IS OUR MIGRATION MODEL BROKEN?

Rapid demographic change has transformed London. David Goodhart asks whether its effects have turned the capital into a place that isn't working anymore

- David Goodhart is a journalist and author who works at the Policy Exchange think tank

In sunnier times our great capital city regarded itself as a model for the country that it was, sometimes reluctantly, attached to. Go back 25 years and London was booming: a global centre of finance and the knowledge economy, sucking people in from the rest of the UK and abroad as the population bounced back from a low of 6.6 million in 1981, on the way to today’s nine million.

It had some of the problems typical of any major metropolitan centre, but starting in the 2000s London schools — driven partly by migrant ambition — began out-performing the rest of the country, its globally rated universities expanded fast, serious national politicians vied to occupy its newly empowered mayor's office and the skyline was transformed by visionary architects.

Nowhere was the London turnaround better symbolised than by Islington, home to Tony Blair before he moved to No 10 in 1997. In the 1970s Islington was still considered a borderline slum area. When Sainsbury's built its supermarket near Angel in the early 1980s, it demanded a car park so that richer customers could drive in from outside the area to shop.

When I moved there in the 1990s it had become a by-word for gentrification. At the same time, Islington’s famous football club, Arsenal, was being transformed by a Frenchman, a symbol of the internationalisation of the new Premier League in which London clubs have always played a disproportionate role.

London was driving the national economy and was regarded by most of the political and media class as a beacon of openness and opportunity for the rest of the country.

How times change. When it was recently estimated, in a report by Professor Matt Goodwin, that the white British population will become a minority in the UK in 2060, I heard nobody saying “rapid demographic change is nothing to worry about, just look at London”.