Consequently, the British are unused to foreigners in large numbers. They make a tremendous fuss over the forty thousand or so Jamaicans and other West Indian Negroes who have settled in the country since 1952. The two hundred thousand Poles and other East European refugees, many of whom fought valiantly beside the British in World War II, are more acceptable. This is true, also, of the Hungarians driven from their homeland by the savage Russian repression of the insurrection of 1956. But you will hear grumbling about "foreigners" in areas where refugees have settled. In rural areas you will also hear someone from a neighboring county, long settled in the village, referred to as a "foreigner."
The Republic of Ireland is the main source of immigrants at present. No one knows the exact figures, for there is no official check, but it is estimated in Dublin that perhaps fifty thousand young Irishmen and Irishwomen have entered Britain in each recent year.
This migration has raised some new economic, social, and religious problems and revived some old ones. It is also beginning to affect, although as yet very slightly, political balances in the western Midlands, for this area is short of labor and its industries gobble up willing young men from across the Irish Sea.
These industrial recruits from a rural background become part of an advanced industrial proletariat. By nature and by upbringing they are foreign to the industrial society that uses them. Their political outlook is far different from that of the loyal trade-unionists beside whom they work. They are much less liable to be impressed by appeals for union solidarity and Labor Party support. They accept the benefits of the Welfare State, but they are not of it. The economic Marxism of the orators in the constituency labor parties is beyond them; besides, have they not been warned that Marx is of the devil? The incorporation of this group into the Socialist proletariat poses a question for Labor politicians of the future.
Despite the lack of large-scale migration into Britain during nine centuries, national strains remain virulent. Noisy and stubborn Welsh and Scots nationalist movements give young men and women in Cardiff and Edinburgh something to babble about. London boasts many local associations formed of exiles from the north or west. Even the provincial English manage to make themselves heard in the capital. Few winter nights pass without the Loyal Sons of Loamshire meeting to praise the glories of their home county and drink confusion to the "foreigners," their neighbors.
If the urbanization of the country has not broken these barriers between Scot and Londoner or between Lancashire and Kent, it has changed the face of England out of recognition. And for the worse.
The empty crofters' cottages around Inverasdale and elsewhere in the Highlands are exceptions, for Britain is crowded. The area of the United Kingdom is 93,053 square miles—slightly less than that of Oregon. But the population is just under 51,000,000, including 44,370,000 in England and Wales, 5,128,000 in Scotland, and 1,389,000 in Northern Ireland.
Since the end of the last century the population has been predominantly urban and suburban. By 1900 about three quarters of the British people were living within the boundaries of urban administrative areas, and the large "conurbation" was already the dominant type of British community. This ugly but useful noun describes those areas of urban development where a number of separate towns, linked by a common industrial or commercial interest, have grown into one another.
For over a third of a century about forty per cent of the population has lived in seven great conurbations. Greater London, with a population of 8,348,000, is the largest of these. The other conurbations and their centers are: southeast Lancashire: Manchester; west Midlands: Birmingham; west Yorkshire: Leeds and Bradford; Merseyside: Liverpool; Tyneside: Newcastle upon Tyne; and Clydeside: Glasgow. Of these the west Midland area is growing most rapidly. Southeast Lancashire has lost population—a reflection of the waning of the textile industry.
The growth of the conurbations, particularly London, has been accompanied by the growth of the suburbs. Of course, many of the older suburbs are now part of the conurbations. But the immediate pre-war and post-war building developments have established urban outposts in the serene green countryside.