The British Dream 12 Years Later

Good luck to the Together Coalition's Commission on integration, but it is likely to circle around the same problems I identified 12 years ago in The British Dream (I republish the introduction below)

In liberal societies we struggle to define common norms, beyond the basics like obeying the law and speaking the language. And even if we could come up with a plausible list of such norms we would struggle to enforce compliance with them. The integration/social cohesion narrative always rubs up against the very essence of what a liberal society is meant to be, one in which people are free to pursue their own goals (within the law) so long as they do not negatively impact others.

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.