by a man who came from somewhere else, did it properly, and is furious watching the rules change for everyone behind him
I was not born here. I want to say that first, plainly, because everything I’m about to say only means anything once you know it. I came to England as an immigrant, with a suitcase and an accent and absolutely no automatic claim to anything, and I understood, the moment I stepped off whatever it was I stepped off, that Britain owed me nothing. It was up to me to earn my place in it. So I did. I learned the rules nobody writes down, the queue, the apology when someone else bumps you, the exact tone of voice a Sunday roast requires. I learned to love a wet Tuesday in a Hampshire village the way the locals do, quietly, without needing to explain why. I did not come here to remake this country into a copy of the one I’d left. I came here because this one, with its wonky church spires and its warm beer and its magnificent, maddening politeness, was worth becoming part of.
That is what integration actually means, and I am living, walking proof that it is possible, because I did it, and I would do it again tomorrow.
Which is exactly why what I am watching happen now makes me so angry I can barely keep my hands steady on this keyboard.
I did the work. I earned it. And I am watching a lot of people arrive in the country now who have no interest whatsoever in doing the same, who bring their old grievances and their old hatreds with them fully intact, who carve out corners of British cities and simply refuse to leave those corners, culturally speaking, ever again. I watch neighbourhoods I used to walk through as a young man, neighbourhoods that made me fall in love with this country in the first place, turn into places where English is the second language on the shop signs and English manners are treated as something quaint and disposable. And when I say this out loud, when I, an immigrant, dare to point out that something has gone badly wrong, I am the one accused of prejudice. Me. The man who actually did the thing they refuse to do.
That is what the anger is, if you want to know. It is not resentment of outsiders, because I was one, and still am one in some quiet corner of myself that never fully left. It is fury at the unfairness of it. Fury that the effort I made, the respect I showed, the years I spent learning to love this country properly instead of simply occupying space in it, is being treated as optional for everyone who’s come after me. Fury that the England I fell in love with, the quiet one, the decent one, the one with hedgerows and dry stone walls and old men walking spaniels who say good morning to strangers out of pure instinct, is being allowed to erode while the people meant to protect it stand around debating whether it’s rude to mention it. Shame on you!
I love the English countryside with an intensity that still surprises me, twenty-odd years on, whenever the mist sits low over a field at seven in the morning and I remember, all over again, why I stayed. I love the deep, embarrassed decency of the ordinary English person, not the drunks stumbling off a ferry in Magaluf, but the real ones, the ones who would rather chew glass than tell you how they truly feel and would still give you their coat without being asked. That England exists. I have lived inside it. I know precisely what it costs to become worthy of it. And I am not going to stand here quietly while people who have never once tried to earn it are handed it for free, and while the country itself is too polite, even now, to ask them to.
Somebody has to be angry about this, because grief alone isn’t going to save it. I am angry. And I am not sorry.
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