Walk down a high street in a deprived, predominantly white area and you’ll spot the same sad litany: boarded-up shops, a couple of tanning parlours, three betting shops, and a half-shuttered Poundland. The pub’s long gone, replaced by a “fast cash” loan place, and the butcher’s window that once displayed proper meat now hosts an estate agent flogging a two-bed terrace for the price of a packet of Hobnobs. It’s not pretty - but it is familiar.
Now, take a bus to a nearby ethnically diverse area and the contrast slaps you in the face. That high street hums with activity: independent grocers stacked to the ceiling, halal butchers, sari shops, cafés, barbers, hardware stores, phone repair stalls, travel agents, restaurants, sweet shops, and money transfer offices. It’s noisy, chaotic, colourful - and thriving. While one street has given up, the other has doubled down.
The right-wing narrative wants you to see this and feel threatened. Reform UK, GB News, and their fellow merchants of misery spin it as “losing our culture” - as if culture is something you keep in a display cabinet until it’s old enough to collect dust. They want you angry, convinced “they’re taking over” rather than asking a far more uncomfortable question: why is it that the incomers are building where others have stopped trying?
Because here’s the thing: it’s not magic. It’s maths. In deprived white-majority towns, people were used to working for someone else. Generations grew up expecting steady employment in factories, mines, shipyards, or supermarkets. But when the industries collapsed and the companies packed up, nothing replaced them - except betting slips, vape clouds, and boarded-up windows.
Meanwhile, migrant communities faced a different reality. Locked out of traditional jobs, qualifications dismissed, and sometimes discriminated against, they had no choice but to build their own. They pooled savings, leaned on extended families, started with corner shops, takeaways, and market stalls, and kept reinvesting in their streets. In many cases, it wasn’t some grand entrepreneurial vision - it was survival. And necessity, as the cliché goes, is the mother of invention.
Add to that an unspoken truth: those communities often trust one another in ways that help small businesses flourish. Shared lending schemes, rotating savings clubs, family labour, informal mentoring - tools the average struggling white British town doesn’t have. One closed shop in Leicester’s Narborough Road quickly becomes a barber, a sweet shop, a phone repair stall, a café. One closed shop in Burnley stays boarded up for 10 years until someone applies for a grant and turns it into a vape lounge.
This isn’t about skin colour; it’s about agency, adaptability, and social capital. But instead of dealing with the structural rot - the broken housing markets, the pitiful job creation, the generational hollowing out of opportunity - the political right points at the thriving streets and says: they are the problem. Not Westminster, not deregulation, not the asset-stripping multinationals who bled those towns dry. No, apparently the bloke selling samosas out of his corner shop is the real threat to Britain.
It’s nonsense, but effective nonsense. Resentment distracts people from the obvious: if migrants packed up tomorrow, many of Britain’s high streets would collapse entirely. Reform and GB News will never say that out loud because their culture war relies on boarded-up Britain staying boarded up. They’re not interested in regeneration; they’re interested in resentment.
Meanwhile, the data doesn’t lie: Pakistani and Bangladeshi workers are 60 % more likely to be self-employed than the UK average. Somali communities have built entire business networks that sustain their neighbourhoods. British Bangladeshis turned curry houses into a £4.5 billion industry - without a government grant, a think-tank report, or a “levelling up” press conference in sight. They didn’t wait for help. They built.
We’re told to “take back control,” but control of what, exactly? The boarded-up Greggs? The empty Debenhams? A betting shop on every corner where livelihoods used to be? If you want control, it starts by being honest about why some streets thrive while others crumble - and the truth is far less comforting than Farage’s slogans.
Britain doesn’t have an immigration problem; Britain has an imagination problem.
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