It's not immigrants who don't 'integrate' with the rest of us - it's the elite

Amid all the acrimony surrounding Keir Starmer's recent remarks on immigration - a row that could follow him into retirement and beyond - there has been one little-examined area of agreement between the prime minister and his critics. “When people come to our country,” Starmer said, “they should also commit to integration.”

- Andy Beckett

You may believe that integration is not best achieved by government decree, yet in conversations about what sort of society Britain should be, it has long been generally accepted that integration is a good thing - not just for immigrants but for everyone.

Mixing, empathising and collaborating with people who aren’t like you has benefits, the argument goes, for individuals and the country as a whole. Perspectives are broadened. Inequalities are softened, at least a little. Lives are enriched, and feelings of loneliness and alienation are diminished. Who would want to live in a country without such social exchanges - in other words, in a segregated society?

Actually, it appears that many of us do. For centuries, this country has been synonymous with segregation - by class, education, manners, dress, accents, leisure habits and housing. Since the early 1980s, when Thatcherism began to erase the more integrated postwar Britain, these ancient divisions have been compounded by a further polarisation in incomes and between regions.

“The UK - England in particular - has some of the deepest spatial inequalities ... among the OECD countries,” noted the socioeconomic data website the Economics Observatory last year. Deep segregation also exists within cities, towns and villages. Last week, research published by the pollsters More in Common showed that 44% of Britons “say they sometimes feel like they are strangers to those around them”.