“Everywhere you go you hear different languages being spoken and it’s like a mixing pot. I’m sure I shouldn’t use that term, but it’s good though… Immigration’s a good thing!”
Which woke, liberal lefty could possibly have come up with such praise of London’s rampant multiculturalism? Who could face standing up for a capital city in which 41 per cent of residents were born abroad?
The answer is Susan Hall, leader of the Conservatives in the London Assembly and the party’s 2024 candidate of London mayor. Back when I interviewed her in 2023, Hall had countless criticisms of Sadiq Khan, but she was full of praise for the vibrant diversity of the city she was hoping to lead. True, she had a tendency to “like” questionable posts on social media (an Enoch Powell meme with the caption “it’s never too late to get London back”), but she was keen to stress that tackling illegal immigration should not mean attacking the capital’s longstanding reputation as a hub for people from all over the world to make their home.
Hall has had a change of heart in the intervening years. Earlier this month she signed up to the advisory board Restore Britain, a new political movement run by erstwhile Reform MP Rupert Lowe. As well as promising to “carpet-bomb the cancer of wokery”, Restore Britain wants “net negative immigration”, achieved in part by doubling the departure of legal immigrants from the UK. It is not (yet) calling for mass deportations, but it does declare that “millions of foreign nationals who cannot speak English… should go home”. Quite how that fits with celebrating the “mixing pot” of languages Hall so recently enthused about is unclear.
I mention Hall not to single her out personally, but because the apparent shift in her views is part of something bigger. It’s fashionable in certain circles today to decry how “London has fallen”, thanks in large part to soaring immigration. The immigration-sceptic journalist David Goodhart was at it in the Evening Standard last month, arguing that “Rapid demographic change has transformed London”. Days later the academic-turned-Reform-activist Matthew Goodwin got in on the action on Twitter, calling London “a city in visible decline with deteriorating standards and no real sense of identity or belonging”. This week, Isabel Oakeshott (partner of Reform deputy leader Richard Tice) wrote in the Telegraph that she knew she’d made the right decision to emigrate from Britain to Dubai because she recently saw a stoned Rastafarian on the Embankment. This was apparently a shock to her – clearly she never hung out in Camden in the nineties.
As well as being quite blurry on the distinction between people who have crossed the Channel in small boats and those here with valid visas, those indulging in this trend like to hint at – or explicitly make – the link between rising immigration and rising crime, from fare-dodging and rough-sleeping to phone theft and shoplifting.
This is great for rhetoric, but light on facts. Fare-dodging, while both visible and infuriating (hence the success of Robert Jenrick’s viral video confronting evaders) is at 3.4 per cent both lower in London than many global cities (it’s three times higher in New York, for example) and is falling rather than rising. Plus there’s no evidence this is linked to immigration, just as there isn’t with shoplifting, which is more likely to be driven by the cost of living crisis. And the capital is still safer than, say, Manchester, which gets none of the same vitriol.
It’s true that foreign nationals are overrepresented in the London homelessness statistics, but not by much (St Mungo’s estimates they make up 48 per cent of the rough-sleeping population, compared to 41 per cent of the capital’s population as a whole), and the Home Office must take some responsibility, given the lack of accommodation during the multi-year waits for asylum processing and the fact claimants are forbidden from working during this time. And, as my colleague Anoosh Chakelian has outlined this week, the argument that immigrants unfairly sucking up Britain’s social housing is also patently false: “48 per cent of London’s social housing is occupied by foreign-born heads of household (the person who fills in the Census form). Hardly surprising, given 49 per cent of the capital’s households include someone born overseas”. (Born overseas – like Robert Jenrick’s wife was. Or Nigel Farage’s ex-wife. Or Boris Johnson himself.)
London is of course beset with reasons people might wish to avoid it. It’s loud and crowded and everything is too bloody expensive, from the £8 pints to the £1,900 monthly rent of a one-bed flat in Zone 2. The housing crisis is acute here in part due to rising numbers, but mostly due to decades of failure to build enough houses. Nightlife is struggling, due not to immigrants but in large part to their absence (the more than 80,000 EU hospitality workers who left in 2021 alone have left a massive gap). And don’t even get me started on the Nimbys who move to places like Soho then try to get every pub and bar within a 500m radius shut down so they can go to bed at 9pm on a Friday night. If anyone should be firmly encouraged to leave the capital, surely they should be top of the list.
But it’s also, as it always was, a city of chaos and joy and spontaneity. The fashionable bewailing of a London long gone reveals a distinct lack of familiarity with the city the authors claim to despise. As the punk-rock singer Frank Turner once put it in his lament for the closed Astoria music venue “singalongs go on but they’re singing different songs in rooms that we don’t know on the other side of the city”. Things change, but there is all kinds of fun to be had by those who can be bothered to find it, much of it staffed and provided by the sort of people Restore Britain think should emigrate.
You can get £15 tickets on the day for a wealth of West End shows – then, if you know where to look, find the secret wine bars serving until 3am. The restaurants and food carts will take you on a culinary trip to anywhere in the world. If this all sounds too expensive and elitist, the city remains a haven for those looking for entertainment on the cheap; free museums, free parks (Goodhart and the like rarely mention that London is the second-greenest city in the world), street performances and pop-up events. Head to the redeveloped oasis of Kings Cross this summer and you can sit, cost-free, on the steps of the canal and enjoy the open-air cinema screening Wimbledon, Wicked and Paddington in Peru.
Speaking of Paddington every additional “London has fallen” diatribe reminds me of the equally unfounded zombie myth that the capital is “unfriendly”, when its diversity is exactly why it has been such a beacon to all-comers for centuries. Goodhart writes in his piece that “Many parts of the capital would fail my integration ‘bus stop’ test – can you share a joke at a bus stop with a stranger from a different ethnicity about something you have both heard on national media?” If such a test ever existed elsewhere in the country, it is something I have never encountered in my three-plus decades in the capital. Most Londoners would balk at an unsolicited bus stop chat not because they are foreigners who have shamefully failed to integrate, but because infringing on someone’s precious quiet time mid-travel is a profoundly rude and un-London thing to do. That is not how residents here show their camaraderie with their neighbours, and the narrative that this is a deficiency tends to be pushed by people who don’t like it much and therefore fail to understand one of its key charms. As Mrs Brown tells our ursine Peruvian immigrant: “In London everyone is different, and that means anyone can fit in.” 2023-era Susan Hall would surely approve.
[See more: The OBR is always wrong]
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