The Great British Delusion
As regular readers will know, for several years now, I have been trying to persuade anyone who will listen that if you want to address the widely-shared concern about the pace and scale of mass immigration - Britain’s most salient political issue - it might be helpful to understand what’s causing the problem in the first place.
The conventional explanation of mass immigration among critical commentators is that “woke ideologues” in the civil service and the political halls of power believe that bringing more people into Britain is an unquestionable moral good. On the fringes of the Right, some even murmur of various theories of the “Great Replacement” which range in emphasis from elites bringing in compliant and desperate foreign workers to avoid providing good working conditions and fair wages to native workers, all the way through to Jews conspiring to replace white people with third-world immigration. Whatever the exact flavour this perspective comes in, the idea is that mass immigration is happening for primarily ideological reasons.
Likewise, advocates of mass immigration believe that anti-immigration sentiment is also motivated by ideology (hating immigrants/being racist etc) rather than reality.
What has been clear to me for some time, however, is that both of these claims are only partially true. Yes, some, as New Labour advisor Andrew Neather explained, wanted to “rub the Right’s nose in diversity”. Yes, many in Britain as a whole and in Westminster in particular think that immigration is an axiomatic moral good. The problem is, however, that this does not explain why a series of Conservative governments, elected on increasingly vociferous promises to bring immigration down to the “tens of thousands”, continued to ramp it up. Facing the threat of Farage, who tore chunks out of the Tory vote year after year, they instead proceeded to set new immigration records, culminating in 2023 when net annual immigration exceeded 900,000.
It’s also true that some people don’t like immigrants. But the idea that this motivates a significant portion of the opposition to mass immigration in a country like Britain is absurd. According to that infamous far-right, anti-immigrant rag The Guardian, British people are statistically some of the most welcoming towards immigrants in the world.
Put simply, both sides are misunderstanding what’s happening, often on purpose.
My view is that much of the concern about immigration comes from two practical realities.
First, mass immigration on this scale is necessarily displacing. I’ve only lived in Britain for 30 years, and no one can tell me that the country and especially its major cities have not been completely transformed in that time. Many of the people who live in London today are either unconcerned by or actively in favour of these changes. But that’s partly because most of the people who were concerned have left. Now multiply across every city in the country and many of their suburbs. You don’t have to dislike people to not want the area where generations of your family were born, lived and died to become alien to you within the space of two decades.
In that same timespan, the British people have been getting poorer. As I keep saying over and over, Britain’s GDP per capita is lower today than it was in 2007, before the Great Financial Crisis.
Ironically, this is also why parties of every stripe have brought in millions of people into the country: we don’t evaluate economic performance on GDP per capita. Instead, we measure GDP itself and itself alone. That is the equivalent of measuring how prosperous your household is without accounting for the number of people living in it. A household income of £100,000 per year is high (by British standards, at least - more on this later) but what matters a lot more than that is how many people are in your household. A single person living on £100,000 is in a very different position to a family of 5 who are effectively getting £20,000 a year each.
The explanation for why Labour and the Tories let immigration run rampant was best summed up by legendary investor Charlie Munger when he said “show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome”. If all you care about is the headline figure, why not hand a bedroom to your in-laws to top up your “prosperity” with their pension? When described like this, it sounds, frankly, insane, yet that is precisely what our politicians are incentivised to do. They are judged on the country’s total GDP. The easiest way to increase it when you’re busy strangling your economy with Net Zero, high taxes and endless regulations? Bring in more bodies.
This really isn’t complicated to understand so why do so many people in Britain, who clearly feel the economic pain, nonetheless refuse to see it? To see that mass immigration is an attempt by badly incentivised politicians to deceive them about what’s actually happening? Instead, they cling to their support for mass immigration and the seductive (but false) idea that they are struggling because “the rich aren’t paying their fair share”.
A report this week, however, has opened my eyes to another reason - one I had never considered:
