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With his attack on immigration, John Lydon has ditched anarchy for something even darker

The former Sex Pistols’ frontman believes migrants are causing anarchy in the UK. But, as Roisin O’Connor says, we have all benefitted from refugees in so many ways – and, before shouting off his famously loud mouth, Lydon ought to remember his own heritage…

Sunday 10 March 2024 11:54 GMT
Former Sex Pistol John Lydon told LBC listeners that ‘prospective immigrants’ arriving in the UK’s seaside towns had created ‘animosity’
Former Sex Pistol John Lydon told LBC listeners that ‘prospective immigrants’ arriving in the UK’s seaside towns had created ‘animosity’ (Getty / iStock)

There’s anarchy in the UK – but, according to former Sex Pistol John Lydon, it’s immigration that’s to blame.

The man formerly known as Johnny Rotten was once a voice of the anti-establishment who, along with his punk band, rose to chaotic fame (or notoriety, depending on how you feel about the Pistols) in the mid-Seventies. Now, though, it seems you’re more likely to see him serving as a mouthpiece for the most controversial figures in British politics, who are in turn desperate to find a scapegoat for their own failures.

And there are many. As the 68-year-old whinged on LBC about the demise of once-bustling seaside towns around the UK, where he is soon to embark on a tour with his band, Public Image Limited, Lydon seemed blithely unaware of the devastation Brexit – which he still supports – has wrought on this country. A report in January found that leaving the EU has already cost the UK £140bn, a figure projected to increase to £300bn in the next 10 years.

Meanwhile, Jeremy Hunt’s latest Budget has done little to address the housing crisis, despite a 27 per cent increase in rough sleeping in the past 12 months. Campaigners have also warned that the chancellor’s cut to capital gains tax for landlords might result in thousands of renters becoming homeless when those property owners sell up.

(Perhaps Hunt was distracted after learning that £15,000 of taxpayer’s money had been used to pay a libel bill for his colleague, MP Michelle Donelan, after she was sued for wrongly accusing an academic of supporting Hamas)

Many former Sex Pistols fans won’t be surprised to hear Lydon blame things on immigration, not after he publicly backed Donald Trump and Nigel Farage in a 2017 interview. But it’s still galling to hear someone still benefiting from a career in music omit how immigration has immeasurably boosted our cultural output.

John Lydon blames immigration for 'division' in UK

Many of our most successful musicians – Freddie Mercury, George Michael, Olivia Newton-John, Raye, Norah Jones, Dua Lipa, Rita Ora – are the result of immigration, as are our politicians (Ed and David Miliband, Suella Braverman, Sajid Javid, Priti Patel), artists (Tracey Emin, Lucien Freud) and entrepreneurs (Alan Sugar).

Lydon also conveniently sidelines his own heritage. He is the son of working-class immigrants, who came to the UK from Ireland before he was born in 1956. Without that, perhaps he would never have formed the Sex Pistols. He certainly wouldn’t have met his late wife, music promoter Nora Forster, to whom he was married to for 44 years, and who moved to the UK from Germany to help nurture the thriving punk scene from which he emerged.

Sex Pistols frontman Johnny Rotten performs on stage in December 1976
Sex Pistols frontman Johnny Rotten performs on stage in December 1976 (Graham Wood/Evening Standard/Getty Images)

My own ancestry isn’t entirely dissimilar to Lydon’s. My grandfather, the surrealist poet Philip O’Connor, was the son of an Irish father and a woman of mixed Irish and Burmese ancestry; born in Bedfordshire, he was then abandoned by his mother in France for two years before being collected and brought back to London. The O’Connors have since scattered around the world – Japan, Canada, France and, in my case, a coastal town in Kent, where my mother’s side of the family have lived for generations.

Living in one of those seaside towns that Lydon mentioned, I struggle to see the crisis immigration has supposedly wrought. Rather, it’s down to the government’s lack of investment, the homelessness crisis in the UK, cost of living, and the fact that the British seaside, once the go-to destination for families in the Victorian era, has been usurped in favour of overseas travel. At least, that was the case until Brexit.

John Lydon on LBC
John Lydon on LBC (LBC)

Many seaside towns are beginning to flourish again, as a direct impact of the housing crisis. I was born in London, but rising rents, the cost of living and the impossibility that I would ever be able to afford a house there played a part in my move to the coast.

But I am also enamoured by the calm that seaside living brings; the community that’s grown here in the last 10 years, full of artists and creatives. It seems that hundreds of other people my age have seen the appeal, too. My hometown still has its problems, and gentrification certainly plays a part in that, but it is far from “ratty” and “rundown”.

If Lydon still wants to blame anyone on “broken Britain”, I suggest he turn his gaze to the Houses of Parliament, co-designed, incidentally, by Augustus Pugin, son of a French immigrant.

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