Life in Immigration Town - Slough Revisited

‘Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough! It isn't fit for humans now’

John Betjeman, Slough, (1937)

John Betjeman later regretted his poem about Slough, which wasn’t a comment on the people, but a reaction against banal petit-bourgeois suburban modernity, the reality of trading estates, ‘air conditioned, bright canteens’, and wives who ‘frizz out peroxide hair’.

In 2017, Slough’s modern reality is mass immigration, renewed concern that Slough is no longer a desirable place to live for either the white indigenous community, or the foreign-born residents from the first waves of immigration decades ago.

Panorama recently aired ‘Life in Immigration Town’, an investigation of Slough’s rising immigration levels. Slough is a microcosm of the national immigration debate, and Panorama had all the ingredients to bring it into useful and sharp focus. Unfortunately, they failed to do so. The final line of the program refers to changes to the town over a decade and concludes, ‘some think, whatever the benefits of immigration, that’s too high a price to pay.’

This ought to be, not the final line, but the entry point into genuine debate. Immigration has made Slough an economic success story. The choice Slough’s residents need to make is just the one that the programme ends with, but fails to really illuminate, the choice between economic benefit and resisting cultural change. This is the hard question that the British people need to answer, the question that isn’t being asked. Which do we want?

The Brexit referendum, and the Trump election, highlighted that honest debate about immigration has been stifled. Ordinary people expressing reasonable concerns are unreasonably labelled xenophobes and racists. Equally however, there is a gulf between the reality of immigration versus common misperceptions, as Scott Blinder’s paper on ‘Imagined Immigration’ illustrates.

Immigration is often portrayed as economically damaging to established communities, by driving down wages, taking jobs from the indigenous population, and over-stretching social services, schools, healthcare and so on. As Panorama highlighted, Slough demonstrates the inaccuracy of those interpretations, but interviews with concerned residents also show how people can choose to live in differently constituted communities, without expressing anti-foreign or racist sentiments.

So, can Slough be the point of entry into the debate everyone agrees needs to take place? I think it can.

Few dispute that immigration has contributed to economic success in Slough. The town has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country, just 1.4%. Slough also exposes the myth that immigrants drive down wages by working for low pay. At £558 per week, Slough has one of the highest average wages in the country. As a local business owner puts it, paying low wages is pointless, because workers simply leave for a better paid job once they’ve acquired a set of skills. A Polish stone-mason illustrates that immigrant workers are neither necessarily low-paid, nor are they prepared to be victims. ‘I have 20 year’s experience,’ he said, ‘I can get a job anywhere’. Other immigrant workers expressed similar sentiments, ‘if they don’t want us here, we’ll work elsewhere.’

Of course, not everyone agrees. One interviewee claims that the indigenous population ‘lose their jobs to people from Europe’, but the evidence would suggest this is not the case. Local businesses say they are always looking for new staff and that, without immigration, they would have no way of filling their vacancies. This mirrors national concerns from business, and from services such as the NHS, who have seen a fall of up to 90% in essential nursing applications from EU applicants.

Others complain that immigration stretches local services to breaking point. Such views are not restricted to white people born in the UK. An interviewee who arrived from the West Indies several decades ago expressed similar concerns over local service provision and, certainly, there is a housing shortage in Slough. On the other hand, one local primary school explained how their school had been on the brink of physical collapse and closure a decade ago. Immigration-fuelled economic growth in Slough has led to increased funding, and the school is now in good shape. The evidence certainly does not support the view expressed by one Slough resident, that when immigration ‘overcomes the whole town, the town closes down.’ Overall, the opposite is the case, Slough has boomed in the last decade.

Of course, housing shortages are a long-term problem right across the country, regardless of immigration levels. A lack of policy to address the issue by successive governments, and a range of other factors are more relevant. Equally, local services have been put under pressure by years of government austerity measures. Again, lower immigration is not really the key problem here.

Surely, the argument goes, if immigrant numbers were reduced, that leaves fewer people to stretch the resources of local services, right? Perhaps, but this is a simplistic argument. Services are paid for through taxation. Reduce immigration, and the tax-take is reduced, leaving less money to pay for services for those remaining. Working migrants make a ‘profit’ for the country. Indeed, migrant workers are more likely to be working than the indigenous population. It is unlikely than anyone benefits from reducing that profit. If a town like Slough grows economically and by population, government ought to allocate greater resources, but it hasn’t, and immigration is a useful smokescreen for such failures.

Another common national concern is the failure of immigrants to speak English. Local primary schools in Slough regularly take in non-English-speaking pupils, yet as one school told Panorama, by the time they leave they are all fluent in written and spoken English. A Spanish boy explained how he spoke barely a word of English when he arrived a year previously, yet he’s now about to sit his GCSEs. Some sections of the media have complained that immigrant communities across the country have levels of non-English speaking which are too high. However, what is not clear is the degree to which this refers predominantly to a traditional problem among older immigrants, and is far less a concern among modern and younger immigrant arrivals. No-one appeared to be concerned about a lack of language skills in Slough.

So, if Slough is such a success, what are local people complaining about? Reaction to the Panorama program in local newspapers suggest that Slough is a happier place than perhaps the program suggests.

The evidence from Panorama shows that complaints about the increase in immigration are not restricted to the white indigenous community. Black and Asian interviewees from previous waves of immigration stated similar concerns. Over 50% of the town voted for Brexit. In a town where the white indigenous British population is just 34%, presumably a lot of other people also wanted to leave the EU.

In fact, Panorama made the answer to this question quite clear. As one resident put it, he ‘felt awful to be in a minority in my own little world.’

An elderly couple preparing to leave Slough for relocation to Norfolk said they simply wanted to live in a place more reminiscent of their youth, one which represents a racial and cultural mix with which they are familiar and comfortable.

Is this racist? I don’t think so. As the couple were keen to stress, ‘if others are happy with the town as it is, fair enough’. They had no issue with individual people, regardless of race or culture, but wanted to live in a community that reflected their chosen identity. Many non-white residents felt the same, that the ‘new’ generation of immigrants were somehow culturally different to themselves. It is ironic, they agreed, that the kind of ‘cultural fit’ comments they made about immigrants from Poland and Romania were very similar to comments aimed at themselves some decades ago. Yet still, they were not comfortable with ‘new’ immigration. Clearly, resistance to cultural change is not a white trait, it is a human condition.

Many, including myself, have no problem with such issues, but I sympathise with those who say that, ironically, so-called ‘liberals’ have become intolerant, labelling those who have different views as ‘racists’. So, once the unlikely claim that only Polish bread is available in Slough, and that Kingsmill can no longer be bought is set aside, how should the debate proceed?

I suggest the issue is not really one of race or colour, as demonstrated by the antipathy to new immigration expressed by UK citizens of Slough, born outside of the UK and who migrated here decades ago. The issue is modernity, as it was for John Betjeman in the 1930s. Immigration has brought economic success to Slough, it is essential to local businesses, as it is across the country, and to services such as the NHS. Yet in its wake comes change. Betjeman hated the changes to Slough in the face of modern trends which brought benefit to the town. In their different ways, white indigenous residents of Slough, and West Indian and Asian immigrants from decades ago, are also resistant to the cultural changes inherent with new waves of immigration, regardless of the benefits. The truth is that Slough has been a multi-culture for many decades. The great majority of Slough’s residents have never known a homogeneous culture.

Slough is not alone in agonising over immigration, even in the face of national success, as a recent report on the popularity of the anti-Islamic politician Geert Wilders points out:

'The Netherlands is, after all, just about the best country in the world — rich, peaceful, stable, picturesque, friendly. A U.N. report recently concluded that Dutch children are, by a long shot, the happiest in the world — first in education, material well-being, and “behavior and risks” (smoking, drinking, obesity, teenage pregnancy); fourth in “housing and environment”; and fifth in “health and safety.” Whatever troubles the Dutch have are, by definition, first-world problems. Of course, Wilders is the living proof that prosperity doesn’t necessarily produce contentment — or even that contentment doesn’t produce contentment.'

I suggest that we accept that discomfort with cultural change is not racist, but a human characteristic which transcends racial difference. The apparent evidence that immigration is economically beneficial can be tested, using Slough as a template. It is essential that we get beyond the damaging binary of ‘liberal elites’ versus ‘xenophobes’. Let’s stop suggesting that immigrants are a ‘threat’, or that concerns about immigration are racist. Let’s accept that the changes that come with modernity are not easy. The decision to reduce immigration or not probably comes down to a choice between economic benefit, and the right of people to resist cultural change in their communities.

It’s unlikely we can have both, so which do we want?