The Road to Somewhere: The New Tribes Shaping British
Politics
by David Goodhart
'A provocative take on the UK's new tribal divisions
... a book whose timing is pitch-perfect'
Andrew Marr
Many
Remainers reported waking up the day after the Brexit vote feeling as if they
were living in a foreign country. In fact, they were merely experiencing the
same feeling that many British people have felt every day for years.
Fifty years
ago, people in leafy North London and people in working-class Northern towns
could vote for a Labour party that broadly encompassed all of their interests.
Today their priorities are poles apart.
In this
groundbreaking and timely book, Goodhart shows us how people have come to be
divided into two camps: the 'Anywheres', who have 'achieved' identities,
derived from their careers and education, and 'Somewheres', who get their
identity from a sense of place and from the people around them, and who feel a
sense of loss due to mass immigration and rapid social change.
In a world
increasingly divided by Brexit and Trump, Goodhart shows how Anywheres must
come to understand and respect Somewhere values to stand a fighting chance
against the rise of populism.
The Road to Somewhere by David Goodhart – a
liberal’s rightwing turn on immigration
Is your tribe the ‘Somewheres’ or the ‘Anywheres’? A
book on the faultlines that divide Brexit Britain is timely but misguided
Jonathan
Freedland
@Freedland
Wed 22 Mar
2017 03.30 EDT
Forget the
title, there will be plenty of people – Guardian readers among them – who’ll
take one look at this book and refuse to get past the author’s name. For many
on the liberal left, David Goodhart became persona non grata more than a decade
ago.
In 2004, he
wrote an essay for Prospect magazine, which he both founded and edited, that
earned rapid notoriety and saw him branded a “liberal Powellite”. In “Too
Diverse?”, he argued that there was a trade-off between increased diversity,
through mass immigration, and social solidarity, in the form of the welfare
state. Goodhart said that for citizens willingly to hand some of their
hard-earned cash to others via their taxes, they needed to feel a basic level
of affinity with those others. He wrote that in the homogenous societies of old
that was never a problem: citizens felt the mutual obligation of kinship. But
in the highly mixed societies of today, such fellow-feeling was strained.
Goodhart offered copious data to show that people bridled at subsidising the
housing, education or welfare benefits of those whose roots in the society were
shallow. As he wrote, “To put it bluntly – most of us prefer our own kind.”
You don’t
have to like any part of that argument to recognise that it was prescient, in
the sense that it anticipated what would become a, perhaps the, dominant issue
of politics in Britain and beyond in the decade to follow. Even as the crash of
2008 was still reverberating, immigration frequently displaced the economy on
the list of issues that mattered most to voters. Though some of the more
high-minded Brexiters wish it were not true, immigration was the beating heart
of the campaign to leave the European Union.
What is
even more striking in retrospect is that Goodhart made his case before the huge
wave of migration that so reshaped British politics: the post-2004 influx of an
estimated 1.5 million newcomers from eastern Europe. In 2004, the Polish
plumber and the Czech barista were in Britain’s future rather than its present.
Six full years would pass before Gordon Brown would be overheard describing
Gillian Duffy as a “bigoted woman”, because she had asked about the arrivals
from eastern Europe who she felt were transforming her native Rochdale.
Given all
that, and whatever other objections Goodhart’s new book might provoke, few
could call it irrelevant or untimely. In The Road to Somewhere he returns to
this most vexed terrain, picking his way through nettles and thorns that might
deter thinner-skinned writers. He doesn’t tread that carefully either.
He argues
that the key faultline in Britain and elsewhere now separates those who come
from Somewhere – rooted in a specific place or community, usually a small town
or in the countryside, socially conservative, often less educated – and those
who could come from Anywhere: footloose, often urban, socially liberal and
university educated. He cites polling evidence to show that Somewheres make up
roughly half the population, with Anywheres accounting for 20% to 25% and the
rest classified as “Inbetweeners”.
A key
litmus test to determine which one of these “values tribes” you belong to is
your response to the question of whether Britain now feels like a foreign
country. Goodhart cites a YouGov poll from 2011 that found 62% agreed with the
proposition: “Britain has changed in recent times beyond recognition, it
sometimes feels like a foreign country and this makes me uncomfortable.” Only
30% disagreed. A 2014 survey found a similar breakdown when asked if “people
led happier lives in the old days”.
Somewheres are rooted in a specific place, often less
educated; Anywheres are footloose, urban, socially liberal
For
Goodhart, the data confirms his belief that Anywhere and Somewhere describe real
groups, the latter characterised by an unease with the modern world, a
nostalgic sense that “change is loss” and the strong belief that it is the job
of British leaders to put the interests of Britons first. Anywheres, meanwhile,
are free of nostalgia; egalitarian and meritocratic in their attitude to race,
sexuality and gender; and light in their attachments “to larger group
identities, including national ones; they value autonomy and self-realisation
before stability, community and tradition”. Unsurprisingly, Goodhart’s
Somewhere/Anywhere distinction maps neatly on to the leave/remain divide.
Indeed, the evidence he presents makes the victory of leave over remain seem
all but foretold: the only surprise is that the winning margin of 52% to 48%
was so narrow.
Given that
result, which meant British liberals and internationalists lost something they
regard as precious – British membership of the EU – the self-critical
progressive will surely want to reflect on where they went wrong, how they found
themselves out of step with a majority of their fellow citizens. There can be
little escape from the damning conclusion that, when faced with the chasm in
attitudes Goodhart charts, especially on immigration, liberals chose to put
their fingers in their ears and sing la, la, la. The revulsion that greeted his
own 2004 essay, and the ostracism that followed, were part of that reaction,
born of a collective desire on the liberal left to hope that if they closed
their eyes and branded the likes of Duffy as “bigoted”, the problem might just
go away.
A more
sophisticated form of ostrich-ism is the redefining of Somewhere anxiety about
immigration as purely a material problem that might be solved economically: by,
say, enforcing the minimum wage to prevent migrants from undercutting local
pay, or by boosting the funds available for housing, health or education in
areas that have taken in large numbers of newcomers. Such measures – championed
by Jeremy Corbyn and Ed Miliband before him – are good and necessary, of course.
But they skirt around the discontent voiced by Goodhart’s Somewheres, which is
as much cultural as economic: the non-material sense that their hometown has
changed unnervingly fast. Goodhart does not suffer from that economistic
myopia: he accepts that when people say their problem is not solely about
money, they are telling the truth.
So Goodhart
deserves credit for confronting this issue early and front on. But that does
not mean either his diagnosis or his prescriptions are right.
First, in
his sympathy for Somewheres he caricatures Anywheres. Too easily does his
category – which, by his measure, should include between 8 million and 10
million people – collapse into an upmarket version of the hated “metropolitan
liberal elite”. He makes the same mistake as Theresa May did when she declared
last year: “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of
nowhere.” This is to assume that those who look outward are automatically
disconnected from the people around them. But a visit to even the much derided,
ultra-remain districts of, say, north London would show areas that are still
genuine communities, right down to their neighbourhood street parties for the
Queen’s 90th birthday. Anywheres come from somewhere too.
Immigrants have not caused the fragmentation he
laments: globalisation, automation and 1,000 shifts bear more blame
Second,
Goodhart insists that the views of Somewheres have been overlooked for decades,
over-ruled by the Anywheres who control the commanding heights of political and
cultural power, from the civil service to the universities to the BBC. This
will come as news to those who have observed our criminal justice system, for
example, where the “prison works” mantra of Michael Howard prevailed right through
the New Labour years (with a brief hiatus while Kenneth Clarke was at the
justice department). The Asbo culture favoured by Tony Blair, David Blunkett
and Jack Straw was arguably Somewhere in its orientation. Somewheres might feel
similarly at home with the division of the population into “strivers” and
“skivers”, a distinction that has underpinned government welfare policy since
2010.
Such
language is echoed and reinforced with relentless vigour by our national press.
Goodhart skates over this crucial hole in his argument. He claims Somewhere
views are marginalised in our collective life, yet the Mail, Sun, Express,
Telegraph and the rest air little else. It is the liberal internationalism of
Anywheres that is drowned out.
Where
Goodhart goes wrong above all is on Britain’s ethnic and religious minorities.
Even though he concedes that these groups can exhibit Somewhere-ish attitudes –
prioritising stable families, for example – he frames them throughout as the
cloud on the Somewheres’ horizon, the blot that has darkened the Somewheres’
previously sunny landscape. It is their arrival that has changed Britain beyond
recognition, their presence that has to be dealt with.
Perhaps my
own experience as a member of Britain’s Jewish community has skewed my
perspective, but I’d suggest that the very qualities Goodhart most admires
among the Somewheres – including neighbourliness, trust and a sense of shared
destiny – are to be found in Britain’s minorities. They have not caused the
social fragmentation he laments: globalisation, automation and a thousand other
shifts bear more blame than they do. If anything, and especially in the cities,
they point to a remedy for those Anywheres Goodhart believes have become
unmoored. Minorities might be more of a model than a threat, more to be
emulated than to be feared.
Even if
that is asking too much, surely the task now is not to look back to the time
when homogeneity made a cohesive society easy, but to ask how today’s
heterogeneous society might be made more cohesive, despite the difficulties.
Goodhart is right that people are more inclined to share with those they regard
as their fellows: so the challenge is to make all citizens, including the newer
ones, appear to each other as fellows.
That need
not be an impossibly utopian goal. The patriotic pride invested in and
unleashed by the likes of Mo Farah may seem trivial, but it shows that people
can indeed come to see a relative newcomer as one of their own. But it takes
effort from every level of society. It requires immigrants to work at becoming
integrated of course, but it also demands that everyone else welcome and
embrace them as Britons. The US used to be a model in this regard, but it’s
hard to see it that way now. This is a task we will have to take on ourselves.
Goodhart’s book does not offer much advice on how we might get there, but it is
a powerful reminder that we have to try.
Too diverse?
Is Britain becoming too diverse to sustain the mutual
obligations behind a good society and the welfare state?
By
David
Goodhart
February 20, 2004
FEBRUARY
2004
Britain in
the 1950s was a country stratified by class and region. But in most of its
cities, suburbs, towns and villages there was a good chance of predicting the
attitudes, even the behaviour, of the people living in your immediate
neighbourhood.
In many
parts of Britain today that is no longer true. The country has long since
ceased to be Orwell’s “family” (albeit with the wrong members in charge). To
some people this is a cause of regret and disorientation – a change which they
associate with the growing incivility of modern urban life. To others it is a
sign of the inevitable, and welcome, march of modernity. After three centuries
of homogenisation through industrialisation, urbanisation, nation-building and
war, the British have become freer and more varied. Fifty years of peace,
wealth and mobility have allowed a greater diversity in lifestyles and values.
To this “value diversity” has been added ethnic diversity through two big waves
of immigration: first the mainly commonwealth immigration from the West Indies
and Asia in the 1950s and 1960s, followed by asylum-driven migrants from
Europe, Africa and the greater middle east in the late 1990s.
The
diversity, individualism and mobility that characterise developed economies –
especially in the era of globalisation – mean that more of our lives is spent
among strangers. Ever since the invention of agriculture 10,000 years ago,
humans have been used to dealing with people from beyond their own extended kin
groups. The difference now in a developed country like Britain is that we not
only live among stranger citizens but we must share with them. We share public
services and parts of our income in the welfare state, we share public spaces
in towns and cities where we are squashed together on buses, trains and tubes,
and we share in a democratic conversation – filtered by the media – about the
collective choices we wish to make. All such acts of sharing are more smoothly
and generously negotiated if we can take for granted a limited set of common
values and assumptions. But as Britain becomes more diverse that common culture
is being eroded.
And therein
lies one of the central dilemmas of political life in developed societies:
sharing and solidarity can conflict with diversity. This is an especially acute
dilemma for progressives who want plenty of both solidarity – high social
cohesion and generous welfare paid out of a progressive tax system – and
diversity – equal respect for a wide range of peoples, values and ways of life.
The tension between the two values is a reminder that serious politics is about
trade-offs. It also suggests that the left’s recent love affair with diversity
may come at the expense of the values and even the people that it once
championed.
It was the
Conservative politician David Willetts who drew my attention to the
“progressive dilemma.” Speaking at a roundtable on welfare reform (Prospect,
March 1998), he said: “The basis on which you can extract large sums of money
in tax and pay it out in benefits is that most people think the recipients are
people like themselves, facing difficulties which they themselves could face.
If values become more diverse, if lifestyles become more differentiated, then
it becomes more difficult to sustain the legitimacy of a universal 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 that 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.”
These words
alerted me to how the progressive dilemma lurks beneath many aspects of current
politics: national tax and redistribution policies; the asylum and immigration
debate; development aid budgets; EU integration and spending on the poorer
southern and east European states; and even the tensions between America (built
on political ideals and mass immigration) and Europe (based on nation states
with core ethnic-linguistic solidarities).
Thinking
about the conflict between solidarity and diversity is another way of asking a
question as old as human society itself: who is my brother? With whom do I
share mutual obligations? The traditional conservative Burkean view is that our
affinities ripple out from our families and localities, to the nation and not
very far beyond. That view is pitted against a liberal universalist one which
sees us in some sense equally obligated to all human beings from Bolton to
Burundi – an idea associated with the universalist aspects of Christianity and
Islam, with Kantian universalism and with left-wing internationalism. Science
is neutral in this dispute, or rather it stands on both sides of the argument.
Evolutionary psychology stresses both the universality of most human traits and
– through the notion of kin selection and reciprocal altruism – the instinct to
favour our own. Social psychologists also argue that the tendency to perceive
in-groups and out-groups, however ephemeral, is innate. In any case, Burkeans
claim to have common sense on their side. They argue that we feel more
comfortable with, and are readier to share with, and sacrifice for, those with
whom we have shared histories and similar values. To put it bluntly – most of
us prefer our own kind.
The
category “own kind” or in-group will set alarm bells ringing in the minds of
many readers. So it is worth stressing what preferring our own kind does not
mean, even for a Burkean. It does not mean that we are necessarily hostile to
other kinds or cannot empathise with outsiders. (There are those who do dislike
other kinds but in Britain they seem to be quite a small minority.) In complex
societies, most of us belong simultaneously to many in-groups – family,
profession, class, hobby, locality, nation – and an ability to move with ease
between groups is a sign of maturity. An in-group is not, except in the case of
families, a natural or biological category and the people who are deemed to
belong to it can change quickly, as we saw so disastrously in Bosnia.
Certainly, those we include in our in-group could be a pretty diverse crowd,
especially in a city like London.
Moreover,
modern liberal societies cannot be based on a simple assertion of group
identity – the very idea of the rule of law, of equal legal treatment for
everyone regardless of religion, wealth, gender or ethnicity, conflicts with
it. On the other hand, if you deny the assumption that humans are social,
group-based primates with constraints, however imprecise, on their willingness
to share, you find yourself having to defend some implausible positions: for example
that we should spend as much on development aid as on the NHS, or that Britain
should have no immigration controls at all. The implicit “calculus of affinity”
in media reporting of disasters is easily mocked – two dead Britons will get
the same space as 200 Spaniards or 2,000 Somalis. Yet everyday we make similar
calculations in the distribution of our own resources. Even a well-off,
liberal-minded Briton who already donates to charities will spend, say, ?200 on
a child’s birthday party, knowing that such money could, in the right hands,
save the life of a child in the third world. The extent of our obligation to
those to whom we are not connected through either kinship or citizenship is in
part a purely private, charitable decision. But it also has policy
implications, and not just in the field of development aid. For example,
significant NHS resources are spent each year on foreign visitors, especially
in London. Many of us might agree in theory that the needs of desperate
outsiders are often greater than our own. But we would object if our own parent
or child received inferior treatment because of resources consumed by
non-citizens.
Is it
possible to reconcile these observations about human preferences with our
increasingly open, fluid and value-diverse societies? At one level, yes. Our
liberal democracies still work fairly well; indeed it is one of the
achievements of modernity that people have learned to tolerate and share with
people very unlike themselves. (Until the 20th century, today’s welfare state
would have been considered contrary to human nature.) On the other hand, the
logic of solidarity, with its tendency to draw boundaries, and the logic of
diversity, with its tendency to cross them, do at times pull apart. Thanks to
the erosion of collective norms and identities, in particular of class and
nation, and the recent surge of immigration into Europe, this may be such a
time.
The modern
idea of citizenship goes some way to accommodating the tension between
solidarity and diversity. Citizenship is not an ethnic, blood and soil concept
but a more abstract political idea – implying equal legal, political and social
rights (and duties) for people inhabiting a given national space. But
citizenship is not just an abstract idea about rights and duties; for most of
us it is something we do not choose but are born into – it arises out of a
shared history, shared experiences, and, often, shared suffering; as the
American writer Alan Wolfe puts it: “Behind every citizen lies a graveyard.”
Both
aspects of citizenship imply a notion of mutual obligation. Critics have argued
that this idea of national community is anachronistic – swept away by
globalisation, individualism and migration – but it still has political
resonance. When politicians talk about the “British people” they refer not just
to a set of individuals with specific rights and duties but to a group of
people with a special commitment to one another. Membership in such a community
implies acceptance of moral rules, however fuzzy, which underpin the laws and
welfare systems of the state.
In the
rhetoric of the modern liberal state, the glue of ethnicity (“people who look
and talk like us”) has been replaced with the glue of values (“people who think
and behave like us”). But British values grow, in part, out of a specific
history and even geography. Too rapid a change in the make-up of a community
not only changes the present, it also, potentially, changes our link with the
past. As Bob Rowthorn wrote (Prospect, February 2003), we may lose a sense of
responsibility for our own history – the good things and shameful things in it
– if too many citizens no longer identify with it.
Is this a
problem? Surely Britain in 2004 has become too diverse and complex to give
expression to a common culture in the present, let alone the past. Diversity in
this context is usually code for ethnic difference. But that is only one part
of the diversity story, albeit the easiest to quantify and most emotionally
charged. The progressive dilemma is also revealed in the value and generational
rifts that emerged with such force in the 1960s. At the Prospect roundtable
mentioned above, Patricia Hewitt, now trade secretary, recalled an example of
generational conflict from her Leicester constituency. She was canvassing on a
council estate when an elderly white couple saw her Labour rosette and one of
them said, “We’re not voting Labour – you hand taxpayers’ money to our
daughter.” She apparently lived on a nearby estate, with three children all by
different fathers, and her parents had cut her off. (Evidence that even close
genetic ties do not always produce solidarity.)
Greater
diversity can produce real conflicts of values and interests, but it also
generates unjustified fears. Exposure to a wider spread of lifestyles, plus
more mobility and better education, has helped to combat some of those fears –
a trend reinforced by popular culture and the expansion of higher education
(graduates are notably more tolerant than non-graduates). There is less overt
homophobia, sexism or racism (and much more racial intermarriage) in Britain
than 30 years ago and racial discrimination is the most politically sensitive
form of unfairness. But 31 per cent of people still admit to being racially
prejudiced. Researchers such as Isaac Marks at London’s Institute of Psychiatry
warn that it is not possible to neatly divide the population between a small
group of xenophobes and the rest. Feelings of suspicion and hostility towards
outsiders are latent in most of us.
The
visibility of ethnic difference means that it often overshadows other forms of
diversity. Changes in the ethnic composition of a city or neighbourhood can
come to stand for the wider changes of modern life. Some expressions of racism,
especially by old people, can be read as declarations of dismay at the passing
of old ways of life (though this makes it no less unpleasant to be on the
receiving end). The different appearance of many immigrants is an outward
reminder that they are, at least initially, strangers. If welfare states demand
that we pay into a common fund on which we can all draw at times of need, it is
important that we feel that most people have made the same effort to be
self-supporting and will not take advantage. We need to be reassured that
strangers, especially those from other countries, have the same idea of
reciprocity as we do. Absorbing outsiders into a community worthy of the name
takes time.
Negotiating
the tension between solidarity and diversity is at the heart of politics. But
both left and right have, for different reasons, downplayed the issue. The left
is reluctant to acknowledge a conflict between values it cherishes; it is ready
to stress the erosion of community from “bad” forms of diversity such as market
individualism but not from “good” forms of diversity such as sexual freedom and
immigration. And the right, in Britain at least, has sidestepped the conflict,
partly because it is less interested in solidarity than the left, but also
because it is still trying to prove that it is comfortable with diversity.
But is
there any hard evidence that the progressive dilemma actually exists in the
real world of political and social choices? In most EU states the percentage of
GDP taken in tax is still at historically high levels, despite the increase in
diversity of all kinds. Yet it is also true that Scandinavian countries with
the biggest welfare states have been the most socially and ethnically
homogeneous states in the west. By the same token the welfare state has always
been weaker in the individualistic, ethnically divided US compared with more
homogeneous Europe. And the three bursts of welfarist legislation that the US
did see – Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, Harry Truman’s Fair Deal and Lyndon
Johnson’s Great Society – came during the long pause in mass immigration
between the first world war and 1968. (They were also, clearly, a response to
the depression and two world wars.)
In their
2001 Harvard Institute of Economic Research paper “Why Doesn’t the US Have a
European-style Welfare State?” Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser and Bruce
Sacerdote argue that the answer is that too many people at the bottom of the
pile in the US are black or Hispanic. Across the US as a whole, 70 per cent of
the population are non-Hispanic whites – but of those in poverty only 46 per
cent are non-Hispanic whites. So a disproportionate amount of tax income spent
on welfare is going to minorities. The paper also finds that US states that are
more ethnically fragmented than average spend less on social services. The
authors conclude that Americans think of the poor as members of a different
group, whereas Europeans still think of the poor as members of the same group.
Robert Putnam, the analyst of social capital, has also found a link between
high ethnic mix and low trust in the US. There is some British evidence
supporting this link too. Researchers at Mori found that the average level of
satisfaction with local authorities declines steeply as the extent of ethnic
fragmentation increases. Even allowing for the fact that areas of high ethnic
mix tend to be poorer, Mori found that ethnic fractionalisation still had a
substantial negative impact on attitudes to local government.
Finally,
Sweden and Denmark may provide a social laboratory for the solidarity/diversity
trade-off in the coming years. Starting from similar positions as homogeneous
countries with high levels of redistribution, they have taken rather different
approaches to immigration over the past few years. Although both countries
place great stress on integrating outsiders, Sweden has adopted a moderately
multicultural outlook. It has also adapted its economy somewhat, reducing job
protection for older native males in order to create more low-wage jobs for
immigrants in the public sector. About 12 per cent of Swedes are now
foreign-born and it is expected that by 2015 about 25 per cent of under-18s
will be either foreign-born or the children of the foreign-born. This is a
radical change and Sweden is adapting to it rather well (the first clips of
mourning Swedes after Anna Lindh’s murder were of crying immigrants expressing
their sorrow in perfect Swedish). But not all Swedes are happy about it.
Denmark has
a more restrictive and “nativist” approach to immigration. Only 6 per cent of
the population is foreign-born and native Danes enjoy superior welfare benefits
to incomers. If the solidarity/diversity trade-off is a real one and current
trends continue, then one would expect in, say, 20 years’ time that Sweden will
have a less redistributive welfare state than Denmark; or rather that Denmark
will have a more developed two-tier welfare state with higher benefits for
insiders, while Sweden will have a universal but less generous system.
What are
the main objections, at least from the left, to this argument about solidarity
and diversity? Multiculturalists stress Britain’s multiple diversities, of
class and region, which preceded recent waves of immigration. They also argue
that all humans share similar needs and a common interest in ensuring they are
met with minimum conflict; this, they say, can now be done through human rights
laws. And hostility to diversity, they conclude, is usually a form of “false
consciousness.”
Critics of
the dilemma also say, rightly, that the moral norms underpinning a community
need not be hard for outsiders to comply with: broad common standards of right
and wrong, some agreement on the nature of marriage and the family, respect for
law, and some consensus about the role of religion in public life. Moreover,
they add, there are places such as Canada (even Australia) which are happily
combining European-style welfare with an officially multicultural politics.
London, too, has US levels of ethnic diversity but is the most left-wing part
of Britain.
In the
autumn 2003 issue of the US magazine Dissent, two academics, Keith Banting and
Will Kymlicka, show that there is no link between the adoption of
multiculturalist policies in countries like Canada, Sweden and Britain, and the
erosion of the welfare state. But many of the policies they describe are either
too technical (allowing dual citizenship) or too anodyne (existence of a
government body to consult minorities) to stimulate serious tax resistance.
They also assume too swift a reaction to growing diversity – these are forces
that take effect over decades, if not generations. Similarly, two British
academics, Bhikhu Parekh and Ali Rattansi, have offered a critique of the
solidarity vs diversity thesis (partly in response to Prospect articles) which
also assumes an implausibly rapid connection between social cause and effect.
They argue that because the expansion of Britain’s welfare state in the late
1940s coincided with the first big wave of non-white immigration into Britain,
ethnic diversity cannot be a drag on social solidarity. But the post-1945
welfare state was the result of at least 100 years of experience and agitation.
The arrival of a small number of immigrants in the 1940s and 1950s was unlikely
to have much bearing on that history. Parekh, Kymlicka and others also argue
that labour movement strength, not ethnic homogeneity, is the best indicator of
the size of a welfare state. But labour movements themselves are stronger where
there are no significant religious or ethnic divisions. In any case, we are not
concerned here with the formation of welfare states so much as with their
continued flourishing today.
A further
point made by the multiculturalists is more telling. They argue that a single
national story is not a sound base for a common culture because it has always
been contested by class, region and religion. In Britain, the left traces
democracy back to the peasants’ revolt, the right back to Magna Carta, and so
on. But while that is true, it is also the case that these different stories
refer to a shared history. This does not imply a single narrative or national
identity any more than a husband and wife will describe their married life
together in the same way. Nor does it mean that the stress on the binding force
of a shared history (or historical institutions like parliament) condemns
immigrants to a second-class citizenship. Newcomers can and should adopt the
history of their new country as well as, over time, contributing to it – moving
from immigrant “them” to citizen “us.” Helpfully, Britain’s story includes,
through empire, the story of many of our immigrant groups – empire soldiers,
for example, fought in many of the wars that created modern Britain.
I would add
a further qualification to the progressive dilemma. Attitudes to welfare have,
for many people, become more instrumental: I pay so much in, the state gives me
this in return. As we grow richer the ties that used to bind workers together
in a risk-pooling welfare state (first locally, later nationally) have loosened
– “generosity” is more abstract and compulsory, a matter of enlightened
self-interest rather than mutual obligation. Moreover, welfare is less
redistributive than most people imagine – most of the tax paid out by citizens
comes back to them in one form or another so the amount of the average person’s
income going to someone they might consider undeserving is small. This, however,
does little to allay anxieties based on perceptions rather than fiscal truths.
And poor whites, who have relatively little, are more likely to resent even
small transfers compared with those on higher incomes.
Despite
these qualifications it still seems to me that those who value solidarity
should take care that it is not eroded by a refusal to acknowledge the
constraints upon it. The politician who has recently laid most stress on those
constraints, especially in relation to immigration, is the home secretary,
David Blunkett. He has spoken about the need for more integration of some
immigrant communities – especially Muslim ones – while continuing to welcome
high levels of net immigration into Britain of over 150,000 a year.
Supporters
of large-scale immigration now focus on the quantifiable economic benefits,
appealing to the self-interest rather than the idealism of the host population.
While it is true that some immigration is beneficial – neither the NHS nor the
building industry could survive without it – many of the claimed benefits of
mass immigration are challenged by economists such as Adair Turner and Richard
Layard. It is clear, for example, that immigration is no long-term solution to
an ageing population for the simple reason that immigrants grow old too.
Keeping the current age structure constant over the next 50 years, and assuming
today’s birth rate, would require 60m immigrants. Managing an ageing society
requires a package of later retirement, rising productivity and limited
immigration. Large-scale immigration of unskilled workers does allow native
workers to bypass the dirtiest and least rewarding jobs but it also increases
inequality, does little for per capita growth, and skews benefits in the host
population to employers and the better-off.
But
large-scale immigration, especially if it happens rapidly, is not just about
economics; it is about those less tangible things to do with identity and
mutual obligation – which have been eroded from other directions too. It can
also create real – as opposed to just imagined – conflicts of interest. One
example is the immigration-related struggles over public housing in many of
Britain’s big cities in the 1970s and 1980s. In places like London’s east end
the right to a decent council house had always been regarded as part of the
inheritance of the respectable working class. When immigrants began to arrive
in the 1960s they did not have the contacts to get on the housing list and so
often ended up in low quality private housing. Many people saw the injustice of
this and decided to change the rules: henceforth the criterion of universal
need came to supplant good contacts. So if a Bangladeshi couple with children
were in poor accommodation they would qualify for a certain number of housing
points, allowing them to jump ahead of young local white couples who had been
on the list for years. This was, of course, unpopular with many whites. Similar
clashes between group based notions of justice and universally applied human
rights are unavoidable in welfare states with increasingly diverse people.
The
“thickest” solidarities are now often found among ethnic minority groups
themselves in response to real or perceived discrimination. This can be another
source of resentment for poor whites who look on enviously from their own
fragmented neighbourhoods as minorities recreate some of the mutual support and
sense of community that was once a feature of British working-class life.
Paradoxically, it may be this erosion of feelings of mutuality among the white
majority in Britain that has made it easier to absorb minorities. The degree of
antagonism between groups is proportional to the degree of co-operation within
groups. Relative to the other big European nations, the British sense of
national culture and solidarity has arguably been rather weak – diluted by
class, empire, the four different nations within the state, the north-south
divide, and even the long shadow of American culture. That weakness of national
solidarity, exemplified by the “stand-offishness” of suburban England, may have
created a bulwark against extreme nationalism. We are more tolerant than, say,
France because we don’t care enough about each other to resent the arrival of
the other.
When
solidarity and diversity pull against each other, which side should public
policy favour? Diversity can increasingly look after itself – the underlying
drift of social and economic development favours it. Solidarity, on the other
hand, thrives at times of adversity, hence its high point just after the second
world war and its steady decline ever since as affluence, mobility, value
diversity and (in some areas) immigration have loosened the ties of a common
culture. Public policy should therefore tend to favour solidarity in four broad
areas.
Immigration
and asylum About 9 per cent of British residents are now from ethnic
minorities, rising to almost one third in London. On current trends about one
fifth of the population will come from an ethnic minority by 2050, albeit many
of them fourth or fifth generation. Thanks to the race riots in northern
English towns in 2001, the fear of radical Islam after 9/11, and anxieties
about the rise in asylum-led immigration from the mid-1990s (exacerbated by the
popular press), immigration has shot up the list of voter concerns, and
according to Mori 56 per cent of people (including 90 per cent of poor whites
and even a large minority of immigrants) now believe there are too many
immigrants in Britain. This is thanks partly to the overburdened asylum system,
which forces refugees on to welfare and prevents them from working legally for
at least two years – a system calculated to provoke maximum hostility from
ordinary Britons with their acute sensitivity to free riding (see latest
Mori/Prospect poll on page 16). As soon as the system is under control and
undeserving applicants are swiftly removed or redirected to legitimate
migration channels, the ban on working should be reduced to six months or
abolished. A properly managed asylum system will sharply reduce the heat in the
whole race and immigration debate.
Immigrants
come in all shapes and sizes. From the American banker or Indian software
engineer to the Somali asylum seeker – from the most desirable to the most
burdensome, at least in the short term. Immigrants who plan to stay should be
encouraged to become Britons as far as that is compatible with holding on to
some core aspects of their own culture. In return for learning the language,
getting a job and paying taxes, and abiding by the laws and norms of the host
society, immigrants must be given a stake in the system and incentives to
become good citizens. (While it is desirable to increase minority participation
at the higher end of the labour market, the use of quotas and affirmative
action seems to have been counter-productive in the US.) Immigrants from the
same place are bound to want to congregate together but policy should try to
prevent that consolidating into segregation across all the main areas of life:
residence, school, workplace, church. In any case, the laissez-faire approach
of the postwar period in which ethnic minority citizens were not encouraged to
join the common culture (although many did) should be buried. Citizenship
ceremonies, language lessons and the mentoring of new citizens should help to
create a British version of the old US melting pot. This third way on identity
can be distinguished from the coercive assimilationism of the nationalist
right, which rejects any element of foreign culture, and from multiculturalism,
which rejects a common culture.
Is there a
“tipping point” somewhere between Britain’s 9 per cent ethnic minority
population and America’s 30 per cent, which creates a wholly different US-style
society – with sharp ethnic divisions, a weak welfare state and low political
participation? No one knows, but it is a plausible assumption. And for that
tipping point to be avoided and for feelings of solidarity towards incomers not
to be overstretched it is important to reassure the majority that the system of
entering the country and becoming a citizen is under control and that there is
an honest debate about the scale, speed and kind of immigration. It is one
thing to welcome smart, aspiring Indians or east Asians. But it is not clear to
many people why it is such a good idea to welcome people from poor parts of the
developing world with little experience of urbanisation, secularism or western
values.
Welfare
policy A generous welfare state is not compatible with open borders and
possibly not even with US-style mass immigration. Europe is not America. One of
the reasons for the fragmentation and individualism of American life is that it
is a vast country. In Europe, with its much higher population density and
planning controls, the rules have to be different. We are condemned to share –
the rich cannot ignore the poor, the indigenous cannot ignore the immigrant –
but that does not mean people are always happy to share. A universal, human
rights-based approach to welfare ignores the fact that the rights claimed by
one group do not automatically generate the obligation to accept them, or pay
for them, on the part of another group – as we saw with the elderly couple in
Leicester. If we want high tax and redistribution, especially with the extra
welfare demands of an ageing population, then in a world of stranger citizens
taxpayers need reassurance that their money is being spent on people for whose
circumstances they would have some sympathy. For that reason, welfare should
become more overtly conditional. The rules must be transparent and blind to
ethnicity, religion, sexuality and so on, but not blind to behaviour. People
who consistently break the rules of civilised behaviour should not receive
unconditional benefits.
The
“localisation” of more tax and redistribution would make it possible to see how
and on whom our taxes are spent. More controversially, there is also a case ?
as Meghnad Desai has argued ? for introducing a two-tier welfare system. Purely
economic migrants or certain kinds of refugees could be allowed temporary
residence, the right to work (but not to vote) and be given access to only
limited parts of the welfare state, while permanent migrants who make the
effort to become citizens would get full access to welfare. A two-tier welfare
state might reduce pressure on the asylum system and also help to deracialise
citizenship ? white middle-class bankers and Asian shopkeepers would have full
British citizenship, while white Slovenian temporary workers would not. Such a
two-tier system is emerging in Denmark. Indeed it already applies to some
extent in Britain: migrants on work permits and spouses during the two-year
probationary period cannot get most benefits. If we want to combine social
solidarity with relatively high immigration, there is also a strong case for ID
cards both on logistical grounds and as a badge of citizenship that transcends
narrower group and ethnic loyalties.
Culture
Good societies need places like London and New York as well as the more
homogeneous, stable, small and medium-size towns of middle Britain or the American
midwest. But the emphasis, in culture and the media, should be on maintaining a
single national conversation at a time when the viewing and listening public is
becoming more fragmented. In Britain, that means strong support for the “social
glue” role of the BBC. (The glue once provided by religion no longer works, and
in any case cannot include immigrants of different faiths.) The teaching of
multi-ethnic citizenship in schools is a welcome step. But too many children
leave school with no sense of the broad sweep of their national history. The
teaching of British history, and in particular the history of the empire and of
subsequent immigration into Britain, should be a central part of the school
curriculum. At the same time, immigrants should be encouraged to become part of
the British “we,” even while bringing their own very different perspective on
its formation.
Politics
and Language Multiculturalists argue that the binding power of the liberal
nation state has been eroded from within by value diversity and from without by
the arrival of immigrant communities with other loyalties. But the nation state
remains irreplaceable as the site for democratic participation and it is hard
to imagine how else one can organise welfare states and redistribution except
through national tax and public spending. Moreover, since the arrival of
immigrant groups from non-liberal or illiberal cultures it has become clear
that to remain liberal the state may have to prescribe a clearer hierarchy of
values. The US has tried to resolve the tension between liberalism and
pluralism by developing a powerful national myth. Even if this were desirable
in Britain, it is probably not possible to emulate. Indeed, the idea of
fostering a common culture, in any strong sense, may no longer be possible
either. One only has to try listing what the elements of a common culture might
be to realise how hard it would be to legislate for. That does not mean that
the idea must be abandoned; rather, it should inform public policy as an underlying
assumption rather than a set of policies. Immigration and welfare policies, for
example, should be designed to reduce the fear of free riding, and the symbolic
aspects of citizenship should be reinforced; they matter more in a society when
tacit understandings and solidarities can no longer be taken for granted. Why
not, for example, a British national holiday or a state of the union address?
Lifestyle
diversity and high immigration bring cultural and economic dynamism but can
erode feelings of mutual obligation, reducing willingness to pay tax and even
encouraging a retreat from the public domain. In the decades ahead European
politics itself may start to shift on this axis, with left and right being
eclipsed by value-based culture wars and movements for and against diversity.
Social democratic parties risk being torn apart in such circumstances, partly
on class lines: recent British Social Attitudes reports have made clear the
middle class and the working class increasingly converge on issues of tax and
economic management, but diverge on diversity issues.
The
anxieties triggered by the asylum seeker inflow into Britain now seem to be
fading. But they are not just a media invention; a sharp economic downturn or a
big inflow of east European workers after EU enlargement might easily call them
up again. The progressive centre needs to think more clearly about these issues
to avoid being engulfed by them. And to that end it must try to develop a new
language in which to address the anxieties, one that transcends the thin and
abstract language of universal rights on the one hand and the defensive,
nativist language of group identity on the other. Too often the language of
liberal universalism that dominates public debate ignores the real affinities
of place and people. These affinities are not obstacles to be overcome on the
road to the good society; they are one of its foundation stones. People will
always favour their own families and communities; it is the task of a realistic
liberalism to strive for a definition of community that is wide enough to
include people from many different backgrounds, without being so wide as to
become meaningless.
David
Goodhart
David
Goodhart is Director of the Integration Hub at the Policy Exchange think tank
and founding editor of Prospect Magazine
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