A Tale of Two Bus Routes

Witnessing the effects of mass immigration

An audio version of this essay – read by me – is available below the paywall.

We moved out of London on the same day that the latest migration figures were released. Many news outlets obediently led with the headline served to them by the Office for National Statistics. The Independent, for instance, went with: “Net migration drops 20% to 728,000 after hitting 906,000 peak.” Migration “drops”! So why all the fuss?

Well, as David Frost pointed out:

It wasn’t just the numbers that surprised me, the fact that net migration was over 900,000 in the year to June 2023. That’s bad enough. But I was also amazed by the level of revision of the figures: all the recent numbers are much higher than we thought.

I remember exactly a year ago waiting for the equivalent set of figures, amid speculation that the 2023 total could be nearly a million. When it landed, at just 672,000, it temporarily took the wind out of the sails of Rishi Sunak’s many critics. Yet now it turns out the actual figure was not far off a million after all.

It is difficult nowadays to regard these statistical mistakes, omissions, and adjustments as entirely innocent, since we know that the government is acutely anxious about the possibility of (more) ethnic conflict on British streets. Starmer has blamed these very high migration figures on the Tories, accusing them of running an "open borders experiment.” Which they have. The problem for Labour is that the experiment was first conceived under Blair, and immigrationist hardliners within government have no intention of halting it. The Tories are not the only party at fault – not by a long way – and the powers that be are not minded to end this experiment any time soon.

It’s popular on the Right to attribute these decisions to a malicious conspiracy, but I tend to find these theories unconvincing. My working hypothesis is that mass immigration came about through a combination of moral and intellectual naiveté within the elite class. The feminisation of public life probably had something to do with it, too. More on this another day.

A bus journey last week invited me to reflect on another factor that has contributed to this elite naiveté: ethnic segregation within London, the city in which mass immigration has had the most dramatic effect, and in which the elite class is overwhelmingly to be found.

London is really a network of small interconnected towns, and a glance at the census data on ethnicity reveals how different these areas are from one another demographically. In Barking, Croydon, and Southall, for instance, some postcodes are less than 10% white British, whereas a large tranche of Southwest London is marked as blue on this census map, since every borough within this area is more than 60% white British. There is very little social mixing between these areas, which means that residents can be largely oblivious to the true composition of the city.