A road to nowhere book2/27/2023 ![]() ![]() In The Road to Somewhere he returns to this most vexed terrain, picking his way through nettles and thorns that might deter thinner-skinned writers. Given all that, and whatever other objections Goodhart’s new book might provoke, few could call it irrelevant or untimely. Six full years would pass before Gordon Brown would be overheard describing Gillian Duffy as a “bigoted woman”, because she had asked about the arrivals from eastern Europe who she felt were transforming her native Rochdale. ![]() In 2004, the Polish plumber and the Czech barista were in Britain’s future rather than its present. What is even more striking in retrospect is that Goodhart made his case before the huge wave of migration that so reshaped British politics: the post-2004 influx of an estimated 1.5 million newcomers from eastern Europe. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian As he wrote, “To put it bluntly – most of us prefer our own kind.”ĭavid Goodhart takes place in a roundtable debate on immigration at the Conservative party conference in Birmingham, 2014. Goodhart offered copious data to show that people bridled at subsidising the housing, education or welfare benefits of those whose roots in the society were shallow. But in the highly mixed societies of today, such fellow-feeling was strained. He wrote that in the homogenous societies of old that was never a problem: citizens felt the mutual obligation of kinship. Goodhart said that for citizens willingly to hand some of their hard-earned cash to others via their taxes, they needed to feel a basic level of affinity with those others. In “ Too Diverse?”, he argued that there was a trade-off between increased diversity, through mass immigration, and social solidarity, in the form of the welfare state. In 2004, he wrote an essay for Prospect magazine, which he both founded and edited, that earned rapid notoriety and saw him branded a “liberal Powellite”. For many on the liberal left, David Goodhart became persona non grata more than a decade ago. F orget the title, there will be plenty of people – Guardian readers among them – who’ll take one look at this book and refuse to get past the author’s name. ![]()
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