The British Dream

Successes and Failures of Post-war Immigration

David Goodhart

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857899750
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

One of Britain's most influential centre-left thinkers examines UK immigration policy and argues that there have been unforeseen consequences which urgently need to be addressed.

In The British Dream, David Goodhart tells the story of post-war immigration and charts a course for its future. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with people from all over the country and a wealth of statistical evidence, he paints a striking picture of how Britain has been transformed by immigration and examines the progress of its ethnic minorities - projected to be around 25 per cent of the population by the early 2020s.

Britain today is a more open society for minorities than ever before, but it is also a more fragmented one. Goodhart argues that an overzealous multiculturalism has exacerbated this problem by reinforcing difference instead of promoting a common life. The multi-ethnic success of Team GB at the 2012 Olympics and a taste for chicken tikka masala are not, he suggests, sufficient to forge common bonds; Britain needs a political culture of integration.

Goodhart concludes that if Britain is to avoid a narrowing of the public realm and sharply segregated cities, as in many parts of the US, its politicians and opinion leaders must do two things. Firstly, as advocated by the centre right, they need to bring immigration down to more moderate and sustainable levels. Secondly, as advocated by the centre left, they need to shape a progressive national story about openness and opportunity - one that captures how people of different traditions are coming together to make the British dream.

Contents

Acknowledgements

A Note on Language

Introduction

Part One Setting The Scene

1 The Bigger Picture: Globalisation and the Economics of Immigration

Nations and People | Open Borders | Does Large-scale Immigration Benefit Existing Citizens? | Immigration Now, British Hubs and Caps

2 The Way We Live Now: How Are Britain’s Minorities Doing?

Life in Merton | Minorities Making Their Way | Thinking about Integration and Segregation | How Racist is Britain Still?

Part Two How Did We Get Here?

3 The First Great Arrival 1948–92

Early Years 1948–62 | Conflict and Accommodation 1962–92

4 The Multicultural Odyssey

Sabeen and Yasmin | What is Multiculturalism and Where Did it Come From? | How Multiculturalism Changed its Spots | Multiculturalism, What’s the Big Idea?

5 The Second Great Arrival 1997–Today

Labour’s Greatest Legacy | Revising the Multiculturalism Story | Poles and Somalis, the Latest Arrivals | The Muslim Question | What about the White Workers?

Part Three Why It Matters and What We Do About It

6 Progressive Dilemmas

The Heart of the Matter | The Flight from State Welfare | Is it Poverty or Ethnicity that Reduces Trust? | Holding on to Nurse

7 The National Question

Put Out More Flags | What is a National Identity, and is Britain’s Declining or Evolving? | Britain, England and All That | Nudging the Nation

8 Where Next?

The Readjustment | The Next Twenty Years: Ripples of Connection

Bibliography

Note on the Author

Index

Acknowledgements

Thanks to my family – my wife Lucy and children Rosie, Maud, Arty and Stan – and the team at Demos. Thanks also to Toby Mundy and James Nightingale at Atlantic and to Annie Lee for her meticulous copy-editing.

This book has been in gestation since I first started thinking about an essay for Prospect magazine about the tension between solidarity and diversity in rich, liberal societies almost ten years ago. In the course of working out my ideas on that and the many related subjects in this book, and in researching the book itself, I have been particularly influenced by and/or helped by a group of around thirty people. I give them special thanks below. There is also a wider group who have given me their time and thoughts on my travels around Britain in the past two years who I would like to thank, and a special thanks to those who were generous with their time despite knowing we had different views. Apologies to those I have left out, and to those who particularly care about titles; I thought it was simpler to have unadorned names.

Special thanks to:

Andrew Adonis; Mohammed Amin; Ralph Berry; Paul Boateng; Liam Byrne; Ted Cantle; Matt Cavanagh; Rob Colls; Geoff Dench; Bobby Duffy; David Edmonds; Ismail Einashe; Kishwer Falkner; Robert Ford; Maurice Glasman; Kat Hanna; Randall Hansen; Michael Ignatieff; Ted Jeory; Sunder Katwala; Eric Kaufmann; Phil Lewis; Michael Lind; Alex Linklater; John Lloyd; Jamiesha Majevadia; Kenan Malik; David Metcalf; David Miller; Munira Mirza; Maxine Moar; Tariq Modood; Herman Ouseley; Bhikhu Parekh; Trevor Phillips; Robert Rowthorn; Shamit Saggar; Paul Scheffer; Jean Seaton; Siôn Simon; Madeleine Sumption; David Willetts; Max Wind-Cowie.

And thanks also to:

Ishtiaq Ahmed; Mahmood Ahmed; Maqsood Ahmed; Omer Ahmed; Riaz Ahmed; Mohammed Ajeeb; Navid Akhtar; Parveen Akhtar; Stephen Alambritis; Paul Allen; Nuzhat Ali; Ruhana Ali; Rushanara Ali; Sundas Ali; Usman Ali; Rob Anderson; Andrew Anthony; Anjum Anwar; Sher Azam; Willy Bach; Gavin Bailey; Jeff Bailey; Shaun Bailey; Jas Bains; Toby Bakare; Muhammed Abdul Bari; Mike Barraclough; Ann Barratt; John Battye; Halima Begum; Harris Beider; John Benyon; Ashish Bhatt; Philip Blond; Gautam Bodiwala; Henry Bonsu; John Bonsu; Tony Breslin; Paul Broks; Simon Burgess; Phil Burton-Cartledge; Bill Bush; Vicki Butler; David Cannadine; Mark Carroll; John Carruthers; Raj Chada; Jayant Chavda; Jack Citrin; David Coleman; Linda Colley; Michael Collins; Christopher Cook; Graeme Cooke; Zaki Cooper; John Cornwell; Alan Craig; Paul Crosby; Jon Cruddas; René Cuperus; Martha Dalton; John Darwin; Rowenna Davis; Howard Dawber; Neli Demireva; John Denham; Meghnad Desai; Sukhjit Dhaliwal; Gabriella Elgenius; Geoffrey Evans; Frank Field; Catherine Fieschi; Daniel Finkelstein; Alun Francis; Mike Gapes; Len Gibbs; Ameetpal Gill; Neena Gill; David Goldblatt; Rosie Goodhart; Paul Goodman; Matthew Goodwin; Bana Gora; Roger Graef; Andrew Green; David Green; Damian Green; Montserrat Guibernau; Jeff Hanna; Zubaida Haque; Toby Harris; Michael Harvey; Miles Hewstone; Susan Higgins; Ellie Hill; Margaret Hodge; Geoff Holden; Kelvin Hopkins; Tristram Hunt; Shehla Husain; Dilwar Hussain; Naweed Hussain; Tanveer Hussain; Will Hutton; Helen Hylton; Khizar Iqbal; Stephen Jivraj; Lindsay Johns; Nick Johnson; Michael Keating; Michael Keith; Ozlan Keles; Peter Kellner; Madiha Khan; Omar Khan; Sadiq Khan; Wajid Khan; Shiria Khatun; Jytte Klausen; Jurgen Kronig; David Kynaston; David Lammy; James Laurence; Charles Leddy-Owen; Liz Legum; James Lewis; Patricia Lewis; Warwick Lightfoot; Joy Lo Dico; Logie Lohendran; Patrick Macfarlane; Nick Macpherson; Fiona Mactaggart; Khalid Mahmood; Sharaf Mahmood; Mohsin Malik; Zaiba Malik; Gautam Malkani; Sarfraz Manzoor; Sukhdev Marway; Ehsan Masood; Ed Mayne; Jean McCrindle; Elizabeth McCullough; Siobhain McDonagh; Pat McFadden; Lauren McLaren; Jasper McMahon; Emran Mian; Jaspal Singh Minas; Anshuman Mondal; Margaret Moore; David Muir; Douglas Murray; Maajid Nawaz; Stephen Nickell; Catrin Nye; Duncan O’Leary; Fran O’Leary; Paul Ormerod; Juliana Owusu; Anthony Painter; Charlie Parker; Hyacinth Parsons; Ceri Peach; Jonathan Portes; Bevan Powell; Anne Power; Jonathan Power; Lucinda Platt; James Purnell; Ayesha Qureshi; Yasmin Qureshi; Tariq Rafique; James Ramsey; Phil Riley; Matthew Rhodes; Ahmad Riaz; Chris Roberts; Ben Rogers; Steve Rumbelow; Mark Rusling; Jonathan Rutherford; Nick Ryan; Johnathan Sacks; John Salt; Neena Samota; Ziauddin Sardar; Stafford Scott; Tony Sewell; Shafique Shah; Ghayasuddin Siddiqui; Ramindar Singh; Swaran Singh; Zadie Smith; Will Somerville; John Spellar; Thees Spreckelsen; David Starkey; Marc Stears; Philippa Stockley; Gisela Stuart; Jack Straw; Phil Sumner; Yusuf Tai; David Taylor; Gowri Thamotharampillai; Paul Thomas; Stephen Timms; Adair Turner; Varun Uberoi; Mike Waite; Robin Wales; Mohammed Aslam Wassan; Albert Weale; Martin Whelton; David Wild; Alan Wolfe; Phil Woolas; Simon Woolley; Waseem Zaffar.

A Note on Language

This book is, in part, about describing the patterns of life of large groups of people who are not part of the white British majority. Words and tone matter. As I am a fifty-six-year-old white, British man, I cannot, obviously, describe these patterns from personal experience. Instead, I have tried to write objectively but also directly, aiming to avoid the caveats and obfuscations that disfigure so much of the literature in this field.

It is inevitable that some people will take offence at my words or tone in certain places, but I have not set out to be provocative and I hope that critics will focus on the ideas and arguments behind the words and phrases. Many words in this field carry within them long-standing intellectual disputes – for example, integration and segregation. The word segregation implies, to some people, a process actively managed and promoted by the majority. I mean it in a more neutral sense to signify separateness – sometimes chosen, sometimes not.

For British ethnic minority categories I mainly use the standard Office for National Statistics groups – black African, Indian (as well as Hindu Indian, Sikh Indian and Muslim Indian), Bangladeshi and so on. Sometimes I use the prefix British, as in British Caribbean background, but to avoid clutter I will often just say Caribbeans, Pakistanis or Somalis; it should be clear from the context when I mean settled British groups. When writing about ethnic or racial minorities I often just refer to minorities. I am not including other groups – like gay people or disabled people – who are also categorised as minorities. Sometimes I am just referring to ‘visible’ minorities and sometimes to all minorities, including white groups like Poles; it should, again, be clear from the context.

Most of the statistics about immigration refer to the UK, though in some cases I use figures that refer just to England or England and Wales. I generally use the word Britain when I really mean the United Kingdom.

Also, although the statistics are often about the UK this is mainly a book written about and from the perspective of England (the immigration stories in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland overlap but are somewhat distinct).

Introduction

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 schools and workplaces and how well they are integrated into British life. 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 links 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 try to look at matters as they are.

The racial exclusion which marked the first few decades of post-colonial immigration after the Second World War has cast a long shadow. But Britain is now a different place. As Munira Mirza, one of the deputy mayors of London, 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 will 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 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 exam results, pay, social mobility and so on – should also make it possible to generalise in a clear-eyed way about how different minorities are making their way, just as we do about social class. Social class is not destiny and neither is ethnic culture. I do not want to stigmatise particular groups nor to imply that generalisations about ethnic groups apply to everyone from that group; there is great internal variety within groups and in any case 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 may have made sense in the 1970s or 1980s when there was widespread hostility to the minority presence but today it sounds increasingly odd. Political leaders do not thank the people of Cheshire for their contribution. It is also too indiscriminate. Not all minority groups do make a great contribution. In thirty years’ time British Somalis may be considered as successful and entrepreneurial as the East...