Cities generally are comfortable with immigration it’s said. But is this true? If there is less confidence outside the city, could this pose problems for city-regions? Could making the positive case for diversity in cities build greater confidence elsewhere – or might that backfire by generating a backlash against the cosmopolitan worldview from those who feel less secure about change? Jeremy Cliffe (Economist) and Sunder Katwala discuss with John Harris (Guardian)and others.

In association with British Future.

Speaker biographies:

Jeremy Cliffe is The Economist's Bagehot columnist. He has appeared on CNN, CNBC, NPR, BBC World, BBC Newsnight, Sky News, Al Jazeera, Arte and France 5, and is a regular guest on BBC News 24's The Papers. He has written and presented documentaries for BBC Radio 4, and produces occasional op-eds for the Guardian and the Evening Standard. Previously, he worked at the Economist Intelligence Unit in New York and the European Parliament in Brussels. He is the author of ‘Britain’s Cosmopolitan Future’, a Policy Network paper which provides an insight into the demographic, social and economic changes that influenced the British election of 2015 and that will shape the elections of 2020, 2025 and beyond.

John Harris is a journalist and author who writes regularly for the Guardian about a range of subjects built around politics, popular culture and music.

Sunder Katwala is the director of the identity and integration think-tank British Future. He has previously worked as a journalist. He was general secretary of the Fabian Society think-tank from 2003 to 2011, and a leading writer and internet editor at the Observer, a research director of the Foreign Policy Centre and commissioning editor for politics and economics at the publisher Macmillan. He writes for the Guardian, the New Statesman and The Spectator’s Coffee House blog.

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