To flee or not to flee

‘Why is no one talking about what is happening in our country?’ demands the splash across the front cover of the latest book by George Walden. It is therefore something of a surprise in the pages that follow to find the former Conservative minister discoursing at length on the problems of immigration, terrorism, crime and house prices — all familiar mainstays of the modern conversational canon.

To be fair, it is Walden’s contention that these are but contributing factors to a national malaise manifesting itself in the under-reported fact that so many Britons want to leave the country of their birth. What is more, it is not our cleaners, plumbers and fruit-pickers who are throwing in the towel in the face of cut-throat competition from the Polish diaspora. It is Britain’s middle classes who are disproportionately most likely to wave goodbye to a country that no amount of Carphone Warehouses can prevent from appearing utterly disconnected.