The British dream is crumbling, replaced by a nightmare of sectarian division

May 9, 2024 by Jill

by Allister Heath, Telegraph:

The UK has been hugely successful at integration, but mass immigration elites have abused our openness.

Britain is a wonderful, welcoming country that has embraced newcomers fleeing persecution or poverty for centuries. Our gradual affirmation of religious toleration after the English Reformation and the Scottish Enlightenment, our individualism, our early adoption of capitalism, our commitment to the rule of law, our pioneering role in the eradication of slavery, all helped forge a culture that to this day remains more open to outsiders than those of European neighbours.

It is a reason why so many first- and second-generation immigrants love this country, why so many are doing so well and contributing so much to politics, business, medicine, academia, sport and entertainment, and why it is entirely uncontroversial that Rishi Sunak is our first Hindu Prime Minister.

Visiting Britain in the 1720s, Voltaire was stunned. “Go into the London Stock Exchange … and you will see representatives from all nations gathered together for the utility of men,” he wrote in Lettres Philosophiques. “Here Jew, Mohammedan and Christian deal with each other as though they were all of the same faith, and only apply the word infidel to people who go bankrupt. Here the Presbyterian trusts the Anabaptist and the Anglican accepts a promise from the Quaker.”

Fast forward three centuries and we continue to integrate immigrants far better than the French or Germans, an ability dubbed Britain’s “superpower”. Across western Europe, the children of immigrants perform worse than those of the native-born; in the UK, children of immigrants are better at maths than the children of natives, and children born abroad do almost as well, the Pisa tests reveal.

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