This is London: Life and Death in the World City

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Nevertheless he gives us some: London has 600,000 people living in it illegally. It is these people most Londoners barely see, and rarely hear from. Sutton, Trevor; Judah, Ben (26 February 2021). "Turning the Tide on Dirty Money". Center for American Progress . Retrieved 24 September 2021. Whether it’s a young Turkish Erasmus student pining for her Austrian boyfriend, a disgruntled Romanian long-distance lorry driver, a Latvian teenager drawn into online sex work, an Ivorian migrant who goes through hell to get to France, or a Galician boat mechanic involved in illegal fishing in the Antarctic, their individuality is slightly lost in a relentless pounding mass.

The wide range of peoples - again a more constant for London than many people perhaps appreciate - was sizeable and varied but some appear again and again: Poles, Romanians, Ghanaians, Nigerians, Afghans, Iraqis, Somalians and Sierra Leoneans - as opposed to Jews, Italians, Indians, Pakistanis, Vietnamese or Ugandans of early years (and many still present in the areas the book covers). While Judah would doubtless be alarmed by the comparison, it’s notable that a number of those he documents, in particular migrants themselves, complain about the migrants they encounter – whom they characterise as immoral or criminal.What does it now mean to call yourself European? Who makes up this population of some 750 million, sprawled from Ireland to Ukraine, from Sweden to Turkey? Who has always called it home, and who has newly arrived from elsewhere? Who are the people who drive our long-distance lorries, steward our criss-crossing planes, lovingly craft our legacy wines, fish our depleted waters, and risk life itself in search of safety and a new start? We shot the film consecutively: day-by-day, as if I really had just arrived. I started at the beginning, at Victoria Coach Station with nothing. As Ben flits round the vast metropolis, his flowing tide of (in general) pretty unhappy interviewees can begin to sound like William Blake All of which he achieves, after a fashion, by becoming a porn star in his low-budget, self-directed videos that have apparently taken the Arab world by storm. His is an extraordinary story, recounted with such urgency and immediacy that the reader is projected headlong into a world about which most of us know next to nothing. A Latvian teenager is drawn into online sex work, an Ivorian migrant goes through hell to get to France It makes you wonder about the things about Europe you don’t see, the strays, battles and difficult times.

From 2010 to 2012, he was a policy fellow in London at the European Council on Foreign Relations, a think-tank. [14] He has also been a visiting fellow at the European Stability Initiative in Istanbul. [15] [ failed verification] From 2017 to 2020, he was a research fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington D.C. [16] In 2020, he joined the Atlantic Council in Washington D.C. as a Nonresident Senior Fellow. [17] Judah has written for various progressive and conservative think-tanks including The Center For American Progress (CAP) and Policy Exchange. [18] [19] His work has also featured at The German Council on Foreign Relations. [20] In a few cases Judah gets so close to his protagonists that he writes as if from inside their heads, in the manner of WG Sebald. There’s the Polish registrar in Catford, for example, who describes her own love life as well as her job marrying couples and deciding which ones are genuine and which doing it for a passport. When she recalls being invited to a Nigerian-Polish wedding party, on “one of those lingering and beautiful fallings of light there is only in England in the summer”, she loses herself in rapture and he lets her run on as if he’s not there. You’ve seen the travel books and documentaries – London: City of Pomp and Circumstance (cue Beefeaters and busbies); London’s Theatreland!; London: Art Capital of the World… and all of that. It is very clear to see that the population of Britain have all been ideologically brain-washed by people hostile to the traditional Christian culture of Europe and the West,their brain washing message continually instils shaming guilt depicting our Christian past in a negative distorted and misleading ways,constantly referencing colonialism, slavery & implying Britain has a long history of being mean nasty and hostile to non Christian minorities and therefore now is the time for us to make amends because they deserve some reparations.Moses the foul mouthed drug dealer & thief has conveniently embraced grievance politics and feels he has the privilege to guilt those who might condemn his criminality.He is able to justify & comfort himself with the postcolonial ideology narrative. "What was the British Empire [censored] based on? drugs,sugar and opium..so don't you ever,ever,give me any of dat moralizing [censored]" Feinberg, Richard (November 2013). "Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin". Foreign Affairs. 92 (6).In the West we all live under the rule of non-discrimination.Recently Donald Trump implied Islam posed a mortal danger to the US & therefore immigration ought to temporarily stopped.There was a public outrage in Britain that included a large petition to ban him from entering the UK, there was even a heated parliamentary debate on the issue of barring him. Such is the neo marxist/progressive belief which says that the most morally wrong thing anyone can ever do is to have a critical view of a foreign group & to want to keep that group out.These people actually feel it is evil to think (thought crime) that some people are more unlike us than others, because that would also be a violation of the politically correct orthodoxy that all people are equally like us. The equality principle of the progressive says immigrants must be permitted to access our society, changing its very nature.These people think of themselves as campaigners for global justice,and no one should be allowed to disagree with them. This is a book written in a flowing/poetic journalistic style, it's intention is to inform us about the real life situation in London.The mainstream media plays an important role in how the public understands issues, such as immigration.In the UK a liberal/progressive political ideology dominates and affects the framing, meaning we tend not to hear the opposing anti-immigration argument,we mostly hear that immigration and diversity is a very positive thing that greatly benefits both the immigrant and the country they move to.This author gives us the other side of the story.

He is at pains to show his working: he tells us when he is making notes or when he has pressed record on his phone, as if talking to strangers in London is so unlikely as to be unbelievable. Unfortunately, the illuminating and candid representations of the city in each chapter are placed within a broader narrative that is contrived. This is London could draw more from the richness within the individual stories to really make sense of the city. Focusing on the boroughs with the lowest share of ethnically British people, at both extremes of the income scale, may have been an attempt to illustrate how profoundly London has changed. Instead, it verges on making a caricature of the city. With a few exceptions, the subjects of this ‘new London’ have been pushed to their limits, and treat their circumstances either with despair, violence or a disturbing sense of apathy. Boroughs and districts are introduced by their poverty statistics and ethnic compositions. Surely there is something we can say to explain modern London in addition to this focus upon race and income? Without discounting the major divisions that stem from differences in culture, language and economic inequality, London surely merits a less simplistic portrayal.Servicing this infrastructure is an every increasing number of illegal or underpaid migrants who, along with the average working class British individual, are forced to live in increasingly squalid conditions owing to the government's ideological indifference to the failure of its precious "market" to provide decent accommodation for the average citizen. In a series of vivid but always empathetic portraits of other people’s lives, journalist Ben Judah invites us to meet them. Drawn from hours of painstaking interviews, these vital stories reveal a vibrant continent which has been transformed by diversity, migration, the internet, climate change, Covid, war and the quest for freedom. Judah grabs hold of London and shakes out its secrets. He has a gift for ingratiating himself into very foreign surroundings and teasing out stories. . .Judah has done an important service in capturing the voices of those swept to the margins by economic forces beyond their control * Economist * Xinjiang: Taming China's Wild West | Standpoint". Archived from the original on 9 March 2016 . Retrieved 19 February 2016.

There have always been people to complain that London is losing its identity, that it is being overrun. In 1185 Richard of Devizes suggested: “I do not at all like that city. All sorts of men crowd there from every country under the heavens. Each brings its own vices and its own customs.” In 1255 a monk with the unlikely name of Matthew Paris remarked that London was “overflowing” with “Poitevins, Provençals, Italians and Spaniards”. In the 15th century certain splenetic commentators were railing against Flemish, Danish, German and Dutch arrivals; Icelanders, commonly employed as servants, were viewed as an underclass. How common is this? In 2015, the ONS estimated that there were 209,000 jobs in the country paying less than minimum wage. Yet the government has prosecuted only three firms for paying less than minimum wage since 2014. Little surprise the touting spots thrive. That didn’t surprise me. In another life, as another Romanian, Polish, Ukrainian person, I know I would have longed to be one who just goes. His first book, Fragile Empire (2013), a study of Vladimir Putin's Russia, was published by Yale University Press. [21] [22] His second book, This Is London, was published by Picador in 2016. The book was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-fiction 2016 and shortlisted for the Ryszard [23] Kapuscinski Award for Literary Reportage 2019. [24]

Judah, Ben (October 2008). "Caucasus: Diary, August–September, 2008". Standpoint Magazine. Archived from the original on 9 March 2016 . Retrieved 19 February 2016.