View all newsletters
Sign up to our newsletters

Support 110 years of independent journalism.

  1. Culture
  2. Books
25 April 2013updated 28 Mar 2023 3:32pm

Reviewed: The British Dream – Successes and Failures of Post-War Immigration by David Goodhart

Comings and goings.

By Jon Cruddas

The British Dream: Successes and Failures of Post-War Immigration
David Goodhart
Atlantic Books, 416pp, £20

For a brief period from late 2008 and all through 2009, some on the left believed that the economic crisis and near collapse of the financial system would rally people to its banner. They were quickly disillusioned and had to ask why no political benefit had accrued to the left from bank recapitalisation and the crisis of capitalism.

A simple suggestion might be that our economic problems pre-date these events. For example, after 1997, immigration policy was a major driver of government macroeconomic strategy and the search for labour-market flexibility. Whatever its economic virtues, this was a policy that, in the eyes of many, helped to turn the Labour Party toxic. Geoffrey Evans and Kat Chzhen of Nuffield College, Oxford calculate that Labour may have lost the 2010 election not because of its handling of the economy but because of perceived failures on immigration.

Yet how do we confront this when the politics of immigration trigger defensive reactions on much of the left? Questioning high inflows of people or raising economic and cultural concerns are too often dismissed as xenophobia and bigotry. David Goodhart was one of the first to raise just such questions and he paid for it. Following the publication in 2004 of Goodhart’s 6,000-word essay for Prospect magazine entitled “Too Diverse?”, the then chair of the Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips, said that “the xenophobes should come clean” and declared Goodhart’s essay to be the stuff of “liberal Powellites”.

Goodhart kept going, however. His 2006 pamphlet, Progressive Nationalism: Citizenship and the Left, pushed further. How do we reconcile our sense of solidarity with our diversity, he asked. How do we overcome tensions between insiders and outsiders that drain support for a shared welfare pool? Goodhart called this our “progressive dilemma”.

Select and enter your email address Your weekly guide to the best writing on ideas, politics, books and culture every Saturday. The best way to sign up for The Saturday Read is via saturdayread.substack.com The New Statesman's quick and essential guide to the news and politics of the day. The best way to sign up for Morning Call is via morningcall.substack.com Our Thursday ideas newsletter, delving into philosophy, criticism, and intellectual history. The best way to sign up for The Salvo is via thesalvo.substack.com Stay up to date with NS events, subscription offers & updates. Weekly analysis of the shift to a new economy from the New Statesman's Spotlight on Policy team. The best way to sign up for The Green Transition is via spotlightonpolicy.substack.com
  • Administration / Office
  • Arts and Culture
  • Board Member
  • Business / Corporate Services
  • Client / Customer Services
  • Communications
  • Construction, Works, Engineering
  • Education, Curriculum and Teaching
  • Environment, Conservation and NRM
  • Facility / Grounds Management and Maintenance
  • Finance Management
  • Health - Medical and Nursing Management
  • HR, Training and Organisational Development
  • Information and Communications Technology
  • Information Services, Statistics, Records, Archives
  • Infrastructure Management - Transport, Utilities
  • Legal Officers and Practitioners
  • Librarians and Library Management
  • Management
  • Marketing
  • OH&S, Risk Management
  • Operations Management
  • Planning, Policy, Strategy
  • Printing, Design, Publishing, Web
  • Projects, Programs and Advisors
  • Property, Assets and Fleet Management
  • Public Relations and Media
  • Purchasing and Procurement
  • Quality Management
  • Science and Technical Research and Development
  • Security and Law Enforcement
  • Service Delivery
  • Sport and Recreation
  • Travel, Accommodation, Tourism
  • Wellbeing, Community / Social Services
Visit our privacy Policy for more information about our services, how New Statesman Media Group may use, process and share your personal data, including information on your rights in respect of your personal data and how you can unsubscribe from future marketing communications.
THANK YOU

Many thought he played too fast and loose, and found him publicity-hungry, overeager to play the iconoclast. Surely any balanced discussion of the welfare state had to acknowledge that its existence and resilience is itself the product of mass immigration? Further, in Goodhart’s framing, the migrant often appeared as the taker, the problem. Yet there is strong evidence that migrants are net contributors to our country. He also lacked an adequate political economy of empire and its labourpower requirements. So he rightly took some heavy criticism. Yet, in the name of tolerance, parts of the left practised intolerance. By closing down the argument they allowed the right to shape the tone and language of the immigration debate, particularly in England. Meanwhile, having earlier in the decade sidelined the Parekh commission on the future of multi-ethnic Britain, New Labour tacked towards popular concerns about immigration and played people’s concerns right back at them.

After a fairly generous lag, a new debate has begun in the Labour Party. The publication of Goodhart’s book The British Dream follows two major speeches late last year by Ed Miliband and a more recent one by the shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper. Both acknowledged the part immigration has played in generating economic insecurity and in shoring up the preference of business for short-termism and cheap labour over innovation and skills training. And they both acknowledged the cultural change and sense of loss that have left many people feeling alienated and resentful. So, to the extent that he raises these issues, Goodhart finds himself occupying the centre ground. We now speak more openly and with less anxiety about race, class, demographics and nation.

The British Dream develops familiar themes. “In the space of less than 60 years,” Goodhart writes, “a rather homogenous country at the heart of a multiracial empire became a multiracial country, now without an empire.” How did this happen and what are the consequences? Three sections follow. The first attacks the remote cosmopolitanism of much of the left and emphasises the importance of physical place and national boundary in an era of globalisation. The second is an empirical analysis of inflows and a tour of debates around multiculturalism, while the third section focuses on the tensions and dilemmas of national identity.

Historians will look back on the past few decades and identify immigration as perhaps the major change to our country. There have been two big phases of immigration. The post-colonial phase lasted from 1948 until the early 1990s. It brought to Britain around two million people from the Caribbean, India, Pakistan and Africa. By the end of this period the number of ethnic-minority Britons stood at four million. The second phase, which coincided with a huge shift in the global movement of people, started in the late 1990s. Net immigration of non-British citizens has added another four million to the population in just 15 years.

The 2011 census for England and Wales put the proportion of the population who are not white-British at just under 20 per cent. This includes eight million of those whom Goodhart terms “visible minorities”, by which he means non-whites, and three million who are white and include those from eastern Europe, Australia, Ireland and Germany. According to Goodhart, future trends suggest that by the time of the next census in 2021 the “visible minority population” (including people of mixed ethnic backgrounds) of England and Wales will have risen from 14 per cent to roughly 20 per cent.

Predictions of population trends, birth and death rates and the growth of our various ethnic populations are contested. But whatever one’s response to such statistics – and some maintain that the mere mention of numbers and projections is tainted with racism – they point to an unprecedented change in our country. It is, Goodhart writes, “a demographic revolution” and one that he argues has happened by accident. It is transforming the cultures and common life of Britain.

Immigration raises questions about the character of England and the English, in particular. Who are we in this post-devolution, post-industrial era? Is the shrill politics of loss and resentment inevitable? These are questions that will continue to energise a politics of culture and belonging and shape the political settlement that is emerging in the wake of the economic crisis, just as they shaped the political settlement that emerged from the crisis of the mid-1970s. That led to the success of the New Right, the victory of Margaret Thatcher and the dominance of the neoliberal model of capitalism.

Though little acknowledged, Enoch Powell’s anti-immigration politics of culture and belonging laid the groundwork for the economic revolution of Thatcherism. His 1968 “rivers of blood” speech attacked government policy on immigration and broke ranks with the political elite. Powell “put a match to a tinderbox” and the result was an “explosion of bigotry, prejudice, alarm and fear”. His racialised politics found ready support among a settled population fearful that their way of life was under threat. Powell had identified and exploited the growing gulf between the people and a liberalminded ruling elite. He accused it of being an “enemy within” bent upon the destruction of the country. It was the first major assault on the postwar consensus.

The response of both the Labour and Conservative leaderships was to dismiss Powell as a demagogue and racist. Few recognised that new political fault lines were opening up, nor did they grasp that Powell had embarked on what was, in Tom Nairn’s phrase, “a preliminary groundbreaking exercise” for a new political order. However, not even Nairn could have foreseen the radicalism of Margaret Thatcher’s economic revolution. “Race” and immigration would play a major role in the new battle for England.

Concern about immigration is felt by all British ethnic groups. Anxiety about being isolated among people of a different culture through no choice of one’s own is understandable. Living in a neighbourhood of constantly changing strangers can be intolerable. People live in places and seek stability and familiarity for their family and children. Home is basic to a secure society. It provides a sense of belonging and identity. People’s loyalties and fidelities are local, ordinary and particular; they are not universal, abstract and general. We live within our relationships and these are foremost in value and importance for us. To fear their loss or disruption to them is only human.

Immigration is as much about those who have lived in these islands for generations as it is about those newly arrived. As Ed Miliband has said, we have to create together a common life around the shared language of English and a willingness to work and obey the laws of the country. It is out of these social bonds that shared ideas of the common good can be built. When people are secure in their culture and identity, they are open to others.

Labour’s “one-nation” politics is less about a society of many cultures and more about creating a common life that allows us to find unity in our differences. It is about a patriotism in which all British citizens are equal in their rights, their obligations and in the opportunities that are open to them. The task of rebuilding Britain will require a democratic politics of culture and belonging as much as a new political economy; a connected society as much as a new economic model of wealth creation.

I was fearful of reading this book. I feared that Goodhart, while claiming he is “not setting out to be provocative”, might seek to turn up the dial in order to gain a certain notoriety and traction for his work. Instead, however, I found greater nuance and texture than before.

There are still some difficulties. I don’t understand why he doesn’t acknowledge that hardline economic liberals, just as much as the most abstract cosmopolitans, reject any notion of national boundaries and loyalties. Goodhart is also too ready to accept the government’s claims about reducing “net migration”, which lumps all immigration together and does nothing about the problem of “churn” that he says he wants to avoid. He misses a trick, too, in not locating hostility to patriotism within a longer arc and linking it to the collapse of Gladstonian Liberalism as patriotic fervour bled into the ballot box in 1900. J A Hobson’s The Psychology of Jingoism (1901) looked for explanations in the essential irrationality of the sentiment, and conditioned much left thinking about patriotism through the last century as a consequence. Goodhart fails to respect genuine concerns on the left regarding the racial absolutism of much patriotic politics.

Nevertheless, The British Dream is an important contribution to any durable “one nation” politics. The country is heading for some pretty turbulent times and the left must contest these spaces, not vacate them to the right and the politics of loss and demonisation. Goodhart has occupied them longer than many and his work is evolving into something of real substance. I hope the book will be widely read.

Jon Cruddas, MP for Dagenham and Rainham, is co-ordinating the Labour Party’s policy review

Content from our partners
The promise of prevention
How Labour hopes to make the UK a leader in green energy
Is now the time to rethink health and care for older people? With Age UK

Select and enter your email address Your weekly guide to the best writing on ideas, politics, books and culture every Saturday. The best way to sign up for The Saturday Read is via saturdayread.substack.com The New Statesman's quick and essential guide to the news and politics of the day. The best way to sign up for Morning Call is via morningcall.substack.com Our Thursday ideas newsletter, delving into philosophy, criticism, and intellectual history. The best way to sign up for The Salvo is via thesalvo.substack.com Stay up to date with NS events, subscription offers & updates. Weekly analysis of the shift to a new economy from the New Statesman's Spotlight on Policy team. The best way to sign up for The Green Transition is via spotlightonpolicy.substack.com
  • Administration / Office
  • Arts and Culture
  • Board Member
  • Business / Corporate Services
  • Client / Customer Services
  • Communications
  • Construction, Works, Engineering
  • Education, Curriculum and Teaching
  • Environment, Conservation and NRM
  • Facility / Grounds Management and Maintenance
  • Finance Management
  • Health - Medical and Nursing Management
  • HR, Training and Organisational Development
  • Information and Communications Technology
  • Information Services, Statistics, Records, Archives
  • Infrastructure Management - Transport, Utilities
  • Legal Officers and Practitioners
  • Librarians and Library Management
  • Management
  • Marketing
  • OH&S, Risk Management
  • Operations Management
  • Planning, Policy, Strategy
  • Printing, Design, Publishing, Web
  • Projects, Programs and Advisors
  • Property, Assets and Fleet Management
  • Public Relations and Media
  • Purchasing and Procurement
  • Quality Management
  • Science and Technical Research and Development
  • Security and Law Enforcement
  • Service Delivery
  • Sport and Recreation
  • Travel, Accommodation, Tourism
  • Wellbeing, Community / Social Services
Visit our privacy Policy for more information about our services, how New Statesman Media Group may use, process and share your personal data, including information on your rights in respect of your personal data and how you can unsubscribe from future marketing communications.
THANK YOU