited by Sam Freedman, is appalling - but having been in the firing line on this issue since stumbling into it in 2004 when I published my Too Diverse? essay in Prospect (and then the Guardian) I am, perhaps, in a better position than most to address these difficult questions.

I think there are three main problems with their approach. First, their loose and elastic definition of racism. Second, naivety about the continuing importance of group psychology in modern societies. Third, a desire to downplay the scale and importance of recent changes to the UK.

On racism. It is one of the left’s greatest post-war achievements to have led the fight against racism, it is now one of the left’s greatest failings to see racism under every stone and too readily to reach for the term to label those they disagree with.

Freedman provides a good example of this in his belief that Konstanin Kisin is ‘obviously’ racist for saying, in a conversation with Fraser Nelson, that Rishi Sunak isn’t English because he’s ‘a brown Hindu’. The language may be blunt but this is an argument about definitions. Kisin and Nelson are talking past each other because they are using the word English in different ways. Kisin is not saying that Sunak is in some way illegitimate or should not have been PM (as real racists do), he is just pointing to the obvious fact that he has a different ethnicity to those who can trace their ancestry in England back for generations. Sunak is a British citizen but cannot by definition, according to Kisin, be English. Nelson, by contrast, is using a broader definition of English which includes people of different ethnicities.

Until about five seconds ago the Kisin approach was actually the dominant one and the one preferred by most ethnic minorities, who saw themselves as British but not English. This has begun to shift in the past 10 or 15 years with black Brits, and others, now claiming an English identity thereby turning it into a civic as well as an ethnic category. The blackness of the English football team has contributed to the shift, and who could be more English than the laddish Londoner Ian Wright? I think this blurring of the line between civic and ethnic identities is to be welcomed, but to argue that someone using the old definition is a ‘blood and soil’ racist seems to be a category error.

As Sam Freedman himself points out there has been a remarkable shift in attitudes to race in the last 50 years, since mass support for Enoch Powell in the late 1960s. Only about 6% of the population say you have to be white to be truly British, and most of them will be old people. There is, again, a rising majority of people who say immigration is too high or much too high, but, contrary to the elision often made in liberal polemics, being anti-mass-immigration is not the same as being anti-immigrant. Moreover, the claim that the anti-racism taboo is a weak one - a claim that Freedman provides no evidence for beyond quoting my friend Ed West - is itself weak.

But because the vast majority of white British people have become used to living in a multi-ethnic society and are in the main comfortable with it, it does not follow that they are indifferent to becoming a minority in their own country or that “they don’t distinguish among their fellow citizens by their ethnicity or where they were born,” as Ansell claims.

This leads me onto my second reservation about the Ansell/Freedman approach. Yes, most of us, consciously or not, sign up to the Christian/post-Holocaust assumption that all people are morally equal, not just in the UK but across the world. It does not follow that we feel an equal obligation to them all or an equal connection. The vast majority of us think that all British citizens are equal before the law and should be treated fairly but we are not so naive as to believe that simply becoming a British citizen is like donning an ethnicity invisibility cloak in which all significant differences are rendered irrelevant.

Ansell implies that we either have to agree to being ethnicity/way-of-life blind “a citizen is a citizen is a citizen” or be classified as someone “who dislikes diversity, immigration and racial difference”. But most of us are somewhere in between these two extremes and drawing the line in this way is self-defeating and damaging to democratic politics. The claim that all British citizens are equal, is politically and legally true but it is the beginning of the conversation about living together in a multi-ethnic society not the end.

Imagine if a representative sample of British people were told that 10,000 immigrants will settle permanently in your town of 50,000 people in the next five years and they could choose whether they will mainly come from Australia or Afghanistan. I think we know what the overwhelming majority, of all backgrounds, would choose. I know what I would choose, though I am friendly with some British Afghans and do not wish to denigrate them in any way. Does that make me someone who is opposed to the idea of equal citizenship or even a racist? Or to take a real world example, more than 200,000 mainly white Brits volunteered to open their homes to Ukrainians after the Russian invasion, yet nobody has suggested the same idea for people arriving on Channel boats from the Middle East and Africa.

Is that regrettable or just common sense? Most people are happier to share with and trust others with whom they have something in common and some similar experiences of the world, regardless of race or religion. Everyone is an individual and should be treated as such but nobody denies there are average group differences that make it a lot easier to absorb 10,000 middle class Hong Kong Chinese than 10,000 poor Somalis. People of all ethnicities generally prefer the familiar to the unfamiliar and want to live in safe neighbourhoods where, regardless of difference, people mix comfortably because they speak the same language and share at least some common norms.

There are many examples of such places in the UK, usually more affluent suburbs where middle class professionals rub shoulders. There are also too many examples of places where this doesn’t happen. The white British people often then move out and the area and its schools become minority dominated, with a sprinkling of white adventurers who are attracted to such places. (Many Caribbeans have recently become upset that it's become too heavy a sprinkling in Brixton on their home patch. In-group preference is not the preserve of majorities.)

Moreover, at the level of the nation, societies are not random collections of individuals but products of history and social evolution with many overlapping and inter-connecting norms and ways of life, both within the white British ethnic majority and the many minorities (there are now more than 30 communities with more than 100,000 people in the UK). To pour several million people into this mix over just a few years - many of them from poor countries with traditional values - is bound to strain the social contract and a unifying sense of national identity.

A libertarian might be happy enough to agree that so long as the new arrival from Eritrea obeys the law, pays their taxes and contributes to the market society, that suffices. But for anyone on the left who wants a high trust/high solidarity society, or indeed anyone who fears social fragmentation, more than that minimum is surely required. Some degree of emotional citizenship, a loose sense of being on the same team, is needed from a critical mass of citizens. Yet the recent story in the UK suggests this low-level sense of solidarity is draining away. According to the British Social Attitudes survey in 1989 61% of people thought spending on the poor should be higher even if it meant higher taxes, today the figure is just 37%.

Is this down to a rapid increase in diversity in the past 25 years? Ben Ansell seems to think so. He writes in his well-received book Why Politics Fails: “When political scientists look at the effects of ethnic diversity on solidarity, we find that diversity, however defined, appears to alter people’s willingness to spend resources supporting each other.”

Solidarity is hard to achieve and sustain and made even harder with a constant churn of people with very different ways of life and worldviews, many of whom in today’s UK explicitly identify with different countries and civilisations: see the way that India v Pakistan conflicts are played out in places like Leicester and the mobilisation of large numbers of British Muslims whenever global Muslim interests are perceived to be threatened.

In order to blend diversity with solidarity, it is no good just preaching tolerance and integration - the latter is in any case notoriously difficult to promote in liberal societies - you need a politics that promotes a common in-group identity. As the psychologist Jonathan Haidt has put it, talking about racial division in the US: “You can make people care less about race by drowning race differences in a sea of similarities, shared goals and mutual interdependencies.”

That is all much easier when immigration is low enough to allow people to be absorbed into the mainstream, rather than ghettoised in parallel communities, and productive enough to be of benefit to the average citizen. Which brings me on to my third point, the extraordinary scale of recent changes.

Nearly 10m immigrants came to live in the UK in the 25 years after Labour came to power in 1997, and around the same number are expected over the next 25 years. In that first 25 years the population of England identifying as white British fell from around 90% to around 70% today, with a further fall to 60% expected around 2040. This is a very big thing, whether you are comfortable with it or not.

Demographic change on this scale has not happened before, at least not since the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in the seventh century and certainly not since the UK became a democracy with a welfare state in which people have some control over the direction of their society, and the precautionary principle suggests it should be handled with care.

It should, at the least, be legitimate for people to publicly advocate wanting to stop it or slow it down. Indeed, this is what citizens have repeatedly voted for and told pollsters they favour. And Ansell himself accepts this: “I might be personally comfortable with high levels of immigration but other people are not and I don’t think it makes sense to shut them out of the debate. Nation states have the ability and right to set some boundaries of membership. How stringent those boundaries should be the stuff of politics.”

Yet when I, or Neil O’Brien or Lord Frost or others, engage in this political debate we are apparently denigrating “implicitly or explicitly” (a phrase doing a lot of work) those who are not part of the historic white British majority. Moreover, we are said to believe in the superiority of the white British. Ansell provides no evidence for either view - I guess that is where the word implicitly comes in - and he is, as so often in this argument, mistaking a desire for stability and familiarity with hostility to minorities.

Ansell is upset by use of the phrase white British, the standard ONS definition of the historic majority. Yet at the same time he accepts it’s legitimate to count using ethnic categories and reprimands France for refusing to do so “while ignoring actually existing racial and ethnic differences in social and economic outcomes.” How can one measure a society’s ethnic evolution if one is squeamish about even naming the largest group?

He also dislikes the focus on those born outside the UK, now around 17% of the UK population. But this is just a way of drawing attention to how recent much of the UK’s immigration has been, recall those extraordinary numbers in 2022 (nearly 800,000 net) and 2023 (nearly 700,000 net). He celebrates the fact that 43% of the non-UK born have taken up British citizenship, but that means 57% have not. And who can blame them because citizenship is a far less important category than Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) which is what opens up the welfare state and social housing. I have lobbied, along with Sunder Katwala of British Future, for reducing the high cost of citizenship but what we should really be doing is merging ILR and citizenship.

I recall debates in the early 2000s about ‘earned citizenship’. This is a popular idea reflecting a universal hostility to free-riding. One of the reasons that people voted for Brexit to end free movement was the dislike of people from eastern Europe qualifying almost immediately for most entitlements. The specialness of British citizenship was thereby diluted.

There remains great sensitivity to people getting access to welfare and social housing without having paid into the system for several years, yet unofficial estimates suggest widespread abuse. Moreover, the universalist thrust of human rights legislation tends to blur the line between citizen and non-citizen as well as making it hard to deport people who shouldn’t be here.

There is also a widespread and justified belief that many recent immigrants from outside Europe are less productive than earlier waves of French bankers and Polish plumbers. Work by the Danish government suggests that non-Western immigrants and their immediate descendants make nowhere close to a positive contribution over their lifespan. Pointing out differences in earnings and employment rates is not denigrating anyone it is conducting a legitimate debate about the purpose of immigration.

To justify their rosy view of how mass immigration is working Ansell/Freedman repeatedly hide behind the fallacy of composition, mistaking the part for the whole. In response to Neil O’Brien’s observation that in many parts of London the traditional majority culture doesn’t exist anymore, Ansell counters that the majority culture was already a hybrid in the 1980s including people like Lenny Henry and Salman Rushdie, successful assimilated individuals (though many thousands of British Muslims also wanted Rushdie dead). Yet it is frivolous to deny that life and culture in London has been radically changed by migration, as I argue here.

Meanwhile, Sam Freedman upbraids Robert Jenrick for talking about importing people from Pakistan who have “medieval attitudes towards women” by citing the existence of a few successful politicians of Pakistani ancestry like Sajid Javid. But anyone who has looked at the alarming polling on the attitudes of British Muslims towards Jews, homosexuality and women, knows that Javid’s more mainstream views are not representative. The Batley teacher still in hiding because of protests over a lesson on Mohammad might have views on the matter, not to mention the victims of the grooming gangs.

It is not the 1990s anymore when the ethnic minority population was barely 10% adding to the variety of British life and, by and large, integrating into it because the minority populations were not large enough to live significantly apart from it.

We are a big, complex, liberal society which can and does accommodate many different ways of life, and it is true that most white people are not conscious of their ethnicity most of the time or even of having a distinct way of life.

But people who are perfectly comfortable, indeed welcoming, when their child’s class has 15 or 20% of chidren from different countries and ethnicities, some of whom might need extra help, might start to feel uncomfortable when that number hits 40 or 50%. Or when a neighbourhood shifts from 10% minority to 30% or 40% minority, attitudes can change fast.

This is not because people have suddenly become racist, if they live in a big city they will probably have minority friends, but because they have lost the familiarity and ease of local connection they once enjoyed, unless the incomers are thoroughly integrated into mainstream British life (as noted, something much more likely in affluent areas). Thomas Schelling, the American economist, famously demonstrated that even a small preference for not being in the minority can quickly convert into highly segregated neighbourhoods.

Ben Ansell and Sam Freedman are obviously entitled to their pro-mass immigration views but they are not entitled to believe that they are morally superior to those with more restrictionist views who are not motivated by racism, which is the vast majority of us. Their reflex is to collapse any discussion of average group differences, such as my Australia/Afghanistan example, into a story of individual exclusion. This might have been justified back in the racist 1960s or 1970s, when there was plenty of such exclusion, but is now just an obstacle to a rational discussion.

One of the things that seems to trigger their righteousness, especially in Sam Freedman’s case, is the belief that the masses cannot be trusted and the anti-racism taboo is shallow, requiring thinker-activists like Freedman and Ansell to patrol the linguistic and ideological borders.

One reason it’s possible to have a more pessimistic view today than 15 years ago, despite the polling evidence pointing towards greater liberalism on race, is the usual suspect social media. Social media not only encourages tribal behaviour – of the kind Ansell performs on Bluesky - it also gives a loud voice to unrepresentative but highly motivated micro groupings, some on the racist far right, who can give the impression that civilised behaviour is indeed a thin crust on a boiling cauldron of prejudice.

Tom McTague, editor of the New Statesman, recently gave a good example of this shift. He recalled how the broad welcome, across the political spectrum, to the uplifting and unifying opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics had only one significant dissenter in the shape of Tory MP Aidan Burley, who was then jumped on by almost everyone. If the same thing had happened today, McTague argued, Burley would have had much more support online, and the ceremony would have felt much more contested, though it would not have changed the fact that the vast majority of British people felt it captured the spirit of the country.

More dangerous than misplaced fear of the masses is the ‘nothing to see here’ insouciance about historically unprecedented changes to society that will need all of our democratic resources to manage. If elites seem contemptuous of the anxieties felt by a significant minority if not a majority of people, and not just white British people, it will make this transition a lot harder. It is a cliche of social psychology that when people feel secure and in control they are readier to accept change and difference, the more uncertain and insecure they are the less open they become and the more attracted to the appeal of ‘rage entrepreneurs’ like Donald Trump.

If Ansell/Freedman have noticed a change in tone in recent times, and I believe they are right to do so, it is in response to a rapid change in the demographic facts, criticised also by the Prime Minister. Those of us sounding the alarm should be challenged if we get our facts wrong or if we slide into catastrophism but not dismissed as beyond the pale because Ansell/Freedman take a different view.

For this reason I believe the only realistic long-term integration policy is a low immigration policy. We simply need time to absorb the roughly 10m people who have arrived in this century. Ideally low immigration would be combined with the robust rhetoric and symbolism of national unity, promoting the kind of ‘emotional citizenship’ we associated with the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony. This kind of unifying nationalism has never been particularly strong in the UK, outside of wartime, partly thanks to the legacy of empire and partly thanks to the fact of being four nations in one state. It has never been popular among the English educated class and is now weaker than ever, especially among young people. National citizen favouritism also falls foul of human rights legislation. But most importantly we do not have a political class with the authority or rhetorical capacity to inspire people in this way. It is no coincidence that we recall Danny Boyle’s Olympic imagery, not Gordon Brown’s earnest lectures about Britishness from a few years earlier. So we are really left with turning off the immigration tap.

This does not mean that there is nothing to be done about the slowly growing problem of the parallel lives of those already living here. I’ve been involved in various attempts to think about this for 20 years or more, most recently in this Policy Exchange report written in 2022 with Brendan Cox one of the leading lights in the Together Coalition (https://bit.ly/3ZTt4hw) which has just announced its integration commission prompted by last year’s Southport riots.

The Policy Exchange report proposed various small-scale nudges like requiring local authorities to publish regular data on neighbourhood and school segregation, something that we have the data for, on the assumption that this would motivate the most segregated places to avoid being labelled the worst in the country. But would this translate into forced anti-ghettoisation policies in public housing, as in Singapore or closer to home in Denmark? Kemi Badenoch recently said she would consider it. Will the Together Coalition’s Commission on integration follow her?

Neighbourhood segregation has actually been declining in recent years as ethnic minorities move from the inner city to the suburbs. But they tend to move to ethnic minority dominated suburbs so the overall level of mixing between minorities and the white British majority has not budged and in schools it may even be getting worse with nearly half of all ethnic minority pupils in schools where the white British proportion is less than one quarter.

These thoughts have been prompted by two things, the announcement of the year-long Together Coalition Commission and writing an introduction for the Japanese edition of my 2013 book The British Dream: Successes and Failures of Post-War Immigration. Better late than never Japan!

Writing the latter led me to re-read the introductory chapter of the book which I re-publish below. It rambles a bit but still seems pretty fresh and even a bit startling in its honesty about the failures. For younger readers it provides a bit of historical context to current debates. I am also publishing the shorter introduction to the Japanese edition which made me reflect on just how much immigration has convulsed British politics since the book was first published.

On the Commission, I wish them well, but I was a bit disappointed to see that the list of 19 Commissioners was heavily biased towards the London-based ‘great and the good’. There was only one person one might describe as sympathetic to populism, Tim Montgomerie, and nobody I could see who might have a recent local understanding of the dynamics of Southport-style rioting (something that could easily be repeated while the Commission is at work). Surely a head teacher or social services director or senior police officer or relevant professional (maybe retired) based in a Rochdale or a Rotherham would have been helpful? I understand that there will be a caravan touring such places but the Commissioners themselves appear to have been chosen to provide a London-centric political balance of sorts rather than drawn on people with relevant recent experience.

NEW INTRODUCTION TO THE BRITISH DREAM (2025)

Britain is being dramatically transformed by immigration. This book, published in 2013, was a warning to the political class to scale back the numbers and to think harder about integrating new arrivals. My advice was ignored. Since 2013 the UK population has increased by more than 5m, almost entirely due to immigration, and now stands at around 70m. Meanwhile, the historic majority, the white British population, has fallen to a bit above 70%, but less than 30% in London, as any recent visitor from Japan will have noticed.

Large scale immigration has advantages and disadvantages. It has made the UK livelier and more dynamic but not obviously richer and more content. My book was an attempt at a hard-headed audit of the costs and benefits, avoiding the sentimentality of the left which sees only benefits or the pessimism of the right which sees only costs.

If I was writing the British Dream today I would need to add a chapter on the way that immigration has convulsed our politics since 2013. A country once renowned for stability and evolutionary change has become a byword for unpredictability. The Brexit decision to leave the European Union shocked the world, led to a three year wrangle about what form Brexit should take, and tore apart the Conservative Party, one of the most successful parties of the last 200 years. And the main driver of the unexpected Brexit decision was the uncontrolled immigration from the new EU states in central and eastern Europe after 2004.

Then after the 2019 election broke the deadlock and gave Boris Johnson’s Conservatives a mandate for a hard Brexit, immigration, instead of gradually falling as Governments had promised at every election since 2010, rose after the pandemic to historically unprecedented levels. Net immigration in 2022 was nearly 800,00 and in 2023 nearly 700,00, falling to 430,000 in 2024. It is now expected to settle at around 350,000 a year, more than 100,000 a year higher than the already high levels prior to the referendum.

Why the spike? There was pent up demand after the pandemic for student visas (everyone who stays for more than one year is counted as an immigrant) and work visas (especially in health and elder care), and refugee numbers rose thanks to the Ukraine war and the discovery that crossing the English Channel on a small boat was an easy way to enter the country illegally, with little chance of being deported thanks to human rights laws.

Boris Johnson, who had been a pro-immigration mayor of London, wanted to signal post-Brexit that having control over immigration, impossible within the EU, did not mean we were retreating behind a wall. His Government carelessly made student and care visas far easier to obtain, including for dependents.

The deeper reason for the spike is that Britain has become addicted to high levels of immigration as a way of getting things on the cheap. International students pay more than UK students and are responsible for 25% of the income of higher education institutions, without them we would either have fewer universities or it would cost the state a lot more to support them. We are also far more dependent than most rich countries on foreign trained doctors and nurses without whom the National Health Service would cost even more than the current £200bn a year and rising.

High levels of legal immigration, and even more the visible daily affront to the idea of secure borders in the English Channel, are not popular with voters. They are hard to reverse partly because of the economic reasons above but also because people in the main centres of power - at the top of most Government departments, in the universities, in health trusts and social care homes, in the courts – tend to favour high inflows.

This also reflects a politically salient value divide between the highly educated, often mobile, people I called in a subsequent book (The Road To Somewhere) the ‘Anywheres’, who are comfortable with change and openness, and the less well-educated ‘Somewheres’ who draw their identity more from particular places and groups and therefore find rapid demographic change more uncomfortable. Anywheres are a minority of perhaps 25% of the population but far more influential on issues like immigration than the mainly immigration-sceptic Somewheres.

My book is a history of the first two big post-war immigration waves, (we are now in the third post-Brexit wave). The first started in 1948 when for 15 years anyone from the British empire and Commonwealth was free to settle in the UK. There was some initial hostility, represented politically by the figure of Enoch Powell, as Britain gradually became a multiracial society with people from the Indian sub-continent, Africa and the Caribbean, totalling about 5m or a bit less than 10% of the population by 2000.

There was an implicit contract between politicians and the public, people accepted the newcomers as equal citizens but politicians kept firm control of inflows, and by the late 1980s/1990s net immigration had fallen to less than 50,000 a year.

But the election of the New Labour Government in 1997 opened the door again and led to the second wave, with a bit less than 5m people arriving by the time my book was published in 2013 (and another 5m since then) in a much shorter period than the first wave.

The case for mass immigration in the first wave was centred on racial justice and imperial obligation by the second wave it had shifted to economic benefit. That is now a much harder case to make, especially since the post-Brexit wave which has been mainly people from poorer countries outside the EU.

The traditionally pro-immigration Labour party elected in July 2024 was, one year later, trailing Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration Reform party in the opinion polls, which prompted an official white paper accepting what mass immigration sceptics have been arguing for 20 years: the pace of cultural change is too fast, the economic benefit over-estimated, the pressure on public services and housing underestimated. Introducing the white paper, Prime Minister Keir Starmer said that Britain is in danger of becoming “an island of strangers”.

People who continue to favour high levels of immigration often say there would be no problem so long as newcomers integrate into our society, through learning the language and adopting the common norms of behaviour. The problem is that in liberal societies it is hard to define what common norms are and, in any case, hard to enforce compliance with them.

The best integration policy is a low immigration policy, taking care to minimise the economic damage on the way. We need time to digest the enormous number of newcomers of the past 20 years. The summer of 2024 saw anti-immigration riots after some children were murdered in Southport. More serious rioting cannot be ruled out. But a more important reason for lowering the inflow is that we need to retain a sense of fellow citizen solidarity to deal with the big problems that we, like all rich countries, will face in the coming years: low growth and withering welfare states thanks to our ageing societies; the burden-sharing that climate change will demand; and a more unstable world that will call on us to defend our countries with our taxes if not with our lives.

Japan has taken a different and much more restrictionist approach to immigration than the UK. I do not know Japanese society or your immigration debate well, and it maybe that there is a case for being somewhat more open than you have been over recent decades. But the British Dream story up to 2013, and even more so considering the subsequent events described above, suggest that your resistance to mass immigration has not been foolish.

London, June 26^th 2025.

FIRST CHAPTER OF THE BRITISH DREAM: SUCCESSES AND FAILURES OF POST-WAR IMMIGRATION (2013)

This book is about post-war immigration to Britain and all the arguments that swirl around it: what the country has got right, and what it has got wrong. It is about the immigrants and their descendants, about how they are progressing in British society and how well they are integrating into British life. But it is also about the country they have come to and what kind of connection people, of all backgrounds, feel towards it and each other and what place national feeling has in an open, liberal, rich society like ours.

Immigration, race and national identity, and the connection between them, are emotional subjects which touch on how people feel about themselves. The conversation has become a more open one in recent years but it is still dogged by many taboos and silences. I want to challenge some of the semi-official “group think” on these matters and try to look at matters as they are.

We still live in the long shadow cast by the racial exclusion which marked the first few decades of post-colonial immigration after the second world war. But Britain is now a very different place. As Munira Mirza has put it: “Racism still exists, but things have improved to a point where many ethnic minority Britons do not experience it as a regular feature in their lives.”

The evidence, as I demonstrate in Chapter 2, indicates that it is time for liberals to reverse the “discrimination presumption” and instead to assume that this is an open society struggling, not always successfully, to make good its promise of a decent chance in life to people of all backgrounds. That is not only closer to the truth but it is also a more useful story to tell young minority Britons than the alternative of a relentlessly racist country thwarting their lives.

The extensive data—about progress in education, pay, social mobility and so on—should also give us the confidence to generalise in a clear-eyed way about how different minorities are progressing, in much the same way that we generalise about social class. And we should not be afraid to reflect on how minority lives can be blighted by self-inflicted cultural wounds such as the macho street culture of many young, male Caribbeans, or the first cousin marriages of Kashmiri Pakistanis.

I do not want to stigmatise particular groups nor to assume that generalisations about ethnic groups apply to everyone from that group; we are all individuals and many of us float free of our origins.

But neither do I want to sentimentalise. Political speeches about immigration or minority politics often praise minority groups for their contribution. This sounds increasingly odd. Political leaders do not thank the people of Herefordshire or Wiltshire for their contribution. It is also too indiscriminate, not all minority groups do make a great contribution. In 30 years time the Somalians in Britain may be regarded as successful and entrepreneurial as the East African Asians are today, but currently only about 30 per cent of them work.

Like most white British people of my age I am happy living in a multiracial society. But unlike most members of my political tribe of North London liberals I have come to believe that public opinion is broadly right about the immigration story. We have had too much of it, too quickly, especially in recent years and much of it has not been of self-evident economic benefit especially for the least well off.

Nor has it been well managed. Britain has never had a robust tradition of integrating newcomers, though many have done it for themselves. In the early post-war decades this laissez-faire approach was overlaid with racial prejudice, latterly by a liberalism that is reluctant to intervene in individual choices. Moreover multiculturalism, particularly in its more separatist form that emerged in the 1980s, has allowed “parallel lives” to grow up in some places and made it harder for ordinary Britons to think of some minorities, and especially Muslims, as part of the “imagined community” with common experiences and interests.

Race and identity politics has too often turned minority Britons into a sectional interest with their own “demands,” rather like the trade unions in the 1970s. And too often the demands have been for a separate slice of power and resources rather than for the means to create a common life. This undermines the cross-ethnic “emotional citizenship”—the belief that despite some different concerns we’re all on the same team—that is necessary, in some degree, to sustain a well functioning democracy and a generous welfare state.

A Mixed Picture

It is a mixed picture. In many places immigration is working as the textbooks say it should: minorities are upwardly mobile and creating interesting new hybrid identities in happily mixed suburbs. And there are more than 1m British people of mixed race who attest to the most fundamental form of inter-ethnic integration of all. Even if the Somalians do not become the new East African Asians, then others, perhaps the Poles, will. And we have come a long way in a short time. A country that less than 100 years ago believed it was its right to control the destiny of many “lesser breeds” has now invited them across its border and learnt to treat them more or less as equals. One of the great achievements of the past 30 years has been the banishment of overt racism: consider the national outrage over a racial expletive uttered by the former England football captain John Terry.

Elsewhere the immigration story has been far from successful, notably in the northern “mill towns” and other declining industrial regions which in the 1960s and 1970s attracted one of the most clannish and hard to integrate minorities of modern times, Kashmiri Pakistanis. There are many groups from developing countries who have done better than the white average in education and employment—Hindu Indians, Sikhs, some Black Africans, Chinese—and plenty who have done worse—Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Turks and African-Caribbeans.

The levels of education and the attitudes that people bring with them has a decisive impact on those outcomes—Britain itself sometimes seems an irrelevant bystander. Muslims have tended to integrate less well not just because of the religion but because most of the British Muslim minority was originally from rural, traditional parts of Pakistan and Bangladesh, and has reproduced many aspects of that life in the streets of northern England, the midlands and east London. Indian Muslims or urban Pakistani Muslims are generally far more successful.

The British political class has never done a good job at explaining what the point of large scale immigration was and whose interests it was meant to serve. Partly because those questions are hard to answer. The idea that immigration, except in the case of refugees, should be unambiguously in the interests of existing citizens was blurred from the start by imperial obligations to the new arrivals; and the difficulty of deciding what the “interests of existing citizens” are. But compared with many other countries (notably Canada) British immigration has been, until recently, largely unselective and those who have settled have generally been low skilled people from poor countries.

The economics of immigration is a big subject (see Chapter 1) but the benefits are not as significant as is usually assumed and have been unevenly distributed, the main beneficiaries being the better off and the immigrants themselves. It is true that skill gaps and undesirable jobs have been filled but poorer British citizens (often from minorities) have paid the price in downward pressure on wages and greater competition for public services and housing. There is a psychological as well as a material dimension to this: groups, like individuals, want to feel valued and useful; parts of white working class Britain have come to feel neither in recent decades and often blame newcomers for their loss.

Immigration has made Britain livelier and more dynamic than we would otherwise have been, but it has not clearly made us richer or more content. Indeed, large scale immigration has exacerbated many of the undesirable aspects of British economic life: poverty, inequality, low productivity, lack of training and employer short-termism.

The country would still have functioned perfectly well with half or one quarter the levels of immigration we have experienced—we would have been greyer, a bit more equal and a lot more Irish. Contrary to the “myth of invitation”, very few people from South Asia or the Caribbean were invited. They came because they could and because Britain offered better prospects. The country did need more workers in the 1950s and 1960s but there was no reason why they had to be poor people from distant cultures on the other side of the globe—especially as the imperial connection that brought them was soon to become a source of guilt to the coloniser and resentment to the colonised.

The post-war immigration story is one of the most enormous and perplexing in the whole of British history—and it is still here all around us, perhaps inside us if we are of recent immigrant descent. In the space of less than 60 years a rather homogeneous country at the heart of a multiracial empire became a multiracial country, now without an empire. The empire truly came home and, initially, occupied large parts of the old working class districts of English cities—London, the West Midlands and the northern industrial towns in particular. And almost everything you can think of to say about this transformation, something close to its opposite will also be true. It has changed everything, yet perhaps for more than two-thirds of the white population it has changed very little at least directly. It is a symptom of Britain’s relative decline, but also of its rebirth and reinvention. It has been a triumph of the human spirit which has enriched this island, it has also been a mess of division and conflict.

It happened in two big waves. In the first post-colonial wave, from 1948 to the early 1990s, people came mainly from the Caribbean, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Africa: by the end of the period their number (including about half who were born here) was about 4m. In the second phase starting with Labour’s election in 1997 and continuing to this day the number of minority residents almost doubled, in just 15 years. Another 4m immigrants arrived in that period, and less than a quarter from the EU.

And both waves happened largely by accident. When the 1948 Nationality Act was passed, giving the right to live and work in Britain to all citizens of the empire and commonwealth, it was not expected that the ordinary people of poor former colonies would arrive in their hundreds of thousands. Nor was it expected after 1997 that a combination of quite small decisions would lead to such a big inflow even before the decision to welcome the new EU states in 2004. The 1.5m Eastern Europeans who arrived after 2004 were as unexpected as those pioneer immigrants after 1948. The second time round Britain was less unwelcoming but no better prepared.

This is a demographic revolution. According to the 2011 census the population of England and Wales that was not “White British” was a fraction under 20 per cent (that includes 3m whites who are not White British, including Eastern Europeans, Australians, Irish, Germans and so on). By 2021 it will be over 25 per cent.

Already in several towns and cities – including London, Leicester, Slough and Luton – the White British are in a minority. Soon Birmingham will join them. The decline in the proportion of the White British in London to just 44.9% was one of the biggest surprises of the 2011 census. If we had a confident sense of our national culture and were good at integrating people into it, then perhaps this would be of little concern. But neither is the case.

Too Diverse?

Immigration prompts not just economic and demographic questions but cultural, political and psychological ones too. What is a modern national community and how quickly can it absorb large numbers of new people? Is there a “core” culture that large scale immigration diminishes? Where does the balance of adaptation lie between the host society and newcomers? Is a more inclusive sense of national identity unavoidably a weaker one?

I had not given immigration much thought until well into my 40s - beyond being vaguely in favour and aware that I had two immigrant grandfathers (both American) - but I was then drawn to reflect on it through these big, political questions. And as a journalist of leftish sympathies I came to see that it was not only the most fascinating story about modern Britain but also, in the way it cuts across old left/right distinctions, an emblem of the new political dilemmas of our times.

Then, in February 2004, I became briefly part of the story. I published a 6,000 word essay entitled “Too Diverse?” in Prospect magazine, which I then edited, about what I called the “progressive dilemma”—the tension between diversity and social solidarity—and unwittingly raised a storm of often angry argument (the essay had been reprinted in the Guardian). I was accused of being a “liberal racist” and had to pay my penance on the race and immigration conference circuit for the next few years, where I tried to articulate—often with difficulty—why it was possible to worry about the effects of “difference” without being a racist.

It was David Willetts, a Conservative politician, who drew my attention to the “progressive dilemma.” He wrote: “If values become more diverse, if lifestyles become more differentiated, then it becomes more difficult to sustain the legitimacy of a risk-pooling welfare state. People ask, ‘Why should I pay for them when they are doing things I wouldn’t do?’ This is America versus Sweden. You can have a Swedish welfare state provided you are a homogeneous society with intensely shared values. In the US you have a very diverse, individualistic society where people feel fewer obligations to fellow citizens. Progressives want diversity but they thereby undermine part of the moral consensus on which a large welfare state rests.”

People are readier to share and co-operate with people whom they trust or with whom they believe they have significant attributes, and interests, in common. That “in-group” can be, and is, extended to include people of very different racial, ethnic or class background. But it is rarely a simple or swift process. Modern science confirms anti-racist intuitions that human beings are all broadly the same, it is also on the side of a more awkward truth: that humans are group based primates who favour their own and extend trust to outsiders only cautiously.

It is the failure of liberals and multiculturalists to acknowledge that strong group identities are legitimate for white majorities as well as non-white minorities that makes them bad at the politics of integration. The liberal story about migration too often assumes a society without any pre-existing attachments or sense of community—but people are not blank sheets, societies are not random collections of individuals and resistance to change in a community is not necessarily racist. If suddenly your neighbourhood fills up with strangers you cannot understand the informal solidarities and reasonable levels of trust and security that a good society depends on are easily disrupted.

And amidst the daily entanglement of competition and co-operation that is a modern urban society, welfare democracies make big demands on their citizens. Behind every citizen lies a graveyard, as Alan Wolfe has put it. Most of us are no longer asked to risk death for our country but we are asked to pay around one third of our income into a common national pool every year and in return the modern state manages large bits of infrastructure for us—defence, transport, energy, public services and welfare—and attempts to regulate the national economy. For this to work the modern citizen is expected to conform to a thicket of rules and regulations. And to sustain this level of sharing and co-operation we need more than passive tolerance, we need some of that emotional citizenship I referenced earlier.

The solidarity versus diversity debate was, and is, often a painful one. Made more so by the fact that I, a privileged white man, was arguing from first principles, many of my non-white opponents from the pain of feeling persecuted for their difference.

I often tried in these debates about “Too Diverse?” to stress that I was not just talking about ethnic diversity, but value diversity in general: the conservative home counties grandmother versus the punk rocker or goth. Even if not a single immigrant had arrived in recent decades the expansion of individual rights and freedoms since the 1960s would have created an unprecedented range of life styles and beliefs in Britain’s towns and cities. This new diversity has created a society that is much freer and in many ways happier, but also more morally confused and with a weaker sense of itself.

The “progressive dilemma” is a permanent balancing act and part of an even bigger tension, at the heart of the human condition itself, between security and freedom. Both of them represent something big in the human spirit—community, belonging, reciprocity and duty on the one hand, the open road, freedom, mobility and rights, on the other. We want the freedom to be geographically and socially mobile, to break free of commitments if we find them too burdensome—to get divorced if our marriages are not happy, to park our elderly relatives in care homes if they become too difficult—yet these choices can be disruptive to strong, stable communities.

Technology and free markets—as well as ethnic diversity—have loosened the bonds we feel with fellow citizens. Social relations have become shallower but our networks are wider and more international. We have lost through this and we have gained. As the philosopher Michael Sandel has put it: “In our public life, we are more entangled, but less attached, than ever before.”

There is a lot at stake here, if we don’t get the balance right. The miracle of co-operation and institutionalised sharing that is a modern welfare democracy has been hard won over centuries of nation-building and class conflict and it could unravel over a generation or two. It is possible to imagine Britain little by little becoming a less civil, even more unequal and ethnically divided country—as harsh and violent as the US.

And it is all too easy to imagine a gradual erosion of the willingness to pay for the welfare state as we become richer and more socially distant—indeed, it is already happening. When I wrote “Too Diverse?” there was little evidence for this, indeed Britain was in the middle of a big expansion of public spending and redistribution. Today it is different with big cuts, and popular ones, to social security budgets and a big, long-term, fall in support for those aspects of welfare which are seen to be mainly for the benefit of poorer others (40 per cent of minority Britons are classified as poor compared with 20 per cent of white Britons). A long period of low growth is bound to exacerbate this.

The most useful responses to my essay were from people who wanted to think about how to mitigate the progressive dilemma. To combine diversity with solidarity, to improve integration and racial justice, it is no good just preaching tolerance, you need a politics that promotes a common in-group identity. As the moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt has put it, talking about racial division in the US: “You can make people care less about race by drowning race differences in a sea of similarities, shared goals and mutual interdependencies.”

So, the second step in the argument, and in this book too, came to focus on integration and national identity and to criticise a multiculturalism which gave precedence to difference while taking solidarity for granted. I argued in a pamphlet for the think tank Demos in 2006 (Progressive Nationalism: Citizenship and the Left) that moderate national feeling has become a positively progressive force. As the British national story has weakened somewhat—thanks, inter alia, to globalisation, EU integration, end of empire, immigration, devolution, the decline of external threats and a big increase in incomes which has allowed us to live less collectivist lives—it has become more important to find a way of talking about national citizenship that suits a more fluid, individualistic and multiracial era. Gordon Brown had an interesting failure with his Britishness debate; it is possible to do better.

One of the creative things about immigration is that it allows us to catch a glimpse of ourselves as outsiders see us, and it is not always flattering. It also requires us to acknowledge that we cannot rely on instinctive understandings any longer, that it is not “un-British” to talk about Britishness. We may disagree about where the balance lies between the civic and the ethnic—between political principles and institutions on the one hand and ancestry and history on the other—but there is a wider acceptance that the conversation matters, especially since 7/7.

A new British conversation was crystallised for many people by Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympics. He captured, in a way that politicians had been unable to do, a sense of a post-racial national story of a country with an extraordinary past and a promising present. National identity necessarily implies a special relationship with one’s fellow national citizens but it no longer implies superiority to other nations or peoples. The idea of the moral equality of all human beings regardless of race, religion or gender—the basic idea behind human rights—is also compatible with national feeling.

Anti-nationalists underestimate just how much the nation state has liberalised in recent decades. One might say that the great achievement of post-1945 politics, in Europe at least, has been to “feminise” the nation state. The nation was once about defending or taking territory and about organised violence but since collective security made major wars unthinkable, at least in Western Europe, the focus switched to the internal sharing of resources within the nation—and the traditionally feminine “hearth and home” issues of worrying about the young, the old, the disabled and the poor.

The national story has been complicated in Britain, at the political if not popular level, by being four nations in one state, and also by an English elite unwillingness to think in ordinary national terms. This ambivalence has its roots in the supra-national British empire but was later taken up by the left, partly in reaction against the anti-immigration nationalism of Enoch Powell in the 1960s.

This is one reason why in the 1970s and 1980s a multicultural idea of group rights and “a community of communities” rather than a more integrationist idea of national citizenship seemed the best way of managing majority/minority relations. It is also why US style symbolic pathways to national citizenship were not offered to newcomers back then. That is beginning to change. Britain may never have done “flags on the lawn” but with the citizenship tests and citizenship ceremonies introduced in 2004 we do now have flags and pictures of the Queen in town halls for new citizens.

England itself has remained part-submerged because an egalitarian age is discomforted by the echoes of its past national dominance—it cannot draw on the small nation solidarity of, say, the Irish or Danes or the anti-colonial spirit of many newer countries. But two generations after empire as England has shrunk and the United Kingdom has loosened, the opportunity for a benign, confident English identity to emerge may be here: a national story which sees England as special but not superior; a blurring of the rigid lines between civic and ethnic forms of identification, and an understanding that there are many ways to be English.

A confident national identity is an aid, not an obstacle, to integrating newcomers, and only a tiny number of white Britons believe you have to be white to be British or English. An ordinary unembarrassed and unchauvinistic attachment to this country—its language, its history, a sense of a common home—has long been the common sense, low-key national feeling of ordinary Britons. It was captured and played back to the country by Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony.

The educated elite is catching up, sometimes reluctantly. In the senior common room, the boardroom, and even in Whitehall a more global liberalism is often the default position. I was forcibly struck by this dining at an Oxford college last year. When I said to my neighbour, one of the country’s most senior civil servants, that I wanted to write a book about why liberals should be more sceptical about the scale and speed of recent immigration he frowned and said, “I don’t believe in all that stuff, when I was at the Treasury I argued for the most open door possible to immigration… I think it’s my job to maximise global welfare not national welfare.”

I was surprised to hear this from such a senior figure in such a national institution and asked the man sitting next to the civil servant, one of the most powerful television executives in the country, whether he believed global welfare should be put before national welfare, if the two should conflict. He said he believed global welfare was paramount. In effect he felt he had a greater obligation to someone in Burundi than to someone in Birmingham.

This encounter re-inspired me to write this book; it had been languishing as a long term project. But I also realised that I could not write about immigration and multiculturalism and minority Britain without going out to observe it and to talk to as many people as possible about their lives, which is what I have done over the past couple of years.

Those two men in Oxford reflect the ideology of Britain’s educated liberal baby-boomers. They take for granted the blessings of a national welfare democracy yet are also marked by the anti-national ideology of the 1960s and 1970s, a lingering reaction against the nationalist extremes of the first half of the 20^th century.

Yet their well-intentioned attempts to transcend the nation state in the name of “global welfare” are not in the interests of the majority of citizens in either rich countries or poor. Sustained mass immigration, without appropriate integration, damages the internal solidarity of rich countries while also stripping poor countries of their most dynamic and best educated people. This is not a sensible way to run the world.

Most people are moral particularists, believing that we have a hierarchy of obligations starting with our family and rippling out via the nation state to the rest of humanity. Charity, like our affections, begins at home, even if doesn’t end there. But many of the brightest and the best now reject this old homily. Their idealism is more focussed on raising the standards of the global poor than on helping out the lonely pensioner up the road. The most idealistic fast stream civil servants usually want to work in DFID, the international development department. And they tend to be uninterested in how mass immigration has affected existing citizens, indeed all too readily accept arguments about the fecklessness of British workers compared with the hard working immigrant.

The late philosopher Michael Dummett argued that open borders ought to be accepted as the norm and, by extension, that existing citizens in western countries do not have any special rights to “their” rich and peaceful countries as compared to newcomers. Why should a London bus driver get paid 20 times more than a Karachi one for performing an easier version of the same task?

The answer is because a society is a contract between generations and the London bus driver is benefitting from hundreds of years of economic and technological development which has made Britain a much richer country than Pakistan.

The post-national globalists do not agree. Consider the debate over “British jobs for British workers,” the phrase used by Gordon Brown in his speech to the Labour conference in 2008. I was at a birthday party for a Labour MP just after the speech. The people around me entered a bidding war to express their outrage at Brown’s slo­gan which was finally triumphantly closed by one who declared, to general approval, that it was “racism, pure and simple.”

Gor­don Brown, it should be recalled, didn’t say Brit­ish jobs for white British workers. In most places in the world today, and indeed probably in Britain itself until about 20 years ago, his slogan about a bias for national citizens would have seemed so banal as to be hardly worth uttering. Now the language of liberal uni­versalism has ruled it beyond the pale.

The slogan was, of course, cynical because Gordon Brown knew that under EU free movement laws it is illegal for British employers to discriminate in favour of British workers. That law was drawn up in the 1950s when nobody expected a block of countries to join the EU with less than half the standard of living of existing members, thus giving individuals a strong incentive to seek work in the higher income countries and undercut the workers there. Yet that is just what has happened. And it has alerted ordinary citizens to the fact that “fellow citizen favouritism” is increasingly overriden in the modern world by liberal economic principles and human rights laws that say it is wrong to discriminate between citizens and non-citizens.

To many commentators this is welcome. Ian Birrell, writing in the Evening Standard in October 2011, attacked the coalition government’s immigration cap on the grounds that it was making it harder to recruit people to care for his seriously disabled son.

Recruiting people for care jobs is a serious issue. Outside London most such jobs are filled by British citizens but increasingly in London and the south east foreign born care assistants predominate. But such people are not, as Birrell implied, on a higher moral plane to British citizens. They have not come here because they love elderly or disabled British people and want to help them. They have come here for a better life and higher pay than is possible in Colombia, Barbados or Slovakia. Indeed, given that their own poorer countries probably have proportionately higher numbers of suffering and elderly people one might ask why they have not stayed to look after them.

Their absence from British care homes would not have led to their closure, rather governments and local authorities and private providers would have had to pay more and make the jobs more attractive to lure British citizens to work in them who have more options than Colombians.

The same day, in the Independent, Dominic Lawson wrote about the other end of the labour market and complained that the immigration cap was preventing Britain from recruiting the brightest scientific and entrepreneurial talent. Immigration is here being pressed into service to support a dubious theory of the “Steve Jobs” economy—the idea that a few heroic CEOs or inventors drive growth; the German economy is a living disproof of that idea. In any case the immigration cap is designed to continue to attract such exceptional people.

The bigger point here is that these arguments in favour of beneficial immigration could apply to inflows at a fraction of current levels. Birrell and Lawson argue from a narrow particular—carers or scientists—and fail to see the bigger picture. The image of the angelic nurse from a developing country or a hard-working Polish plumber must be balanced against the fact that working age immigrants in general are less likely to work than natives. Unprejudiced British citizens in places like Bradford and Birmingham saw the point when hard-working immigrants arrived to do useful jobs in the period of post-war construction. They now look on bemused at some of the inward-looking communities with low employment levels and high welfare dependency that have emerged in recent decades.

The Immigrationist Story

Too much of this debate is dominated by a semi-mythical “immigrationist” story. Britain, it is said, is a “mongrel nation” that has always experienced high inflows of outsiders. But actually from 1066 until 1950 immigration was almost non-existent—about 50,000 Huguenots in the 16^th and 17^th century, about 200,000 Jews in two waves, and perhaps 1m or more Irish over 200 years during most of which time they were internal migrants within one state. Britain is a historic nation with an ethnic majority (or four separate ones) which has recently experienced very high levels of immigration—we are not, or not yet, an immigration nation like the US, Canada or Australia.

Immigrationists, like globalists, typically claim that the nation state is in terminal decline and that large scale immigration is now inevitable thanks to cheap travel and open economies. Britain is far more globally interconnected than 50 years ago, but people are more not less dependent on the nation state for physical and economic protection. And after the dust settles from the recent decades of globalization, and its overblown rhetoric, the national seems to be in reasonable shape—when banks are collapsing it matters which set of taxpayers are standing behind your savings account.

And mass immigration is not inevitable. It is true that flows into rich countries have doubled over the past 30 years but worldwide only about three per cent of the global population live outside the country of their birth. Moreover, back in the early 1990s when the British economy was only a bit less open than it is today net immigration was as little as 20,000 a year.

Finally, the immigrationist world view occludes the ways in which post-war immigration is utterly different from 19^th century or early 20^th century immigration. First, there is simple scale. Since 2004 nearly 600,000 people have arrived each year to stay for more than a year, with about 350,000 leaving—that means more people arrive on these shores as immigrants in a single year than in the entire period 1066 to 1950 (excluding the Irish and wartime flows).

Second, Britain is a welfare democracy. Native citizens have rights of national ownership and a far louder voice than in the 19^th or early 20^th century, they also inherit valuable social rights with their citizenship. While economic globalisation has blurred national boundaries the welfare state has, if anything, sharpened the boundary between national insiders and outsiders. Extending the idea of equal citizenship to millions of outsiders raises the problem of how to reconcile the special rights of existing citizens with those of new ones.

Third, multiculturalism—meaning for these purposes allowing immigrants not to have to adapt beyond a bare minimum—has changed what we expect of newcomers. As the incoming groups after 1948 became more different, we made fewer efforts to integrate them. And imperial experience leant against a robust national integration project. The communalist worldview derived from Britain’s “light touch” empire was comfortable with ethnic groups living largely separate lives, and the British ruling elite which had been used to holding the ring between competing interests in the empire slipped into a similar role at home.

Immigrationists point to the Jews of Whitechapel in the early 20th century: how alien they seemed then but how soon they dispersed into the suburbs to become one of Britain’s most successful minorities. Surely the Pakistanis of Bradford and Bangladeshis of Tower Hamlets will soon do the same? Perhaps. But there is, today, a huge difference in scale and in the laissez-faire spirit of the times which slows down the integrationist drift.

At its best multiculturalism allows people to come to their own hybrid identity without feeling pushed. But by placing ethnic identity before citizenship the multiculturalism that emerged in the 1980s failed to challenge the separateness that was developing in some minorities through sheer weight of numbers. The Thatcher governments had little interest in the inner cities and, in effect, sub-contracted race relations to local government and to the multiculturalist left.

The left hasn’t always been wrong about race and immigration, it has just got things out of balance. One of its greatest services in the post-war era was to lead the battle against racism, one of its greatest subsequent disservices has been to find racism under every stone and make the conversation so much harder.

This book is not an appeal to stop the tide of history and return to a warm, community-minded Britain of the 1950s. David Kynaston’s social history of the 1950s shows that such a place never existed. It is rather an attempt to persuade modern liberals that large scale, poorly managed immigration can damage the social contract and that national attachments are a necessary condition of any realistic centre left project—a “citizenship state” not a “market state.”

Yet, squeezed between a “leave me alone” individualism and a growing number of networks—from immigrant diasporas to computer gamers—which transcend and even disdain national borders, the nation state often appears to be drawing on dwindling intellectual and emotional support.

History matters but we are not its prisoners. We have made mistakes. But we can also celebrate what we have got right. New citizens become British by working, going to the shops, sending their children to school, speaking English well enough to have native friends and understanding the media well enough to join the national conversation. The state can remove obstacles to the creation of a common life and make it easier to join in.

What is there to integrate into? It is a question often asked by integration sceptics. And in a complex liberal society it is a hard question to give a simple answer to. But Britain is not just a few political institutions, and the NHS and “core liberal values”—it is the texture of everyday life from our sprawling conurbations to small villages. There can be found characteristic forms of behaviour, a certain kind of humour, a richly idiomatic language. Outsiders can often see this more clearly than insiders. The country does still have a “core” culture—a way of life, a theme, with many sub-cultural variations on that theme—both establishment BBC 1 and anti-establishment Channel 4.

This core culture is shifting, hard to pin down. It has a great capacity to absorb newcomers, but not a limitless one. Immigration is not just a problem. It benefits many people, the immigrants themselves by definition otherwise they would not come, and many people in the host society too. But when it is regarded as a problem or particular immigrant groups are seen to be underperforming then the debate tends to focus on the failings of the host society to be sufficiently accommodating. But the real failure in Britain in the post-war period was the failure to control the inflow more overtly in the interests of existing citizens, the failure to prepare those existing citizens for something as existential as large scale immigration and the failure to make a clear confident offer to newcomers to secure their loyalty and integration.

Unlike the American dream, the British dream is a phrase that does not trip off the tongue, the British tradition is more pragmatic than visionary. But it is time we started getting our tongues around the phrase. We may not have reached a post-racial Nirvanah but we have absorbed many different kinds of people into this old country in a remarkably short space of time. Our many immigrant success stories should be celebrated along with the best things about the historic British people—our imagination, our creativity, our bloody-mindedness—this is the country, after all, that invented much of the modern world from capitalism to soccer. The dream is about them too, about connecting majority to minority and old to new. Let me now describe what I have glimpsed of it.

It had some of the problems typical of any major metropolitan centre but starting in the 2000s London schools - driven partly by migrant ambition - began out-performing the rest of the country, its globally-rated universities expanded fast, serious national politicians vied to occupy its newly empowered mayor’s office, and the skyline was transformed by visionary architects.

Nowhere was the London turnaround better symbolised than by Islington, home to Tony Blair before he moved to No 10 in 1997. In the 1970s Islington was still considered a borderline slum. When Sainsbury’s built its supermarket near Angel in the early 1980s it demanded a car park so that richer customers could drive in from outside the area to shop (as Stephen Webb has noted on his substack).

By the time I moved there in the 1990s it had become a by-word for gentrification. At the same time, Islington’s famous football club, Arsenal, was being transformed by a Frenchman, a symbol of the internationalisation of the new Premier League in which London clubs have always played a disproportionate role.

London was driving the national economy and was regarded by most of the political and media class as a beacon of openness and opportunity to the rest of the country.

How times change. When it was recently estimated that the white British population will become a minority in the UK in 2060 I heard nobody saying ‘rapid demographic change is nothing to worry about, just look at London’. The capital has been majority minority since the mid 2000s and the white British proportion, still about 85% in 1980, is now less than one third. In Greater London’s schools only one in five children are white British.

That degree of demographic transformation inevitably takes its toll. Unless you are either pretty affluent, recently arrived from somewhere much poorer or live in an ethnic core (like Bangladeshis in Tower Hamlets), London’s quality of life leaves much to be desired. Like many big cities it is a place of high prices and low trust, low level crime and disorder abound (shoplifting and fare evasion on the tube have increased sharply in recent years), housing is expensive and home ownership has fallen 20% since 1991, and few people want to have babies here (London has the lowest fertility of any UK region).

Relentlessly high immigration is not responsible for all these ills, most of which afflict the rest of the country too, but nor is it entirely blameless. Moreover, 20 years ago London migrants were generally high contribution French or German bankers or Polish plumbers today they are more likely to be young food delivery drivers from outside Europe, almost half of whom are working illegally according to a 2023 Home Office survey, or minimum wage care workers.

London’s illegal immigrant population could be as high as 500,000, assuming a national figure of just over 1m, and many of the 160,000 people, mainly young men, who have crossed the Channel on boats since 2018 are now Londoners. Hillingdon and Hounslow have a particularly high share.

The capital is not as ethnically segregated as some other majority minority places in Britain, such as Leicester or Luton, nor is it a model of integration. Many parts of the capital would fail my integration ‘bus stop’ test – can you share a joke at a bus stop with a stranger from a different ethnicity about something you have both heard on national media? - given the fact that 40% of Londoners are foreign born and nearly 25% do not have English as their first language.

London’s Gaza battles are a sign of things to come as diasporas fight it out on our streets. And the capital will be increasingly divided between a secular, liberal, affluent professional class and increasingly religious ethnic minorities. Around 16% of Londoners are Muslim and politics in several boroughs is already dominated by sectarian Muslim allegiances.

The tourists have not yet been driven away by unpunished street crime, including sexual harassment, but London is in danger of trashing its own brand. Consider the iconic black cab with the driver’s deep knowledge of the city. Uber introduced some welcome competition but should it be allowed to strangle such an institution?

What has happened in London, and similar cities, is one factor behind the great shift in what drives Western politics from metropolitan openness to provincial insecurity. Populists do not like metropolitan centres, which they accuse of hoarding too much wealth and power and forcing progressive laws on conservative provincials. Levelling up the rest of the country, if necessary at London’s expense, is a popular idea that remains to be properly pursued.

Pierre Vermeren, the French historian, calculates that the top 12 French cities account for 25% of the country’s population but 60% of GDP and two-thirds of all high-income people. The UK is even more tilted towards one big city and has fewer successful provincial metropolises, Bristol is the only other English city that makes a positive fiscal contribution to UK plc.

In 2017 I published a book about populism in which I described two main education-based worldview groups in rich countries: the Anywheres (about 25% of the population), the highly educated, often mobile, people who value openness and autonomy and find it easy to negotiate change; the Somewheres (about 40 to 50%) the somewhat small-c conservative people who draw their identities more from particular places and groups and so tend to be discomforted when things change too fast.

Anywheres have portable ‘achieved’ identities based on their own educational and professional success, which means they can live comfortably surrounded by the bustle and churn of the edgy inner city. Metropolitan centres like London attract Anywheres and repel Somewheres, (except for ethnic minority Somewheres who usually have their heartlands in the metropolis).

The Anywhere worldview has dominated most Western societies for a generation, and populism is the Somewhere pushback. London is the capital of blue state Britain - alongside Manchester, Birmingham, and the other big cities – and the resentful red state provincials have had enough.

London, of course, has many of the same problems as the rest of the country: high welfare dependency, unselective immigration, an ageing population, and a state that can’t build houses or infrastructure.

The Lower Thames Crossing is one of the emblems of ‘broken Britain’. Consultations about a new crossing to alleviate congestion at the Dartford tunnel began more than 10 years ago. A decade later £300m has been spent on a 360,000 page planning application and work has still not begun.

London also has plenty of poverty, an unusually high number of single people who will need extra help from the state when they age, plus a disproportionate number of single parent families – more than 40% of children live in single parent households in Southwark, Lambeth, Islington, Lewisham, Hackney and Greenwich.

But to the rest of the country some of these trends look like the self-inflicted wounds of the dominant Anywheres, merely echoed by Sadiq Khan’s City Hall. Meanwhile provincial Britain drifts further away from London because its children are less likely to work here, unless seriously high achievers, thanks to international migration. I hear far fewer regional accents, let alone proper cockney, among London workers than I did when I was growing up in the 1970s.

Even British high achievers who do end up in London often find they can only afford to live in a shoe-box at the end of a tube line. One group, around the Pimlico Journal publication, has noticed that in nearly half of London’s social housing the head of household is someone born abroad, and that such homes enjoy an annual rental subsidy of more than £4bn (relative to market prices). In cases where the head of household is not employed the subsidy is nearly £3bn. They propose privatising the social housing estate, valued at £210bn.

Not much chance of that, unless forced by national government, as London voters move ever leftward. There are just 9 Conservative MPs out of 75 London seats. It is the one area of the country where the flawed assumption that the UK would move to the left as the proportion of graduates and ethnic minorities increased has proved true.

Of course, London still has many economic and cultural strengths, and it still needs talented migrants, nearly two-thirds of staff at the Francis Crick biomedical research lab are from overseas. But it also needs to make itself more attractive to its own hinterland. The political tide has turned against it, you can see it on the anxious faces of the provincial family on a birthday trip to London.

And what happens when the white British population falls below 20% in 10 years time? Is there some minimum number of natives that a capital requires before it ceases to be the capital? Perhaps Nigel Farage’s next policy surprise will be to propose stripping London of its capital status and moving the Government to York.

(This is the original version of a piece that appeared in the Evening Standard on Thursday June 19th https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/london-immigrants-broken-system-islington-b1233625.html Apparently it got a lot of abuse on BlueSky, including from the prominent liberal academic Ben Ansell.)

My own reaction was “two cheers for Keir”. As a former Labour member who left a decade ago partly thanks to the party’s enthusiasm for mass immigration I was happy to see him embracing most of the arguments that we sceptics have been making for 20 years: the pace of cultural change is too fast, the economic benefit is over-estimated, the pressure on public services and housing under-estimated, too many visa routes are abused, many of the benefits of immigration have been privatised while the costs are nationalised.

Credit where it is due: Labour’s white paper is challenging two of its core constituencies, universities and the health/care system, and we will hear loud complaints from both over the coming weeks. Yet overall these are only modest changes to migration flows that will give some extra impetus to the decline that began after the last Government’s hand-brake turn on its initial visa nonchalance. They will allow Labour to claim it has reduced numbers by half in a couple of years but will not be enough to win back many Reform voters.

So how much further can Labour go? Will human rights legislation, central to Keir Starmer’s own legal career, be next on the block if it stands in the way of progress on illegal immigration? Can a quintessentially liberal graduate, ‘Anywhere’, party appeal once more to its old ‘Somewhere’ voters without twisting itself too far out of shape and trashing any credible voter coalition.

Let me explain my vocabulary. In 2017 I published a book, The Road to Somewhere, attempting to explain the populist revolt in light of Brexit and the first Trump election. I described two main worldview groups in rich countries: the Anywheres (about 25% of the population), the highly educated, often mobile, people who value openness and autonomy and are comfortable with change; the Somewheres (40 to 50%), the somewhat small-c conservative people who draw their identities more from particular places and groups and tend to be discomforted by rapid change. (This sounds binary but I found many varieties of Anywhere and Somewhere and an ‘inbetweener’ group straddling the two worldviews.)

These education-based value divides have not fully eclipsed the old socio-economic basis of political conflict but they have shifted the battlefield onto the more psychological terrain of security and identity issues - immigration, national sovereignty, group attachment - which are both more emotional and harder to compromise on.

So, in the light of Reform’s electoral breakthrough, and Labour’s attempt to steal their clothes on immigration, what does the balance of forces in European and UK politics look like through that Anywhere/Somewhere lens?

Somewhere-based populist parties, mainly leaning to the right, have surged in almost all European countries since the turn of the century - wreaking electoral havoc on mainstream parties of centre-right and centre-left - and have participated in, and in some cases dominated, governments in several countries including Italy and Poland. The UK’s populists came late to the party but having helped to win the Brexit vote they then shattered the Conservative party in the 2024 election and are now threatening to do the same to Labour.

Much attention has focused on the extremist roots of some populist parties but growing support has moderated their outlooks – see Giorgia Meloni in Italy or Marine Le Pen in France – and allowed them to occupy that ‘missing majority’ position vacated by mainstream parties by leaning to the left on economics and to the right on most other things. There is no successful populist party, at least in Western Europe (with the possible exception of parts of Germany’s AfD), that does not sign up to the basics of the liberal constitution: the rule of law, individual and minority rights, electoral democracy, race and sex equality.

What one might call ‘decent populism’ looks unstoppable in the medium term partly because the conditions that have given rise to it are becoming even more entrenched.

Both Anywhere and Somewhere worldviews are perfectly good and proper. The problem for our democracies is that the Anywheres have been too dominant. And whether from the centre-left or centre-right - what the populists deride as the ‘uniparty’ - they have defined the common good in ways that reflect their own interests.

They have been broadly pro-globalisation and comfortable with high levels of immigration; they have preferred universal human rights to national citizen preference; they have been ready to sacrifice national sovereignty on the altar of economic efficiency and European integration; they promote mass higher education and knowledge economy ‘London/Paris/Berlin’ jobs before vocational training and industry; they are content to pursue net zero even at the cost of much higher energy costs; and have overseen the crumbling of state capacity, and GDP growth, thanks in part to the over-zealous regulation promoted by an expanded ‘lanyard class.’

Populism is the democratic push-back against these Anywhere priorities. But they remain entrenched. Mass immigration continues, partly driven by the needs of ageing societies, with less numerous but more aggravating illegal immigration trampling on secure borders thanks to the universal rights framework established after 1945. Deindustrialisation also continues, driven by a uniparty consensus favouring the dash to net zero.

Meanwhile, not only has the expectation of generational improvements in living standards been disappointed in most of Europe but wealth is increasingly centred on a few metropolitan centres. French historian Pierre Vermeren calculates that the 12 biggest metropolitan centres in France account for 25% of the population but 60% of national wealth and more than two-thirds of high earners, not to mention almost all of the political and media class.

The UK has an even more unbalanced economy with only one town outside London, Bristol, making a positive fiscal contribution. The demoralisation felt by many citizens in the periphery is reinforced by the perception of a rapidly changing ethnic demography and the failures of integration, especially of Muslim minorities.

There are many stories for populists to tell and they can now tell them in a new media landscape by-passing elite filters. The recent prominence of extreme liberal causes, such as BLM or trans activism, has provided a constant source of offence for populist “rage entrepreneurs” to exploit.

The upshot is that Somewhere populists have placed limits on Anywhere power and shifted national priorities in many countries, see the greater focus on illegal immigration. And note the evolution of Emmanuel Macron’s stereotypically Anywhere party En Marche in 2017 to today’s more hard-edged Renaissance.

This Somewhere veto has led to a kind of impasse. The power of populist parties and opinion has prevented the further liberalisation of economies and societies, at both the European and national level, but the populists are not yet strong enough to impose their own agendas. It is reminiscent of the stand-off in mid-1970s Britain between organised labour and business/the middle class, before Margaret Thatcher broke the log-jam.

So, can the Anywhere/Somewhere impasse be broken? The Conservatives had a chance in 2019 to shape a new Anywhere/Somewhere settlement and blew it. Can Labour do any better?

The opening of European societies over the past 30 years brought many benefits. The Anywhere baby-boomer settlement - often led from the centre-left - produced decent levels of GDP growth and upward mobility (though never again achieving the levels of the post-war decades), a new phase of European integration promoted by German unification, big advances for women and ethnic and sexual minorities, and the start of the energy transition. And the Cold War victory enabled a further (now reversing?) shift from warfare to welfare economies.

But this settlement has now breached the limits of democratic consent and created too many losers. In economics it elevated the consumer above the producer and the knowledge economy too far above the industrial one. In politics it required transferring too much power from national politics to supranational institutions or courts.

The political alternative to uniparty Anywhere liberalism surely starts with refocusing on national citizens and national sovereignty, both economically and politically, while acknowledging the continuing necessity of high levels of international co-operation and interdependence. I have never met anyone who wants to live in a closed society but the form that openness has taken has benefitted Anywheres far more than Somewheres.

Propelled by the Trumpian winds blowing across the Atlantic, and the need to respond to the disrupter populists at home, European politics requires a new democratic settlement. Such a settlement needs to accommodate that ‘missing majority’ of decent populism: a social democratic-conservative hybrid leaning somewhat to the social market left in economics and somewhat to the right on social and cultural issues.

This hybrid, sometimes labelled ‘post-liberal’, is also a reaction to modern liberalism’s reticence on many human needs: for belonging and community, for tradition and authority, for status and recognition for those who cannot thrive in the cognitive meritocracy race, for meaning and purpose in a post-religious age.

Mainstream liberalism has tended to see such concerns as beyond politics, a matter for private individuals. And many individuals endowed with agency and self-control do flourish under modern conditions. Others are left demoralised, especially in a world with weaker families, widely available drugs/alcohol and the constant distracting hum of the internet.

When life was visibly improving for the majority the silences of liberalism mattered less. Now, the combination of several unforeseeable events - the 2008 crash, Brexit, the pandemic, the Ukraine energy crisis – plus the sclerosis of low fertility/ageing societies requiring ever higher taxes have dampened spirits. Compare the optimism that even non-political people felt about New Labour’s thumping victory in 1997 with the justifiably low expectations accompanying the 2024 Labour landslide.

It is possible that Labour’s high command will press on from the white paper and steal even more populist clothes. A Somewhere-sensitive moderate left politics of recognition based around the priorities of the average provincial voter, rather than highly educated metropolitans, would focus on: reviving the abandoned levelling up programme; vocational training and good jobs for people of average ability; privileging national citizen access to housing, work and the social state with the help of digital IDs; ensuring welfare support incentivises work and enterprise and is focused on those who really need it; rewarding parenthood and supporting stable families; securing orderly, crime-free neighbourhoods.

This requires not a victory of the Somewheres, to replace that of the Anywheres, but rather a rebalancing and a new compromise between different interests and outlooks. The moderate left should offer itself as a bridge between what is best in both worldviews.

Progressives can take comfort from the fact that a new post-liberal era does not mean retreating to an illiberal one. In the UK only 6% of the population believe that you have to be white to be truly British and only 9% still believe that a man should go out to work while a woman stays at home to manage the household.

Leaning to the right on culture means focusing on those areas where the uniparty has most egregiously ignored public opinion - above all on immigration and national sovereignty - not on rolling back sex and race equality. National identities and solidarities remain central to most voters and still provide the main source of political legitimacy for the burden sharing challenges coming down the track.

And there is one European country where the main party of the centre-left has grasped this: Denmark. “High levels of immigration undermine cohesion while imposing burdens on the working class that affluent voters largely escape,” Mette Frederiksen, leader of the Danish Social Democrats, said recently.

Her party beat off the populist Danish People’s Party by borrowing its tough immigration and integration policies and won re-election in 2022, (contrary to the liberal story line of the acclaimed TV drama Borgen). Denmark remains a high-trust, socially progressive country with a generous welfare state and moderate levels of immigration.

It used to be said that it was easier for the right to follow voters left on economics than for the left to follow them right on cultural issues. I suspect that remains true. Starmer’s speech on Monday will have been felt as a personal violation by many Labour MPs and activists. And going Danish is easier in a small country that already has a broad consensus on not opening up too much and whose courts do not prevent deportations.

If Starmer talks Somewhere but continues to act Anywhere, he could hasten a Labour implosion. On the other hand he has another four years to show some governing competence in a turbulent world and Somewhere voters may forgive his progressive past if he can deliver on some of their priorities, maybe helped by a collective, Europe-wide reform to refugee laws. Such a shift could be made palatable to the left by linking it to a beefed-up labour inspectorate with teeth, a big new national training initiative, and finding creative ways of taxing the unproductive rich.

He might also benefit from the fact that Reform, like many new right parties, is something of a personality cult and could fragment. Its incoherent programme will come under more scrutiny and, despite Farage’s efforts to keep out extremists, so will some of Reform’s zanier representatives.

The Anywhere/Somewhere impasse will be broken gradually, if at all. Populists will continue their onward march at the ballot box, and firewalls against them will fall all over Europe, both in politics and the middle-class pubs and clubs. Somewhere priorities will no longer be marginalised whether represented by populist parties or absorbed by mainstream ones. A breakthrough into national government in the UK looks possible, most probably in coalition with Conservatives. But, unlikely though it sounds, I’m tempted to place a few quid on an Angela Rayner/Nigel Farage coalition. If it happens its origins will be traced back to Starmer’s “island of strangers” last Monday.

And there is some welcome movement towards greater restriction: the end to international recruitment in social care (though with no corresponding moves to make care more attractive to UK nationals); the small reduction in the two year post-study work route for international students to 18 months and a levy on the fees they pay; and the extension to 10 years (from five) of the qualification period to apply to stay in the country permanently, though it is riddled with loopholes.

Credit where it is due: Labour has had to challenge two of its core constituencies, universities and the public health/care system, and we will hear plenty of loud complaints from both over the coming weeks. Yet overall these are only modest changes - the Home Office thinks they’ll cut numbers by 100,000 - that will give some extra impetus to the decline that began after the last Government’s hand-brake turn. They will allow Labour to claim it has reduced numbers by half in a couple of years time but are unlikely to be enough to win back many Reform voters.

The two major drivers of immigration in recent years - students and health/social care workers - are the result of wanting both higher education and a decent health/care system on the cheap. Reducing the country’s immigration addiction depends on wider connected reforms in those two sectors, including a significant shrinkage of the bloated higher education system.

To significantly reduce immigration while minimising the economic damage requires a long-term, and ideally cross-party, plan as I spelt out in a Saturday Times essay in February https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/immigration-is-out-of-control-this-ten-year-plan-could-fix-it-3rjw3w9fk. Our adversarial politics has, alas, ruled out the latter with tiresome claims from Labour about the Conservatives deliberately opening the door to much higher immigration while at the same borrowing many of their ideas and policies.

Finally, “an island of strangers” is one of the few striking phrases that Starmer, or a speech writer, has come up with since he was a front-line politician, and it was amusing listening to Sarah Montague trying to grapple with it on the BBC’s World at One. Poor Seema Malhotra, the immigration minister, was all over the place. But I guess she didn’t expect to come into politics to defend big reductions in immigration. Will be interesting to see how much push back the Goverment receives.

A couple of weeks ago I also did a round the houses discussion with LSE professor Paul Dolan on his oddly titled Breaking Beliefism podcast about my recent books (what I now grandly call my Anywhere/Somewhere trilogy: The Road to Somewhere; Head, Hand, Heart; and Care Dilemma). We were supposed to be disagreeing well, but didn’t actually disagree about much. I sounded a bit more fluent than I sometimes do - fewer erms and you knows - perhaps it was kindly edited. https://shows.acast.com/breaking-beliefism/episodes/david-goodhart

The city was eerily empty yesterday morning as I pedalled around on a lime bike: passed the Gedachtniskirche in the heart of the old West Berlin, then on to the Brandenburger Tor, the Reichstag (which was cordoned off while president Steinmeier delivered a solemn address), the Holocaust memorial, and on to Potsdamer Platz and the iconic buildings of the eastern part of the city. The police were out in force especially by any memorial commemorating the Soviet/Russian contribution to VE, which were attracting handfuls of pro-Putin and pro-Ukraine demonstrators. The fact that tourists seemed to outnumber Berliners across the city was thanks to the fact that VE day was a public holiday for the first time in Brandenburg, the state within which Berlin sits, though not in the rest of the country.

As I pedalled I reflected on what a big part in my life Germany has played. I was fortunate enough to live there for three years, in the old western capital Bonn, as a foreign correspondent for the Financial Times during the unification period, 1988-91. It was there that me and my future wife, Lucy, courted, one weekend a month (I would return to see her in London once a month too). We used to visit Berlin often when it was still a divided city with all the strange romance of the frozen Cold War conflict - many buildings even in the west still had the scars of war - and hang out with the cool kids in Kreuzberg or try to catch a few words with Otto Schily (a founder of the Green party) in the Paris Bar. Later in 1991 we lived there for three months, with our first baby Rosamond, as I had a sabbatical from the FT during which I worked in the press department of the organisation, the Treuhand, trying to attract investment into the newly open East Germany. The report I wrote, with British and American investors in mind, was deemed too blunt about the challenges and was binned.

I was also lucky enough to be in the city, actually in East Berlin, on November 9th 1989, the day the wall fell, and sent an eye-witness account of the joy and chaos of that new dawn. I spent a lot of time in East Germany both before and after the fall of the wall and attended many of the famous marches in Leipzig, in particular, getting to know individuals and families in the old DDR, whose views on developments I would regularly seek out and report on, (one of my regrets of that period was losing my address book towards the end of my time in Germany and so losing contact with many of those people, in the era before texts and emails).

I was, and remain, a Germanophile. When I first arrived I recall loving the earnestness and directness of the place, compared with the superciliousness and obfuscation that is too often characteristic of my own land. And how could you not admire the recovery from the physical and moral destruction of 1945? I wrote a pamphlet for the centre-left think tank the Institute for Public Policy Research in 1994 - The Reshaping of the German Social Market - celebrating its virtues even as it faced the biggest downturn since the war. It was influenced by time spent at the Wissenschaftszentrum in Berlin sitting at the feet of the great British political economist David Soskice (and it was edited by a young David Miliband, who was very grumpy when I spelt his name wrong in the acknowledgements).

But we across Europe have also suffered from Germany’s scrupulous over-correction when it comes to the nation state and national citizen preference. ‘Never again’ was once a moral virtue but has turned out to be a security vulnerability. And it has helped to create an over-mighty EU, Brexit, and, now, our apparent inability to reform the outdated refugee laws that is fuelling populism everywhere.

And this is where my book publishing friend, Jochen Buchsteiner, becomes relevant. Jochen was the London correspondent of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (the German Times equivalent) until a couple of years ago, which is how I came to know him, and has just written a book about his grandmother’s escape from the family estate in East Prussia, as the Soviet army approached in January 1945, and his own, sometimes comic, attempts to reconnect with a place - now part of Russia - where Germans had lived for hundreds of years.

The Prussians, or more specifically the East Prussians, were the most significant European tribe to be ethnically cleansed after 1945. The place and people that gave us the enlightened absolutism of Frederick the Great, thinkers and reformers such as Kant and Copernicus, as well as the reactionary junkers and the military men with enormous moustaches who were Bismarck’s sword in creating the single Germany in 1870, were wiped from the map.

They joined the flood of German-speaking refugees from the east, 15m in all, who were absorbed, somewhat reluctantly at first (see Ed West’s recent substack account), into a shrunken, shattered Germany. They were tough and hard working people - the ‘laptops and lederhosen’ success of modern Bavaria, home to Siemens and other once-Prussian companies, is based on the marriage of conservative small farmers and industrious refugees. But their flight has never attracted much sympathy and liberal-minded Germans, who have happily welcomed millions of refugees from outside Europe in recent decades, have shown little curiosity about the refugee stories of their own grand-parents and great-grandparents.

Jochen wants to change that. Speaking at his book launch the evening before VE day he said he did not wish to downplay Germany’s historic crimes nor to turn perpetrators into victims. He does, however want to encourage people to investigate these stories of family trauma while there are still notebooks with letters and photographs in the attic and even people with childhood memories of flight. The book, We East Prussians, has the subtitle An Ordinary German Family History. He says he knows many people who are now saying ‘I which I had asked more questions about the refugee story’. While I was chatting to him after his talk a former German ambassador came up and said he now felt guilty that he had not properly investigated his own family’s refugee story while that generation was still alive.

When Germany hosted the 2006 football world cup I returned to Bonn with my two sons to stay with my old neighbour Nestor for an England game nearby. At the time there was much talk, amid the flag-waving, about the ‘normalisation’ of German national feeling. Full normalisation is not realistic but a more comfortable, less paranoid, relationship to the national past and present would be a blessing for all of Europe and maybe Jochen’s book is making a small contribution to that end.

Berlin’s spy agency, meanwhile, in its designation of the AfD populists as “extremist” illustrates just how far there is to go. No doubt German populists will always be judged by somewhat different standards but this is a party that received 20% of the vote at the last election and has a programme that could have been drawn up by the main centre right party the CDU in the 1990s. The desire to deport illegal immigrants, even when expressed in spicy language, is not an extreme view. The experience throughout Europe is that populists moderate as they get closer to power. Voters dislike extremists but they also want borders controlled and national sovereignty respected and if mainstream parties cannot deliver they will vote for populists. Excluding them has not worked anywhere. If the courts uphold the extremism designation the new Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, is unlikely to actually ban the party but it will likely weaken the forces of moderation within the AfD and make German politics even more dysfunctional as it is difficult to establish workable coalitions with the populists siphoning off so many votes.

My own political journey from mainstream progressive to feeling some sympathy for the populist revolt began in Germany. I was an enthusiastic supporter of the red-green SDP led by Oscar Lafontaine during the 1990 reunification election. I then made the mistake of meeting my hero. I was on the Lafontaine train travelling around the country during that campaign surrounded by political journalists all of whom were SDP supporters and thought it was hilarious when Lafontaine made jokes about the supposedly primitive views of East German voters. This was the haughty, ultra-liberal, post-national ‘Tuscany’ fraction of German politics in full view and I was appalled. It continues to turn up its nose at moderate nationalism and continues to have too loud a voice in German life.

I have many reasons to feel grateful to Germany. Reporting on a world historic event in my early thirties made me aim for something higher than a comfortable berth at the FT for another 30 years, it led me to take the risk of setting up the political monthly Prospect magazine in 1995. Germany, as noted, opened my eyes to some of the failings of modern liberalism, and also to just how quickly political euphoria can turn to disappointment as East Germans came to feel like second class citizens in the united Germany.

Living in a foreign country for a few years and trying to master another language was also a blessing. I will never be a fluent German speaker having arrived without even a German O level to my name. But thanks in part to travels in East Germany, where people spoke little English, I picked up enough. By the time I left Germany in 1991 taxi drivers mistook my German for that of a Dutchman which I took as a compliment.

The FT had been understandably reluctant to send me to Germany in 1988 as I knew no German and had no German connections, but the number two job in Bonn was considered the most boring on the whole foreign correspondent circuit and no one else applied. And it turned out that I did have a German connection. It was not one that I knew much about when I went, until reminded by my own father’s discomfort that I was returning to the land his great-grandfather had left in the mid-19th century.

That great-grandfather, my own great-great grandfather, was Mayer Lehman, who along with his two brothers left Germany to establish in Alabama the business that would later become the legendary investment bank. As a minor beneficiary of that success four generations later I have had choices and economic security denied to most people, so thank you again Germany for prompting Mayer’s exodus. Living in a small town, Rimpar, outside Wurzburg in northern Bavaria the Lehman boys faced more restrictions as Jews than they would have done if they had lived in supposedly illiberal Prussia, which granted Jews full citizenship in the early 19th century. They left Germany partly because of those restrictions, Mayer was especially disappointed at the failure of the 1848 Frankfurt parliament to usher in a new era.

I visited Rimpar just once in 1994 along with other British and American Lehman relatives to attend a celebration of the 150th anniversary of the first Lehman bother leaving for the new world, before the name Lehman became synonymous with economic disaster. There was a ceremony where I gave a short speech in German, reflecting on the fact that I was probably the first Lehman relative for two generations to speak the tongue. There were telegrams of greeting from Helmut Kohl and Bill Clinton. A local historian of the Lehman family, Roland Flade, also spoke.

The Lehman dynasty in the US produced many distinguished figures including the US senator and leading liberal Democrat and protege of FDR, Herbert Lehman, whose first cousin Eva Thalheimer perished at Treblinka. The dynasty also claims a connection via marriage to a less popular figure, Henry Morgenthau Jnr, Treasury Secretary to FDR and author of the notorious Morgenthau plan of July 1944 for returning Germany to being a purely agricultural country.

The plan was initially taken quite seriously by FDR and Churchill but they soon realised it would have led to mass starvation and would have created resentment among those Germans who remained 1,000 times worse than left by the Treaty of Versailles. Nonetheless the plan did have a significant, though unquantifiable, impact on the last few months of the war. For the plan was, inevitably, leaked and it was a gift to Goebbels inspiring Germans to defend the fatherland with even greater vigour in the belief that American Jews wanted to return them to conditions of 1500 years ago. American military commanders did report more vigorous resistance in the weeks after the plan was reported in the German press. Maybe without the Morgenthau plan we might be celebrating VE day a few weeks earlier.

It is not only Germans who have skeletons in the family closet. We are almost all descendants of both slaves and slave-owners if you go back far enough. In fact, in my case, you don’t have to go back too far. Mayer Lehman, the understandably disgruntled German Jew became, briefly, a slave owner in Montgomery, Alabama. His son, Herbert, played a prominent role in the early days of the civil rights movement. History is messy.

The essay prefigured my later formulation of the people who see the world from ‘Anywhere’ and those who see it from ‘Somewhere’.[ii] The Anywheres being highly educated, often mobile, people who value openness and autonomy and are comfortable with change, while the Somewheres are people who derive their identities more from particular places and groups and tend to be discomforted by rapid change.[iii]

These education-based value divides have not completely eclipsed the old economic interest basis of political conflict but they have substantially shifted the battlefield onto the more cultural-psychological terrain of security and identity issues - borders, immigration, national sovereignty, identity politics - which are both more emotional and harder to compromise on.

So, 10 years on - and on the eve of a widely predicted electoral breakthrough for Reform in the UK - what is the state of play and the balance of forces in European politics looking through that Anywhere/Somewhere lens?

Much has happened to widen the divide: the ‘Wir schaffen das’ Syrian refugee crisis and the rise of the AfD as an anti-mass-immigration party in Germany; the Brexit vote and the failed attempt to thwart the UK’s EU exit; the Gilets Jaunes movement and the rise and fall of Macronist centrism in France; widespread commitment to net zero carbon economies before 2050; the Covid pandemic and the temporary closure of most European economies/societies; the Russian invasion of Ukraine creating a spike in energy prices and a further drag on slow growing European economies; and now the great Trump disruption and its uncertain impact on European politics, defence and living standards.

Somewhere-leaning populist parties, mainly of the right, have become stronger in almost all European countries and have participated in, and in some cases dominated, governments in several countries including Italy, Poland, Slovakia, Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden, while in the UK Nigel Farage’s UKIP party (now Reform) contributed significantly to the Brexit vote to leave the EU and after the shattering of the Conservative party in the 2024 election is now threatening to replace it.

Growing popular support has, in the main, led to greater normalisation and moderation with the new populist parties replacing the old centre-right parties across much of Europe.

The Meloni Government in Italy has proved surprisingly stable and though culturally conservative and immigration restrictionist has moved at a moderate pace and avoided, so far, a major backlash. Parties once strenuously excluded from mainstream politics, such as the Sweden Democrats and the Geert Wilders party in the Netherlands, are now dominant players (though this hasn’t stopped the failed exclusion policy being repeated with Germany’s AfD, maybe a special case). The Rassemblement National’s policy of de-diabolisation has largely succeeded and, courts allowing, Marine Le Pen is on course to become French president in 2027. In the UK, the Reform party has done its best to purge extremist candidates and has excluded the anti-Islamist street politician Tommy Robinson, reaping a reward in voter support.

The onward march of what one might call ‘decent populism’ looks unstoppable in the medium term partly because the conditions that have given rise to it are becoming even more entrenched, as I will argue below, and the response from the Anywhere parties of the centre-right and centre-left has been to either ignore, emulate, or attempt to de-legitimise the populist turn.

Both Anywhere and Somewhere priorities are perfectly decent, at least in their mainstream forms. The problem for our democracies in recent years is that the Anywheres have been too dominant. And whether from the centre-left or centre-right - what the populists deride as the ‘uniparty’ - they have defined the common good in ways that are too biased towards their own interests.

They have been broadly pro-globalisation and comfortable with high levels of immigration; they have preferred universal human rights to national citizen preference; they have been ready to sacrifice national sovereignty on the altar of economic efficiency and European integration; they promote higher education and knowledge economy ‘London/Paris/Berlin’ jobs before vocational training and traditional industry; they are content to pursue net zero even at the cost of much higher energy costs.

Despite the democratic signal being sent by populist parties and voters fleeing from the centrist uniparties, those priorities continue to govern most European countries. Mass immigration continues, indeed it dramatically increased in the UK in 2022/2023 despite the Brexit vote to control it, as does deindustrialisation driven in part by a uniparty consensus favouring the dash to net zero and the goal of an economy centred around higher education and the knowledge economy. European integration has lost its impetus but powerful lobbies continue to demand the erosion of the national veto.

Somewhere populists have placed limits on Anywhere power and shifted national priorities in many countries, especially the greater focus on stopping illegal immigration. The Brexit vote showed that populist causes can succeed electorally even against a largely united establishment. And consider the evolution of Emmanuel Macron’s quintessentially Anywhere party En Marche in 2017 to today’s more hard-edged version, Renaissance, and Macron’s own strong opposition to the EU-Mercosur free trade deal.

This Somewhere veto has led to a kind of political impasse, the power of populist parties and opinion has prevented the further liberalisation of economies and societies, at both the European and national level, but the populists are not yet strong enough to impose their own agendas. It is reminiscent of the stand-off in mid-1970s Britain between organised labour and business/the middle class, before Margaret Thatcher broke the log-jam.

Meanwhile, there has been no significant change to the underlying conditions that sends voters into the arms of the populists. Not only has the expectation of generational improvements in income been dashed in most of Europe but wealth is increasingly centred on a few metropolitan centres. The French historian Pierre Vermeren has calculated that the 12 biggest metropolitan centres in France account for about 25% of the population but 60% of national wealth and more than two-thirds of high earners, not to mention almost all of the political and media class.[iv] The UK has an even more unbalanced national economy with only one town outside London, Bristol, making a positive fiscal contribution. The demoralisation felt by many citizens in the periphery is reinforced by the perception of a rapidly changing ethnic demography and the failures of integration, especially of Muslim minorities, a problem exacerbated by intermittent Islamist terror incidents.

Populist movements also benefit from the new media landscape which allows people to by-pass elite controlled newspapers and broadcasting. Meanwhile, the recent prominence of extreme liberal causes, such as BLM or trans activism, has provided a constant source of offences against common sense for populist leaders to exploit.

So, can the Anywhere/Somewhere impasse be broken? The political alternative to uniparty Anywhere liberalism surely starts with refocusing on national citizens and national sovereignty, both economically and politically, while acknowledging the continuing necessity of high levels of international co-operation and interdependence. It also requires a clear-eyed view of both the strengths and limits of modern liberalism.

The Anywhere liberal baby-boomer settlement - often led from the centre-left under Clinton/Blair/Schroder/Jospin - had notable achievements to its name: decent levels of economic growth and upward mobility (though never again achieving the levels of the early post-war decades), a new phase of globalisation and European integration promoted by German unification, big advances for women and ethnic and sexual minorities, and the start of the energy transition. Meanwhile, the Cold War victory enabled the final shift from warfare to welfare economies, with the phasing out of compulsory military service in several countries and defence budgets switched to social spending.

But three decades later, propelled by the Trumpian winds blowing across the Atlantic, but also by the need to respond to the disrupter populists at home, European politics needs to find a new democratic settlement. Such a settlement is likely to be closer to the ‘missing majority’ of decent populism: a social democratic-conservative hybrid leaning somewhat to the social market left in economics and somewhat to the right on social and cultural issues.

This hybrid, sometimes labelled ‘post-liberal’, is a response to liberalism’s absence or silence on many human needs: for belonging and community, for tradition and authority, for some status and recognition for those of average ability who cannot enter the upper ranks of the cognitive meritocracy, for meaning and purpose in a post-religious age.

Mainstream liberalism has tended to see such concerns as beyond politics, a matter for private individuals. And many individuals endowed with agency and self-control do flourish under modern conditions. Others are left demoralised, especially in a world with weaker families, widely available drugs/alcohol and the constant distracting hum of the internet. (It is sometimes said that the average US citizen is obese, divorced and with less than $1,000 in savings.)

The populist surge is a response, too, to the left’s failure to erect boundaries against ‘woke’ illiberal progressivism. The intellectual crisis of the left, of mainstream social democracy and of feminism, is partly a product of an unwillingess to acknowledge victory. Instead of defending the status quo created by those victories, the left’s oppositional ethos has encouraged it to seek out new oppressions - see the militant transgender misstep or critical race theory - or to continue fighting battles largely won with a language of left and right that no longer captures the new divides described above.

The uniparty baby boomer settlement has simply grown arthritic in too many respects, leaving a sense of stagnation and disillusionment with politics and a growing number of voters who feel their wealth and well-being draining away. Compare the optimism that even non-political people felt about New Labour’s thumping victory in 1997 in the UK with the justifiably low expectations accompanying the 2024 Labour landslide.

Unforseeable events have contributed to slow growth - the 2008 financial crash, the Euro crisis after 2010 and Brexit in 2016, the Covid pandemic 2020-2022, the Ukraine war related energy crisis - all feeding into the backdrop of sclerosis that seems to be the unavoidable fate of low fertility/ageing societies requiring ever higher taxes and debt.

There has been a more structural constraint on economic dynamism too: the left’s social and cultural advances from the 1980s onwards created pressure for stronger safety nets - meaning more business regulation and ever rising welfare spending - which has placed strict limits on the right’s economic victory after the Thatcher/Reagan ascendancy.

But the accumulating resistance to the Anywhere settlement is best attributed to disenchantment with excessive openness. In the economic sphere the opening of borders and markets - with globalisation at the international level (most notably China’s entry into the World Trade Organisation in 2001) and the Single Market in the EU - did for a period boost growth, restrain inflation and drive down prices. But it also elevated the consumer above the producer, the knowledge economy above the industrial one, and meant uncomfortably rapid de-industrialisation, and the destruction of long established ways of life—one of the drivers behind Trump’s chaotic tariff policy.

In the political sphere the opening of markets required weakening the nation state through the pooling of sovereignty in supranational institutions, especially within the EU. It also saw power flowing from elected politicians to the judiciary as international legal conventions, such as the European Convention on Human Rights, took precedence over national courts and politicians.

In the cultural/social sphere more open borders meant much higher levels of immigration and rapid demographic change, while human rights legislation made it harder to favour national citizens before outsiders or deport people who arrived illegally. Meanwhile, on the left, diversity and identity politics tended to eclipse solidarity and a proper focus on the revival of post-industrial regions.

As noted, the dramatic opening of European economies and societies has brought many benefits over recent decades but it has now breached the limits of democratic consent and created too many losers. I have never met anyone who wants to live in a closed society but the form that openness has taken has benefitted some far more than others.

In the medium-term populists are likely to continue their onward march at the ballot box, accompanied by more inchoate protests such as the Gilets Jaunes movement or the anti-immigration riots in the UK in summer 2024, without being able to fully set the agenda.

On the other hand, mainstream parties will benefit from the fact that populist parties are often built around charismatic individuals and prone to internal dispute, are a blank-slate in large areas of policy, and have limited experience of governing. And the success of Denmark’s Social Democrats in defeating populism by adopting its anti-mass-immigration priorities provides a model for the mainstream that others will inevitably follow. A redrafting of the laws and conventions that prevent tough action against illegal immigration into Europe is surely just a matter of time.

European politics needs to find a new balance. But it cannot simply replace Anywhere rule with Somewhere rule, even if the latter are more numerous than the former. What is needed is a new generation of politicians capable of speaking to and synthesising both Anywhere and Somewhere priorities. A new third way? We wait and hope.

Footnotes

[i] Extract from ‘Eine Postliberale Antwort auf den Populismus’ 2014

“The supporters of populist parties tend to feel uneasy about many aspects of cultural and economic change. Many might be described as ‘conflicted populists’—they are opposed to large-scale immigration (as people tend to be everywhere) and suspicious of the centralizing and anti-national tendencies of the EU. But they are also, in the main, modern people for whom the rule of law, rights, including minority rights and race equality, distrust of power, freedom of expression and individual autonomy, are just part of the air they breathe.

They usually come from the more rooted and middling sections of society, from small towns, suburbia and former industrial areas, places that often feel the national story has passed them by. They do not share the progressive individualist world view of the mobile, graduate elite, but they are mostly communitarians not reactionaries. They think that their country is a better place for the advances in sex and race equality of recent decades, but also think that somewhere along the way we have lost a sense of moral community and common sense.

They generally want a narrower and more conditional welfare state and worry that some ethnic minorities remain too separate from the mainstream. Most are not opposed to gay marriage and similar causes but think that metropolitan liberals give them too high a priority. They are in the main "post-liberal" rather than illiberal.

What we are dealing with here is not a contest between good and evil but rather an argument between two different strands of liberalism based partly on the different life-styles, experiences and interests of, on the one hand the upper professional class (of which politicians are one part), and on the other hand the numerically larger but less influential ordinary voter of middle or lower income with an average education.

On many political and economic issues this argument does not arise either because the issues are essentially technocratic, say, how best to manage the energy market, or because they remain strongly subject to left v right priorities, for example how much to tax the rich. But there is one very big reason why, in recent years, what one might call ‘metropolitan liberalism’ has been losing ground to what I will label ‘popular liberalism’—metropolitan liberalism is invariably a cheerleader for restless change. When change seems to benefit everyone the conflict between the two liberalisms recedes but when change does not seem to benefit everyone or happens too quickly popular liberalism finds a voice.

One of the implicit promises of modern democratic citizenship is some degree of control over one’s life. That most easily translates into a right to stop things happening, the right, at its most basic, to some stability and continuity in the place and the way one lives. Given the nature of the modern world this is not a promise that is easy for democratic politicians to deliver.”

[ii] The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics (Hurst, 2017).

[iii] There are many varieties of Anywhere and Somewhere and a large ‘inbetweener’ group that straddles the two worldviews. I invented the labels but not the worldviews which are there to be seen in value and opinion surveys (I focus particularly on the UK in the Road to Somewhere and the British Social Attitudes surveys). The proportion of the population represented by theses worldviews differs from country to country but when I was writing the book in 2016 I calculated for the UK that the Anywheres represented about 25% of the population and Somewheres 40 to 50%.

[iv] L’Impasse De La Metropolisation (Gallimard, 2021).