Polarising Liberals

Ben Ansell and Sam Freedman have raised the alarm about a radicalisation of commentary on race/immigration. Most such fears are misplaced but they in turn must acknowledge the dramatic scale of change

I want to challenge the recent assertions, in substacks by Ben Ansell and Sam Freedman, that the focus on the decline of the white British majority by various politicians and journalists - including me in the case of Ansell - represents a disturbing shift in our politics and is motivated by racism and the desire to denigrate ethnic minorities.

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.