Strong social norms once helped integration, but not in today’s fractured society
This article is taken from the October 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
I wonder how many British visitors to Salisbury Cathedral could come away with the precise height of its 123 metre spire, ready to rattle from off the top of their heads to any interested party? Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov could when asked to account for their movements that implicated them in the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in 2018.
When their infamous interview first aired, many British observers immediately suspected some deeper meaning to this oddly specific piece of information. Was there some code or message in there? But anybody familiar with the institution of the official guided tour in Russia will have raised a wry smile.
Where a Western tour guide may try to weave a story around their castle or cathedral, focussing on characters or motifs to try to bring it to life, their Russian equivalent deals in cold, hard facts: dimensions, dates, precise construction timeframes, tonnages of building materials. Schoolchildren are primed to retain these facts to prove they were paying attention. To the Russian mind, therefore, anybody who had been to Salisbury Cathedral for a look-see would know that fact — even the world’s most glaringly obvious pair of foreign intelligence agents.
You won’t find this just in Russia. In anywhere touched by the Soviet Ministry of Culture, from Moldova to North Korea, that is what people have come to expect of a visit to a place of interest. No milling about soaking up the atmosphere, please.
The Soviets had an incredible ability to construct norms of behaviour and institutional practice, so that even in places such as Georgia and western Ukraine where most can’t stand its political legacy, people still can’t conceive of any other way of doing things. Everything from the layout of apartment buildings, the manner in which people queue in local shops, the furnishing of hotel rooms, to the order and style in which toasts are given at parties, still goes on according to formulaic patterns standardised across the USSR decades ago.
Even ethnic Germans, returned to the bosom of the fatherland from Central Asia, have a hard time shaking off Soviet-era customs. Ukraine has found it very difficult to accept assistance from its Western allies during the war, due to its state institutions having a Soviet-style paranoid suspicion of outsiders baked into the organisational DNA.
Why was a society that was in so many ways an abject civilisational failure, so good at inculcating such enduring norms and customs? In large part, it was because it was a culture forged with almost minimal levels of either privacy or personal autonomy.
The early decades of the USSR saw enforced urbanisation on an incredibly rapid scale; cities emerged from villages in the space of a few years, and established cities doubled or trebled in size over a couple of decades. For almost everybody, this meant cramped, communal living, often amongst neighbours who were complete strangers.
All of this went on in an atmosphere of material privation, under almost unimaginable levels of stress due to political terror and with the unceasing background noise of stultifying propaganda. Needless to say, it was not an atmosphere in which eccentricity was rewarded; it was a place in which commonly understood norms were essential and where expressions of individuality could be deadly.
The second world war, which militarised much of society, again threw much of the population into new settings surrounded by strangers. This accounts for the sheer degree of standardisation across such a vast geographic area. People internalised the idea they could be picked up and dropped in another part of the country at very little notice. Just as any piece of equipment needs to be ready to be picked up by a member of an army at a moment’s notice, so the Soviet citizen had to be ready to be slotted into any factory, or any dormitory at the whim of the State.
After Stalin’s death, there was a slow relaxation of political tension and living conditions steadily became less congested as more apartment blocks were built — in interchangeable, uniform style — across the country. But communal living in the sense of shared kitchens and bathrooms remained common throughout the Soviet period.
In this atmosphere, an argot of euphemism and double-meaning emerged — along with a dry, acerbic but subtle humour that remains the heritage of the common Soviet experience. No two people who share that heritage, even at a generation’s remove, can be truly foreign to one another, as much as they may wish they were.
We can draw some parallels to Britain. What remains of the common culture of the British nation was also forged by a period of social flux caused by rapid urbanisation, though in the wake of an industrial rather than a political revolution. It was slower, far more voluntary in nature, but also entailed a substantial degree of cramped and squalid living conditions.
Over the long 19th century, the emerging proletariat attempted to recreate the characteristics of village life in industrial towns and cities. With family networks uprooted by rural-to-urban migration, common institutions were created to replicate their functions.
The British working class may not have endured the kommunalka experience of shared kitchens into the late 20th century, but in the world of back-to-back, two-up-two-down houses in factory and mill towns, they had forged a very real civil society from the bottom up. Voluntary associations built around churches, friendly societies, temperance unions, sports clubs, betting syndicates and ultimately the trades union movement itself, formed the institutional edifice of working class life in Britain.
The workplace, church, the pub, the football terrace and the streets and alleyways between houses were the arena of a communal way of living that endured to some extent until roughly the time that the Soviet Union itself vanished.
This was a world grounded in the economics and human geography of the Victorian era, and it was to disappear as that era itself was slowly eclipsed. First, the crushing experience of the First World War severely damaged the British people’s trust in God. Bombing during the subsequent war, and “Homes for Heroes” saw the world of terraced housing replaced by urban housing estates and tower blocks. More recently, the British economy reluctantly moved up the value chain from basic heavy industries toward modern entreprises such as electronics and aerospace, necessitating lighter, smaller scale manufacturing, with a more dispersed workforce.
Over the course of a couple of generations, the vast bulk of the British industrial working class became middle class. Cars, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, supermarkets and, perhaps more than anything the ubiquitous back garden saw life become far more private. The last straw was the 1990s repeal of the First World War-era licensing laws, which had meant that pubs were extremely busy for a few short hours of the day.
With those rules gone, the smaller street-corner pubs tended to attract a far slower footfall spread out across the day and lost their status as the default place of social congregation. Thereafter, ordinary folk would share the comfortable isolation of the privileged classes.
The British never experienced the intensity of the Soviet Union’s enforced communalism. The only people with anything like that degree of common ritual were veterans of the armed forces and the alumni of public schools.
But there was, for a time, a common British working class culture. Though now largely vanished, it has left an enduring legacy in how most people interact with each other: common codes and customs in terms of how people speak to each other; norms in terms of friendship, courtship, marriage and the upbringing of children. And, as in the case of the Soviets, a very distinct sense of humour — one that is shared with the Irish and the Australians, but definitely not with Americans.
As with the rituals of army regiments and public schools, communal cultures like those of the USSR and working class industrial Britain could suck people in and spit them out in their own image because an individual had to conform to survive. Thus ethnic Koreans or Kyrgyz nomads became Soviet, and Eastern European Jews were transformed into Cockneys. Poles and Italians could still turn up in Birmingham in the post-war years, and their children turn out basically indistinguishable from the rest of the population. Or at least able to present as such, if they so chose.
The kind of society that could take in newcomers and mould them in its image now seems as nostalgic and distant as the idea of a factory putting on a staff charabanc trip to the seaside. Today, when we hear the term “integration’”, we think of an abstract, inauthentic process created on Home Office flipcharts, which we hope will prevent extremist politics breaking out amongst segregated communities of second generation immigrants.
Rather than immersing incomers in the common norms and customs of the native culture, we instead associate integration with stripping that culture back to its lowest common denominators in the hope that common humanity alone can foster co-existence. There’s some irony to the proliferation of the patronising euphemism “communities” at almost exactly the time in history when we could all agree that the vast majority of British people no longer meaningfully live as part of one.
The disappearance of a genuine sense of community from our towns and cities forced officialdom to re-imagine them in the 1990s in an abstract sense, as something inhabited by black people in inner-cities, segregated Pakistani clan networks in former mill towns, and the sort of white people who were regarded as being at risk of voting for the BNP. These places were “our communities”, and as the rate of immigration steadily increased, these were also the kind of places that new arrivals ended up, so that was where “integration” happened by default.
But this integration was thought of in the most superficial terms, and at least in the sense that officialdom hoped it would go on, it turned out to be as nebulous and imaginary as the “communities” themselves. This was because there was no longer a communal culture — certainly not in those places — that newcomers would automatically be drawn into by living on a certain street, working in a certain factory, or sending one’s children to a particular school.
It wasn’t to say that the culture itself was gone — it is still to be found in villages and suburbs. But to join in with it, one would now need a car, the means to afford a house in that kind of place, fluency in English, and the general wherewithal to participate in middle class life. Some groups have managed this; for example the more prosperous Hindu and Sikh arrivals from East Africa have achieved material prosperity over the course of one or two generations and can now meet the traditional British middle classes on their own terms. But this is very much not a lifestyle that one gets thrown into; one has to actively seek it out.
This is not to say that no integration goes on in Britain at all. There are sub-sections of society that do have the capability and the willingness to induct new arrivals in their customs, practices and norms.
Most obviously, there are the South Asian Muslim enclaves across the North of England and the Midlands, as well as in parts of London. In smaller, provincial towns these communities tend to be based around specific extended family networks, and they are likely to be receptive only to those with the right kinship ties. But in places such as Tower Hamlets or parts of Birmingham, they are far more cosmopolitan. Mosques act as a focal point and meeting place, and religious affinity rather than kinship provides the basis for employment, accommodation, friendship and a sense of belonging.
Similarly, and more uniquely to London and areas of the larger cities, there are evangelical Christian communities built primarily around African immigrants in which new arrivals can be brought into the fold. Neither of these settings provide new immigrants with a direct route into the British mainstream, but they can protect an individual from social isolation as they make a start in a new country.
Beyond these religious enclaves, there is the street. Proletarian culture may have forced new arrivals to conform in order to survive, but not necessarily in quite so starkly literal terms as we see in many cases in contemporary British cities.
For all that the pro-multicultural British elite can sometimes express a sense of smugness about how much better Britain supposedly was at integration in the late 20th century than countries such as France or Belgium, they largely did so looking at British Asian communities, and contrasting them with North Africans in the banlieues.
The Afro-Carribean experience in Britain was left out of this, largely because of similarities in language and culture in its most superficial terms, that meant we didn’t think about that group’s struggles to integrate. The crises of low-educational attainment and social dysfunction just looked like the same problems as the post-industrial remnants of the white working class, but worse.
But the experience of the Afro-Caribbean community in Britain — distinct from more recent African arrivals — is a textbook case of integration failure, and one that now threatens to define the future far beyond that particular ethnic group. And this is a story that is linked intimately with the atrophying of the communal culture of British cities in the post-war era, and the departure of much of the white British population from areas of the larger cities.
In areas of inner-city Nottingham and Wolverhampton, early arrivals from the Caribbean were inducted into the local white working class relatively quickly and comprehensively. Those areas now have substantial mixed race populations, to the point that whites and Afro-Caribbeans in some of those places exist on a single spectrum lacking a meaningful point of distinction, all of whom suffer from a similar mixture of social dysfunctionality.
In areas of South London and Birmingham on the other hand, Afro-Caribbean immigration was fast and substantial enough that the group could retain far more autonomy, and remain distinct from the local white population. The whites moved out of the bigger cities in a more piecemeal fashion, as individual factories moved or shut.
This often left the Caribbeans surrounded by more recently-arrived Asian immigrant communities, and they had a far lower superficial cultural affinity with them than with the English. The Caribbeans were left marooned as industries left the cities, lacking either the wherewithal of the whites to relocate to Essex or Warwickshire, or the kinship bonds of the Asians that would allow them to finance the setting up of cash businesses.
But mainstream society has remained reluctant to define the Afro-Caribbean experience in terms of integration; a question of how a group of people moving from elsewhere in the world would find a place and purpose in modern Britain.
They were thought of simply as being “black”, as if they were just English people randomly born with different coloured skin, and their exclusion from economic and educational opportunities was down to irrational prejudice about this accident of genetics. Rather than grounding the situation of Afro-Caribbeans in British cities firmly in terms of practical human and economic geography, the group was instead mythologised and adopted almost as a counter-cultural mascot by the avant garde.
An absence of industrial jobs in the inner city initiated a reliance on state welfare, which itself begot family breakdown, a disengagement from education, and ultimately a culture in which gangs participating in illicit economic activity became the most obvious means by which boys and young men could gain social status. This was the basis of the socio-criminal culture of modern inner city Britain, and one that now has a cultural influence that is completely disproportionate to the actual number of people engaged in gang-related criminality.
The Christian commentator Jide Ehizele has described a culture of “urban nihilism” that evangelicals in Southeast London have to contend with in their outreach to the young and vulnerable. Whilst outwardly, this is a culture that projects a sense of swagger and an idealisation of violence, it is one that is defined by spiritual absence and a lack of belonging, filling the void with reckless hedonism.
The superficial elements of the culture; the music, clothing and sociolect of the “roadman” are a variant on a global phenomenon, loosely based on a pastiche of the African-American hip hop culture now in at least its fifth decade. It is simultaneously distinctively British, and alarmingly foreign.
But whilst it may look like a rejection of, and a barrier to participation in mainstream British society, this nihilistic street culture is effectively the default that the children of non-integrated immigrant parents, or first-generation young immigrants to British cities will be drawn into.
To resist it, they will either require immense strength of character, or a robust alternative cultural underpinning, probably in the form either of an Islamic or Christian tradition from their parents’ home country. Certainly, there is no endogenous British culture left in the cities that will pull these kids in and churn them out as part of a national family, as might once have happened.
Britain has been gambling for decades that it has the capacity to assimilate large numbers of new arrivals into the general population. As cracks have begun to emerge in the national edifice, successive governments have continually raised the stakes, expanding not just the numbers, but the variety of places of origin.
I’ve tried here to examine the social mechanisms by which outsiders might be inducted with reference to earlier communal societies, but I don’t think even the Soviets or the Edwardian East End would have been able to assimilate thousands of Somalians or Pashtuns every year.
But if we are to persist with these policies, or even to ameliorate the consequences of the last 30 years, it will require a reckoning with what integration actually is, and whether Britain still has the social means to do it. And if we don’t, then what other forces will chew new arrivals up and spit them out instead.
