THE NEXT GREAT EXODUS

Simon Heifer on the growing phenomenon of English emigration from England

IF you have read Ayn Rand's objectivist epic Atlas Shrugged, you will remember the novel's compelling central conceit: America has fallen victim to a variant of communism. Some businesses, it is decided, are becoming too successful and their shareholders too rich. A Fair Shares Law is implemented to make sure that those who cannot prosper by their own efforts do so thanks to the efforts of others. (One of Miss Rand's most celebrated apergus was that the difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian state is a matter of time') A character in the novel, John Galt, has more to lose from this than most. He has discovered the secret of perpetual motion, and stands to make an unimaginable fortune. He is determined not to be enslaved by indolent, cowardly mediocrities, and so he disappears and sets up a community in the Rockies. He invites to live with him all the other entrepreneurs, risk-takers and toilers who create America's wealth; they 'disappear' too. America rapidly crashes to a halt. Galt, who has shown that the will of individuals must always be more powerful than that of the state, becomes the man who stopped the motor of the world'. The moral, of course, is that it is an illiberal, ignorant, thoughtless government that has stopped that motor. In the end, Galt returns on his own terms. The experiment is proved to have failed, and order is restored.

Miss Rand herself had been part of a similar sort of emigration: she had fled Russia after the 1917 revolution, along with many others from the ruling class or intellectual elite. The dark ages that fell upon that county, and lasted for decades, were exacerbated by the loss of so many talented people. In a minor way, we had a similar phenomenon here in the 1970s: the so-called 'brain drain', when many of great talent and earning potential went abroad — often, like Miss Rand, to America — to avoid a top tax-rate of 83 per cent and to escape a country where innovation and enterprise seemed all but impossible.

Those who remember that time might have noticed something familiar of late. We may not have the high taxes, but there is widespread discontent with the way the country is governed, and a lack of belief that any

one can ever put it right. A few years ago the most popular middle-class dinner-party conversation concerned property prices. Now it is about the desire that more and more people have to get out of England. Those who create the country's wealth — who form its opinions and shape its non-governmental institutions — are feeling increasingly alienated. The past used to be the foreign county where they did things differently. Now many of us find, to our horror, that the foreign country is the present, and that the England we knew is not the England we live in. The place is becoming increasingly dangerous and uncongenial. Maybe the time has come, if not to seek our fortune elsewhere, at least to consolidate it there.

The world is in a convulsion of mass emi gration. Europe, for the moment, is the prime target. Waves of people seeking a better economic future are coming north from Africa, west from Central Asia, or even just making the comparatively short hop from the other side of what used to be the Iron Curtain. A substantial proportion of them end up on this already cramped and crowded island. Many are refused permanent admission, on the grounds that they have entered illegally and are not fleeing persecution. However, the government is lax about expelling them. Of the 150,0(X) such cases who have arrived in little over the last year, 120,000 who were deemed to have no right to be here are still to board the plane home. Thus, by stealth, a mass immigration is well under way. The question is: will the indigenous population absorb it, and the changes to life and culture it will bring; or will the British, too, start to get on the move?

Given the bureaucratic obsession in this country for collecting statistics, one crucial figure is, surprisingly, hard to find. No one seems to know how many people in Britain already own or have access to a second home abroad. Casual inquiries raise some interesting, if anecdotal, observations. Knight Frank, one of the country's leading estate agencies, with a big overseas property business, estimates that interest among Britons in foreign properties has doubled in the last five years. Others in business reckon that there are already formidable numbers of Brits abroad. A consensus is hard to find, but some say that there are as many as half-a-million in France, 350,000 in Spain, and perhaps 100,000 in Florida alone.

Such conversations trigger a host of further anecdotes. Those seeking homes overseas are noticeably younger than they used to be: this is no longer a business aimed at retirement boltholes. They are no longer simply the traditionally monied classes. They are not people who wish to spend just the odd weekend and perhaps one month a year there. Thanks to cheaper air travel, they might go there every other weekend. Thanks to the Internet and superior telecommunications, some might work from their foreign outposts some of the time, most of the time or all of the time. And many of them, when buying, say that they have had enough of living here. While Europe is popular — more space, better food, better weather, yet proximity to 'home' — America is becoming an increasingly attractive destination. This is not least because those who have visited many of its cities recently are impressed by how safe they are compared with our own, how clean everything is, and how easy it is to get around.

The cheapness of property in charming parts of the near-Continent also has an incentive effect on would-be migrants. As one of Knight Frank's spokesmen put it, 'Ten years ago, people had a small place in London and a bigger house in the country. Now you find that they've sold in the country, bought a larger place in London and have a house abroad.' With ten-bedroom manor houses in spacious grounds in Brittany and Normandy going routinely for about £250,000, it is easy to see why. More and more people are making the leap. A friend of mine bought a house abroad two years ago for the odd holiday and weekend, and now seems to spend about a third of the year there. Another couple I know have just bought in Provence, with a view to spending as much time there as possible: the wife doubts she will want to come back once she moves in, on the grounds that Britain has become so dirty, dangerous and disgusting.

Nor is the potential exodus confined to white-collar workers. My builder, who routinely works six or seven days a week so that he can take his wife to Australia for six weeks in the winter, now so despairs of this country that he is looking to buy in Brittany. Infected by this pessimism and wanderlust, I can begin to imagine having a permanent home outside England. I suspect that I would have to be in the sort of horrible predicament faced by the white farmers of Zimbabwe before I actually tried to persuade my wife that we ought to go. Many others seem to need far less persuasion.

That was not always the case. Something is happening in Britain that happened in America in the 1960s and 1970s: whole areas of cities are being surrendered to an underclass. In London, although we have yet to see Mayfair. Belgravia or Chelsea taken over by menacing Albanian 'illegals', residents of premium areas are banding together to hire private security patrols, and people are afraid to wear their Rolexes out of doors. Even in the most salubrious streets, few relish going for a walk after nightfall. In America, the authorities — by a policy of zero tolerance — have been largely successful in reclaiming the streets from the criminal. Here, there has been no effort to do so, and there is unlikely to be one. And it is not just the inhabitants of cities who rail against the ineffectualness of politicians and the law in protecting them. Country people, as was shown in the Tony Martin case (where a Norfolk farmer shot a gypsy burglar), feel that they are almost entirely unpoliced and unprotected, and that the law's main concern is not with the victim.

Crime is just one symptom of the problem. Unlike in the 1970s, the root causes of the dissatisfaction are not financial. They stem from all the things about which one reads daily in the newspapers, and for which the government is now being held increasingly to blame. Also, the dissatisfaction is not confined to the native population: many who have migrated here since the war, and have worked hard and honestly to establish themselves, share the view that the country is going to the dogs. The malaise cuts across classes, races and regions. At a time when essential public and social services seem not to be guaranteed even for the most vulnerable — such as the sick and the elderly — there is widespread annoyance at the millions being spent on benefits for illegal immigrants. Schools are perceived to be failing, after years of promised improvements. The transport system compares abominably with other First World countries. Our agricul

ture has been decimated, mainly thanks to governmental stupidity and carelessness. Unfortunately for the government, we now have a well-travelled population who see how things are in other countries, and who are starting to wonder why on earth they cannot be like that here.

The inevitable effect of this institutionalised disappointment is a disengagement from the political process as part of a general disengagement from society. The turnout at the last general election was, at 59 per cent, the lowest since the introduction of universal adult suffrage. The calibre of those wishing to participate in government, whether at national or local level, is (with certain honourable exceptions) pitiful. Politics no longer holds any appeal for those who traditionally dominated it. The middle classes, who are the most vociferous complainants about rising crime, avoid jury service if they can. A concept of civic duty is not yet entirely absent, but it is fast evaporating. A largely corrupt central government, whose leader openly tolerates lying and graft, has set an example of rottenness that trickles down through society. That, and an almost total absence of national pride, forces people to reconsider their commitment to such a community.

One almost begins to wonder whether the failure of the government to get to grips with any of these problems is deliberate. One is reminded of William Hague's much-criticised (and much misunderstood) 'foreign land' speech of just over a year ago, in which he suggested that we were now being ruled in a way that was entirely alien to us. This assertion was undoubtedly true, and it seemed all part of 'the project' to nationalise attitudes in this country in accordance with those held by senior members of the government. Also, Mr Blair's commitment to the great European adventure is certainly not hindered by his helping to create a climate in which many Britons are happy to go and live in Provence, Umbria or on the Costa del Sol. There can be no doubt that the creation of a European Union has made it easier for people to take the option of living abroad, whether permanently or part-time; but ease is not necessarily what encourages them to do so.

Part of the process of the Briton's disengagement from Britain is, as Mr Hague hinted, to make him feel like a foreigner in his own country. We saw another magnificent example of this the other week, in the absurd remarks of Gavyn Davies, the chairman of the board of governors of the BBC, about white, middle-class people and their so-called attempt to 'hijack' the Corpora tion's output. New Labour's constant rhetoric of multiculturalism — in a country where 95 per cent of people are white and 96 per cent Christian — is designed to exacerbate the feeling of alienation by undermining the old certainties that any established nation and its people ought to be able to take for granted. The grand temple of this ethos was, of course, the Dome, which had no palpable relevance to Britain.

That should have been no surprise. The Blair government is probably the most antiBritish and certainly the most anti-English in history. For much of its duration there has been no feasible opposition, though that might be changing. It has set about vandalising much that we used to take for granted in our constitution and our lives. The Queen is treated as a troublesome museum-piece, the House of Lords is stripped of expertise and stuffed with cronies of the Prime Minister, the House of Commons is treated as a rubberstamp, the civil service is demoralised and humiliated. No wonder the public increasingly find the whole idea of politics repellent.

We have recently had, too, an acceleration in the process of alienation with the unpopular decision to metricate our weights and measures, and the heavy-handed, illiberal and extreme decision to prosecute and punish those traders who prefer to stick to imperial measures. Although just one of many laws inflicted on us from Europe. it is one of the most noticeable, for it affects people's everyday lives. It removes from Britain an important part of its distinctiveness, and helps make elsewhere a less foreign place. It is all part of the torpedoing of what British culture remains; like the attempts to abolish fox-hunting, and the turning of rural Britain into a gigantic theme park punctuated by hideous and inappropriate housing developments.

In an age when many factors conspire to make mobility much more feasible than in the past, it might, of course, be coincidental to the state of the country that so many people wish to leave or have already left. After all, if there had been no exchange controls in the 1970s, if the Internet and satellite communications had existed. if what is now called the European Union had been in such an advanced state of cohesion, then millions more might have gone then. What is not in doubt is that many more have not just the means, but also the will, to leave Britain now. They already play no part in their country except for paying taxes. There may not be a John Galt, but the loss of a few hundred thousand more proto-John Gaits would be something this country could not afford, morally or culturally.

What is so frightening is that it could, now, be very easily accomplished. Anyone who imagines that the surrender of England by the English to a new wave of incomers is the stuff of fiction should note how simple it would be to effect, and how little interested our present rulers seem to be in preventing it. There is no reason why history's next great exodus should not be from here.

Simon Heifer writes for the Daily Mail.