London Is So Over

A viral tweet that raises deeper questions about our capital city

Jun 23

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When I took out my phone and fired off a tweet about my experiences in London, I didn’t expect it go viral and be read by 10 million people around the world.

But that’s exactly what happened this weekend when I shared a few observations on the way home after a day out in our capital city.

What did I say?

“All these things happened to me in London today.

I paid nearly £30 for a train ticket to take me into London from a town just 30 miles away —on a Saturday.

The first person I sat next to, I think from India, decided to have a FaceTime conversation with his friend on speakerphone so we all had to listen to it.

The train was late by 40 minutes due to unexplained “signalling issues”. It was also filthy.

I paid nearly £8 for a pint.

I offered a woman my seat on the tube without realising she was with a man who intervened and said, “no man”. He was not from the UK. I think he took my gesture as an insult.

I was asked for money by homeless people three times in one day.

I noticed several people who are paid to give information to taxpayers and tourists over the tannoy on London’s Tube cannot speak English properly.

A cabbie told me “London is dead most nights”, unless you are among the global high net worth set and the top 1%.

Restaurants are visibly struggling and often hideously overpriced.

I had dinner in a neighbourhood where the average rent is £3,663 per month while half of all local social housing has gone to people who were not even born in the UK.

I was constantly aware I should not get my phone out on the street as 80,000 were stolen last year.

I also discovered while checking that statistic that there were 90,000 shoplifting offences in London last year, up 54%.

My train back —delayed—was suddenly changed at the last minute with all passengers on board. They were told it would no longer be stopping at all stops.

I bought a tin of instant coffee on the way home and it had a security tag on it.

Maybe I’m in a bad mood and perhaps it’s amusing to think how somebody of my political outlook is “triggered” but to me there is a deeper point here.

London is over —it’s so over.

It’s a city that is now in visible decline, with deteriorating standards and no real sense of identity or belonging.

Going in and out of our once great capital city is a truly miserable experience.

Infrastructure is falling apart, as is the social contract.

I’ve been coming in and out of London since 1981.

I simply cannot remember a time when it’s been this visibly dire and when so many things just do not work as they should”.

While the tweet inevitably irritated London liberals who are unable to accept any criticism of their beloved urban paradise, it struck a chord with a larger audience.

At the time of writing, the tweet’s been shared 19 thousand times and has been liked, endorsed, by 100 thousand people, many of whom can clearly relate to what I said.

Funnily enough, one scene I had in my mind when I was writing the tweet was from the once-upon-a-time but no longer entertaining show, Sex and the City.

Filmed in 2004, the main character, Carrie Bradshaw, bumps into an old friend and prominent NYC socialite, Lexi Featherston, at a party for New York’s ultra elite.

Looking out at a crowd of upper-class, status-obsessed, high-achieving liberals who the American writer David Brooks once dubbed the ‘BoBos’ —Bourgeois Bohemians— Lexi Featherston, stunned the elite gathering by interrupting their bland party and delivering a damning indictment of their cosmopolitan paradise.

“This city”, she proclaimed to the elite class, the members of which were all as boring and predictable as one another, “used to be the most exciting city in the world. [But] New York is over. O.V.E.R. Over”.

While her complaint about New York had more to do with how a stuffy, health-conscious, fitness-obsessed and utterly boring elite was sucking all the fun and spontaneity out of a city that once had this in droves —a trend that can now be seen in most Western cities today—my complaint about London is shaped by other factors.

Particularly over the last decade, I’ve watched a toxic cocktail of rapid demographic change, mass immigration, and economic stagnation push our once great city into managed decline and make it completely unrecognisable.

And I’m not the only one.

Last week, writer David Goodhart referenced many of the same things that have been on my mind in a compelling and insightful essay for London’s Evening Standard.

A quarter-century ago, writes Goodhart, London was a booming metropolitan centre that for much of the political, media, and creative class was seen as a beacon of openness and opportunity for the rest of the country. He goes on:

“How times change. When it was recently estimated, in a report by Professor Matt Goodwin, that the white British population will become a minority in the UK in 2060, I heard nobody saying, “rapid demographic change is nothing to worry about, just look at London”.

He has a point, and not only because he cites my recent work.

Consider some of the truly eye-opening and sobering statistics in Goodhart’s piece.

White Britons now represent less than one-third of London. Only one in five children in Greater London’s schools are white British. Four in ten Londoners were born overseas. Close to one in five are Muslim. Nearly one-quarter do not speak English as their main language. Almost half of all social housing in London is now headed by somebody who was not born in Britain. And those homes enjoy a rental subsidy, from the British taxpayer, of more than £4 billion every year.

While London’s liberal set will respond to this by repeating, in robotic fashion, “diversity is our strength”, Goodhart asks the more troubling question that is clearly, based on the reaction to my tweet, on a lot of people’s minds.

Yes, immigration has long been a central feature of London’s life. But is all this demographic change actually improving the quality of life for Londoners? Really?

Just look around.

Shoplifting in London is soaring, up 54 per cent in the last year, compared to 15 per cent across the country. Housing is now beyond reach for most Londoners as demand has pushed property prices and rents sky-high.

Home ownership, since the early 1990s, has crashed by 20 per cent. London rents over the last fifteen years have surged 83 per cent, while earnings increased by only 21 per cent —a housing crisis undoubtedly exacerbated by mass migration.

And if London really is the future, if it inspires such confidence and optimism, then why does it have, by far, one of the lowest fertility rates in the country? People not wanting to have babies is a pretty good indicator of not just a cost-of-living crisis but, at a deeper level, how they feel about the surrounding social contract.

To Goodhart’s list we can add some other facts.

Violence against women and girls in London has increased sharply and remains “endemic”. Homelessness and rough sleeping are up. Violent offences in London are up 35 per cent on a decade ago. Knife-crime surged by over 20% in the last year alone, as gang violence has become a depressing, everyday feature of London life.

While ‘theft from the person’ fell across England last year, by 14 per cent, in London it rocketed by 41 per cent. Robberies are also up 10 per cent. ‘Moped-enabled crimes’ are booming. Pickpocketing is up 38 per cent in a year.

And if London is so great then why do more than one quarter of Londoners now say they feel unsafe walking alone at night in their own neighbourhood, which rises to nearly 40% for women?

The story of diversity in London, beloved by liberals who talk about today’s migration into London as if it’s similar to what they witnessed in the 1990s and the 2000s, has also changed in profound and, I would argue, negative ways.

The European bankers, asset managers, and Polish plumbers of two decades ago, as Goodhart points out, have now largely been replaced by low-wage, low-skill migrant workers from across the Middle East and Northern Africa.

Coming as part of the post-2019 ‘Boriswave’, this more recent immigration, as several studies have made clear, is taking more out of the economy than it’s putting in, exacerbating not just the housing crisis but the glaring lack of growth.

While London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan continues to mislead people about the effects of this migration, there is now no doubt it’s making the country, including its capital city, poorer. Everybody can sense it; and now the evidence backs them up.

This is not to criticise the migrants themselves; it’s merely to point out the reality Londoners are now living in. Like much of the rest of the country, London’s energy, productivity, and prosperity is being drained by a model of low-skill, low-wage, non-European immigration that simply does not make sense for Western nations.

While 30,000 millionaires and taxpayers fled London over the last decade, they’ve been replaced not only by these low-skill workers but roughly 500,000 illegal migrants, who are now also being joined by many of the more recent arrivals on the small boats.

How do you sustain a social contract in a major city like London when it’s estimated that roughly one in every twelve people is an illegal immigrant, and when a significant share of the population are breaking our laws and not contributing at all?

London’s immigration story is also having many other unintended effects that are stripping the city of its former charm and recognisable identity, which many ordinary Londoners will be able to relate to.

The iconic black cab with a driver who possesses a deep and historic knowledge of our capital city is now being replaced by the Uber driver from Somalia who mutters in a different language into his phone, can barely speak English, and drives you around while relying heavily on Google Maps.

And while the idea, head around the dinner tables of liberals like Fraser Nelson, that London is a remarkable success story when it comes to integrating this demographic change, no serious observer from outside the elite class would agree.

Watch the pro-Hamas hate marches, mingle in Tower Hamlets, look at the data concerning the shocking number of people in London who neither speak English nor identify as British or English, or read about the 286 per cent increase in antisemitic hate crimes in London and then tell me London is an integration success story.

Indeed, one fact I left out of my viral tweet is had I walked around London for a little longer at the weekend then I would most likely have bumped into pro-Iran, pro-Hamas, and pro-Hezbollah protests on the streets of our capital city.

Rather than build a dynamic, integrated, and unified capital city with a clear sense of history and identity, what all this is pushing us toward, as Lord (David) Frost pointed out in another insightful essay last week, is the ongoing ‘Yookayfication’ of our capital city and, indeed, our country.

Increasingly, after passing through the stages of “Great Britain” and then the “United Kingdom”, the label “Yookay” is now being used to refer to the aesthetic quality of the country today —a jarring mix of cultures, languages, and identities that are being imposed on what we once recognised as England and Britain.

Examples include the American candy store next to the kebab shop, the Deliveroo bags and Uber Toyota Prius that have come to symbolise this new, migration-fuelled low-skill, sluggish economy, the proliferation of Palestine flags and obvious signs of sectarianism in migrant communities, the spread of multicultural “English” with its global slang, the mainstreaming of gang culture in everything from fashion to advertising, the loud drill music and speakerphone conversations in the train carriage on the way home, the constant smell of weed, and so on, and so on.

As Lord Frost points out, the term “Yookay” is no longer just about what we see on the surface; it suggests we are quite literally becoming a new country, a successor state to Great Britain and the UK, with an entirely new and very distinctive identity, character, culture, set of values, and way of life, emerging among a population that has no real connection to what came before.

As the young and promising writer Luca Watson notes, the promise made by Tony Blair et al. in the late 1990s was that multiculturalism would deliver exciting new experimental fusions not “the reality of actually-existing-multiculturalism, a world of endless chicken shops and Turkish barbers, of constant unfamiliarity, estrangement, and alienation, of a common language flattened of its regional varieties into a crude Multicultural London English pidgin”. He goes on:

“Instead of high streets full of exotic shops selling Persian rugs or Moroccan spices or French delicatessens, we get an incomprehensible number of vape shops and Turkish barber shops of dubious legality. Once mysterious religions that enthralled Anglo-orientalists have been thoroughly demystified, reduced to rackety dawah stands obnoxiously blasting nasheeds amidst backdrops of decaying commercial centres.”

Shaped by past and ongoing mass migration, this cultural process of “Yookayfication” now looks set to accelerate and spread rapidly, not only because 81 per cent of all all migration into the Yookay now comes from outside Europe but because of how the foreign-born and their immediate descendants are forecast to become a majority of the entire country by the year 2079 —only 54 years from now.

All this raises profound questions for future of the country and its capital city, as David Goodhart asks in his essay:

“What happens when London’s white British population falls below 20 per cent in 10 years’ time, as it appears on track to do? Is there some minimum number of natives that a capital requires before it ceases to be the capital?”

While I’m not sure of the answer I am certain that unless there is a radical change of direction then I’m unlikely to be one those natives living in a London that will from hereon look a lot more like the “Yookay” than the country I once knew.

In fact, the question Goodhart asks took my mind to a thought experiment that raises a much deeper point about not only London and Britain but the West more generally.

Known as the Ship of Theseus, it goes like this. If you gradually replace every part of a ship so that its parts no longer have any real connection to the past —if you replace, say, the physical parts, the people on board, the language they speak, the historic connections—then is it really the same ship or has it become something else entirely?

It’s a question I would encourage you all to ponder, perhaps the next time you pass through our once great capital city and take a look around.