Why I feel like I have been dropped into the Third World, without leaving home

From burqas to belches in the theatre, the petite discomforts of mass immigration.

We creak under the weight of so many new people. Diversity is not our strength, it is a millstone around the neck of the United Kingdom.

The impacts are stark and measurable. I could lay out the mess in terms of aggregated economic and crime data, but you can find that in most newspapers of record these days. Nor do I want to recite again the horrors of the rape gangs. The disaster of uncontrolled mass immigration and the failure of cultural integration are well understood now, by all but a few centrist dads who look more like eccentric oddballs by the day.

There is a contrast yet also a depressing similarity between these gargantuan failures and the day to day petite discomforts and grating irritations. I found myself today pondering the depressing lack of recognition of my home town.

This morning there were three women in full burqas in my local budget supermarket. I’d barely seen these twenty years ago in Britain. I’ve never liked the sight of them and have had numerous disagreements with self-declared feminists who argue for a woman’s right to choose. That sounds nice, tell that to the women of Afghanistan. Here in the UK, the burqa — that “letterbox” garment, as Boris Johnson once quipped — symbolises a refusal to blend in, even if that is not the wearer’s intention. A burqa is uncomfortable to look at (and to wear, I imagine) making a woman look as foreign as it is possible to look, an objectified pillar of cloth, stripped of her face.

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The cashier and I looked at each other. When the two burqas in front of me had left the shop, the cashier said she didn’t like them. She said they made her feel nervous and I agreed with her.

And in the post office, the clerk did not say hello, please, thank you or goodbye. She conducted a conversation on her phone, loudly, in front of me, throughout the transaction. Needless to say, this was in another language.

Going about your business and shopping can be filled with warm interactions and good manners, strengthening the ties of community, making your day better. Or it can be a series of grating differences, fraying communal bonds and make your day worse.

Today I felt like I had been dropped into a third-world country. But I can’t fly home. I am home. Baroness Louise Casey warned some areas have changed “beyond recognition”. The White British population is projected to become a minority by the 2060s. If the current cultural chasm leaves me feeling like a stranger in my own land, I fear what the country will be like by then.

Why write this now? Recently, I splashed out on good seats to watch War Horse. I expected to be entertained and moved but I found myself marvelling just as much at the man behind me.

As the lights dimmed and silence fell, he emitted a long, low belch that vibrated around our row, and probably a ten-seat radius. You had to hear this to believe it. There was no attempt at discretion, no effort to stifle or disguise it. Heads snapped round in unison, as anyone’s would in the pregnant hush of the opening scene.

He was wearing a hat. Odd, since an Englishman would once have removed his headgear in respect for the stage and for the person behind him.

His bag seemed to be stuffed with papers and sweet wrappers, which he rummaged through with gusto for the entire performance. He and his wife chatted in a perfectly ordinary volume, as though we were not in a theatre but in their living room. I whipped round, eyes flashing, and viperishly whispered, “Will you be quiet!” which bought us reprieve for a few scenes. They broke into chatter for the final moving scene.

That evening distilled something I have been noticing everywhere. It’s not just a First World problem — middle-aged white woman disturbed by foreigner in theatre! — it’s that the strain of diversity is felt everywhere. The serious issues of immigration are real and manifold, from economic strain to social cohesion and crime. But there is also the simple matter of manners, the glue of everyday life. If you move here, if you buy a theatre ticket, if you work in a shop, for the love of civility and decency, could you please try, just a little, to fit in.