‘I feel truly ashamed.’ Keith Burnett on Theresa May’s trade mission to India

Well said, Sir Keith. The lessons of global influence and a pro-British attitude amoing the opinion-formers and leaders of other countries who were educated in the UK from the 1950s onwards have been well and truly forgotten by recent UK Governments. As a recently retired senior academic, I am also ashamed of how we now treat overseas students.

Thank you Sir Keith for being so frank. In my naivety i dont understand who the politicians think they are fooling, but then i guess their horizons are measured in days rather than years.

I found a similar situation when visiting India in July, and speaking to agents who recruit for UK HE, also alumni and business people. The message was that Indian students are increasingly sophisticated in their decision making. This is an expensive investment for them and often their families. They will go where they think they will get the best all round value, from quality of education yes, but job prospects are of course key. Increasingly this means the USA, Canada and Australia.

Many thanks for this analysis. Anyone reading this, please read our letter and petition to Theresa May to safeguard higher education in this recent turn of insularity. Better treatment of foreign students would certainly help https://www.change.org/p/the-cabinet-of-the-united-kingdom-rt-hon-prime-minister-theresa-may-mp-safeguard-uk-higher-education

Most have no problem with students coming here to study, as long as they go home. In the past as you all know, we had fake students studying in fake universities. It went on for years. Fake or real, you could be forgiven for thinking, they all had no itention of going home, which of course they didn't, and still dont. And it goes on and on.This is not about race its about space. This isn't just about bringing money in for Universities, and those who work there either!

What happens with the UK under Brexit and May, it hurts. What happens with the US hurts too. Academia may have an historic role in the social healing. Is good to coagulate as a large unformal academic body, but please exceed the this aria, open a wider dialogue on several social an professional levels. Is academia only a source of professionals, a public convenience, a simple provider delivering at home?! Or a major source of intelligence, a public guide, a trusted mentor to follow, above all infatuated politicians!? Science is the modern power and it is the now the time to see that. I wish you the best of luck on all the good actions you are planning ahead. (Replace Europe with India in the 8th paragraph, maybe... although it makes sense the same)

It's my rule to challenge middle class ignorance wherever it surfaces. Here are a few pointers for Sir Keith as he luxuriates in his shame and moral superiority. Let's accept that a highly paid internationalist (like Sir Keith) is rational and not biased. Let's agree that migration (in total) is a good thing. Let's suppose it helps grow the economy, it brings the benefits of diversity and upgrades the talent pool and is very popular with highly educated middle class professionals like Sir Keith. Despite all this there's a problem. These arguments have been widely promoted for many years and they are rejected by some voters. This problem is growing and now includes enough voters to vote for Brexit or a demagogue like Trump. That's a crisis. Mrs May, cannot observe this from an ivory tower (even in India). She has to respond to democratic push. If she does nothing she will risk losing power to an even more populist and dangerous movement. Mrs May has to limit migration even if it damages the economy (at the aggregate level) and reduces the earnings of the University of Sheffield. It's an ugly unsatisfactory political reality. Understanding this Sir Keith might help you feel less ashamed. And, if you can understand this your intellectual curiosity might prompt you to explore further. You might like to imagine what it has been like to live through the transition that many British white working class voters have experienced in the last twenty years. Not only have their incomes and status declined, their neighbourhoods have been through traumatic change. Let's use the London Borough of Newham as an illustration. This traditionally poor borough has low cost housing so it has long been a reception point for migration. According data from ethnicity.ac.uk. (graph and link below) in 1991 it's population was 215,561 and its ethnic profile was 56% white British. This showed that it had already diversified substantially from the normal UK ethnic profile. In 2011 it's population had grown to over 306,998. From my knowledge of Newham I'm confident there has not been a matching increase in housing stock. It's character has been materially changed by squeezing the equivalent a new town the size of Barnsley into multiple occupation of poorly designed Victorian terraced houses. Overcrowding is one of the reasons why Newham has a TB problem. The proportion of white British citizens (who aspire to a nuclear family residential lifestyle like Professors have) has declined to 17%. These bare facts do not show the stark ethnic concentration (segregation and tension) that lack of migration management has resulted in. There are many Newhams in the U.K. Sir Keith. They are not happy imiddle class university campuses. They are low income, deprived communities. They have been transformed. They have been abandoned by those white British occupants who had the means to fly but no power to resist a level of change they did not feel comfortable with. The shock of this change, which shows no indication of levelling out or being shared more equally with more prosperous areas, explains why so many British White voters are putting pressure on government. We - that's the highly educated, well paid, middle class who benefit from migration like you and me Sir Keith - can make ourselves feel superior by condemning white working class opinions as racist, ignorant, self defeating, bigoted etc etc. However, a more mature and intelligent response might be to consider if it is healthy to allow migration to continue in this way. A recent report by Professors Cantle and Kaufman from Birkbeck (see below) highlights the risks of segregation and suggests that white British people should be encouraged to move back. A braver report might have suggested a moratorium on migration with more intelligent preventive action to manage reception and integration so that it does not feed this dangerous social, political and economic division. The British working class are just as capable of building strong relations with a diverse mix of ethnic neighbours as their university educated superiors but it's hard to imagine any group, however well educated that would not object to displacement on the scale that has fuelled UKIP and possibly even IS in Britain's poorest communities. Perhaps the knock-on effect of shock therapy in migration policy is sufficient to prompt a widening of deeply entrenched, perhaps even bigoted opinions, in intellectuals like Sir Keith whose blog clearly shows way too much focus on his own little (internationalist) world. Reading for Sir Keith's http://www.ethnicity.ac.uk/medialibrary/briefings/localdynamicsofdiversity/geographies-of-diversity-in-newham.pdf https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/nov/01/call-for-action-to-tackle-growing-ethnic-segregation-across-uk?CMP=share_btn_fb

The University of Sheffield has used its 'internationalist world' to create 550 industry sponsored apprenticeships in Rotherham, sitting right on the Orgreave site. No lectures please on working class communities when it is out there with sleeves rolled up.

@Ken.charman_260628 I am not sure how what Burnett has said links to your reply. You talk about migration to London boroughs and displacement of the low-income white working class, he is talking about deterring talented Indian nationals who want to study in the UK. Last time I visited hospital I have to say I was pretty glad of the medical help I received from 'migrants'. Whilst I might be an out of touch middle-class elitist, those very same migrants did not (that I saw) have badges that said latte drinkers only. So surely we can agree that some talented hard working migrants have made a positive difference to everyone? Given Sheffield is indeed world class University producing talented scientists, medics and engineers that the world need, this is not where the problem with migration lies. Governments own figures show overstaying students to be a vanishingly small problem. Your wider arguments about the effect of low-income migration have some merit and deserve to be addressed. In doing this I am sure you will not fall into the lump of work fallacy rather your analysis would include the role the UK restriction on housing, the degree of progressiveness of the taxation system, the size of the state, the increasing automation, the silencing of dissent by some smug liberals and societal change (family breakdowns, assortative mating) in the UK all play in the (I agree with you here) dissatisfaction of the average citizen. One interesting measure is that immigration is a reverse Goldilocks problem, almost none (rural Scotland) people are happy with the concept, quite a lot (London) people are comfortable with result but somewhere in the middle (Lincoln, Boston) people are very unhappy. However, your mischaracterization of the points Burnett was making (a narrow point about students) obscures this argument. Rather what you wrote makes you sound like the sort of person who has never a migrant they like and that the route to a happier society is to stop it all. This is a shame because you are right that there is a danger of a serious split in society that will make us very unhappy very soon. There has been too little real attention paid to the problems, concerns and lives of the 'average' UK citizen.

The core issue, as the comment line suggests, is that this is about immigration not education. Indians, and other foreign immigrants, are attracted to UK HE not only for the education that it offers, but for the prospects of employment in the UK: as a means of by-passing immigration restrictions. The debate needs to focus on the debatable benefits arising from continued mass immigration for the indigenous population of these islands - this is a legitimate matter for political discussion.