One friend's daughter grew up here, in this small Dorset town, in a time when it was almost entirely white. Not hostile, just uniform. The full extent of the foreign was the Indian takeaway, the Chinese takeaway, perhaps the Thai. Exotic food, exotic people, safely contained in a transaction. You ordered, you paid, you went home. Foreign was a category, not a neighbour.
She lives somewhere different now. And when she hears loud voices through the wall — raised in argument, or just in the ordinary percussion of a different culture's domestic life — she assumes the worst. She presumes abuse. Never mind that she and the woman next door share food, which is one of the oldest forms of human recognition, the quiet acknowledgement that we are both here, both hungry, both worth feeding. The frame overwhelms the fact. My friend's conclusion, drawn from her daughter's experience, is that multiculturalism has failed.
I disagree. But I understand how you get there, when your only preparation for the world was the takeaway.
Percy didn't have to be in the room to do this. He was already in the formation — in the media, in the framing, in the long patient work of teaching people what loud foreign voices mean. Her daughter wasn't being cruel. She was being careful in the way people learn to be careful when they've been told, for long enough, what to be careful about.
Our former MP Oliver Letwin — not a man I would rush to defend — once told a story against himself that I have never forgotten. A constituent wrote in demanding action on immigration. The usual: we are being swamped, something must be done. His office composed a sympathetic reply. Letwin went to sign it and noticed, for the first time, the name of the person he was addressing. Some time later the same constituent wrote in again, furious — because the authorities were threatening to deport the man who ran his local shop. The shopkeeper was foreign, yes. But a good foreigner. A known foreigner. His foreigner.
Percy lives in that gap. The abstract immigrant is a threat. The concrete person who sells you your newspaper and remembers what you take in your tea is fine — he's one of the good ones. The work Percy does is to keep the two from ever meeting. To keep immigration as a wave, a flood, a swamping — never a woman sharing food through a wall.
I should say something about the people I have been eating with.
We have been meeting for meals for twenty years or more. We came together originally because of Iraq — the conviction that the war was wrong, the weapons were invented, the case was a lie. We knew, and we said so, and that shared knowing made us a group. We have been breaking bread together ever since.
At a recent meal I found myself divided from my friends on three separate counts. Ukraine. Transgender rights. Multiculturalism — specifically whether it has failed, as one friend's daughter believes, having grown up in a town that was almost entirely white and now living somewhere that isn't.
I am not going to pretend I handled any of these divisions with great grace. I am an anarchist of sorts, a libertarian of sorts, disagreeable by nature and by conviction. I rub up against people. I always have.
But here is what I want to say about all three disagreements at that table, because it matters for everything this book has been arguing.
Invading other countries is bad. War is bad. Trans women attacking women in spaces where women are vulnerable is bad. Domestic violence is bad — and a woman who grew up somewhere vanilla-white, who now lives somewhere she doesn't fully understand, who hears loud voices through a wall and fears the worst, is not wrong to fear domestic violence. It is bad. It happens.
None of us at that table disagreed about any of this. We agreed that these things are bad. What we disagreed about was the arrangement — which bad thing was the real threat, which bad thing was being exaggerated, which bad thing was a distraction, which bad thing justified overriding everything else.
And that is Percy's masterpiece. He doesn't need to invent the bad things. They are real. The invasion happened. The attacks happened. The violence happens. He just needs to place them carefully — so that the people who agree on everything fundamental end up facing each other across the table instead of facing him. So that the ones who marched together against Iraq find themselves on opposite sides of Ukraine, of trans rights, of what a loud voice through a wall might mean.
The good guys have been granulated.
Not by persuading us of anything false. Not by making us cruel or stupid or corrupt. But by arranging real things, real fears, real harms, so that we spend our energy on each other. So that twenty years of shared meals and shared marches and shared conviction that the story was wrong turns out not to be armour against it — turns out, in fact, to be exactly the material Percy needs. People who trust each other enough to argue. People who care enough to fall out.
He didn't need to be at the table. He'd already done his work.
We had a good meal. We always do.