Kemi is RIGHT to put forward the Danish model
A counter-intuitive case for the Tory Leader
On Monday, Kemi Badenoch brought up the Danish model of ‘integration’ when discussing how the Tories would Tackle immigration.
Many anonymous accounts took to X to denounce this latest statement for reasons that are now well-trodden. The principle one of which is that ‘integration’ is undesirable. This is a case that the Dragon has made in these pages on many occasions.
There are 445,000 Chinese in Britain and it is remarkable how little anti-immigration sentiment they excite; especially when we compare them to Bangladeshis (644,000) and black Carribeans (623,000). Most people basically do not care at all about them being here. This is partly because they are much less likely to commit violent crime, and are less welfare dependent, but also because they do not generally attempt to integrate into wider society. There is only one East-Asian MP in Parliament (Alan Mak, one of Kemi’s colleagues) compared to 14 Pakistanis and 27 black British. In ‘the Footy’, the Nation’s Sport, there is only one prominent East Asian, Son Heung-Min, whilst the English national team is about half non-white.
Chinatown in Soho is a model for what ethnic minority communities would look like in a better Britain. You go there for slightly seedy services; dodgy duck and pancakes, ‘massages’ and women also get their waxes/nails done on the cheap. It’s existence is to the benefit of most Londoners, partly because the services are cheap but also because it’s a conservation area (Soho and Chinatown) which mandates that the streets are aesthetically different - balloons, Mandarin signs etc - miles apart from Blackstock Road where Victorian mixed use parades have been festooned with ‘Perfect Fried Chicken’, ‘Baba Naan’ and ‘Uncle’s Jerk Chicken n spice’. Even if it’s slightly kitsch, it’s still better.
The London of the Future, which will abolish the greenbelt and integrate Birmingham, Oxford and Cambridge into one massive conurbation will have plenty of space for small foreign national quarters such as this; akin to the European enclaves in Istanbul at the height of the Ottoman empire (Genoese, Venetian, French, Dutch, British etc). This, combined with disenfranchisement from both the welfare state and the electoral system, and a much improved justice system, would make the cosmopolitan diversity envisaged by George Osborne and Janan Ganesh sustainable. You can afford these flights of fancy when you have both corporal and capital punishment, deportation agreements enforced by nuclear threats and economic growth approaching 10% a year.