Long past caring what liberal metropolitan opinion thinks, Walden writes with passion and eloquence about how vast an experiment the current unprecedented level of immigration into Britain is proving. The working-class neighbourhood of his childhood — from which he escaped by winning a place to Latymer Upper (when it was still free) and then to Cambridge — is but one of many changed utterly by immigration. Whatever else they may be, such neighbourhoods have not become safer places. Yet, if any accuse Walden of writing a racist tract, then they have either not read it properly or are falling back on the increasingly tired reflex of trying to shut down a debate by screaming ‘racism’ at anyone whose arguments affront their unquestioning faith that all will be well, come one, come five million.
A cultured and well-travelled commentator, Walden is not so blinkered as to pretend that immigration has been entirely to this country’s detriment. Frankly, many of the new arrivals show up the limitations of the natives. Nor does he suggest that Britain’s problems can be primarily attributed to those seeking a better life here. If anything, it is the sheer variety of his targets that makes this book such a depressing read. Some modern horrors richly deserve — and receive — Walden’s bazooka treatment. At other times, though, he could benefit from giving his trigger finger a rest. His somewhat tasteless attack, for instance, on David Cameron (a Princess Diana clone who keeps going on about his disabled son) seems disproportionate and may partly reflect his loathing for those he identifies as belonging to the media class he so effectively pilloried in his previous book The New Elites.
Although he attempts to provide a balanced assessment of the state of the nation, Walden’s problem is that his prose is far sharper when he is admonishing than when he is praising. Despite many trenchant observations, powers of castigation that work effectively in newspaper-length articles become wearisome in a polemic of book length. Indeed, like being forced to endure relentless baiting by triumphalist Australians about how rubbish we Poms are at sport (and therefore at everything), the reaction produced is not assent but sullen resentment. Rather than thanking George Walden for suggesting there may be no glittering future in Britain for middling income sorts like this reviewer, one feels almost duty bound to stick it out regardless, almost to spite such doom-mongering. No problem was ever solved by running away. If this was the response the author secretly hoped to engender, then he really is as clever as billed.
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