They hate London because it is beautiful

Matthew Goodwin went to that there London the other day and what he found shook him to his core.

Photo by Benjamin Davies on Unsplash. The horror, the horror.

Matthew Goodwin went to that there London the other day and what he found shook him to his core.

You may know who Goodwin is. He is a kind of parable in political science, the lesson of which is that you should be careful how long you gaze into the abyss because the abyss gazes also into you. He is, in fact, a walking abyss, which now shuffles around the corridors of British politics as a warning to what might happen to other researchers who do not exercise proper caution.

In 2014, Goodwin published a book called Revolt on the Right with Robert Ford. Ford remains a highly regarded academic with a dispassionate view of the subject matter. Goodwin took a different path. He began to morph into that which he studied. Imagine him like Jeff Goldblum in the Fly, but instead of an insect in the teleportation device Nigel Farage's little finger was in there. Every day, Goodwin became a little more like the right-wing populism he was ostensibly studying.

Why did it happen? Was he always a believer and simply hid it? Did he begin to convince himself as he wrote about it? Or did he realise the economic possibilities which exist on the grievance circuit and set out to exploit them? Who knows. Who can imagine what goes on in the rubbery folds of his mind? All we know is that he became his own doctoral thesis, a nativist meta narrative crawling out of its lever-arch file, unleashed on an unsuspecting world.

This is what gives him his unique position in the British political landscape. It is not that he is any worse politically than the other right-wing populists. It is simply that he is more pathetic. He still does not quite have the bravery to state that these are his views, so instead he presents himself as an impartial observer whose analysis invariably involves projecting his own prejudices onto the public. He is to disingenuousness what Usain Bolt is to running.

In the years which followed, the academic quality of his work began to degrade, in the same way that Jeff Goldblum's face began to decompose in the Fly. It wasn't subtle. He would ignore evidence that challenged his position, even when it was contained in the very same surveys he was citing. He would develop highly expansive demographic categories and make heroic assumptions about future trends. Teeth fell out, then the nose, then the scalp would begin to crack. And one day you would wake, like Geena Davis, and find him drooling over his food so it could be consumed. The respectable academic had fallen away entirely, leaving only this angry right-wing rabble rouser in his wake.

Goodwin's first problem about London was the price of the train ticket into the city. "I paid nearly £30," he said. You wouldn't have thought that this would be the introduction to an anti-immigration diatribe, because that's mad, but I am sorry to inform you that it is.

"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." It's easy to get stuck there, of course. On what basis did he think that? Is he well placed to distinguish Indian Punjabis from Pakistani Punjabis, for instance, or Indian Bengalis from Bangledeshi Bengalis? I suspect he is not and that far more egregious assumptions led him to his conclusion.

He then began a litany of complaints. The train was late, it was dirty, he paid £8 for a pint, homeless people asked him for money, a cabbie complained about stuff, restaurants were expensive, he was worried about having his phone stolen. At one point he offered a seat to a woman "without realising she was with a man". This man, he tells us pointedly, "was not from the UK" and discouraged him. It's hard to tell what happened here but it's possible that Goodwin acted like a freak and received a predictable and commensurate social response. Then, in a terrible final misfortune, he states simply: "I bought a tin of instant coffee on the way home and it had a security tag on it."

His conclusion: "London is over - it's so over."

Goodwin is not alone. In fact, his description of London is part of a sustained effort to disparage the capital. Conservative leadership hopeful Robert Jenrick spent a day recently chasing fare dodgers around London Tube stations, like some kind of shithouse Inspector Morse. His audience was not Londoners. It was people outside of London. The message was that the capital is crime ridden, collapsing, morally decaying.

In the Telegraph, Neil O'Brien, a Tory MP who has journeyed very far from the basecamp of his better nature, described immigration as one of the reasons why "Britain is heading for utter oblivion". Needless to say, he focused on London. "Among private renters in Greater London, around a third are white British," he warned readers. "In greater London's schools just over one in five school children are white British."

He was joined by David Goodhart in the Standard. A few years ago, the Standard seemed merely alienated by the city it was supposed to be covering. Now it actively despises it. It therefore hired Goodhart, who has made his career out of berating places like London, to write a piece talking about it. It's like asking Martin Scorcese to review Marvel films, or Donald Trump to review Michelin starred restaurants.

He painted the same picture: high crime, high rent, high cost. Similarly to Goodwin, much of this seems to be merely a political formulation of his deep social weirdness. "Many parts of the capital would fail my integration 'bus stop' test," he said, with the confidence of a man who needs more critical friendships. "Can you share a joke at a bus stop with a stranger from a different ethnicity about something you have both heard on national media?" Imagine what it would be like - anywhere at all, in city or town, village or hamlet - to have this halfwitted old Etonian try to make a joke about Rachel Reeves as you got the bus to work. And then imagine ignoring him and being blamed for the failure of multiculturalism.

When the liberal Muslim Zohran Mamdani’s won the New York mayoral primary election this week, the response of many right-wing commentators was to warn that "New York will turn into London". That's a reference to London's liberal Muslim mayor Sadiq Khan, of course, but also to the images that have been actively associated with him in the right-wing internet: crime, failure, cultural degradation.

What's going on here? Why are all these people launching such similar attacks on London? What's behind this effort to portray London as a failure?

That story takes us down a very strange path, involving race, openness and Britain's better nature. And it eventually leads to the one place we must try never to visit: the tortured minds of the politically unwell.

On the face of it, London is a strange target to pick, because it is so preposterously successful. It generates close to a quarter of the UK's entire economic output. Along with the South-East, it is the only region of the UK with a net fiscal surplus. It remains the most economically productive region in the UK, with output per hour 28.5% higher than the national average. Its key sectors, which help provide all this growth, do so on the basis of immigrant labour. Each migrant worker contributes £46,000 in Gross Value Added to London’s economy per year.

London is also a success on a deeper and more important level. It is a triumph of multiculturalism. This is not an exclusively London story - you can see it in metropolitan areas across the country - but it is obviously at its most vigorous in the capital, a city where over 300 languages are spoken every day. Those who visit are often overawed by the texture of life here. Those who live here often do so because of it.

Khan stands as a kind of totem in that regard. In policy terms he has accomplished comparatively little, but he has been a powerful force symbolically. The fact that he is a Muslim is crucial. It is important to show that Muslims can achieve the most senior positions in political life. And it is important to show that liberal Islam exists, even though many authority figures inside Islam wish to deny it and many reactionaries outside of Islam wish it were not so. Khan can be seen celebrating gay pride. He can be seen celebrating Chanukah. He can be seen celebrating Eid. And by doing so he demonstrates that there is no contradiction between these activities.

These twin successes - wealth and multiculturalism - are not truly separate. They both grow from the same root.

One of the traditional big five personality traits is openness to new experiences, which suggests intellectual curiosity, creativity, and a preference for novelty and variety. These traits are often geographically clustered. Studies of psychological types by Local Authority Districts in Britain found these sorts of people to be congregated in metropolitan areas. As one reported:

"Significantly high levels of Openness emerged throughout the London boroughs, Oxford, Cambridge, Brighton, Bristol, Manchester, Glasgow, and parts of Wales, indicating that a disproportionate number of residents of these areas were creative, unconventional, and curious."

Internationally and in the US - where the majority of these studies have been carried out - areas that have a higher percentage of people with this trait also tend to be more liberal - voting for progressive political candidates and demonstrating social tolerance. They also tend to be more economically successful. Those two characteristics are entwined.

The success of London is a point-blank, up-against-the-wall-motherfucker refutation of the right-wing populist world view.

At the root of this worldview is the theory of ethnopluralism, which was born in France under the New Right in the 1960s and 1970s. It rejected the racism of the far right and instead adopted a subtly different position. Ethnic groups were not superior or inferior to each other, but they were distinct. They should not mix. People could only flourish within their ethnic heritage.

This belief may have sidestepped the race question but it entailed a similar policy position to what had come before: the removal of immigrants, the creation of a homogenised society, the monoculture. A tiresome persistent colouration, society as an undifferentiated mass, robbed of the contours that give it shape or beauty.

Many modern populists might be unaware of this intellectual heritage, but the basic policy programme is broadly in line with what came before: Stop immigration. Deport immigrants. Establish the monoculture. You know the tune.

This is why London must be portrayed as a rotting failure. If London is seen as a success, it collapses their worldview. If it is seen as a failure, it vindicates it. For these purposes, London is immigration. That is what it symbolises. That is what it represents. It has effectively ceased to have meaning outside of that association.

Now they are manufacturing a sense of crisis. This is possible because of one of the key roles Goodwin maintains. Among academics, he is a joke. But for mainstream consumers of the news, he seems to lend a sense of academic plausibility to fire-and-brimstone warnings of national decline, like an am-dram rendition of the Book of Revelations.

The Telegraph ran a piece recently with the headline: "White British people will be a minority in 40 years, report claims". Inside, we find out that "white British people will decline from their current position as 73% of the population to 57% by 2050 before slipping into a minority by 2063" and constituting "around a third" by the end of the century. The article featured several gloomy warnings from "Prof Matt Goodwin" - the prefix is doing a lot of work here - about the "profound questions about the capacity of the UK state to both absorb and manage this scale of demographic change".

The research itself is preposterous, of course. His definition of 'white British' is so narrow that it excludes anyone with an immigrant parent. This will be news to the king, who is now apparently an ethnic minority. As Georgina Sturge, a former statistician at the House of Commons Library and the author of Bad Data, pointed out, the report assumes that we will have one hundred years of migration flows which happen to be identical to the ones we've had since 2021. It also relies on claims about the ethnic composition of non-EU migration being 13% white which don't make sense and can't be replicated. "When I run the numbers," she concluded, "I can't get to 13%."

This is hardly surprising, because the research is not meant to stand up. It is meant to do what it has done: be featured in a broadsheet newspaper and create a sense of emergency, which authorises previously unthinkable solutions.

These guys do not hate London because it is ugly. They hate it because it is beautiful. They hate it because it shows a different way of doing things, in which Britain could become a far more successful country than it currently is. They hate it specifically because it is comfortable with itself - permissive, accepting, unpredictable, vivacious, alive.

London is not distinct from the rest of the country. In fact, you can see its values in cities and towns all over this island. You see it in gay couples who now increasingly hold hands confidently in public, down the high street as well as the gay district, and the manner in which we've stopped noticing that this is a thing. You see it in young women in hijabs who sit with racially mixed groups of friends, many of whom are dressed more provocatively. You see it in a Muslim mayor who looks happy, relaxed and supportive at a gay pride march. You see it in the patchwork, which now rests over countless metropolitan centres in this country, and the way that every day seems to bring a startling new element to its design.

Nor is London distinct from its British identity. The specific combination of attributes it possesses are an outgrowth of the British personality. It is steeped in its past and yet alive to the present. It largely ignores granular fashion trends in favour of expressions of personal authenticity. It celebrates the architectural combination of old and new. It has an unexpected egalitarianism that exists regardless of, or perhaps because of, the fundamentally unequal nature of the society. It categorises urban sprawl through the mental projection of villages with links to historic communities. It trades in irony, sarcasm and jaded commentary. Only Britain could have made London. Its openness is not a rejection of the national personality, but a reflection of it.

They will never understand why London works, or how absurd they look trying to claim otherwise while shaking their security-tagged instant coffee tin at passers by. Nor will they ever succeed in dismantling it.

It's bigger than they are. It hasn't even noticed them.

Odds and Sods

My column in the i newspaper this week was on the war in Iran, which was a fucking disaster no matter how much anyone tries to claim otherwise. We put out a Q&A edition of Origin Story this week, exclusively for Patreons. We're already knee deep in research for the next season, so now's a good time to support us if you like our work over there. You can also hear our old live episode on Goodwin's last book here. We weren't any nicer there than I have been in this article.

This week I watched Predator: Killer of Killers, which is on the Disney channel. Look, I don't know how this happened. I don't know how - out of nowhere - we ended up with a perfectly viable, creatively rich Predator universe, with fascinating snippets of lore, the confidence to move on from the past, and an infinite variety of stories to tell. But somehow it's real. I went into this expecting very little. I got beautiful animation, gloriously splattery action, a script with no fat on it whatsoever, and genuinely new and exciting avenues of Predator storytelling. I don't understand. But by Christ I'm fucking happy about it.

See you next week.