Why Lionel Shriver Really Left Britain

An interesting spat has emerged involving the writer Lionel Shriver and the Telegraph journalist Claire Alfree who recently interviewed Shriver about her new novel A Better Life and describes her thus:

Well known today as a bracing anti-woke columnist. Gender ideology, diversity initiatives, the “insanity” of lockdown: she skewers it all with ruthless disdain for liberal piety.

Shriver has recently left Britain to live in Portugal. If you read the Telegraph piece, which appeared several weeks ago, you’d be left in no doubt that this was solely due to immigration:

A Better Life is unquestionably down on mass immigration. A satirical take-down of an unrealised 2023 New York initiative whereby private residences would take in immigrants, it follows Nico, an adrift 20-something who lives with his mother, a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, in Brooklyn. A fully signed-up member of the scheme, Nico’s mother has recently taken in a Honduran migrant called Martine, who has allegedly escaped an abusive gangland husband, and yet is, Nico suspects, not quite so helpless as she seems.

Shriver, who was born in North Carolina in 1957, but lived in the UK for 36 years before moving to Portugal, is also unapologetic in her belief that mass immigration places an unworkable burden on the host population. “People from my generation who were born into a country that was overwhelmingly white European have experienced this huge demographic swing,” she says. “And to point this out isn’t to say you’re a racist or you hate foreigners, but it is to acknowledge a huge transfer of power between groups, in terms of territory and culture. A considerable proportion of these foreigners have no permission to live in the country. To fail to feel at least a trace of resentment in these circumstances would be anthropologically abnormal. It’s a big ask.”

And just in case there was any doubt:

Shriver and her husband, Jeff Williams, a jazz drummer (the couple have no children), left their home in Bermondsey in 2022 primarily because of immigration. “Over the course of my 13 years there, the white working-class character of the area had completely changed.”

No other reason is cited.

Shriver isn’t taking that lying down, as she writes for the Spectator in a piece called ‘The real reason I left Britain‘. The first thing that annoyed her was a reference to a half-finished bottle of wine, evidently thrown to suggest that Shriver has some sort of drink problem, but she’s much angrier about the rest:

Although I did observe that the London I left is no longer an ethnically English city – factually true – the biggest inaccuracy in that profile is slanderous. Apparently the sole reason I left the UK was to get away from the country’s immigrants. More inference: Shriver is a nut and a bigot.

My reluctant departure from Britain was motivated by a crowded basket of push and pull factors. Yet one prospect tipped the balance, amounting to the straw that broke the camel’s British residency: the upcoming HMRC policy to require the self-employed to file tax returns five times a year. When I first encountered these plans – which mandate that freelancers upload to government-approved software (hence to government) every single receipt – I thought: that’s the limit. I refuse. You cannot make me, and if you’re intent on imposing this death-by-bureaucracy, I will leave. So, note to HMRC: please mark me down as one of the loads of self-employed workers ensuring your unreasonable new obligations will backfire for the Exchequer.

Articles and comment sections are chocka with older entrepreneurs announcing that, thanks to this onerous, complex and laborious regime, they are retiring early and closing shop. Many younger self-starters will think twice about being their own boss. An HMRC spokesman assures us, inanely, ‘Making Tax Digital’ will make it easier for sole traders and landlords to get their tax right by providing a more real-time overview of their finances, freeing up their time to focus on growing their business’. Really? Why not file 10 times a year, then, or every day? In truth, vastly increased electronic paperwork is apt to generate more errors, not to mention more fury. There’s nothing “easy” about a thicket of new reporting requirements. The claim that the regime will “free up time” is an insult to our intelligence.

This innovation is surely about control. HMRC may suspect that the self-employed are big cheats. It mightn’t fancy taxpayers whose wages it can’t garnish at source. So maybe they’re happy to discourage being a sole trader. There’s a reason that ‘the process is the punishment’ has become a cliché. This extraordinary administrative demand – on top of quarterly VAT reporting for many – seems deliberately punitive. Well, punish work, get less of it. Punish my work, get less of me.

The two pieces are an interesting example of how two people can present the same event quite differently. However, Shriver, who claims to have been “burnt repeatedly by hacks”, says she was “an idiot” for having broken her own rule and let the Telegraph writer into her home and thereby exposing her “gormless naïvety”.

Shriver’s piece is worth reading in full, but she offers her readers two options:

“If you’re interested in the duplicitousness of British journalists, then keep reading. If you’re only interested in self-destructive British tax policy, skip to the middle.”