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The Sunday Times - Britain
September 18, 2005
Race chief warns of ghetto crisis
David Leppard
BRITAINS race relations chief is to
warn that the country is sleepwalking into New Orleans-style racial
segregation, with Muslim and black ghettos dividing cities.
Trevor Phillips, chairman of the
Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), is to say the July terror attacks have
exposed a racial nightmare where some districts are becoming fully-fledged
ghettos literal black holes where people fear to go.
In a stark warning to Tony Blair,
Phillips will say in a speech this week that race relations policy is failing to
tackle the roots of ethnic alienation and extremism.
He will suggest new measures that he
admits critics will regard as social engineering. These could include forcing
white schools to take larger numbers of ethnic minorities to help to encourage
integration.
He will admit that his message is
bleak but sees Americas experience after Hurricane Katrina as a warning to
Britain to avoid similar complacency in believing that it has an integrated
society.
The fact is we are a society which,
almost without noticing it, is becoming more divided by race and religion. We
are becoming more unequal by ethnicity, he will tell Manchester Council for
Community Relations on Thursday.
Our ordinary schools . . . are
becoming more exclusive and our universities are starting to become colour-coded
with virtual whites keep out signs in some urban institutions.
In a side-swipe at Oxford, Cambridge
and other top universities, he will say: If you look closely at the campuses of
some of our most distinguished universities you can pick out the invisible no
blacks may enter messages.
Some districts, he will say, are on
their way to literal black holes into which nobody goes without fear and
trepidation, and from which nobody ever escapes undamaged.
He will warn that if this continues,
the first century of black immigration would end in a New Orleans-style Britain
of passively coexisting ethnic and religious communities, eyeing each other
uneasily over the fences of our differences.
Assessing where Britain stands in
the aftermath of the July 7 attacks, he says: We are sleepwalking our way to
segregation. We are becoming strangers to each other and leaving communities to
be marooned outside the mainstream.
Phillips cites new evidence from the
CRE that residential segregation is increasing even as some Asians are moving
into middle-class areas. What is left behind is hardening in its separateness,
he will say.
The number of people of Pakistani
heritage in ghettos, which he defines as those with more than two-thirds of any
one ethnicity, trebled between 1991 and 2001. In Bradford, 13.3% now live in
such communities compared with 4.3% in 1991; in Leicester it has risen from
10.8% to 13.3%.
According to Phillips, new research
also pours cold water on hopes that children mixing in schools might break down
the barriers between communities. The study by Bristol University found that
children are slightly more segregated in the playground than they are in their
neighbourhoods. That means that not only arent the children meeting nor are
their parents, Phillips will say.
New CRE research will also show that
most white people do not have a non-white friend, while young Asian and black
people have almost exclusively Asian or black friends.
Phillips will suggest that schools
could be given cash incentives to increase their ethnic mix and local education
authorities could be forced to broaden their catchment areas to include a more
even racial mix.
He also has concerns about white
working-class ghettos in places such as Barking, Essex, and parts of Yorkshire.
Critics will dismiss his warning as
alarmist. But Phillips will argue: America is not our dream but our nightmare.
When the hurricane hits and it could be a recession rather than a natural
disaster those (segregated) communities are set up for destruction.
The Sunday Times - Britain
September 18, 2005
Focus: Are we sleepwalking our way
to apartheid?
The Commission for Racial Equality says segregation in
Britain is going the way of New Orleans. Is it right and, if so, what can be
done, ask Richard Woods and David Leppard
In Aston, a predominantly ethnic
minority area of Birmingham, Pardeep Modhvadia was quite frank last week about
how insulated his life can be from mainstream white British culture.
We are very much involved with our mosque and events in
the Asian community, said the 34-year-old IT consultant whose wife, Nazia, is
33. Many of these events involve Asians exclusively and it can be easy to get
wrapped up in Asian culture and not embrace other communities around you.
Modhvadia admitted that he and his
wife mainly only see Asian people, partly because of religious and family
ties.
I dont think we are as segregated
as some people say, though, he added. It has always been this way. However,
since the London bombings you can get an unfriendly reaction from white people
who do not know you.
There are plenty of those because
white people, even those living in the same area, are equally unlikely to know
many fellow citizens from across the cultural divide. Among them is James
Parker, a 24-year-old mechanic, who lives in the same area of Birmingham with
his girlfriend Chloe, 22. He, too, was straightforward about the ethnically
restricted ambit of his life.
Our friends are mostly white, he
said. I knew a lot of Asians in school and they mainly talked only to each
other and would sometimes speak in Gujarati it was like their own club. So
everyone kind of divided into their own racial groups.
He added that the community had
been more segregated since the London bombings.
Is this the true face of modern
Britain? Is it diverse but divided; integrated in theory, separate in practice?
Trevor Phillips, head of the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), believes so.
In a bold and controversial speech
this week, he will warn that Britain is sleep-walking its way to a society of
segregation, ethnic enclaves and potential conflict.
We are becoming strangers to each
other and we are leaving communities to be marooned outside the mainstream, he
will say.
Some districts, he will add, are on
their way to becoming literal black holes into which nobody goes without fear
and from which nobody escapes undamaged. We could have a different future. But
if we want that different future, we have to face facts now.
According to Phillips, the facts are
deeply uncomfortable and largely unspoken. Ethnic communities, he says, are
increasingly concentrated in ghettos. Although there has been some
integration, notably in London and the southeast, the popular image portrayed
abroad of Britain as one big happy melting pot is false.
Not only do ethnic minorities
largely live in separate areas, they are typically segregated at school and
socially and it is getting worse. When we leave work, most of us leave
multi-ethnic Britain behind, Phillips will say.
He will draw on CRE research which
shows that most Britons cannot name a single good friend from a different race
and that many young people from ethnic minorities have no friends beyond their
own community. We are divided physically, economically, culturally and
psychologically, he will say.
Most controversially, perhaps,
Phillips likens the widening gulf in Britain to the dark underbelly of America
revealed by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, where rich whites escaped the
devastation while poor blacks were left to sink.
Britains sleepwalk to segregation
may lead to a similar rude awakening: When the hurricane hits and it could be
recession rather than natural disaster, for example those communities are set
up for destruction.
It sounds almost apocalyptic, as doom-laden in its own
way as Enoch Powells rivers of blood speech in 1968, when he warned of the
effects of mass immigration. But this is not a sudden intemperate outburst from
Phillips. It is part of a broad strategy to change the way that Britain deals
with race.
Phillips began an orchestrated
challenge to the whole notion of multiculturalism last year, when he said there
was a need for a return to common values. Now he is to make the point even more
starkly: The fragmentation of our society by race and ethnicity is a
catastrophe for all of us.
TO understand Phillipss fears, it
is necessary first to examine some of the basics about Britains ethnic make-
up. Despite decades of immigration, and unprecedentedly high levels in recent
years, ethnic minorities still account for only about 8% of the total
population, according to government figures.
In many areas of Britain, black or
brown faces remain rare. In Scotland, Wales, the northeast and the southwest,
ethnic minorities account for just 2.3% of the population or less; in Northern
Ireland the figure in 2001 was just 0.75%. Not exactly multicultural.
What is striking, by contrast, is
the concentration of ethnic minorities in key regions and cities. In the East
Midlands minorities make up 6.5% of the population, in the West Midlands the
figure is 11.3% and in London 29%.
In fact, nearly 45% of all ethnic
minority people in the UK live in London, the ultimate kaleidoscope capital.
In a way this could be seen as
ghettoism on a grand scale and, as it developed, the emphasis on the capital
probably influenced how opinion formers grappled with the advance of ethnic
minorities.
As Kenan Malik, the writer, puts it
in the forthcoming issue of Prospect magazine: At one time the left had been a
champion of a common humanity and universal rights. Over the past 20 years,
however, many key figures and organisations on the British left have promoted
the idea of multiculturalism.
The intellectual elite decided that
accepting difference took precedence over upholding British values.
It was a view encapsulated in a race
relations plan that was developed in Bradford, after race riots in the 1980s,
which declared that every section and ethnic group of the city had an equal
right to maintain its own identity, culture, language, religion and customs.
Such multicultural tolerance,
Phillips now believes, has ultimately helped to build ghettos. We have allowed
tolerance of diversity to harden into the effective isolation of communities in
which some people think special separate values ought to apply, he will tell
his audience in Manchester this week.
It has also allowed the traditional
British values of free speech and family to be eroded. He points to such
incidents as Sikh activists trying to ban a play they found offensive rather
than support free speech; and to the almost casual acceptance of
Afro-Caribbean fathers abandoning their children.
We even tolerate evangelical African
churches performing exorcisms on children in the name of multiculturalism, he
notes.
The growing ethnic divide, says
Phillips, takes two broad forms, the first being hard segregation based on
where people live.
Residential segregation is increasing for many groups,
especially south Asians, he will say. Some minorities are moving into
middle-class, less concentrated areas, but what is left behind is hardening in
its separateness. The number of Pakistani heritage people in ghetto communities
defined as districts with over two-thirds concentration of any one ethnicity
trebled between 1991 to 2001.
Zooming in closer on the figures for
ethnic minority communities lends support to this proposition.
A recent analysis of census data by
experts at Sheffield University identified in detail for the the first time
where migrants (many of whom, but not all, are from ethnic minorities) settle in
Britain. It revealed that in five areas of London Wembley, Hyde Park, Southall
West, East Ham and Kensington more than 45% of the population had been born
abroad.
Outside London, areas such as
Sparkbrook in Birmingham and Belgrave in Leicester had populations with more
than 30% of people not born in the UK. When British-born ethnic minorities are
taken into account, the ethnic ghettos become even starker.
Another study, presented to the
Royal Geographical Society last month, calculated that the proportion of Asians
living in ethnic enclaves had risen by 30% in 10 years. It listed eight British
cities, including Leicester, Birmingham and Bradford, where levels of ethnic
segregation were beginning to rival US cities.
They are coming into the major
league of segregation, said Dr Mike Poulsen of Macquarie University in
Australia, who led the study.
Other experts, however, argue that
the picture is more complex and that, for some groups, such hard segrega-tion
has been declining rather than rising.
What we have got in Britain as a
whole is a decrease in segregation, said Professor Ceri Peach of St Catherines
College, Oxford, and author of The Ethnic Minority Populations of Great Britain.
For example, if you look at the Caribbean population in London, you can see a
decrease (in segregation) census by census since 1961.
You can see a hollowing out of the
inner-city concentrations and a movement towards the outer boroughs, and it is a
pretty well standard movement. The Indian population has also spread into the
wider community.
Peach, though, agrees that there are
Asian-dominated enclaves, particularly in some northern cities.
You have got some areas of very
high concentrations of Pakistani or Bangladeshi populations, where they form
half the population in a few wards. But it is not a very common situation.
AS so often, statistics can be used
to support a case either way: both for an increase or a decrease in segregation,
depending on where you draw the lines.
Peach points out, for example, that
just because there are some highly visible ethnic enclaves, it does not mean
that overall segregation is increasing because the total ethnic population is
growing and spreading at the same time. Within a decade, the ethnic population
is projected to become the majority in Leicester and Birmingham.
Danny Sriskandarajah, head of
migration at the Institute of Public Policy Research, argues that there is no
simple static segregation at work, but a more complex churning of ethnic
populations.
The segregation thesis is based on the notion that
there are white people leaving mixed areas to settle into more white areas, he
said. But the evidence suggests it is not a white phenomenon, it is not based
on race. It is more to do with socio-economic class and age.
What we are seeing in London is
people with young families of all colours and races moving out. You are seeing
that across the Indian community as much as the white community. Middle-class
Indian families are moving out as well.
What we are seeing in London,
peculiarly, is a movement out of everyone who is settled and has the means to
go, and the movement in of people from all over the world from Albania to
Somalia. That is what I would see the phenomenon as, rather than a racial one.
Such an influx and outflow, he says,
is very different from the black ghettos that have persisted in some American
cities for generations. The exception is the Bangladeshi community in the East
End of London, which is the one settled ethnic community that has failed to
improve its position.
Beyond the physical divides,
Phillips also identifies soft segregation in social and cultural circles. Even
in London, the CRE found, a derisory proportion of whites had non-white
friends and ethnic minority youngsters tended to have friends exclusively from
their own community.
HOW much does this matter? When
isolation is coupled with economic deprivation, it breeds discontent, says MI5,
which recently issued a new edition of a study on the radicalisation of young
Muslim men.
The paper, which takes into account
the background of the four July 7 suicide bombers who attacked London, points to
social and economic deprivation as key drivers in their conversion to
terrorism.
In addition, a recent Home Office
study analysed for the first time the unemployment and economic inactivity by
religion rather than the usual categories of age, sex or geographical area.
It found that the Muslim community
was the most disadvantaged faith group in the country, with lower educational
attainment and higher unemployment. The document, marked restricted, found
that the unemployment rate among Britains 1.6m Muslims is more than three times
that of the general population and is the highest of all faith groups.
About half of all Muslims are
economically inactive (52%). That is higher than any other religious group.
WHAT drives where ethnic minority
groups live? And if segregation needs to be countered, what can be done? In
Thurmaston, a largely Asian area of Leicester, Rajiv Shah averred that there was
a natural progression towards separate communities.
Its true Asian people tend to live
together thats because when one Asian goes somewhere another one follows. I
think its because Asian society is a close family community and they like it to
be that way, he said.
However, Shah, a Hindu who moved
from Uganda, in east Africa, in 1972 and has lived in Leicester for the past
five years, added: This does not mean Asian people want to live apart from
white people or black people. In Leicester we are more separated but it does not
seem to interfere with the general day-to-day living.
In a mainly white area on the outskirts of the city,
Carol Brooks, who has run an art gallery in the city for 20 years, agreed that
there was segregation but did not see it as a problem. The Asian population
does tend to keep themselves to themselves and look after one another. But it
does not bother me I say live and let live.
Indeed, many people willingly become
members of ethnic enclaves, argues Peach. Family links and chain migration
explain much of why ethnic groups are concentrated in certain areas.
People come and join their
families, or the families settle and grow, said Peach. The economic
explanations (for where ethnic groups live) are relatively weak. His analysis
of 1991 census data in London showed that less than 10% of the distribution of
any ethnic group could be explained on economic grounds.
Economic factors decide the range
of places you can live, but not the particular place, he said. For quite a lot
of people they actually want to stick together. You have both positive reasons
for sticking together and negative reasons that prevent you getting out into
other areas.
Phillips, however, is convinced that
wider and deeper integration is essential and urgent, if not physically, then at
least culturally and economically. In particular, he believes that schools must
be reformed because, as early results from a study by Bristol University show,
children are even more segregated in schools than in the neighbourhoods where
they live.
According to Ted Cantle, who studied
the causes of the race riots in Bradford, Burnley and Oldham in 2001, schools
tend to reach a tipping point when about 45% of the pupils come from ethnic
minorities.
The evidence is anecdotal, he
said, but it seems you then get all the white families leaving.
Phillips will suggest that young
people of different ethnic backgrounds should be brought together in summer
camps to overcome suspicions and prejudice; he will also say that schools should
be encouraged, or even coerced, into accepting a greater ethnic mix of pupils.
I do not favour quotas and I think
that busing (of children into racially mixed schools in America) showed itself
to be a failed solution, he will say. But we cannot stand by and see the next
generation schooled to become strangers.
He wonders whether local authorities
should be forced to redraw their school catchment areas so as to encourage
integration.
How would that work in areas where
ethnic populations are minimal? Would it work even in Londons schools, where
children from ethnic minorities will be in the majority within a few years?
Phillips recognises that he will be accused of social engineering, but he is
adamant that action needs to be taken, given that immigration is going to
continue. His strategy to counter critics is his vision of integration instead
of multiculturalism.
Integration, he will emphasise, must
be based on the shared basic values associated with Britain. They include, he
will say, democracy, freedom of speech, equality and common language and a
tradition of poking fun at politicians.
He is in no doubt that it is not
enough to believe such integration will be brought about by natural pressures or
anti-discrimination laws.
Only action will do. We need a kind
of integration that binds us together without stifling us, he will say. We
need to create a nation of many colours which combine to create a single
rainbow.
The Phillips Manifesto A better balance to be struck between multiculturalism, which leads to greater division and inequality, and enforced assimilation, which creates an intolerant repressive uniformity. Integration is the key. Establishing a set of non-negotiable British values to which all groups must subscribe, including respect for democracy, freedom of speech, tolerance of others, care for children and equality of opportunity. A recognition by government that anti-discrimination laws alone are not enough to foster a properly integrated society, and for new measures to be taken to foster greater equality, participation and interaction between ethnic groups. Specific proposals here include: More equality audits to root out institutional racism in the public and private sectors; More ethnic minorities to be appointed to public bodies such as health boards; US-style sport and summer camps for children to encourage integration; Cash incentives for schools to take a more diverse range of pupils, and the redrawing of catchment areas to get a better social mix.
Mukefor West Sussex, United Kingdom |
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