The alternative to concrete

WAITER, THERE'S A FOREIGNER IN MY SOUP

What has this done for Britain? Changed London dramatically, for a start.

When did you last have a British waiter? Whatever happened to the famous British nanny? When did you last go to a City reception and not hear a mix of accents? Can you imagine the blandness of the place without them? At a macroeconomic level, the foreigners have inevitably boosted growth, in the not-very-interesting sense that more people means a bigger economy; but it has also, probably, made the economy work better. Giving foreigners access to the labour market has the same sort of effect as opening an economy to trade: more competition, greater efficiency.

Even so, many argue that Britain is paying too high a price for a cosmopolitan buzz and a smoother working labour market. They fear two consequences in particular: population pressures in the south-east of England and ethnic tension.

An extra 120,000 people a year in a region as densely populated as the south-east is, the argument goes, too much. It means more congestion, more concrete and less beauty. Locals don’t want house building. The government can impose it on councils only by giving itself powers to override the objections of local councils and decreeing that hundreds of thousands of new homes should be built.

But there’s no need for this. Over the past decade, London and south-east have absorbed a net 680,000 foreigners, without losing much countryside. How has that happened? Partly through development of old industrial areas – such as Docklands – in a place which remains thinly populated compared with the world’s other great cities. But it is also partly because, as immigration has fuelled demand and London house prices have risen faster than those in the rest of the country. Londoners have crashed in, sold their houses and moved to cheaper, emptier bits of Britain.

Why, then, is the government so keen on all these new houses? Because public sector workers are being priced out of the property market. Vacancies in London schools, for instance, are higher than anywhere else in the country. But concreting over the south-east is not only solution to this problem. The government could always pay public sector workers in London and in the south-east more and those elsewhere less. That solution does not, however, appeal to the Labour Party’s paymasters, the trade unions.

But what of ethnic tensions – an unvoiced fear behind much of the unfavourable comment? Is a bit of economic efficiency worth many summers of race riots? Probably, not; but, in Britain at least, there’s not much connection between race and civil disorder. Certainly, the spotlight fell on Oldham and Bradford, which have big Asian populations, when they went up in flames a couple of years ago. But white Britons are quite capable of organizing such entertainments without help from immigrants, as they showed in Blackbird Leys in Oxford in 1991 and Portsmouth in 2000. What’s more, London, with its dense ethnic mix, has not seen a good riot for two decades; and the disturbances in Brixton in the early 1980s were a reaction to heavy-handed policing, not a race riot.

That said, immigration is changing Britain, and people find change frightening. Governments need to be careful. That mans, for instance, letting immigrants stay where there are lots of other immigrants, and where they are therefore inconspicuous. Some of the loudest recent rows have been over setting up camps for asylum seekers in bits of the (still very white) countryside. And the government needs to address the question, raised this week by the Conservatives, of screening immigrants for infectious diseases – a reasonable thing to do those invited in for economic reasons (on work permits) but not those given sanctuary on moral grounds (asylum-seekers).

But the best thing for Britons to do about immigration would be to embrace it. It is nice to be wanted. And, economics aside, foreigners make the place infinitely more fun.

( The Economist, August 2003)

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