The debate over 'small boats' is a proxy (BEN STANSALL/AFP via Getty Images)

During a recent holiday in the East of England, I followed a sign through a farm gate offering raspberries for sale. It turned out to be a table in an empty farm outbuilding, with punnets of raspberries, a weighing scale, and an old ice-cream box full of loose change.
If you live at the periphery of a large English city, you’d be forgiven for thinking that no one does honesty boxes anymore. Even where I live, at the outer edge of the capital’s blast radius, a relatively high-trust English society is on its way to a markedly more Londonesque state of atomisation. A little town that until just recently recorded a handful of crimes every year now has county-lines graffiti in its alleyways, a persistent shoplifting problem and, as of late, a bevy of hard-eyed young women who hang about in the market square and get into men’s cars. Local police, if they ever put in an appearance, seem either unable or unwilling to do anything.
Why my town and not one in Norfolk? What is the difference between these two areas, such that in one the default is to trust strangers, and in the other to view them with increasing suspicion? The most obvious answer is also an uncomfortable one by modern moral standards: population turnover. While rural Norfolk doesn’t change very fast, my town has more or less doubled in size in a decade, largely swelled by people forced out by the capital’s ever-intensifying competition for housing.
I’m not suggesting no one should ever move house. But when a lot of people do in a short period of time, how does it affect the social fabric? A stable and tight-knit community isn’t sufficient to deliver high levels of interpersonal trust, but it’s probably necessary. A fluctuating community, by contrast, with a large proportion of individuals who don’t (or don’t yet) have longstanding ties to the area and one another, is unlikely to be one in which people leave their doors unlocked, or sell raspberries via honesty box.
Why is London pricing families out at this rate? It’s not just that the capital’s outsized cultural and economic draw sucks in workers from all over the country. Our national birth rate is well below replacement, and has been since 1973. But Britain’s population is still growing rapidly: it is just that 60% of this growth is via immigration, which has increased Britain’s foreign-born resident population from 4.6 million in 2001 to 10 million in 2021.
Almost a third of that immigration has been into the capital, which is now the most ethnically diverse part of Britain. In respectable society, this is framed as a feature rather than a bug: the Mayor of London, for example, is fond of telling us that “Diversity is our strength”. The consensus across government, media, NGOs and the urban educated classes is that ongoing high immigration is good, and anyone who disagrees is morally beyond the pale. And for beneficiaries of the resulting economic growth, this must seem self-evident. London is wealthier than my town, which is wealthier than rural Norfolk. Who gives a stuff about honesty boxes?
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