From high trust rural Yorkshire to 3rd world Londonistan

I was down in London yesterday, a little off the beaten path. After four years of living in the Yorkshire countryside, you realise how much you take a high trust society for granted. You don't have to do a safety assessment before taking your phone out. You can sit on a street bench without assessing who's around you. But in London, the moment you step off the tube you really need your wits about you. 

London always has an exciting buzz to it, and there's always been an underlying sense of danger to the place. That's part of its appeal and what makes it attractive to young people. There's a sense of adventure. But at the same time, there a sense that the peace is fragile. Wait around long enough and something will kick off. Multiculturalism isn't "melting pot". There isn't a sense of mutual affinity or cultural commonality. You're very much aware that you're among foreigners and alien cultures. 

That too, I suppose, has been part of London's appeal. There is a certain novelty to it, and a break from the humdrum and sameness of provincial life. But that's in the knowledge there is somewhere to retreat to at the end of the day, where cultural norms resume, and you can make certain basic assumptions about personal safety. ie. that people who look like you, or members of your family probably aren't going to mug you or stab you, and there are shared values in the public sphere. This is what we mean by community cohesion. This is the only basis for any sense of belonging. 

As such, London is a foreign country. I have no affinity with the people I'm surrounded by. There's barely a common language now. You're on high alert the whole time, and on a subconscious level, it's exhausting. There's tired, and then there's London tired.

Humans can become accustomed to this, and even learn to appreciate it. Even thrive off it. It creates its own culture. It's not surprising that many wouldn't have it any other way, and don't see a problem with it. It's immersive, and you soon adapt. Every day brings something different. 

For me, as a towering chap, I can take much of it in my stride. I'm generally not in danger. I would think very differently, though, as a single white female. That subconscious sense that danger is everywhere must be draining. More so as a parent. I'm not sure I would want offspring to have to run the gauntlet of gangs of feral black youths. I wouldn't want to stay there.

And that's the thing about a high trust society. Life may not be as exciting, but you can take certain things for granted, and there are far fewer basic things to have to worry about. You don't have to reserve mental resources to running a personal safety programme. You don't have to double check your car is locked and shut your windows at night. You can relax in the public realm, and take your eye off your kids. 

I know there's probably Londoners reading this and chuckling to themselves. I suppose when you're immersed in it, you stop realising the habitual routines you go through, and you've seen enough to know when you're safe, but even for them, whether they admit it or not, there's side streets they think twice about going down. Districts they won't walk through at night. Parks they walk around rather than through. They've just learned to manage the dangers. 

Underpinning all this, though, is the fact that you're only ever one 999 call from help. In central London, you won't wait long for the police to show up, and notwithstanding the current state of the Met, they still have the authority of the state and the monopoly on violence. That's the only reason it all works. But what happens when the police are outnumbered? What happens when immigrant communities elect to ignore them and directly challenge their authority? What happens when they can determine their own law of the street? In some places that tipping point is already reached. 

And what happens, when there's nowhere to retreat to at the end of the day? What happens, when there's nowhere to move away to? What happens when that basic trust is nowhere to be found? What happens when there is no clear majority capable of asserting a dominant rule of law? What happens when warring minorities compete for control of the streets and nobody can restore order?

It's easy to develop a fortress mentality when you spend much of your time on social media, exposed to a steady stream of violent imagery from the capital, and there's a lot of histrionics around election time about crime and public safety. We all know it's not as bad it seems. But all the same, there are signals that we cannot afford to ignore. The shift in London demographics tells its own story. White flight from London tells us that people crave a sense of safety, identity and belonging. It's fundamental to family and community. There is no community without trust in the public sphere. 

The danger now is that there is nothing of our own culture left in London for immigrants to integrate into. It's increasingly alien and foreign, and may of our other cities are going the same way. How then can immigrants learn from us to become part of us? Integration with current rates of immigration is simply impossible. How then can there be a sense of national identity when there is so little cultural commonality between county and conurb, country and capital? How can we ever be a functioning society? At what point does peaceful coexistence become an impossibility? This doesn't end well.

Early reactions to this post have pointed out that other towns have their own problems, not least high crime "white trash" ghettos. I don't dispute that. But they are easier problems to resolve. Crack down on that kind of crime and there's immediate public backing. But any time the police try to get on top of machete crime in London, the race grifters are immediately out in force protesting institutional racism. There's nothing like the same challenges, and the police can generally do their jobs.

When it comes to high crime provincial towns, very often you have a problem with Albanian gang crime, drugs and the inherent social problems that go with high unemployment and an easily gamed welfare system, leading to high welfare dependency. These are fixable problems. Unchecked immigration, however, creates problems of its own. 

In 2022 we saw outbreaks of unrest between Hindu nationalists and Muslims. There is zero chance of building good community relations or high trust in those circumstances, and policing it is just as much a refereeing job. It's closer to policing Belfast suburbs during the troubles. That's the true nature of the sectarianism that goes with multiculturalism. You would hope we would have learned.

The problems are just as acute, if not more so, in places like Leicester, but as we've seen from the Israel-Gaza conflict, these spillovers can be deadly. We're now seeing Jews hunted by Arab-speaking degenerates in broad daylight. The bottom line is that if you import the Third World, then you also import their tribal Third World problems. For the moment, we are (just) able to contain it, but for how much longer? And what happens if a more serious conflict kicks off, say between India and Pakistan?

The reason we're losing our cities is that anybody sane doesn't want to live among it when it does kick off. Those with the means to leave are leaving, and what's left are ethnic enclaves and ghettos where the state is unable to exert its own authority. Urban Balkanisation is here and now.

We're then dealing with immigrant communities who will not integrate (because there's nothing to integrate into) and couldn't if they wanted to, because their native culture is too far offset from European high-trust norms.

This isn't a case of a country boy being bewildered by London. I've had plenty of experience of the grimier bits of London, and it's noticeably worse in recent years. I've lived in the "diverse" areas of Leeds, Bradford and Bristol, and I've seen the crime for myself. I've experienced it plenty of times. There was a time when terraced houses didn't have bars on the windows, but now it's common enough to be unremarkable. 

This didn't happen overnight. Our cities became more crowded, more hostile, more transient, and more alien, making the bonds that make community possible unlikely. This certainly no environment to raise kids if you want to keep them on the straight and narrow. 

Community isn't council-sponsored diversity murals. It cannot be manufactured by bureaucrats. There has to be a sense of belonging, and a sense of commonality. That can't happen when there isn't even a common language. And without community, a district is just a dormitory. You can't even call it multiculturalism because there's no culture at all. Without a moratorium on immigration, our cities will become urban wastelands and occupied territories.