The political impact of immigration

It won’t actually come as a surprise to anyone living in London that the census results from the Office of National Statistics this week showed that ‘white British’ are down to 45 per cent in the capital. There are bits of the capital whose look and feel suggests that the percentage is much higher – well, the figures are from people who filled in the census forms, which isn’t quite the same thing as the actual population. Remember that cover story in The Spectator a couple of months back, based on the premise that London was practically a city-state, radically different from most other parts of the UK? Well, this census bears that contention out: the number of people living in England and Wales who were born abroad now amounts to 13 per cent nationally; in the capital, it’s 37 per cent. And plainly, many of the people here from non-indigenous backgrounds will now be second and third generation.