The Sessile Isle
Britain’s identity crisis isn’t immigration. It’s immobility.
Grüezi!
Grüezi!
Was in London this week, which got me thinking about identity...
1. No Exit Brexit
The crisis of the West isn’t immigration. It’s immobility.
Politicians talk endlessly about who’s coming in. No one talks about who can’t leave.
And that is the real story.
The political scientist David Stasavage argues that exit options are what discipline power:
“Whenever the populace found it easier to do without a particular ruler – say by moving to a new location – then rulers felt compelled to govern more consensually.”
The principle is so general it applies to ants, birds, wasps. Social organisation tends to be less hierarchical when the costs of dispersal are low.
Turn that around. When exit closes, hierarchies harden. When people cannot leave, rulers need not listen. The history of democracy is partly a history of viable departure – and its absence is a history of something else.
My own ancestors stayed put. They were attached to Britain like limpets to piers. Biologists would call them sessile – organisms fixed in place, incapable of movement. Centuries of immobility in unmarked mounds from Anglesey to East Anglia.
Migration, such as it was, meant moving from village to town for service or industry – the shortest of distances. Not immigrant mobility. Barely even internal migration. The sessile haven’t chosen rootedness; they are stuck.
For most of British history, working-class immobility was the norm. The aristocracy toured Europe; the middle classes followed trade and empire; artisans booked passage; the poor stayed put. The eventual compensation for staying put was a health service, education and a pension. It was never advancement.
Today that immobility is spreading upward. The graduate who cannot afford to leave her parents’ home. The professional priced out of the city where the jobs are. The retiree trapped in a house worth less than the mortgage.
Britain is becoming a sessile nation – its people fixed in place not through values or tradition but by economics, not by choice but by the collapse of choices.
2. The Broken Machine
The university was supposed to be the great sorting mechanism – the engine that turned clever children into mobile adults. For a few decades, it whirred.
Selective schools fed campuses; they turned out the managers and professionals; and they fed the expanding middle class. The machine operated.
Now it processes more people than ever whilst delivering less mobility than before. The generations born in the early 1980s are as likely to move down the social ladder as up – the first cohort since records began for whom this is the case.
Britain ranks among the least socially mobile nations in the OECD. Children from higher professional backgrounds are twenty times more likely to reach similar positions than those from working-class families.
The machine still ticks over. But where once it transformed, now it simply processes.
When 50 per cent of young people attend university, a degree is no longer a distinguishing mark. It merely qualifies you to compete.
The return on education has been commoditised whilst the costs have been individualised – tens of thousands of debt for a credential that was once free and is now merely necessary.
But the deeper problem is residential. A decade ago, 23 per cent of students lived at home whilst studying. Now it’s 37 per cent. In London, a third of first-year undergraduates live with their parents.
Disadvantaged students are three times likelier to stay home than their wealthier peers – 45 per cent compared with 13 per cent.
The university experience that was supposed to sever ties to place now reinforces them. What was once a point of departure is now the beginning of a lifetime of debt.
3. The Frozen Hierarchy
In 1965 – the year I was born – Michael Caine played Harry Palmer in The Ipcress File. A neat, precise, working-class spy in a bedsit, cooking his own meals, permanently subordinate to his upper-class military handlers.
Ipcress was anti-Bond. No glamour, sophistication or sang froid. Just paperwork and competence packaged as passive-aggressive over-compensation. Palmer’s superior, Colonel Ross, is manipulative and supercilious.
Sixty years later, Gary Oldman’s Jackson Lamb in Slow Horses is also a spy, slovenly but brilliant, banished to MI5’s dumping ground for failures and misfits. His nemesis, the polished and political “Second Desk.” The choreography is the same. Working-class man, upper-class handler. But Colonel Ross is now Diana Taverner.
Both Caine and Oldman left Britain to build their careers. Caine decamped to Beverly Hills in the late 1970s, “fleeing” the 83 per cent top tax rate. He returned after Margaret Thatcher cut top tax rates.
Oldman moved to Los Angeles in the early 1990s and stayed for three decades. When he returned to play George Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, he needed a dialect coach to recover his native accent.
The men who play Britain’s working-class heroes on screen left Britain to escape its constraints. But when they portray those heroes, the hierarchy remains intact. Palmer answers to Ross. Lamb answers to Taverner. The accents may change, but the on-screen org chart does not.
Oldman did make one film about where he came from. Nil by Mouth, released in 1997. It depicted a violent South London family on a council estate – drunken father, battered wife, the children surviving chaos.
He dedicated it to his father, an alcoholic welder who left when Oldman was seven. “It took three weeks to write,” he said, “and thirty years to prepare for.” Then he returned to Los Angeles.
4. The Diversified Elite
And this, perhaps, is why the diversification of the elite attracts such suspicion from below. It changes demographics without disturbing the class composition. The colonel becomes a woman – but is still the boss.
In the corridors of power, the cabinet fills with non-white faces – but they went to Winchester, or Oxford, or Goldman Sachs. Gender and race get addressed; class does not.
For those locked out, it looks less like success than shape-shifting. The club admits new members – but only from certain places.
Consider the current lineup. Shabana Mahmood, now Home Secretary, born in Birmingham to Pakistani parents from Mirpur. She spent part of her childhood in Saudi Arabia, where her father worked as a civil engineer. Her mother kept a cricket bat behind the counter of the family shop. Mahmood failed the eleven-plus but went to Oxford anyway.
Once she supported a general amnesty for undocumented workers. Now Mahmood champions Europe’s longest path to settlement – twenty years for refugees, longer than Denmark. The experience of racist abuse is an excuse for “securing our borders.”
When she announced the policy, Maurice Glasman – the academic who founded Blue Labour in 2009, arguing that the party had abandoned the white working class for metropolitan liberalism – called it “fantastic.”
A Labour tendency that spoke of family, flag, and faith, finally found its champion in government. She’s now “clearly the leader of our part of the party,” he said. Having ridden the mobility wave, Mahmood is happy to let it break behind her.
In the year above her, at the same college, was Rishi Sunak. His Punjabi parents came to Britain from East Africa – father born in Kenya, mother in Tanzania. His father was a GP, his mother a pharmacist who ran her own shop.
They “sacrificed,” as he says it, to send him to one of England’s oldest, most expensive public schools. He was Head Boy. Then Oxford, Stanford, Goldman Sachs, hedge funds. He married the daughter of an Indian billionaire; their combined fortune approaches three-quarters of a billion pounds. Britain’s first British Asian, first Hindu Prime Minister – arguably the richest man ever to sit in the Commons. And still, after all of that, it wasn’t enough.
A race-baiting podcaster asked: “How is he English?” The schools, the accent, the career, the premiership? His Englishness was challenged because it wasn’t sedimentary – Sunak was missing the limpet-like sessility only generations of immobility could buy.
Kemi Badenoch, daughter of Nigerian parents, now leads the Conservative Party. Zia Yusuf, born in Scotland to Sri Lankan immigrants – father a doctor, mother a nurse, both NHS – selective school, LSE, Goldman Sachs, founded a luxury concierge service for billionaires, then became chairman of Reform UK. A British Muslim “patriot” championing immigration restriction.
Nigel Farage – who offered walls rather than pathways in 2016 – found his shield:
“I would remind everybody that the chairman of the party is Scottish-born, but comes from parents who come from the Indian subcontinent.”
The old school race-adjacent grievance merchants and the new diversified elite discovered they could use each other.
Their families had choices and made them. They moved across continents – Punjab to Kenya to Southampton, Mirpur to Saudi Arabia to Birmingham, Sri Lanka to Scotland to the City. They climbed. They succeeded. But there’s nothing sessile about success, and race and religion make them visibly different.
When Mahmood says “my parents came here legally and played by the rules,” she’s defending a narrow legalistic Britishness. It offers less protection than it seems. As the legal historian James Whitman has shown, Nazi jurists studied American citizenship and immigration law precisely because legal definitions of belonging can be rewritten.
The Nuremberg Laws drew on American precedents for creating categories of “second-class citizens” defined by blood rather than statute.
If you build your Britishness on legality alone, you will find yourself outflanked by people willing to change the laws to keep you out. You have to build British on freedom. And that means the freedom to go.
5. Negative Space
I went to selective school, Oxford, then journalism. But the colour of my skin made my rise through social mobility invisible. I could have improved the accent and my manners to truly disappear, but I’ve unrooted and uprooted myself.
I am no longer authentically sessile – if I ever was. I’ve worked in many countries. I live in France. My surname, Monck, is occasionally – ridiculously – mistaken as aristocratic. My college bursar – an admiral – asked if I was one of the “naval” Moncks.
At London Business School, a professor asked to be remembered to my father, “Sir Nicholas.” There is a Sir Nicholas Monck – but from a different, genuinely aristocratic family. My own impeccable “pedigree” is a misspelling on nineteenth-century paperwork.
Yet my sessile inheritance persists. It shaped my brother and sister and my own identity not through what my ancestors did, but through what they didn’t do. They didn’t emigrate. Didn’t seek their fortune in the colonies. Didn’t move even when moving was cheap and destinations were plentiful.
Other families left for Australia, Canada, America. Mine stayed – through agricultural depression, industrial collapse, two world wars. It wasn’t loyalty, or conscious choice. Just the absence of the resource, or the knowledge, the networks or the nerve that made people go.
This negative identity is harder to see than a positive inheritance but it’s no less powerful. The sessile class defines itself partly through what it never did – never left, never climbed, never won. You can call that keeping the faith, or being owed something, you can call it resentment. It sits there, a sullen blight on those it possesses.
When a politician’s parents came from somewhere else, that somewhere else is the problem. Not because immigration is wrong, but because it represents a capacity for movement the sessile never had.
The resentment is less towards foreigners as such. It’s to mobility itself – the quality that allowed some to escape whilst others stayed trapped. When Sunak’s parents moved from East Africa to Southampton, they demonstrated an adaptability that would serve their son well.
When Mahmood’s father took engineering contracts in Saudi Arabia, he was building the capital – financial, cultural, psychological – that would send his daughter to Oxford. These are not betrayals, they are choices – options the sessile never possessed.
6. The Gate Closes
And now the gates are closing on everyone.
Brexit was many things, but one of its effects was to end freedom of movement for British citizens. Before 2021, any Briton could live and work in nearly thirty European countries without a visa. Now that right is gone.
The young professionals who might once have escaped to Berlin or Barcelona face paperwork, quotas, and restrictions. The exit route the working class never really had is now being withdrawn from the middle class too.
You cannot move if you cannot afford to leave. You cannot leave if every city prices you out. You cannot build equity if you spend half your income on rent. The mathematics of immobility now apply to people who once assumed they’d outrun them.
Thirty years ago, 65 per cent of 25-to-34-year-olds on middle incomes owned their homes. By 2016, it was 27 per cent. House prices have rocketed 152 per cent in real terms over two decades; incomes just 22 per cent. The average first-time buyer is now 34 years old.
Meanwhile, those with capital have options multiplying. The wealthy can buy second passports. They relocate to tax havens. They send their children to international schools that function as global sorting mechanisms.
The gap is no longer just income – it’s freedom itself. Some can leave; most cannot. Some have exit options; most are sessile.
In 2024, for the first time in modern history, more UK citizens left Britain than arrived. Net migration among British nationals turned negative by over 100,000. Those who can leave are leaving. The people who can’t are staying.
The country is being sorted not by talent or effort but by the capacity to move – which is increasingly a function of inherited wealth.
7. “If We Can’t Be Saved, Let No One Be Saved”
The white working class is often discussed as a problem – politically incorrect, culturally backward, resistant to change.
Their resentments, their nostalgia, their hostility to elites who lecture them about adaptation – are not character flaws. They are an assertion of solidarity in defeat – “if we can’t be saved, let no one be saved.”
Now, like ice forming on a frozen pond, the water stops moving. The graduate with debt and no prospects. The professional priced out of homeownership. The family that cannot afford to live where the jobs are.
These people are discovering what the working class has known for decades: that mobility is not a right but a luxury, unequally distributed and increasingly hoarded.
The sessile isle is not a metaphor. It is a description of what Britain is becoming – a nation of people fixed in place, watching others move freely, ruled by elites who preach flexibility whilst hoarding the rights and resources that make flexibility possible.
Italy shows the mirror image. Meloni campaigned as the hammer of illegal immigration; in office, she has quietly issued nearly a million legal work visas across two three-year periods – a sevenfold increase on her predecessors.
The Albanian processing centres she trumpeted have housed 132 migrants at a construction cost of €65 million. Meanwhile, 1.6 million Italians have emigrated in two decades; births fell another 6 per cent this year. The country is emptying whilst performatively “full.”
The pattern is the same on both sides of the Alps: perform restriction, deliver pragmatism. Mahmood champions twenty-year settlement paths whilst Britain’s hospitals and care homes depend on foreign staff. Meloni criminalises overseas surrogacy whilst expanding seasonal agricultural visas. The electorate gets the theatre; the economy gets the labour; the diversified elites get to demonstrate their toughness on “people who look like them.”
Stasavage’s logic applies to rulers too. When people cannot leave, rulers need not listen. When exits close, hierarchy hardens. But they cannot afford to close the doors they pretend to slam.
Britain’s political dysfunction is not a failure of communication or a problem of messaging. It is the predictable consequence of a society in which most people have no credible alternatives – and know it.
The question is not whether to restrict immigration or expand it.
The question is whether Britain can rebuild the escape options that make identity meaningful and bearable. The freedom of movement that once made democracy function.
Or whether it will continue its slow calcification into a nation of limpets, fixed in place, waiting for the next tide.
Thanks for reading!
Best
Adrian
Terrific stuff, Adrian. When it’s optioned and turned into a movie, Georgio di Monck will be played by Ian McShane.
Brilliant.