Dear Son, Let me tell you what immigration has done to this country

August 2007, UK Daily Mail

Last year, former Tory minister George Walden wrote a book about the future of life in Britain and why record numbers were emigrating. Taking the form of a letter from a father to his son, it provoked a massive, positive response from readers when it was serialised in the Daily Mail.

In the book, Guy and Catherine despaired at having to bring up their two children in an area that had been dramatically changed by mass immigration, where their children had become a minority in school and teachers struggled to deal with so many pupils who did not speak English ...

Since then, the couple have given up the battle and moved abroad to Canada ...

Walden observes that despite all the changes mass immigration has brought in Britain, there remains a conspiracy of silence that has stifled debate on one of the most important issues of our age.

Now, in this thought-provoking followup, Walden examines Guy and Catherine's new quality of life, using it as a mirror to reflect the dreadful state of Britain today.

Walden, who served as higher education minister in Margaret Thatcher's government, has been married to Sarah for 38 years and they have three grown-up children. The son to whom his letters are addressed is fictional, but the incidents affecting him and his wife are based on fact.

Dear Son,

It's getting on for ten months now since you and Catherine left for a new life in Canada. And we didn't get the impression, when we came to see you, that you've regretted your decision for a moment.

... it looks as though you got out just in time. Driving close to your old place in West London the other day, I saw a police notice asking for information about a young man who'd brandished a gun at an officer.

There is an atmosphere of suppressed - or outright - violence and disorder that makes me worry for the next generation ...

Often, it's the little incidents that are telling. Yesterday, your mother was on a bus when three girls aged between 16 and 18 tried to board in Ladbroke Grove ... The bus was held up for 20 minutes while the girls blocked the doors, laughing and screaming obscenities in their newly-acquired Essex accents.

The point is that during all this little drama, not a single one of the weary rush-hour passengers said a word. The great British public held hostage by a trio of sozzled teenage girls!

Toronto sounds safer, though it seems a hell of a way to go for a little peace of mind ...

Here, the country is not so much disintegrating as disaggregating. The Balkanisation of our lives is happening on a national scale.

Scotland's falling off the top, self-sealing ethnic communities are proliferating in the Midlands, and London's got its own thing going at the bottom.

We boast of our prosperity, but it's fragile and concentrated in the South East - an island within our island. Perhaps we'll have to get used to thinking of London and its environs as a kind of Hong Kong or an Italian city state ...

Imagine my astonishment when the Minister responsible, Liam Byrne, actually admitted recently that large-scale immigration has profoundly unsettled the country - and that it's the poorest communities that have suffered the most. The influx was overwhelming public services, schools, the NHS and housing, he said ...

Wherever you look, crazy systems have replaced our old prudent-minded approach ...

Politics or parenting, schools or Scotland, wherever you look, very little seems to be holding things together. People live side by side yet separately, in mental isolation, with their eyes fixed warily on one another.

When communities, races, classes and families become segregated to the degree they have, feelings of social solidarity erode.

Society ends up like a shattered windscreen: holding together by the grace of God, even though it's all cracked to hell, so no one can see ahead or have any idea where they are going.

Love to all, Dad

Adapted from Time to Emigrate? Letters From A Father by George Walden, published by Gibson Square.

BBC, November 2006

"Why write a book called “Time to Emigrate?” Because I’ve got three grown-up children, the book is about the future, and the future of life in London looks increasingly risky and pessimistic for millions of middle class families from teachers, nurses to taxi drivers that the only secure option is to emigrate. This is a book for my children and their children.

Compared to young families today my generation had it easy. I began life on an estate in Dagenham, a place you wouldn’t recognise now. There were no racial tensions in my day. I’m not opposed to some immigration, and know how we can all benefit. But what we’ve done is a massive gamble. Trevor Phillips says that if we don’t talk about the problems of integration honestly the tensions out there will increase. He’s right - but if you do, someone will call you a racist. For the sake of a bit of honesty I'm ready to risk it ..."

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