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Dear Son, Let me tell you what immigration has done to this country
Last updated at 00:50am on 17th August 2007
Last year, former Tory minister George Walden wrote a book about the future of life in Britain and why record numbers were emigrating. Taking the form of a letter from a father to his son, it provoked a massive, positive response from readers when it was serialised in the Daily Mail.
In the book, Guy and Catherine despaired at having to bring up their two children in an area that had been dramatically changed by mass immigration, where their children had become a minority in school and teachers struggled to deal with so many pupils who did not speak English.
The country - where 57 per cent of births in the capital are now to mothers who were born abroad - seemed to be failing them on multiple fronts, not just on education but also on security and health care.
Since then, the couple have given up the battle and moved abroad to Canada. And they are not alone in their decision. As Walden pointed out in the first serialisation, a total of 350,000 people left Britain in 2004 - equivalent to a third of the population of Birmingham.
Danger: Fear of antagonising the Muslim community has put the country's security at risk from Islamic terrorists
Walden observes that despite all the changes mass immigration has brought in Britain, there remains a conspiracy of silence that has stifled debate on one of the most important issues of our age.
Now, in this thought-provoking followup, Walden examines Guy and Catherine's new quality of life, using it as a mirror to reflect the dreadful state of Britain today.
Walden, who served as higher education minister in Margaret Thatcher's government, has been married to Sarah for 38 years and they have three grown-up children. The son to whom his letters are addressed is fictional, but the incidents affecting him and his wife are based on fact.
Dear Son,
It's getting on for ten months now since you and Catherine left for a new life in Canada. And we didn't get the impression, when we came to see you, that you've regretted your decision for a moment.
Still, I'd better avoid saying anything excessively encouraging about the state of the nation you've left behind. Not difficult, as it happens.
In fact, it looks as though you got out just in time. Driving close to your old place in West London the other day, I saw a police notice asking for information about a young man who'd brandished a gun at an officer.
The people who bought your house at a ludicrously high price are unlikely to be thrilled. I don't suppose there's another city in the world where people have to pay that kind of money for the privilege of living in an area where hoodlums go round flashing guns.
There is an atmosphere of suppressed - or outright - violence and disorder that makes me worry for the next generation.
Often, it's the little incidents that are telling. Yesterday, your mother was on a bus when three girls aged between 16 and 18 tried to board in Ladbroke Grove. They were Brazilians, she thinks, but so completely anglicised that they'd got themselves roaring - or rather squealing - drunk.
Toting bottles of vodka and plastic cups, they pressed on to the platform, but the Bangladeshi driver stalwartly refused to allow them to board. The bus was held up for 20 minutes while the girls blocked the doors, laughing and screaming obscenities in their newly-acquired Essex accents.
The point is that during all this little drama, not a single one of the weary rush-hour passengers said a word. The great British public held hostage by a trio of sozzled teenage girls!
Toronto sounds safer, though it seems a hell of a way to go for a little peace of mind.
Back from our visit to you, we did a sort of audit of your new life. We loved your old brick house with wooden trimmings in the Riverdale area of Toronto - bigger than your London one and, at £220,000, less than half the cost.
Not to speak of your country place at Muskoka: a simple cottage but with the swimming, boating and fishing on all those lakes, a cut above Ruislip Lido.
And it's good to hear that the children look set to get into the nearest state secondary. A citycentre school with no problem of drugs or knives and one that teaches Latin!
We were relieved that you picked up an academic job so quickly, paying rather more than you got in the UK. With taxes and the cost of living lower, you should feel more relaxed financially.
The very fact that Canada has half our population (30 million) in a land many times bigger is good for the spirit - not to speak of car-parking.
The ethnic population, I see, is higher than here, but then Canada is much more selective. The points system they operate seems pretty rigorous, and it was only your impressive chemistry qualifications, I suspect, that got you in so smartly.
Also, the ethnic pattern is different, with the Chinese the largest element, followed by Indians, and fewer ghettos. As Catherine said, a strong secondary state education system is a key to integration.
Here, the country is not so much disintegrating as disaggregating. The Balkanisation of our lives is happening on a national scale.
Scotland's falling off the top, self-sealing ethnic communities are proliferating in the Midlands, and London's got its own thing going at the bottom.
We boast of our prosperity, but it's fragile and concentrated in the South East - an island within our island. Perhaps we'll have to get used to thinking of London and its environs as a kind of Hong Kong or an Italian city state.
Here, the most obvious disconnection is between the rich and the rest. An old story, but the difference today is that the fate of those at the top is divorced from those lower down.
When the housing ramp collapses, most of the falling masonry will hit the little guys in the middle and at the bottom. The top London prices helped drive up the entire market, but are less likely to fall when it all comes down. There's no feeling that we're all in this together.
The divisions run from earliest youth to grim old age. More boys at Eton get five good GCSEs, I hear, than in the entire borough of Hackney.
And now there's another divide growing up: between those who have a decent pension to look forward to and those for whom longevity has become more a threat than a promise.
Then there's the widening gap between the married and unmarried, or rather those with children and those without.
Large areas of our towns are now such havens of hedonism for the money-flashing singles that they're pretty much out of bounds for the poor bloody infantry who keep procreation going and cannot afford such leisures.
Everything's geared to the needs of the drinker and consumer, and little to the couple with the buggy. On top of all this is the growing disconnection between politics and the people.
And the more fractured we become, the greater our pretence of togetherness to cover it up. That's why the Government bangs on about 'community' and has tried so hard to ignore the problems caused by immigration.
Imagine my astonishment when the Minister responsible, Liam Byrne, actually admitted recently that large-scale immigration has profoundly unsettled the country - and that it's the poorest communities that have suffered the most. The influx was overwhelming public services, schools, the NHS and housing, he said.
If Labour failed to address public concern, he concluded, it could lose the next election.
I couldn't have put what Byrne was plucky enough to say better myself. But what is extraordinary is the lack of reaction to his words. Where are the columns and editorials and BBC programmes saying that the Government has gone racist?
On the principle that a sinner who repenteth deserves the greatest praise, Byrne is something of a saint. He'll certainly have the majority of immigrants on his side.
According to a speech by the former chairman of the race relations commission, Trevor Phillips, 54 per cent of them think there's been enough immigration.
Hardly surprising, since they and their children are among those who stand to suffer most from overcrowding, poor schooling, racial tensions and discrimination.
To complete this outburst of honesty, Byrne should have acknowledged that it's the rich who stand to gain from the profits of low-paid labour. But it would have raised the cry: "So why in God's name have you done it - and why are you letting more in?"
The evidence that the whole country benefits has shrunk to vanishing point.
The Governor of the Bank of England recently told MPs it was getting increasingly hard to manage the economy without knowing how many people were in the country. But everyone seems to have missed the implications of this: if the Bank doesn't know the true population, neither can the Treasury.
And now local councils are up in arms, saying the Office of National Statistics (ONS) does not have a clue about the number of people - for whom local services are required - who are entering the country.
How can anyone assess the profit and cost of migration, and claim that the balance is positive, if nobody knows the figures?
Meanwhile, the Government continues to pour billions into the NHS. That's supposed to be another success story, but nobody can really explain where all the money's going, let alone why it's so hard to keep our hospitals clean.
Let me tell you what happened to me recently. As you know, for years I've suffered from that irritating condition Dupuytren's contracture (named after a Frenchman) - or claw-hand in its less distinguished appellation, because the fingers contract until they look like one.
There's no pain - it's just a bloody nuisance, not least because after you've had an operation for one finger, the next one starts to contract.
I've had two fingers treated, one on the NHS and the other private - because I didn't fancy going into hospital for a minor operation, catching MRSA and coming out dead, as thousands are now doing.
Anyway, another damned finger began curling last year, so I went to my NHS doctor and - after a wait - saw a consultant who told me to come back in six months to see how it was progressing.
Meanwhile, I read that the French had developed a cure. So thanks to them and none at all to the NHS, 30 years of aggravation was fixed while we were in Paris in a single afternoon by injection, for the sum of about £60 - with no pain, no anaesthetic, no hospital operation and no maddening sling.
It's a strange society we're building. You can't avoid the conclusion that the way to avoid all the inequities and social fractiousness is simple: be rich.
Then you can flash those beneath you a benign, ingratiating smile - and have as little as possible to do with them.
There's a new brand of social selfishness about, a kind of "Sod you Jack, I'm all right" attitude.
For those doing well out of New Britain PLC, I don't see how things can change. The problem is that for those lower down - the middleclass majority - I don't see how they can change either.
I can't report much joy on the security front, though: the mood is still one of evasion.
In the case of Islamic terrorism, we're so afraid of antagonising the Muslim community that we turn our anger on our defenders rather than the killers. If the security services slip up - as occasionally they're bound to - they're branded as criminally incompetent on Newsnight.
The most likely reason is that they're overwhelmed. Yet if MI5 were expanded as much as it should be, its operations beefed up and surveillance increased, watch out for Newsnight programmes proclaiming the beginning of the end of our human rights and warning that picking on Muslims will alienate the community further.
It's all part of our loss of any sense of balance. We may not go in for revolutions, but Britain has become a society of extremes.
Look at public policies. It's lunacy to go on promising free medical treatment for all- comers, but we do. It's against every tenet of common sense to have mixed-ability classes, but in the delirium of our classconsciousness, we persist.
Doing away with most of our manufacturing base is reckless economic behaviour, but the moderate British have done that, too. The income gap, house prices and mass immigration - they're all examples of national excess.
Wherever you look, crazy systems have replaced our old prudent-minded approach.
Look at families. Instead of beginning with the self-evident proposition that two parents are better than one, we start at the other end.
The result is that we insist on individual rights to the exclusion of everyone else's interests, including the child's. As a result, we have more single parents, more teenage pregnancies, more adolescent misfits and more destitute families than anyone in Europe.
Not bad for the country of balance and moderation.
Meanwhile, debt is at a dangerous high and millions of us are living beyond our means. Actually, the more I look at the economic outlook, the wiser your decision to take a break from Britain begins to seem.
Everything seems to be unreal - whether it's the bonuses in the City, the purchasing power of the pound on shopping trips to America, or the money you sold your house for before emigrating.
If the economy falters - and the signs are beginning to show - the social consequences of unemployment don't bear thinking about. And, this time, people who are laid off won't be able to retire early because Gordon Brown has blocked that avenue of escape by b*****ing up their pensions.
Even now, with the economy still riding high, a record number of people are leaving the country to start again elsewhere. Think what will happen to emigration figures if the economic bubble is pricked.
Whether it is or not, we can certainly expect the splits and cracks in society to grow. Which leaves people your age with three choices: resign themselves to a life in a perilously fragmented community, get rich or do as you have done and get out.
Politics or parenting, schools or Scotland, wherever you look, very little seems to be holding things together. People live side by side yet separately, in mental isolation, with their eyes fixed warily on one another.
When communities, races, classes and families become segregated to the degree they have, feelings of social solidarity erode.
Society ends up like a shattered windscreen: holding together by the grace of God, even though it's all cracked to hell, so no one can see ahead or have any idea where they are going.
Love to all, Dad
Adapted from Time to Emigrate? Letters From A Father by George Walden, published by Gibson Square, £6.99. To order a copy (p&p free), call
Dear Son, Let me tell you what immigration has done to this country
Last updated at 00:50am on 17th August 2007
Last year, former Tory minister George Walden wrote a book about the future of life in Britain and why record numbers were emigrating. Taking the form of a letter from a father to his son, it provoked a massive, positive response from readers when it was serialised in the Daily Mail.
In the book, Guy and Catherine despaired at having to bring up their two children in an area that had been dramatically changed by mass immigration, where their children had become a minority in school and teachers struggled to deal with so many pupils who did not speak English.
The country - where 57 per cent of births in the capital are now to mothers who were born abroad - seemed to be failing them on multiple fronts, not just on education but also on security and health care.
Since then, the couple have given up the battle and moved abroad to Canada. And they are not alone in their decision. As Walden pointed out in the first serialisation, a total of 350,000 people left Britain in 2004 - equivalent to a third of the population of Birmingham.
Walden observes that despite all the changes mass immigration has brought in Britain, there remains a conspiracy of silence that has stifled debate on one of the most important issues of our age.
Now, in this thought-provoking followup, Walden examines Guy and Catherine's new quality of life, using it as a mirror to reflect the dreadful state of Britain today.
Walden, who served as higher education minister in Margaret Thatcher's government, has been married to Sarah for 38 years and they have three grown-up children. The son to whom his letters are addressed is fictional, but the incidents affecting him and his wife are based on fact.
Dear Son,
It's getting on for ten months now since you and Catherine left for a new life in Canada. And we didn't get the impression, when we came to see you, that you've regretted your decision for a moment.
Still, I'd better avoid saying anything excessively encouraging about the state of the nation you've left behind. Not difficult, as it happens.
In fact, it looks as though you got out just in time. Driving close to your old place in West London the other day, I saw a police notice asking for information about a young man who'd brandished a gun at an officer.
The people who bought your house at a ludicrously high price are unlikely to be thrilled. I don't suppose there's another city in the world where people have to pay that kind of money for the privilege of living in an area where hoodlums go round flashing guns.
There is an atmosphere of suppressed - or outright - violence and disorder that makes me worry for the next generation.
Often, it's the little incidents that are telling. Yesterday, your mother was on a bus when three girls aged between 16 and 18 tried to board in Ladbroke Grove. They were Brazilians, she thinks, but so completely anglicised that they'd got themselves roaring - or rather squealing - drunk.
Toting bottles of vodka and plastic cups, they pressed on to the platform, but the Bangladeshi driver stalwartly refused to allow them to board. The bus was held up for 20 minutes while the girls blocked the doors, laughing and screaming obscenities in their newly-acquired Essex accents.
The point is that during all this little drama, not a single one of the weary rush-hour passengers said a word. The great British public held hostage by a trio of sozzled teenage girls!
Toronto sounds safer, though it seems a hell of a way to go for a little peace of mind.
Back from our visit to you, we did a sort of audit of your new life. We loved your old brick house with wooden trimmings in the Riverdale area of Toronto - bigger than your London one and, at £220,000, less than half the cost.
Not to speak of your country place at Muskoka: a simple cottage but with the swimming, boating and fishing on all those lakes, a cut above Ruislip Lido.
And it's good to hear that the children look set to get into the nearest state secondary. A citycentre school with no problem of drugs or knives and one that teaches Latin!
We were relieved that you picked up an academic job so quickly, paying rather more than you got in the UK. With taxes and the cost of living lower, you should feel more relaxed financially.
The very fact that Canada has half our population (30 million) in a land many times bigger is good for the spirit - not to speak of car-parking.
The ethnic population, I see, is higher than here, but then Canada is much more selective. The points system they operate seems pretty rigorous, and it was only your impressive chemistry qualifications, I suspect, that got you in so smartly.
Also, the ethnic pattern is different, with the Chinese the largest element, followed by Indians, and fewer ghettos. As Catherine said, a strong secondary state education system is a key to integration.
Here, the country is not so much disintegrating as disaggregating. The Balkanisation of our lives is happening on a national scale.
Scotland's falling off the top, self-sealing ethnic communities are proliferating in the Midlands, and London's got its own thing going at the bottom.
We boast of our prosperity, but it's fragile and concentrated in the South East - an island within our island. Perhaps we'll have to get used to thinking of London and its environs as a kind of Hong Kong or an Italian city state.
Here, the most obvious disconnection is between the rich and the rest. An old story, but the difference today is that the fate of those at the top is divorced from those lower down.
When the housing ramp collapses, most of the falling masonry will hit the little guys in the middle and at the bottom. The top London prices helped drive up the entire market, but are less likely to fall when it all comes down. There's no feeling that we're all in this together.
The divisions run from earliest youth to grim old age. More boys at Eton get five good GCSEs, I hear, than in the entire borough of Hackney.
And now there's another divide growing up: between those who have a decent pension to look forward to and those for whom longevity has become more a threat than a promise.
Then there's the widening gap between the married and unmarried, or rather those with children and those without.
Large areas of our towns are now such havens of hedonism for the money-flashing singles that they're pretty much out of bounds for the poor bloody infantry who keep procreation going and cannot afford such leisures.
Everything's geared to the needs of the drinker and consumer, and little to the couple with the buggy. On top of all this is the growing disconnection between politics and the people.
And the more fractured we become, the greater our pretence of togetherness to cover it up. That's why the Government bangs on about 'community' and has tried so hard to ignore the problems caused by immigration.
Imagine my astonishment when the Minister responsible, Liam Byrne, actually admitted recently that large-scale immigration has profoundly unsettled the country - and that it's the poorest communities that have suffered the most. The influx was overwhelming public services, schools, the NHS and housing, he said.
If Labour failed to address public concern, he concluded, it could lose the next election.
I couldn't have put what Byrne was plucky enough to say better myself. But what is extraordinary is the lack of reaction to his words. Where are the columns and editorials and BBC programmes saying that the Government has gone racist?
On the principle that a sinner who repenteth deserves the greatest praise, Byrne is something of a saint. He'll certainly have the majority of immigrants on his side.
According to a speech by the former chairman of the race relations commission, Trevor Phillips, 54 per cent of them think there's been enough immigration.
Hardly surprising, since they and their children are among those who stand to suffer most from overcrowding, poor schooling, racial tensions and discrimination.
To complete this outburst of honesty, Byrne should have acknowledged that it's the rich who stand to gain from the profits of low-paid labour. But it would have raised the cry: "So why in God's name have you done it - and why are you letting more in?"
The evidence that the whole country benefits has shrunk to vanishing point.
The Governor of the Bank of England recently told MPs it was getting increasingly hard to manage the economy without knowing how many people were in the country. But everyone seems to have missed the implications of this: if the Bank doesn't know the true population, neither can the Treasury.
And now local councils are up in arms, saying the Office of National Statistics (ONS) does not have a clue about the number of people - for whom local services are required - who are entering the country.
How can anyone assess the profit and cost of migration, and claim that the balance is positive, if nobody knows the figures?
Meanwhile, the Government continues to pour billions into the NHS. That's supposed to be another success story, but nobody can really explain where all the money's going, let alone why it's so hard to keep our hospitals clean.
Let me tell you what happened to me recently. As you know, for years I've suffered from that irritating condition Dupuytren's contracture (named after a Frenchman) - or claw-hand in its less distinguished appellation, because the fingers contract until they look like one.
There's no pain - it's just a bloody nuisance, not least because after you've had an operation for one finger, the next one starts to contract.
I've had two fingers treated, one on the NHS and the other private - because I didn't fancy going into hospital for a minor operation, catching MRSA and coming out dead, as thousands are now doing.
Anyway, another damned finger began curling last year, so I went to my NHS doctor and - after a wait - saw a consultant who told me to come back in six months to see how it was progressing.
Meanwhile, I read that the French had developed a cure. So thanks to them and none at all to the NHS, 30 years of aggravation was fixed while we were in Paris in a single afternoon by injection, for the sum of about £60 - with no pain, no anaesthetic, no hospital operation and no maddening sling.
It's a strange society we're building. You can't avoid the conclusion that the way to avoid all the inequities and social fractiousness is simple: be rich.
Then you can flash those beneath you a benign, ingratiating smile - and have as little as possible to do with them.
There's a new brand of social selfishness about, a kind of "Sod you Jack, I'm all right" attitude.
For those doing well out of New Britain PLC, I don't see how things can change. The problem is that for those lower down - the middleclass majority - I don't see how they can change either.
I can't report much joy on the security front, though: the mood is still one of evasion.
In the case of Islamic terrorism, we're so afraid of antagonising the Muslim community that we turn our anger on our defenders rather than the killers. If the security services slip up - as occasionally they're bound to - they're branded as criminally incompetent on Newsnight.
The most likely reason is that they're overwhelmed. Yet if MI5 were expanded as much as it should be, its operations beefed up and surveillance increased, watch out for Newsnight programmes proclaiming the beginning of the end of our human rights and warning that picking on Muslims will alienate the community further.
It's all part of our loss of any sense of balance. We may not go in for revolutions, but Britain has become a society of extremes.
Look at public policies. It's lunacy to go on promising free medical treatment for all- comers, but we do. It's against every tenet of common sense to have mixed-ability classes, but in the delirium of our classconsciousness, we persist.
Doing away with most of our manufacturing base is reckless economic behaviour, but the moderate British have done that, too. The income gap, house prices and mass immigration - they're all examples of national excess.
Wherever you look, crazy systems have replaced our old prudent-minded approach.
Look at families. Instead of beginning with the self-evident proposition that two parents are better than one, we start at the other end.
The result is that we insist on individual rights to the exclusion of everyone else's interests, including the child's. As a result, we have more single parents, more teenage pregnancies, more adolescent misfits and more destitute families than anyone in Europe.
Not bad for the country of balance and moderation.
Meanwhile, debt is at a dangerous high and millions of us are living beyond our means. Actually, the more I look at the economic outlook, the wiser your decision to take a break from Britain begins to seem.
Everything seems to be unreal - whether it's the bonuses in the City, the purchasing power of the pound on shopping trips to America, or the money you sold your house for before emigrating.
If the economy falters - and the signs are beginning to show - the social consequences of unemployment don't bear thinking about. And, this time, people who are laid off won't be able to retire early because Gordon Brown has blocked that avenue of escape by b*****ing up their pensions.
Even now, with the economy still riding high, a record number of people are leaving the country to start again elsewhere. Think what will happen to emigration figures if the economic bubble is pricked.
Whether it is or not, we can certainly expect the splits and cracks in society to grow. Which leaves people your age with three choices: resign themselves to a life in a perilously fragmented community, get rich or do as you have done and get out.
Politics or parenting, schools or Scotland, wherever you look, very little seems to be holding things together. People live side by side yet separately, in mental isolation, with their eyes fixed warily on one another.
When communities, races, classes and families become segregated to the degree they have, feelings of social solidarity erode.
Society ends up like a shattered windscreen: holding together by the grace of God, even though it's all cracked to hell, so no one can see ahead or have any idea where they are going.
Love to all, Dad
Adapted from Time to Emigrate? Letters From A Father by George Walden, published by Gibson Square, £6.99. To order a copy (p&p free), call
