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Times
23-07-2025
- Politics
- Times
Now I've left Britain, here's what you look like
An American based in the UK for 36 years, in 2023 I absconded to Portugal. So how dismal does Britain look from a distance? Like the Danes abandoning their country because of rising sea levels in Families Like Ours, should Brits evacuate, too? Granted, I make frequent trips back. What I most miss in a small town just west of Lisbon is my friends and colleagues, whose dry, casually cynical sensibility dovetails with mine. Given the average periodicity of meet-ups in London, I'd have seen these people less often had I stayed put. Because I left Britain. I didn't leave the British. I still read The Times and The Telegraph. I watch Spectator TV, Spiked Online podcasts, and YouTube appearances by Matt Goodwin, David Starkey and Brendan O'Neill. Am I suffering separation anxiety? I'm still emotionally and politically enmeshed in British affairs. But my personal fate is no longer joined at the hip with the increasingly distressing fate of the UK. Thus six officers can no longer pound on my door to do me for a 'non-crime hate incident' (a charge that Americans refuse to believe is even real). But the British state will now imprison locals over online bursts of purely rhetorical frustration, while giving rapists a rap on the wrist. The country that gave conceptual rise to free speech no longer believes in it. Instead, the primary purpose of the British constabulary is to suppress the unruly passions of a native population it holds in contempt. At least my lights will still go on when Ed Miliband's net-zero fanaticism crashes against the brick wall of reality. By closing power plants that aren't replaced, Britain has neglected long-term energy planning for decades. Its exorbitant electricity relies dangerously on imports and intermittent renewables. Yet it may take blackouts — entailing what we euphemise as 'unrest' — for the government to get a grip, and new power plants don't spring up overnight. In the birthplace of Brunel and the Industrial Revolution, nothing works. Trains are late or cancelled. Heathrow goes dark. It takes months and endless hair-tear to install a single residency's fibre-optic cable. Construction is eternal; roadworks languish untended indefinitely, backing up traffic. Britain can no longer build anything. HS2 is an ever-costlier white elephant. Tradesmen are little kings, but finding one to do repairs to a reputable standard is like winning the lottery. Small boats and sky-high legal immigration will continue to wreak demographic havoc. This change is permanent. Millions of immigrants from clashing traditions will bring only more of their friends and families. None of these people are going home. A succession of governments has systematically watered down British culture, until it's a pale solution with no distinctive flavour, like over-extended squash. Supposedly, a leading 'British value' is 'fair play'. So let's talk about fairness. Amid an ever-escalating housing shortage, itself powered by mass immigration, your government uses your money to provide a free water-taxi service to your shores and to put up low-skilled, overwhelmingly male foreign citizens in four-star hotels. No one's putting locals in free hotels. Ten million working-age inhabitants are on benefits. Almost half of universal credit recipients need neither work nor look for work, and over a million are foreign-born. Soaring disability payments allow anyone to retire to a life of Netflix if they're worried or sad. At once, the tax burden is the highest of the postwar era and set to rise further. Small businesses are hammered. The British tax code severely punishes success at shockingly low levels of income. This is fair? If you haven't downed tools and thrown yourself on the mercy of the state, you're a sucker. Modern Britain rewards sloth, irresponsibility and self-pity. Why is the mild-mannered academic David Betz now such a popular guest on British podcasts? Because Betz, a professor of war in the modern world, assesses the forbiddingly high likelihood of a British civil war. Not that Portugal is Valhalla. It's notoriously bureaucratic. Residency application was costly, complex and exhausting. That residency has already passed its renewal date, but the immigration system has a backlog of over 400,000 cases and now we're in residency limbo. I'm crap at languages, and I miss British banter. We get a tax break, but that status is temporary and we Americans must declare every sou of worldwide income to the feds wherever we live. Portugal also has problems with imported energy, housing and immigration. Supermarkets don't even carry cumin, much less English mustard or treacle. Our local dry cleaner shrank my jumpers into doll's clothing. Yet we'd never have afforded our spacious house in Britain. The Portuguese are as warm as their weather. I'm unlikely to forge the same deep connection to Portugal that I did to the UK, but, hey — it's a two-and-a-half-hour flight to Heathrow, so I can keep a foot in both worlds. Ironically, the red wine is both rich and cheap; the fish is fresh; the coastal walks are enchanting. The most striking contrast from afar is the emotional colour of the popular mood. The Portuguese emanate a soft, calming peach, like the sunset over the sea from our balcony. They take their time. They seem contented with the modest ambitions of their small post-empire state. Yet even when your weather is fair, from Lisbon, Britons appear a wan umber. You seem gloomy and aggrieved — and for good reason. Sure, I could have stayed in London. When it's close up, one often doesn't notice steady but gradual decay. A debt-fuelled fiscal collapse and an energy crisis remain agreeably abstract, mere talking points, until they happen. I take no pleasure in the observation that the UK is falling apart. But in the comments under articles like this one, native Britons are vowing to leave in droves. Others express relief that they've already left or sorrow over ambitious children lost to Dubai. And should Sir Keir Starmer capitulate to a wealth tax, the exodus will get worse Lionel Shriver's most recent novels are Should We Stay Or Should We Go and Mania.
New Statesman
17-07-2025
- Politics
- New Statesman
In defence of Lord Hermer
Photo byIn a competitive field the Attorney General, Lord Hermer, is the biggest ministerial villain for the right-wing newspapers. Rarely a day passes without the Telegraph, Mail and others screaming about what they see as Hermer's hyper-active interventions within government. Hermer dares to warn ministers that they must act within domestic and international law and his critics fume. 'The least patriotic man EVER to hold high office?' asked former professor turned Reform mouthpiece Matt Goodwin in the Mail over the weekend. None of the media noise would matter that much but for two additional factors. Some anonymous government insiders are quoted regularly echoing the views of the newspapers in their political pages. How can we be insurgent incumbents, they ask with apparently defiant machismo, when Hermer is forever warning us that we cannot do what we need to do to beat Nigel Farage? Inevitably the rise of Reform is the other factor triggering insider briefings. Farage has never been a great upholder of international law if it gets in the way of 'Britain's interests'. A big part of his pitch is his conviction that Britain must leave the ECHR. Like Keir Starmer, Hermer is a world expert on international law, including the ECHR. Apparently No 10's self-described 'insurgent incumbents' are deeply frustrated. Whenever there is speculation about a cabinet reshuffle Hermer's name is cited as one who could or should be sacked. Such an outcome would be calamitous for Starmer and his government, not least because Hermer is an 'insurgent incumbent' as far as that latest, fashionably imprecise term has any meaning at all. He has the confidence and authority to challenge current orthodoxies that have dominated the British media and political culture since Brexit, including an assumption that breaking international law is to be celebrated because it is in Britain's self interest to do so. This is now a mainstream view in parts of the Conservative Party, Reform, as well as the newspapers. The new orthodoxies shaped Boris Johnson's Rwanda policy, a scheme that the courts found violated both international and domestic law. A recent message from Hermer to the government's law officers triggered another outrage in some newspapers partly because he declared: 'You have a key role in helping ministers meet their overarching [legal] obligation while delivering their policy objectives.' What did they expect the Attorney General to state, that they should urge ministers to ignore the legal obligations? It remains staggering that to assert the centrality of the law stirs raging controversy: 'An Attorney General warns ministers of legal obligations… He should be sacked!' Revealingly, those forces touched in some form or other by Hermer's interventions do not share the angry disdain. Senior Tory and Reform figures predicted that all hell would break loose in the Trump administration over the Chagos Islands deal that partly arose from Hermer's reading of Britain's legal obligations. The opposite happened. Trump praised the arrangements. Back in the UK, the Home Office has nothing but praise for Hermer. The Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, actively seeks his advice and willingly involves him in sensitive decisions. They do not complain that he is actively or naively obstructing policies they wish to pursue. On some highly charged issues, he shows flexibility. He supports the Justice Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, in her current efforts to reform the ECHR. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Some Labour MPs complain that Hermer is hopeless at politics – a failing that becomes more apparent when the Prime Minister struggles with the political demands of high office and the Chancellor realises she is not as skilled as she believed at the near-impossible art of blending politics and economics. But even that common observation doesn't tell the whole story. I am told that Hermer spends more time in the Westminster tea rooms engaging with backbenchers than most Cabinet ministers. Although he is rarely allowed out to do broadcast interviews he did give one recently to the BBC's Henry Zeffman in which he navigated tricky themes with skill, countering the populist onslaughts with the accessible case for his faith in the law. 'No one wants to do deals with people they don't trust. No one wants to sign international agreements with a country that's got a government that's saying, well, 'We may comply with it, we may not'… We do. We succeed… Being a good faith player in international law is overwhelmingly in the national interests of this country.' That answer from Hermer forms the substantial case for keeping him in position. The willingness to break laws displayed by previous Tory administrations did not lead to boats being stopped or flights to Rwanda taking off. There was no evidence anywhere that lawbreaking helped the UK. Starmer is ruthless enough to sack an old friend like Hermer. But doing so would raise significant questions about his own public identity and sense of self, far more than with other high-profile dismissals under his leadership. As power edged closer before last summer's election, Starmer showed only limited interest in ministerial appointments. He was preoccupied with campaigning, well before Rishi Sunak announced the election date. Sue Gray played a larger role in many junior appointments, consulting with shadow cabinet members and their advisers on who should form the ministerial teams. But Hermer's appointment was Starmer's alone. He wanted him in that role. Those within government who brief against Hermer are, in effect, challenging Starmer's judgment and worldview. The Prime Minister's public voice is often unclear. Is he the leader who warned that Britain risks becoming an 'island of strangers,' or the one who later regretted saying so? Removing Hermer would suggest that Starmer had once again ceded power and key decisions to advisers who want him to be someone he is not. The symbolism would be stark. But more than that, his government needs the incumbent insurgents to flourish. Ironically, some of the most distinctive change-makers – Hermer, Ed Miliband, Bridget Phillipson – are being briefed against by those who see themselves as the real insurgents. Yet their version of insurgency amounts to continuity with the recent past: support for Michael Gove's secondary school reforms, alignment with Rishi Sunak's caution on net zero, and a desire to emulate Johnson or Farage on international law. Labour's manifesto was titled 'Change'. It is time to move on from that past. Hermer is among those doing just that. Whatever happens in the reshuffle, the genuine incumbent insurgents should remain in place. [See also: Are Unite and Labour heading for divorce?] Related
Telegraph
02-07-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
It's not racist to believe in English identity
The English 'can trace their roots back over generations' and have a history which is 'the legacy of our collective identity'. This should be an uncontroversial claim. When the Venerable Bede wrote his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, almost 1,300 years ago, he felt no need to define the English, and even described 'the English nation' as existing in the 6th century. The first King of the English, Æthelstan, was crowned in 927AD, and it was during his reign that the word 'England' was first written down, by Ælfric of Eynsham. The English have been a people, and England a country, for a very long time. We are what the Bible calls an ethnos; a people and a nation. Yet when Matt Goodwin made these arguments in an interview with Spectator editor Michael Gove, drawing a distinction between Britishness, a wide, cultural identity, and Englishness, a 'very distinct identity… which goes back for centuries', many commentators reacted with fury and disgust. David Henig, a trade expert, described Goodwin's remarks as 'unashamed racism'. Simon Schama, the historian, said they were 'pure recycled Enoch Powell', and journalist Oliver Kamm posted that 'it's alarming how far racism has become normalised in public debate'. John McTernan, who served as Tony Blair's Director of Political Operations, went even further, saying that 'the concept of the ethnic English is truly evil', in a tweet so unpopular that it had been viewed almost a million times, and attracted fewer than 50 likes before he deleted it. McTernan went on to claim that 'races and ethnicities don't exist', despite having described himself as 'Irish' and 'never English'. When I asked him to explain, he claimed that any definition of Englishness 'is either wooly and meaningless or othering and malign'. I find these reactions very strange. Is it racist to recognise that the English exist? I asked Oliver Kamm to explain his thoughts. He said 'it's obvious what the subtext is, and it's alarming… moreover, the reasoning is spurious… very few people can 'trace their roots over generations' – my own ancestors, like many Central European Jews, came off the boat at Liverpool and settled'. Is Kamm right? Can it really be true that 'very few' English people can trace their roots in this land back for generations? Adrian Targett, a teacher from Cheddar in Somerset, has been shown to be the direct descendant of 'Cheddar Man', a 9,000 year old skeleton found in the area. And according to Laura House, Genetic Genealogist at Ancestry, 'the majority of people from the British Isles will be able to trace their ancestors back to the 19th century… [and] for people with Christian ancestors… there's a good chance researchers will be able to trace at least one line into the 1500s'. As with any people, there are fuzzy edges and exceptions. But the existence of these exceptions doesn't mean the people don't exist. Would these commentators say the same if the Irish, Igbo or Han identified themselves as a distinct ethnos? I suspect not. What is different about the English? Bijan Omrani, historian, churchwarden and author of God is an Englishman: Christianity and the Creation of England said McTernan's tweet is 'unhinged'. Omrani told me that the hostile response to Goodwin's interview is 'an amazing manifestation of our intelligentsia hating itself', something he links to an education system which, since the 1960s 'doesn't even want to pass on any knowledge or vision of Englishness'. Omrani agreed with Goodwin that there is 'undoubtedly an ethnic element to Englishness', although he sees this as one aspect, alongside language, culture and our Christian faith. To recognise the English as a people need not mean excluding others from Britain, or Britishness, nor does it mean that those who aren't English are lesser, merely different. To say that someone isn't English is no more a moral judgement than to say they aren't Tamil or Maori or French. To believe otherwise a person must think the English are uniquely bad, or uniquely good. It seems that this anger and horror that the English might identify as an ethnos is grounded in a prideful self-loathing. To suggest, as McTernan did, that it is 'truly evil' to even conceive of the English as an ethnic group, is to deny our right to describe, recognise and understand ourselves. That is the true evil.
Telegraph
25-06-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
How mass migration will transform your town
Mass migration is propping up the populations of towns and cities because of the collapse in Britain's birth rate. Across England, 173 council areas – around 58 per cent of the total – are on course to suffer a fall in their populations over the next 25 years without international or cross-border migration. The data, from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), will raise concerns about the growing dependence of business and communities on migration as well as raising questions over integration. The figures suggest that immigration will fuel the majority of change across local areas and the country as a whole with 8.3 million more migrants arriving between 2022 and 2047. Without international migration, the population of England would fall from 57.1 million to 54.6 million, according to the projections. This figure also includes zero movement between England and Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland. It comes just weeks after a report by Prof Matt Goodwin, based on ONS figures, which projected that white British people would become a minority in the UK population within the next 40 years. This was fuelled by immigration as well as lower fertility rates among the white population. Prof Goodwin forecasts that by the year 2100, six in 10 people in the UK will not have been born in the UK or born to two UK-born parents. 'This raises enormous questions about the capacity of our country and leaders to unify people around a shared sense of identity, values, ways of life, and culture, and avoid the very real risk of us becoming what Sir Keir Starmer referred to in May as 'an island of strangers',' said Prof Goodwin, of Buckingham University. Across 173 local areas, around one in three of the total, a complete ban on migration would lead to population decline, with Birmingham, Newham and Manchester among those losing over 100,000 residents in this scenario. Urban areas, such as Newham, Birmingham, Brent, Westminster and Manchester are all expected to see UK-based residents move away and be replaced with a steady flow of migrants. Meanwhile, areas with fewer residents will see massive amounts of people migrate towards them, including Cornwall, Somerset and Shropshire. The population estimates, the first at a local level since 2020, also highlight England's continued transition into an elderly-heavy, 'grey' population. By 2047, 78 council areas are projected to have at least one in four residents at retirement age, compared with just eight in 2022. Each area is affected differently by projected trends in birth rates and migration. Use our tool to see how it impacts you. The overall population across England is expected to increase by 12.7 per cent between 2022 and 2047. This would mark a slowdown from the preceding 25 years, when the population increased by 18.5 per cent. Just four local authorities will suffer a population decline using the best estimates of migration: Ipswich, North East Lincolnshire and Gosport, in Hampshire. Previous projections, released in 2018, suggested that 16 areas would see population decline, but this has likely been updated due to increasing international migration. In other areas, there are expected to be population explosions over the next quarter century, with five where populations are due to increase by more than 30 per cent, including South Derbyshire (38 per cent), Stratford-on-Avon (36 per cent) and Tower Hamlets (33 per cent). Based on current household sizes, this would require an additional 3.1 million houses by 2047, Telegraph analysis shows. Additionally, the country would need 18,022 more police officers and 4,730 more GPs to keep per capita levels at current rates. The make-up of your area Across England, the country will continue to grey, with more Baby Boomers entering retirement age, while birth rates among Millennials and Gen Z are expected to continue their sharp downward trend. By 2047, 19.6 per cent of adults will be 68 years or older, the expected pension age at that point, up from 15.6 per cent now. At least one in four residents will be retirement-age or older across swathes of the country, including Dorset, the New Forest, North Norfolk and Rother, where this will be as high as 30 per cent. Declining birth rates will also result in just 18 areas supporting a child-heavy population, defined as a local authority where more than one in five is under 18. Currently this is true in 165 (56 per cent) of all local authorities. In North Norfolk, Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea, less than 16 per cent of the population will be children. What will drive population change? Birth rates have fallen drastically in recent decades with each woman giving birth to an average of just 1.44 children in 2023. For the population to continue growing without migration, this figure must be above 2.1. This rate has not been hit since 1972. Across England, the number of deaths is expected to outstrip births by 2031. By 2047, 60,000 more people are expected to die than be born. Over the next 25 years, 187 of all local areas, roughly 62 per cent of the total, are projected to see more births than deaths.
Kiwiblog
14-06-2025
- Politics
- Kiwiblog
UK migration trends
Matt Goodwin looks at how current migration trends will change the UK, if unchanged. Key findings: The proportion of the UK that is 'White British' will drop from 73% today to 57% in 2050 and 34% in 2100 The non-white proportion will increase from 20% to 59% by 2100 19% of the UK will be Muslim by 2100 Hard to imagine that Japan would (for example) have an immigration policy where native Japanese would become a minority in Japan within two generations.
