The Limits of Integration

Mass migration and weak governance have left us more divided and disordered

Towering columns

At ConservativeHome, James Johnson believes the Southport riots have exposed our failure to confront both political correctness and racist prejudice.

Here are the facts. The murderer was born in Cardiff. There is no indication in investigations or information made public so far that he subscribes to any particular creed and zero evidence of a link to Syria or Islam. He was a son of Rwandan refugees, one of the more integrated ethnic groups in the UK. No, you could not have ‘sent him home’. No, there is no reason to believe he is representative of any wider group in society. In the same way, we must condemn the wilful mischaracterisation of the murder of David Amess, we must do the same here. Many of the online and in-person responses have been disgusting, racist, and an insult to the dead and those grieving.

There has always been a far-right movement or a gang of thugs to whip up a storm. That is nothing new. But such trends are becoming more fashionable, more in vogue, moving beyond the realm of the skinhead rioter to learned society. Scour Twitter these days and there are more openly racist memes. I have noticed more people I know sharing such content. Sometimes they morph from half-comedy to half-serious suggestions. Policy solutions amongst these packs have become more radical, with some even suggesting deportations of second-generation immigrants.

This is of course partly the fault of the first form of denial I talked about: that of the politically correct. It makes people suspicious of the police’s motives. I am sympathetic to the view that the ignorance of people’s legitimate concerns about the nature of unbridled immigration has helped some of the violence we saw last night to come to the surface. But there is no excuse for this behaviour and nothing can legitimise it or legitimise sympathy with it. We can all think for ourselves. We should be able to distinguish between what is right and what is wrong. Whether these people are marching on the street of Southport with the thugs, or quietly agreeing from behind the safety of their computer screen, they are participating in the laziest form of bandwagon-jumping, divorced from the facts.

On his Substack, Matt Goodwin examines the rise of sectarian Islamic politics and how it could shape future elections.

While much of the political class has its head in the sand, this problem has become impossible to ignore. In a number of heavily Muslim seats, Labour saw its majorities slashed by campaigns that were more interested in Palestine than potholes. Overall, five independent candidates won election to the House of Commons—including Iqbal Mohamed in Dewsbury, Shockat Adam in Leicester, Ayoub Khan in Birmingham, and Adnan Hussain in Blackburn…

…In half a dozen other seats, sectarian candidates came close to winning, nearly unseating Labour heavyweights like Wes Streeting (Ilford North), Shabana Mahmood (Birmingham Ladywood), and Jess Phillips (Birmingham Yardley), with many of these Labour politicians reporting a shocking rise of abuse, harassment, and intimidation. If these pro-Gaza Muslim candidates had joined together to form a single party then they would have finished second, ahead of the Conservatives, across Birmingham, England’s second city. This is especially troubling given that 40% of British Muslims openly say they’d support a Muslim-only political party if they had the chance…

…Fuelled by mass immigration and a botched approach to integration, we are sleepwalking into a new set of political norms, in which elections are reduced to communitarian head-counts and politics is reduced to a zero-sum game in which different groups are incentivised to compete over limited resources and attention. If this trend continues, furthermore, expect to see a considerable backlash from the white British majority, who may come to question why they should continue to uphold pluralism when other groups do not seem to be bound by the same constraints.

For The Critic, Laurie Wastell argues that mass migration has created fractured communities that cannot be resolved by appeals to integrate better.

One way of admitting there’s a problem but still missing the point is to blame state “multiculturalism” and insufficient “integration”. If only the woke grievance lobbies quietened down the identity politics, so this hackneyed argument goes, and everyone remembered that there’s “more that unites than divides us”, everything might turn out alright. Supposedly, with a sufficient level of civic nationalism, along perhaps with some Michaela-style disciplinarianism, they’d all be chumming along happily, at ease with each other, their social situation and the country they’re living in, deferent to authority and in gainful employment.

Perhaps this argument was once convincing, in previous times when immigration was relatively slow, GDP per capita was growing, and we hadn’t reached a diversity saturation point in our inner-city areas. Yet looking at the level of demographic churn in somewhere like Harehills, it is hard to see calls for “integration” as anything but a fantasy. More than 80 nationalities live in Harehills, with a whopping 43% of residents born outside the UK in a densely packed population of 31,000. It struggles with the highest level of unemployment in Leeds and 74.2% of households being classed as “deprived” at the 2021 census. Many residents can barely speak English. A Leeds City Council report last year found that only one in four Roma residents in Leeds had English as their main language, while one in five said they spoke “very little English, or no English at all”. The man alleged to have set the bus on fire, a 37-year-old father of two and a Romanian national, required an interpreter for court proceedings.

In any case, there is no majority culture in Harehills to be “integrated” into. The white British population of its two main districts is just nine and 16%. (The Pakistani Muslim population is much larger, a plurality, while the Roma population sits at around two per cent). Following the latest riots – Harehills also saw large anti-police riots in 2001 and 2019 – some of the few white British residents that remain are now looking to move out.

For The Telegraph, Charles Moore explains why the renewal of conservatism under the next party leader must be adapted to an age of insecurity.

To succeed, he/she will need an unusual mixture of humility and confidence. Humility, because the Conservatives have never recovered the unity they lost during Brexit and the trust they forfeited in relation to immigration. They are still tainted by the confusion and bad behaviour they displayed in the face of Covid and their weakness in the face of wokery’s march through the institutions. 

To maintain morale, any leadership candidate will naturally wish to assert that things weren’t all bad. It was brilliant, given the parliamentary and judicial manoeuvring, that Boris Johnson outwitted opponents within and without his party and got Brexit done. It was impressive that Britain moved faster than any other Nato ally to back Ukraine after Putin’s invasion in February 2022. And although growth rates remain unspectacular, Rishi Sunak deserves more credit than he is getting for steering the economy through the after-effects of Covid and Putin’s energy war. One might even hazard that a British citizen today has more reason for economic optimism than does a German or a French one…

…The next leader, rather than blaming what went wrong on factions other than his or her own, needs to be seen to blush on behalf of all. He must also ask how more than half the votes won in the general election of 2019 disappeared in 2024. That means thinking not only about why Conservative voters defected to Reform but also to Labour, Liberal Democrats and Greens, or just to staying at home. Confidence, however, because now is the time to think, and there is time enough. It is remarkable how many conservative approaches to society have been abandoned, neglected or diluted in recent years. The leader must renew those approaches. 

In The Times, Phil Rosenberg cautions against Labour softening its support for Israel and commitment to the safety of Jewish communities.

Last week, the government proposed to resume funding to UNRWA. While aid to the beleaguered Gazan population is welcome, this move comes despite allegations that UNRWA’s employees and institutions have actively enabled Hamas’s atrocities. On Friday, the government decided not to pursue an objection to the ICC’s jurisdiction, despite the ICC normally being used for countries that, unlike Israel, have no independent judiciary. Indeed, Israel’s courts have, in recent years, put a prime minister on trial and a president in prison. The move has implications for democratically elected leaders around the world.

Even more concerning are briefings that the UK may impose an arms’ embargo, potentially as early as this week. This would be an astonishing decision to take against a key UK ally and security partner, damaging their ability to defend against terrorist foes like Hamas, or shared UK adversaries like Iran. This, at just the moment that there is a material risk of a full-scale conflict with Iranian proxies like Hezbollah in Lebanon, and increased conflict with the Houthis, who are bombing British ships.

Worse still, it ignores the fact that, right now, Israeli and Hamas negotiators are locked in tense negotiations about how to end this terrible war and release the hostages. Despite the government’s call for the release of the hostages, Israel is effectively being told the return of loved ones must rely on Hamas’s goodwill. The UK’s signalling will encourage Hamas to dig in, prolonging the agony for Israelis and Palestinians alike.

In the New Statesman, Sohrab Ahmari asks which presidential nominee will follow the example set by Joe Biden’s economic populism.

The analogies between Trumpism and Bidenism are too distasteful for most professional Democrats to acknowledge. For many, Trump is simply the Orange Bad Man who owes his rise to a combination of Kremlin machinations and the deplorable prejudices of his supporters. But an important faction inside the Biden administration, probably led by National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, was astute enough to look beyond such partisan cant.

The Bidenites discerned reasonable popular demands that Democrats had to try to mollify. In an April 2023 address at the Brookings Institution — perhaps the most important text of the Biden administration — Sullivan made this explicit. In it, he denounced the neoliberal, free-trade dogmatism that had eroded the “public investment that had energised the American project in the postwar years” and treated “liberalisation as an end in itself”.

Biden-style post-neoliberalism took shape in the form of: massive regional investment programmes bundled under the (tragically mis-titled) Inflation Reduction Act; a monumental effort to shift semiconductor production back to the homeland via the CHIPS Act (the arch-neoliberal Wall Street Journal, where I once worked, conceded its significant impact); a Federal Trade Commission reversing decades of neglect by pursuing aggressive antitrust under Chairwoman Lina Khan (even J.D. Vance described her as “one of the few people in the Biden administration that I think is doing a pretty good job”); the most pro-union National Labor Relations Board in decades; and a renewed emphasis on consumer protection, particularly in downscale financial markets at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. These were major achievements for which Team Biden has received too little credit.

Wonky thinking

The Hoover Institution published On Day One: An Economic Contingency Plan for a Taiwan Crisis by Hugo Bromley and Eyck Freymann. They explore the options available to the United States to decouple from the Chinese economy on day one of a crisis in Taiwan, which can form the basis for contingency planning, deter Chinese aggression, and protect the rules-based trading system.

Since hard decoupling through sanctions is unviable, the only way to achieve trade decoupling is through national trade policy using tariffs or quotas to phase out bilateral trade over time. The challenge of this approach is that Washington currently lacks the policy tools and administrative ability to stop firms and third countries from transshipping PRC goods into the US market while taking steps to obscure their origins. If Washington tried to reduce bilateral trade with the PRC to zero without a plan for managing this problem, it would quickly find itself in simultaneous trade disputes with nearly all of the global economy. Supply chain disruptions, shortages, and inflation would result, and the global trading system based on WTO rules would quickly break down. If Washington persisted in its push for decoupling, it would give the PRC an opportunity to co-opt the system and deepen its partnerships with US allies and neutral states in the process. In short, unless the United States develops new unilateral tools and multilateral coordination systems that other countries are incentivized to join, it cannot decouple from the PRC without decoupling from much of the global economy.

At the same time, a violent PRC move against Taiwan would also represent a threat to the rules-based trading system. While Taiwan is not a US treaty ally, it is among the world’s most important high-tech trading economies. If Beijing seized Taiwan and used it as a geographic springboard to project naval power into the Western Pacific, other US treaty allies in the region, including Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines, would become far harder for Washington to defend. Beijing would gain a far freer hand to coerce its neighbors with economic tools or use political coercion to impose its economic preferences, particularly now that the United States would have conceded that it could not break its dependence on the PRC. As Asia fell under the hegemonic control of the PRC, Beijing would be emboldened to flaunt global trade rules and practice economic coercion against states in other regions, heralding a shift to a truly multipolar world. In the wake of a Taiwan crisis, there would also be a risk that major economies, including the United States, would turn away from global trade, resulting in a disastrous rerun of the 1930s that would leave the United States far weaker and far less prosperous.

Given both the scale of the challenge and the unique position the United States holds in the global economy, US economic action on Day One must be conceived as a program of economic leadership and reconstruction to help the world deal with the challenge of a PRC gone rogue, not a strategy of impoverishing the world in order to punish the PRC. If Washington chose to decouple, it could not coerce other countries to facilitate a US pro-decoupling policy against their fundamental economic interests, let alone force them to decouple from the PRC themselves. Washington would have to articulate publicly and in advance that it was making a unilateral decision to preserve its own national security and that it would incentivize other countries to meet the minimum bar necessary to achieve that outcome as part of a wider program of economic recovery. That minimum requirement is that other countries that traded freely with the United States would need to report accurately which products they were exporting (or what share of the products by value) originated in the PRC.

Since successful avalanche decoupling would require the cooperation of third countries and private firms, the United States would have to commit to four principles that would guide its conduct through the decoupling process:

1. Impose no restrictions on noncritical supply chains on Day One, and thereafter give firms adequate time to reshore them.

2. Sustain dollar hegemony and prevent the rapid internationalization of the RMB.

3. Refrain from asking other countries to decouple from the PRC; instead, build US decoupling into a wider program of economic support in response to the Taiwan crisis.

4. Commit the United States to enforce its anti-PRC trade policy against third countries in a rules-based manner, subject to appeal and external adjudication.

Washington would have to respect all four principles, bringing them together in an affirmative vision to sustain the rules-based trading system in the face of an unprecedented challenge from a large rogue state. Only the United States and a small number of like-minded allies would be likely to decouple fully from the PRC.

Building on these principles, the report discusses three policy pathways that, if implemented together, could achieve avalanche decoupling on terms favorable to the United States, its allies, and the wider rules-based trading system.

1. Unilateral trade policy: Ratcheting tariffs or quotas on imports from the PRC.

2. Unilateral financial intervention: Treasury intervention in currency markets.

3. The establishment with Core allies of an Economic Security Cooperation Board, which would provide aid to third countries, collective insurance against PRC economic coercion, and a rules-based system to support and adjudicate US and allied trade policy against the PRC.

In The Times, Oliver Wright and Ed Halford report on how public funding is only a part of why public services are underperforming. Drawing on research from the Institute for Government, they look at the structural problems that are undermining the criminal justice system.

Across the police, courts and prison service the cumulative effects of cuts has become a pressing crisis for the new government. Surveys show that fewer than 10 per cent of crimes with an identifiable victim resulted in successful charges, down from 20 per cent in 2015. A recent YouGov poll suggested that only 40 per cent of people had at least a “fair amount of confidence” in the police to deal with crime in their local area, down from 53 per cent in 2021.

It is not just the police that are struggling. In crown courts that deal with the most serious crimes, the backlog of cases stands at 67,573, its highest ever level. Part of the problem is that there are not enough lawyers to meet demand and this means the court system runs less efficiently. Last year 5 per cent of all scheduled trials in the crown court were rescheduled on the day due to the unavailability of legal professionals. That compares to 0.3 per cent in 2019. The total proportion of ineffective trials has gone up sharply and now makes up more than a quarter of all crown court trials (27 per cent), up from 16 per cent in 2019. The size of the backlog means cases are waiting months or years to be heard.

Then there are the problems with prison capacity. Since 2021 the number of prisoners has been climbing steeply. This rise is a combination of the long-term trend for longer sentences, as well as dramatically larger remand population, in part because of delays in court. In a vicious circle there are also significant problems in the probation service, which is supposed to rehabilitate offenders. His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Probation rated nearly half of the 31 probation delivery units as inadequate, while only one was good and none was outstanding. This reflects failures across probation activities, from supporting offenders to adequately assessing risk of harm.

Recalls to prison have risen 26 per cent since 2021 even though the number of people on post-release supervision has fallen by 5 per cent over the same period.The number of prisoners serving sentences of 14 years and more has increased by 35 per cent since 2016, while there has been a reduction of 48.1 per cent in those prisoners serving sentences of two years or less. Inside prisons assaults on staff members have returned to peak levels and prisoner on prisoner assaults have risen sharply since 2021.

Book of the week

This week we recommend Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert D. Putnam. In this classic text, the author looks at how the decline of social bonds and communal activities, like church attendance and the PTA, have led to greater isolation, poorer health, and less safety. Putnam also considers the tensions between maintaining tolerance and cultivating social capital that have resulted from the arrival of the Boomer generation.

Far from being incompatible, liberty and fraternity are mutually supportive, and this remains true when we control for other factors like education, income, urbanism, and so on. The most tolerant communities in America are precisely the places with the greatest civic involvement. Conversely, communities whose residents bowl alone are the least tolerant places in America. Moreover, on closer inspection, the trends toward greater tolerance and civic disengagement over the last thirty years are not simply two sides of the same coin. Most of the changes in both tolerance and civic engagement over the last several decades are traceable to generational succession. That is, the main reason that people have become less engaged and more tolerant is that newer, more tolerant, less engaged generations have gradually replaced older, less tolerant, more engaged cohorts. But the generational dividing line between tolerant and intolerant Americans is not the same as the generational dividing line between engaged and disengaged Americans.

The increasing tolerance of the last several decades is almost entirely due to replacement of less tolerant people born in the first half of the twentieth century by more tolerant boomers and X’ers. People born after about 1945 are now and always have been more tolerant than those born before. However, this generational engine producing greater tolerance appears to have halted with the advent of the boomers. As sociologist James C. Davis noted some years ago, people born in the 1970s or 1980s are no more tolerant than their parents born in the 1940s and 1950s. The generational turning point is quite different for social capital, as I noted in chapter 14. There is little difference in the civic habits of people born in the 1920s and those born in the 1940s, but those born in the 1940s and even the 1950s are more civic than those born in the 1970s and 1980s.

Something in the first half of the twentieth century made successive cohorts of Americans more tolerant, but that generational engine failed to produce further increases in tolerance among those born in the second half of the century. The late X’ers are no more tolerant than the early boomers. So the biggest generational gains in tolerance are already behind us. By contrast, something happened in America in the second half of the twentieth century to make people less civically engaged. The late X’ers are a lot less engaged than the early boomers. As a result, the biggest generational losses in engagement still lie ahead.

Virtually no cohort in America is more engaged or more tolerant than those born around 1940–45. They are the liberal communitarians par excellence. Their parents were as engaged, but less tolerant. Their children are as tolerant, but less engaged. For some reason, that cohort inherited most of their parents’ sense of community, but they discarded their parents’ intolerance. For the most part, they successfully passed their tolerance to their children, but they failed to transmit the communitarian habits they had themselves inherited. It was from this liberal communitarian cultural matrix that the civil rights movement emerged. But that cultural matrix has already begun to fade, leaving a nation as we enter the new century that is increasingly disengaged, but no longer increasingly tolerant. Closely examined, the generational roots of the growing tolerance and declining civic engagement of the last several decades are quite distinct. There is no reason to assume that community engagement must necessarily have illiberal consequences. Indeed, looking across the variegated states and communities in this diverse land, precisely the opposite appears true: social capital and tolerance have a symbiotic relationship.

Henry David Thoreau and Sinclair Lewis and Walter Bagehot were not entirely mistaken. No doubt community connections are sometimes oppressive. American clubs and churches are even more racially segregated than our neighborhoods and schools. Bonding social capital (as distinct from bridging social capital) is particularly likely to have illiberal effects. As political philosopher Amy Gutmann has observed:

“Although many associational activities in America are clearly and directly supportive of liberal democracy, others are not so clearly or directly supportive, and still others are downright hostile to, and potentially destructive of, liberal democracy…. Other things being equal, the more economically, ethnically, and religiously heterogeneous the membership of an association is, the greater its capacity to cultivate the kind of public discourse and deliberation that is conducive to democratic citizenship.”

Community-mongers have fostered intolerance in the past, and their twenty-first-century heirs need to be held to a higher standard. That said, the greatest threat to American liberty comes from the disengaged, not the engaged. The most intolerant individuals and communities in America today are the least connected, not the most connected. There is no evidence whatever that civic disengagement is a useful tool against bigotry, or even that tolerance is a convenient side effect of disengagement.

Quick links

Southport suspect Axel Muganwa Rudakubana has been charged with the murder of three young girls and 10 counts of attempted murder.

Disorder broke out on the Southend seafront when violent youths clashed with one man stabbed and eight others arrested…

…reflecting a major decline in law and order over the past three weeks.

High Court ruled that the Conservative government’s ban on puberty blockers was lawful.

Junior doctors were offered a 22% pay rise.

English GPs will stage industrial action for the first time in 60 years.

Labour moved its housing targets significantly towards areas in the North of England…

…while reducing London’s housing target by 20,000 homes a year.

Sir Kier Starmer left the door open to processing asylum claims offshore.

The UK dropped from the top ten manufacturing nations for the first time, falling behind Russia and Mexico.

North Sea investors are now withdrawing from domestic oil production in response to Labour’s levy on energy profits.

Despite an economic slowdown, China is rebuilding its commodities stockpile with a 16% increase in imports last year.