American Immigrants

Are they really pouring in?

Ellen Degeneres lives just down the lane from me. She bought a big old farmhouse for a few million, as you do.

That’s what many news reports have stated.

Apparently she lives in ‘The Cotswolds’ or so the likes of the Daily Mail like to report. I’m here to set the record straight on that for the majority of you who know little or nothing about the Cotswolds and care even less. Why should you, it’s all fluff and nonsense.

Jeremy Clarkson, the farmers friend, and Ms Degeneres both live in Oxfordshire. I grew up and went to school in Oxfordshire, I know of which I speak.

But I feel a snobbish, unnecessary and frivolous need to correct some of the terminology being bandied around by the press.

I live in the middle of the proper, old school Cotswolds and have done for 35 years. I live ‘on the escarpment,’ a term I only learned from a very posh neighbour about 20 years ago.

The escarpment is the proper, high wolds, the hills and valleys that make up the proper Cotswolds. This means our house is about 950 feet, (289.5 meters) above sea level. In the summer, it’s delightful, but due to the slightly raised elevation, it’s generally 5 to 6 degrees C cooler than the surrounding lowlands. In the winter, like right now, it’s wet, cold, dark and cold.

To our west is the delightful Vale of Evesham, low lying, traditionally covered in orchards, prone to floods along the banks of the River Severn, it’s beautiful with many fine old houses, but that area is NOT the Cotswolds.

The flat slabs of Oxfordshire to our east, again, lovely countryside with many attractions is where farmer Clarkson the Ellen and Portia live. And again this area is NOT the Cotswolds.

The reason this small part of the southern UK has a reputation is that it is a National Park, and an AOB (Area of Outstanding Beauty) and many of it’s pristine villages are in conservation areas, including the village we live just outside. In fact our garden hedge and wall is the boundary of the village conservation area, we are just outside it in our entirely inappropriate house for the area. It’s timber built, not the honey coloured limestone cottages and houses you see on twee postcards.

Most of the houses in our village are old, some very old and one in particular is properly ancient. The original part of the neighbouring property to our modern effort was built before Billy the Conq arrived on our shores in 1066. Their extension was built in 1207. Ours was built in 1998, as the previous owners of the ancient pile next door clearly enjoyed telling us.

But my very petty point is, a real estate broker, or ‘estate agent’ as we call them in the UK, will expand a fashionable area by sometimes comical amounts. This is especially prevalent in London where the snob value of a particular post code (like a ZIP code, sort of) can add hundreds of thousands to the value of a property.

On the opposite side of the river Thames in west London is the very salubrious borough of Chelsea is a slightly less posh borough of Battersea. For many years, this part of London was referred to, by people making fun of estate agents desperate attempts to flog a house, as ‘South Chelsea.’

Likewise, an area I know well, Bayswater, is often referred to as East Notting Hill if you’re looking to buy a tiny apartment for a couple of mill.

So, the Cotswolds has expanded from a very specific area of ‘wolds,’ high treeless hills occupied by a few thousand sheep, to almost half of the West of England.

Okay, it’s not important, but all these rich folk you are hearing about, they live in Oxfordshire okay, not the wretched Cotswolds.

But I didn’t find out that Degeneres and de Rossi had moved nearby from reading advert flooded trashy tabloid pages, no dear readers, for I met them both.

Okay, I’ll modify that by saying I doubt they would remember, but I was at a gym about 5 years ago. I generally don’t wear my glasses when I’m in the gym, it allows me to focus on pumping staggering amounts of iron. I can bench press 4 or 5kg on a good day.

Anyway, I was there doing some twisty sideways pulls on a machine when an American woman asked if I could help fasten a velcro strap on her ankle as she’s doing some sideways pull things with her leg. You know, how people do in gyms, the velcro strap was attached to a pulley with weights.

I was happy to help, I could tell she was a woman and I could just about tell she had blonde hair but I truly had no idea who this person was. I knelt down and put the velcro strap on her ankle which was quite easy, she thanked me, and as I stood up another woman was standing quite close to me. Even without my glasses, her face and voice were instantly recognisable. It was Ellen Degeneres, asking her wife Portia if she was going to be long.

I returned to my twisty efforts, they help with my lower back, and that was the end of my long standing show biz connection to these two American icons.

So the stories about them fleeing the USA now might be slightly distorted, the reason cited in the UK press is they are fleeing after the orange mega MAGA victory, the greatest election victory in history, the best, biggest, most beautiful victory ever.

I think Ellen and Portia were thinking of moving here long before the orange one stormed to glory.

But a little more digging and it does seem that a number of fairly high profile and very wealthy Americans have started to arrange an exit. Maybe only for the next few years, but they are definitely citing the orange victory.

I discovered from the CITY AM news site that “Henley & Partners, a residence and citizenship specialist, recently reported a 504 per cent increase in the number of enquiries it gets from American citizens compared with just four years ago, with many clients either side of the electoral divide, it said, citing the country’s high stakes election as a core motivating factor.”

Okay, that’s pretty clear. And I learned another acronym from my scant research, UHNWIs. Ultra-High-Net-Worth-Individuals. These are the people who, according to many fairly respectable sources, are fleeing the states and snapping up posh properties in London and of course, the area known as the ’Cotswolds.’

But there’s another layer to this, one I have been aware of. Since our recent election, the new Labour administration are slightly less sympathetic to the hyper wealthy, tax dodging, land owning, mean, selfish loopholers I have written about before. The theory is, our homegrown UHNWIs are fleeing to various tax exile boltholes and selling off their UK properties, which means there’s a bit of a glut which means the prices of really high end posh houses has dropped. Not down to a level where normal people could afford them. I wouldn’t be able to afford the front of some of these gaffs.

So in come the Americans, snapping up house bargains in the £10 to £50 million bracket. There are now estimated to be over 200,000 US citizens living permanently in the UK.

Quick observation. When I’m in London I stay in the Bayswater area, I often walk down Westbourne Grove, a kind of middling posh street with some high end grocery stores mixed in with scruffy old ‘we can fix your phone’ shops.

25 years ago, if you walked down this street, the most common language you would hear was Arabic. It was a very big Arab area, many of the people doing their shopping or going out to the numerous Arabic restaurants were Saudi’s, in London for a short period, often to do with their health. For many years our private medicine industry was powerfully supported by visiting Saudi’s.

What happened immediately after the 9/11 attacks was they all disappeared, it all went very quiet. But then, I don’t know exactly when, maybe 5 years later and the most common language you would hear spoken was Russian.

We know of dozens of big Notting Hill houses, we’re talking between £5 and £10 million, were bought by Russians. They opened a lot of quite bizarre furniture stores, the sort of stuff a set designer would fill a swanky apartment for a Russian oligarch in a spy movie.

But then the Ukraine invasion happened, they all drifted away, now, the most common language?

English, with an American accent.

So of course Americans are very welcome here, we love Americans, but I suspect they have a slightly different experience to the thousands of non white, non American people who arrive here LEGALLY each year.

I’m not talking illegal immigrants, but the legal ones who are far more numerous than the folks risking all in boats and getting endless hysterical headlines in our vile right wing, foreign owned, non tax paying press.

And of course low life specimens like Faragé milking their plight for all it’s worth. It is rarely stated but we are very reliant on immigrants, from all nations. Our indigenous birth rate is so low, we have fewer and fewer young people to maintain everything and power our economy. Thank goodness people are arriving and settling here.

As I walked through London yesterday evening, I was quite moved by all the people walking around me.

Every race on the planet represented, in large numbers. Big gaggles of black, asian and anglo girls all walking along together, laughing with youthful exuberance. Three big lads with bulky sports bags who looked like they’d just been to the gym, I could not begin to describe their racial background save to say they were all different and none of them Anglo Saxon.

Big families, mum in a headscarf, 4 kids, dad on the phone, chattering and laughing together, old Indian ladies with big shopping bags, young Chinese men standing together, all looking at their phones. Then, an old English couple, walking along arm in arm, so sweet, smiling at everyone.

It was like a montage sequence from a Richard Curtis movie

I live in a country where people from all over the world want to live. The change I’ve seen in my 68 years is remarkable and mainly positive. There was one black girl in my school when I was a teenager. Nearly 800 kids and only one of whom was black., And she was so cool, even the racist skinheads liked her.

Immigration has changed things for the better in 98.5% of cases on these damp and windy islands, yes of course there’s crime, and poverty, and racism, and ignorant hatred based on fear all around, but in general, people genuinely do just get on with their lives and try not to hurt others.

So if these hyper wealthy Americans come to live here, and are generally kind and not spreading hate and division, then I for one, welcome them.

the number of US citizens in the UK has jumped from 137,000 in 2013 to over 166,000 by 2021. This is the latest known figure and the highest in Europe. It could be higher by now.