The book is also bitty, which is hard to avoid when you're covering so much ground. It's ten magazine features and half-a-dozen newspaper articles glued together, buried under a topping of statistics. But Goodhart has some good anecdotes and does a great job of demonstrating of how many idiots have been at the helm of our country. In his introduction, he recounts how many in the Labour Party considered Gordon Brown's "British jobs for British workers" to be "pure racism" and mentions an evening socialising with a senior civil servant (British) who believed that it was his job "to maximize global welfare not national welfare". 

Goodhart does his best to sum up the various immigrant groups and their fortunes. He's a little unfair on the Poles, who, he states, aren't "model immigrants". I'd argue if there's one group who have joined in enthusiastically, while also retaining their culture, it's the Poles. Of course, the racism-hunters would argue that the Poles are white Christians so it's not difficult for them to fit in, but the Chinese have also done exceptionally well, while retaining their culture and not making a fuss about their non-whiteness. My father, a refugee who was warmly and generously welcomed into this country, says the great thing about Britain is that everyone minds their own business. Let's hope it stays that way, because tolerance is about the only thing left in this country that works (a few jihadis and Scots excluded).

I can't say The British Dream is a scintillating, unputdownable read, but Goodhart probably wasn't aiming at that. It is, however, a thoughtful, meticulous consideration of the subject.