Dreams and Nightmares (2015)

Book Review from the March 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

David Goodhart: The British Dream: Successes and Failures of Post-War Immigration. Atlantic £9.99

This is a real mixed bag of a book, a curate’s egg as you might say. It combines some interesting observations about migration with some rather unconvincing arguments.

Goodhart points out that many of the outcomes of immigration to Britain were unplanned and not those envisaged; but this after all is what happens with much government legislation under capitalism. The Salman Rushdie affair of 1989, arising from the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses, led to a boost in the authority of Muslim leaders in Britain, and ‘began to mark out Muslims as a special, and in some ways especially problematic, minority’. Satellite television has played an important role in slowing down the integration of immigrants into mainstream British culture, as it enabled people to watch news and soaps from ‘back home’ (Turkey, for instance) rather than the BBC.

Goodhart sees himself as a Labour-supporting ‘progressive’ but as one impressed by Conservative politician David Willetts’ claim that cultural diversity undermines the legitimacy of a universal welfare state. This just illustrates how little difference there is between Labour and Tory policies, and it is also part of the current attack on benefits for those at the bottom of the pile. He observes that forty percent of ethnic minority Britons (not all of whom are immigrants, of course) are poor but he has little idea of the capitalist framework within which migration and the struggle for jobs and housing occur. He refers quite often to ‘the elite’, but this seems to mean the political and media establishment rather than the capitalist class. Moreover, last year’s Sunday Times Rich List featured nine immigrant individuals or families in its top twelve, but the extent of inequality gets almost no mention here.

The two biggest sets of arrivals in the last decade are Poles and Somalis, neither of whom Goodhart regards as ‘model immigrants’ (which presumably would mean causing no problems and producing plenty of profits for the owners of industry). The Poles are mostly hard workers but (though no real evidence for this is provided) have helped to drive down wages for the unskilled. Moreover they ‘mainly have a guest worker mentality and many have no particular interest in joining British society’. As for Somalis, they are highly dependent on welfare, and as a group have retreated into themselves. So refusing to integrate (whatever that might mean exactly) is seen as a major problem. Perhaps, if they lived in grand mansions in some posh part of London and consequently had little contact with the average worker, that kind of non-integration would be acceptable.

Paul Bennett