Pauline Hanson doesn’t want to live in Luton. Nor does her new best friend, activist Tommy Robinson, who grew up in the Bedfordshire town half an hour by train from London, but who now prefers Spain and the Canary Islands. And nor do I. A few hours on my own “walking tour” of the satellite town this week convinced me of that, despite lots of friendly locals and an excellent shopping mall.
Unlike the One Nation leader, I was not “gobsmacked” by the demographic: just under half of its 240,000 residents are Asian (which in Britain includes Indians, Bangladeshis and Pakistanis) or black, and when you add in a few other ethnic groups Luton is officially a “super diverse” town with a non-white British majority.
But I was disheartened by the poverty and shabby infrastructure of a town that once had a thriving industrial sector based on cars (the Vauxhall plant that ran for 120 years was closed last year) and an international airport but looks bland and bleak, even on a sunny afternoon.
Luton, 51km northwest of London, has become a lightning rod in the nation’s debate over illegal migrants, asylum-seekers and social cohesion. One-third of residents identify as Muslim and Robinson cites it as an example of the “Islamification” of the UK.
Hanson, who is in London on a two-week “fact-finding mission” and to build connections with far-right, anti-immigration leaders such as Reform UK’s Nigel Farage, famously announced on social media that the town, where she was filmed for a 7News Spotlight documentary, was not the Great Britain she knew.
In social media grabs ahead of the doco screening on Sunday night, Hanson walks through the main square and drives through other areas with Robinson, chats with locals and says she is going to “protect Australia” from the Luton path. Hanson (who later schlepped off to Sicily for a break from her “fact-finding mission”) may need to get out more.
Britain has plenty of areas like Luton, towns that are a far cry from the royal box at Wimbledon or the glamorous shops at Covent Garden or the gentrified terrace houses of Hammersmith, the grand country seat of Woburn Abbey 30 minutes away by car. There are plenty of black and Asian people in this country, with very high concentrations in some areas – Luton’s 47 per cent is more than twice the national figure of 19 per cent.
So yes, Hanson has a point when she suggests Luton does not fit her image of Britain. And anti-immigrant leaders such as Robinson are right when they say the numbers of non-white Brits has grown rapidly in recent years – fuelled in part by illegal migrants and asylum-seekers but also relatively high fertility rates in some of these groups plus, importantly, deliberate post-Brexit policies to bring in workers.
In 1991, when the ethnicity question was first asked in the census, the figure was 5.5 per cent; in 2001 it was 12.5 per cent; in 2011 and again in 2021 it was about 19 per cent. But the percentages are much higher in Luton: 19 per cent in 1991, 40 per cent in 2011 and now 47 per cent.
On just about every statistic you care to use, Luton scores very badly – bad health, high crime, low life expectancy, high ethnic unemployment, a bad record in the use and sale of hard drugs. But the question for Hanson, as she announces she is going to “protect” Australians from a similar demographic journey, is whether the second and third-generation Pakistani and Jamaican Britons I met in Luton are part of the problem or part of the solution. Are they the unpopular (slightly dodgy) guests or equal members of a society that 100 years ago ruled more than 458 million people under its empire?
In this town where the Uber drivers collect you in BMWs and Teslas, there are pockets of solid working-class or attractive middle-class houses, the lovely Wardown Park, a university and an active Luton Borough Council.
But there are also big housing estates built after World War II on farmland, grim high-rise and low-rise buildings that sparked social problems and riots. The worst, Marsh Farm, gained a dreadful reputation in the 1990s when serious riots broke out on the estate. The area was vandalised and run down, but in the past few years a new shopping centre has been built, ruined buildings removed and the tower blocks reclad in cheerful blue.
At Futures House, a community and business hub across the street from the shops, I grab a latte and talk to the man running the cafe. He is 26, born and bred in Luton, and he tells me his sister went to school at Marsh Farm. Luton, he says, has always been diverse “in my lifetime”. Identifying as a British Pakistani, his grandparents left their home in Mirpur in Kashmir in the 1960s, driven out by the construction of the Mangla Dam that flooded the land and displaced about 1000 Muslims.
He won’t give me his name but, cynical about press coverage of his city, he says: “If you want a headline, go to Bury Park.”
On their tour, Hanson and Robinson drove through this area to view “the Islamification” along the narrow, crowded and badly maintained Dunstable Road often referred to as “Little Asia” rather than hit the pavement. I got out and walked and felt no apprehension as a white woman wandering past the fruit and vegetable stands, the daggy dress shops, the Muslim gift shop, the Afghan Bazaar. The women in hijabs, niqabs and burkas were too busy shopping or on their lunch breaks to give me another glance. This street, about 10 minutes’ drive from Luton railway station, has been revived by Asian business owners in the years since it was all but destroyed by the opening of the central Luton Mall built in the 1970s. (By the way, it’s a very pleasant mall, far more people-friendly than the giant Westfield shopping complexes at Shepherd’s Bush and Stratford.)
Bury Park has the intense concentration of non-white people that fuels anti-immigration movements across Europe and the West, but in many ways Australians are familiar with suburbs that have almost been taken over by ethnic groups. Think Cabramatta in western Sydney, where less than 10 per cent of the population identifies as Australian or English. On a slightly overcast weekday, Bury Park looks like many other shabby shopping strips – except this one is thriving economically.
But 10 minutes away at the mall, a 65-year-old white man who worked for years in aircraft maintenance at the airport tells me that he is losing his identity. He has no truck with Farage and Reform and votes Liberal Democrat, but he says: “People who are born here feel they are being pushed out; allowances are made for everyone except those born here. People have embraced the food and the culture, but we are told what we can and can’t do. If we say anything about behaviour, we are racist.”
It used to be easier to absorb the migrant workers who came from Ireland and Italy and Poland and other parts of eastern Europe to fuel Luton’s industrial base, he says.
Today, many of the “different” people are “hanging about, not working”, according to his daughter-in-law, who’s having a coffee with him this morning.
She grew up in the notorious Marsh Farm but didn’t experience any direct trouble, but at 38 she lives outside Luton in a village and says: “I don’t come in (to the mall) in the evening, and I wouldn’t necessarily come in on a Saturday because there are far too many people, a police presence.”
Her parents allowed her 12-year-old self to catch the bus to town for the afternoon picture show but she’s not going to allow her daughter, now 11, to do the same.
Some of her friends have had enough and are moving away; one couple will return to Bulgaria, where the market-based economy offers unemployment of under 4 per cent. Another couple has gone to Norfolk (where the ethnic minorities comprise only 5.3 per cent and are overwhelmed by a very big, very white majority) because only a handful of those in their daughter’s class were white.
I’m devouring a feta and spinach Turkish borek – bought from a woman who went to the University of Bedfordshire as an overseas student, hated living in the centre of Luton and moved out to rent in a nearby village – when I notice several women running advice stalls in a section of the mall.
The Luton Borough Council staff and NGO employees are explaining services for aged people, sufferers of Alzheimer’s or those needing other support.
Stacey, a local area co-ordinator at the council, was born in Jamaica and arrived in Britain as a child. She has been in Luton for 20 years and says that despite the poverty, there is a strong community feeling in the town. Yes, gangs can be a problem, but an unemployment rate of about 70.5 per cent for ages 16 to 64 and a lack of much to do in the town don’t help the young, she says.
Another council manager, Shabeena, a 43-year-old British Pakistani who was born here, is wearing the hijab. She started “covering” a decade ago to support her husband, who travelled to Saudi Arabia on a “spiritual journey”. She has a psychology degree and has worked in the care sector for several years, and says the veil hasn’t proved a barrier in her outreach work.
Her colleague, running a stall explaining advocacy rights, is a third-generation British Pakistani. Her grandfather fought for Britain in World War II and later came to England, married and settled in Luton where jobs – and council housing – were plentiful. She agrees there has been change in the demographic in her lifetime: “If I didn’t see a change that would be a problem. There’s definitely a change, but whether that’s for better or worse … It’s not necessarily about skin colour. People are scared of change but people here, their kids go to college and work.”
She acknowledges that knife crimes have risen in the town but notes that’s a problem around the world. Metropolitan Police figures, released under Freedom of Information legislation in 2023, showed that in 2022 almost 60 per cent of knife crimes in the country were committed by black and Asian Brits, who were also responsible for 46 per cent of violent crimes.
That’s high, given blacks and Asians make up only 19 per cent of the population, but it’s also the case that most of these crimes are committed against people from the same ethnic groups.
At Starbucks, near Luton station, a 26-year old third-generation British Pakistani, who works in IT in London and grew up in Luton, tells me: “If we’re being fair, Luton is much more ethnic than it used to be. It would be unfair to say that people who complain about this are wrong.” He doesn’t see an easy answer but says the problem is made worse when people stick in their own groups.
One group that has clear ideas about immigration is the American Conservative Union, which runs giant Conservative Political Action conferences around the world. On Saturday, Hanson, back in London from Sicily, will address the first CPAC to be held in Britain.
That’s a significant coup for the One Nation leader as she seeks to build links with global groups arguing against multiculturalism and migration. CPAC was launched in 1974 in the US and initially was focused on free-market economics, a strong military and traditional social values. In more recent years it has been taken over by the MAGA stream and has a strong connection to religious groups in the US.
The London CPAC has been billed as a summit “dedicated to commonsense, national sovereignty and pro-growth policies”. Organisers say “the event aims to galvanise the Right to defend Western values, protect national identity and chart a bold path forward for the United Kingdom and its allies”.
Hanson’s speech will come straight after the daily prayer from American preacher Judd Saul, whose website, equippingthepersecuted.org, is focused on helping Christians who are attacked for their beliefs. On Thursday, the opening day, he told the audience in London that the world’s problems would not be sorted until the world repented.
I’m on my way back to London when I talk to a young woman on the Luton platform. She came here in search of cheap rent. She has just checked out a private flat in a newish block about 2km from the centre. The rent is good – £1300 (about $2500) a month compared with £2800 in Camden Town. But no way, she tells me. The apartment was fine but the (white) druggies outside and on the stairs were a turnoff, the whole place felt shabby and scary, and a couple of hours had convinced her she didn’t want to live in Luton, she said.
Despite the sense of community and hope that exists in this satellite town, I knew what she meant.
Read related topics:One NationPauline Hanson