What we expected was grief

“What did you expect? Britain’s protests reflect DECADES of elite failure.” Thus starts a Substack post by populist commentator Matt Goodwin. This was in the aftermath of a violent attack on a mosque in Southport which in turn followed an appalling stabbing in that town, when three little girls were murdered, and several others injured.

What we expected, Mr Goodwin, was that the victims would be given due respect, and that their friends and neighbours be given the space to come to terms with the horror of what occurred. And we expected that time would be given for the facts of the incident to be established, and for lessons to be drawn from those facts. We expected common human decency. We did not expect the community’s grief to be hijacked by outsiders to promote their particular frustrations and grievances. At least the riot gave the community a chance to show their real mettle by turning up to help clean up the mess afterwards, and offer the mosque’s congregation messages of support. But, alas, further riots have taken place in other towns, well and truly hijacking a proper response to the tragedy – though at least these are leaving the town of Southport alone.

Mr Goodwin’s diatribe is worth reading for any of those wanting to get a better understanding of the undercurrents in British political life. It’s a powerful polemic and, apart from being too long and a bit repetitive (making it hard to re-read), it is well-written. The idea is to make people angry, and not to put forward a coherent argument in a process of debate. But Mr Goodwin is an academic, and a coherent argument does lie behind it, and, though there is a lot of insinuation, it is reasonably factual (though taking facts out of context is very much his method) – unlike much of what gets written in this space. It is worth trying to understand it, and drawing out where it is right, where it is wrong and where it is hard to know. That’s what I want to do here.

Mr Goodwin’s argument is that the riot stemmed from a protest by “ordinary people” fed up with the effects of mass immigration, which is disrupting society and making it less safe. The critical fact about the murders, so far as Mr Goodwin is concerned, is that the the arrested suspect is the son of a Rwandan immigrant, allowing blame to be put at the door of immigration policy. Mr Goodwin’s ire is directed at policies, including “unrestricted” immigration, being practiced for “decades” by a liberal governing elite, taking in all the main political parties (apart from Reform UK and its predecessor, Ukip), the mainstream media, and government agencies. These liberal policies are excessively indulgent to minorities, he suggests, and do not take account of the impacts on “ordinary people”, who feel they didn’t consent to them, and don’t recognise their country any more, after decades of change. I could go on – Mr Goodwin is especially vitriolic about the Labour Party and left-wing academics, of which he doubtless has a lot of direct personal experience. Notwithstanding the complaint that these voices of complaint are unheard, readers will doubtless be very familiar with what is being said. Indeed these views have been expressed by Conservative politicians, such as Suella Braverman. They are frequently heard, though rarely endorsed, on mainstream media, and especially the BBC. Mr Goodwin does unequivocally say that attacking the police is always wrong, and in a later Substack post, he condemns all the violence as simply damaging the communities in whose name the complaints are being made. But he also complains of double standards over how the police and politicians handle these protests compared to those made on behalf of Palestinians, say – or counter demonstrators, often by Muslim men, which in some cases have been violent too. His critical argument is that the protests should not simply be dismissed as being the work of “far-right” activists, and it isn’t just a matter of misinformation and disinformation. It is a symptom of millions of people being utterly fed up.

So, where do I think Mr Goodwin is right? Firstly, that alongside the violence, is a voice of protest that is a reflection of many people’s views. Mr Goodwin suggests that these are drawn from a majority of “ordinary people”. That’s a stretch – but his alternative characterisation of “millions” is surely on the money. Many people would hear what Mr Goodwin has to say, and thank him for expressing their views faithfully. It’s a lot of people, and they feel ignored or betrayed by the political class. The Conservatives under Boris Johnson courted such people in the 2019 election, and won over many of their votes on the basis of promises to limit migration and “level up” left-behind places. A vision was painted of a high-productivity country, with higher wages, which did not depend on immigrants, especially lower-paid ones (I’m not comfortable with the usual formulation of “lower-skilled”). But this was a have-your-cake and eat it vision, typical of Mr Johnson, that did not acknowledge the difficulties in reaching such a promised land, and the costs. Those costs are skill shortages in industries such as healthcare, social care, agriculture and hospitality, to name only the most obvious. These skill shortages lead to higher wages, which was exactly the intention, of course. But these, initially at least, lead to inflation. It’s not possible to pay for the higher wages through higher productivity in the short-term, and often higher productivity actually occurs in industries that are not directly affected by the skills shortages, meaning that things have to be rebalanced. Inflation is inevitable, even if is part of a temporary process of readjustment in the economy. Higher inflation means higher interest rates and more expensive mortgages. Mr Johnson’s government was not ready for this, and in any case was blown off course by the Covid crisis, followed by the Ukraine war and the rising costs of fossil fuels. After he went, as the chaos and low-level corruption of his government became too much, the Conservatives changed tack. They became passionate opponents of inflation, and obsessed with cutting taxes. That meant taking a hard line on public sector salaries, and letting inflation cut the real cost of public services – which in turn led to an increased dependence on cheap imported labour. The government buckled under the pressure of labour shortages, and other pressures to revive short-term economic growth, and allowed immigration levels to continue at high levels and even to increase. It is not hard to see why so many people feel betrayed and angry. A reaction was to be expected.

The second place where I think Mr Goodwin is right is that immigration is causing real stress. The most important stress point in my view is in housing. The rise in property rents – in the region of 6% per annum since the start of 2022, according to the Office for National Statistics – and significantly higher in places like London -is causing widespread hardship. The country struggles to expand its housing stock fast enough – with dysfunctional planning controls, to say nothing of labour shortages. In this sense, the popular plea that immigration should be stopped because “we are full” has some merit. Claims on immigration’s other effects, on public services and public order, are much harder to substantiate. But the impact on housing is serious enough by itself.

I have a little sympathy with when Mr Goodwin says that a lot of policy at public agencies has been inept, and left-wing fads have been given too much headway. This is especially the case with universities, although a lot of this has been driven by student action, and the “cancelling” of speakers, often on flimsy evidence. The Tavistock Clinic’s life-changing treatments on young people with gender dysphoria leant more on fad than evidence. Looking further back in time, but still very prominent in Mr Goodwin’s list of evils, was the lack of action to combat the grooming of girls by Asian gangs in a number of towns – this had a lot to do with old-fashioned class prejudice, but it was also regarded as politically sensitive. Having observed some of controversies at Liberal Democrats conferences over the years, I get that with some people you are not allowed a proper conversation on sensitive issues.

There are number of grey zones – claims made by Mr Goodwin or his critics that are either hard to establish in fact, or where the evidence is mixed. The narrative that the unrest is all about “far-right” thuggery is pushed hard by the government, and fully supported by media such as the BBC, and criticised by Mr Goodwin. But there is clearly a lot of politically directed thuggery going on, and while I’m not comfortable with the label, I don’t have a better one than “far-right”. But there are a lot of others who come along to watch or cheer the thuggery on, including people local to the areas affected. Still, the thuggery is a serious law and order challenge, and the public expects political leaders to deal with it firmly. Anything that sounds like making excuses for people crosses an important line. This is something that Mr Goodwin seems to be finding out for himself: in his latest message, ironically titled “The British People need to feel safe,” he gives the impression of being under siege, and he appeals for more people to make subscriptions too support the promotion of his message. Here he does say unequivocally that he is against the violence – something he didn’t quite do earlier, except when the violence was directed against the police.

Another part of the grey zone is the claim that certain immigrant communities are making the country less safe. One BBC correspondent has been saying that violent crime has been falling through the period when the number of immigrants is rising. But the quality of British crime statistics is not what it was – and reported crimes depend on other factors than the number of crimes committed. And what if crime is falling because people are going out less? A lot of illegal immigration is linked to organised crime, and I would not be surprised if certain immigrant communities were linked to crime. But a lot of the right-wing tropes about no-go areas and such are nonsense. I used to live in an inner London borough, with large immigrant communities. But the danger posed to a single young woman walking home there came from a white British police officer. If I wanted to develop an idea that there was a national crime wave of violence against women perpetrated by white men, I would find it easy to produce a litany just as horrific as Mr Goodwin’s on immigrant crimes.

I’m also putting Mr Goodwin’s claim about multiculturalism in that grey zone. He promotes the common right-wing trope that multiculturalism has failed. This was not evident where I used to live – including when I was a chair of governors at a multi-ethnic primary school, where white British were in a minority. Local parents, from all communities, simply wanted their children to do well for themselves. The school adapted to the fact that so many children were from homes with English as a second language, and achieved national average performance regardless. But this isn’t always so. There are places where integration has not worked well – for example in some northern towns – and politicians seem short of ideas about how to move on.

There’s a lot more grey: claims made by Mr Goodwin where the evidence is in fact mixed, if it exists. Where do I think he is out and out wrong? One place is pinning the blame for the policies he likes on a tiny elite (sometimes widened to an “elite class”) imposing policies on an unwilling majority. That governing elite has a hinterland of people that largely share their values, even if they disagree with policy specifics, that runs into millions of people. This is after all how the politicians get elected. They include many people like me, who feel just as unable to shape public policy as people throwing bricks at police in Rotherham, and who don’t take well to be called a governing elite. Describing the political class as an elite has its sinister aspects too. Often this language is used by people who want to gain power and plant their own governing elite, which then moves on to practice self-enrichment using the state privileges. This is what happened in Hungary and Poland, for example. It is hard not to see Donald Trump’s entourage in that light. The striking thing about the liberal elites in Britain and elsewhere is how honest they are. It’s a question of being careful what you wish for.

A further place where Mr Goodwin is clearly wrong is blaming public policy on the elite’s “luxury beliefs” though I don’t think he uses that phrase in “What did you expect?”. There is a reason that public policy has taken the direction it has in the last couple of decades or so, including mass migration, and it is not a dilettante governing elite imposing its luxury beliefs. It’s because the country faced serious challenges, and this seemed to be the easiest way to meet them. I have already described how Mr Johnson’s government fell apart because of the impossibility of the vision he promoted. The is not to say that a low-immigration economic model is infeasible for Britain, or even undesirable. It is just a lot harder to get there than the idea’s supporters claim. Brexit is another example of a policy that was promoted without making clear what the full implications were. There was a case for Brexit, but one that involved a difficult transition that was glossed over or disbelieved by its supporters. And now our politicians are trying to promote the idea that the main tax rates can be left unchanged while public services are repaired. And so the government is kicking a response to crisis on social care into the long grass in order to preserve tax rates. It is fair to accuse our politicians of not being honest about the choices the country must make. But, I’m afraid the electing public are deeply complicit with that. If anything the luxury beliefs are the ideas that low immigration and post-Brexit prosperity can be acheived easily.

And finally there is the issue of culture. Mr Goodwin wants to suggest that there is a British culture that is being undermined by mass immigration, and foreign beliefs imposed by the elites. But culture is a moving target. Not so long ago pregnant women would commit suicide rather than endure the disgrace of being a single mother. Even more recently being gay was considered by most to be a disgusting perversion. Pretty much the whole of society has moved on. And our culture has always been part and parcel of a worldwide cultural melange. And it wasn’t all that long ago when British commercial emissaries, armed forces and religious missionaries went out into that wider world to export and impose our culture on the developing world – the era of Empire. Indeed I think Mr Goodwin wants us to be proud of that empire. But that history leaves us very open to importing cultures from elsewhere, through immigration amongst other ways – from our former empire, and from Europe, to which our history is so closely bound. Our country cannot live in isolation – we cannot escape treaties, international conventions and obligations, as there is no such thing as absolute national sovereignty. And by taking a fuller role in the wider world, we can make it a better place, by ensuring European security, or saving the world from global warming, for example. By trying to pretend that things can be otherwise, Mr Goodwin is simply stirring up trouble for no positive end.

There is much that is wrong with Britain. Class prejudice remains – and I think that lies behind much of what Mr Goodwin complains of. So does racism and misogyny. Drug addition and unhealthy lifestyles are rampant. Too many young people are drawn into violent gangs. There is too much sub-standard housing. And too many of these things are not being confronted by the political class – or the public that votes them into office. Mr Goodwin did the country a service after the Brexit referendum, when he tried to illuminate how many of our fellow countrymen felt. But he has gone way beyond that, as he is promotes a destructive political agenda, fuelled by false ideas. By trying to exploit the grief of Southport, or at least excuse those that are, he has sunk to a new low.