How integrated has Britain become? © Al Cane
Ethnic Identity and Inequalities in Britain edited by Stephen Jivraj and Ludi Simpson (Policy Press, £19.99)
A new England is being born in the suburbs of London, Leicester, Slough, Birmingham and many other towns and cities. These are places where nobody would be surprised to hear that 30 per cent of all primary school pupils in England are now from ethnic minority backgrounds.
A new England is being born in the suburbs of London, Leicester, Slough, Birmingham and many other towns and cities. These are places where nobody would be surprised to hear that 30 per cent of all primary school pupils in England are now from ethnic minority backgrounds.
The Anglo-Indians, Anglo-Africans and Anglo-Poles who are growing up in these places are in many ways a success story—a tribute both to their own aspirations and the openness of British society. They are in general outperforming the white British majority in the education system and some groups, above all the Indians and Chinese, are joining the middle class and to a lesser extent the elite in large numbers.
These minority Brits, the product of two waves of post-war immigration (post-colonial from the 1950s and then post-1997), were never fully embraced by British society. The racial discrimination of the early decades is well documented but law, politics and time have done their work and many of the old obstacles have been swept away.
The many migrants crossing the Mediterranean who are heading to Britain are testament to that new openness. They are also attracted by a somewhat older openness: the unbureaucratic market economy ushered in by Margaret Thatcher. There are thought to be 45,000 Dutch Somalis living in Britain partly because they do not need the diploma and the fluency in Dutch that is required to start a business in the Netherlands.
Along the way, “they” have in the main become more like “us”—the majority of people from ethnic minorities call themselves British, do not have a minority religion and speak English as their main language.
That, of course, is not the whole story. The sheer speed of change—the non-white population of England and Wales has grown from about 7 per cent to about 17 per cent in the past 25 years—has left many feeling unsettled. And the size and concentration of some minority groups has made it easier to live “parallel lives,” especially in the Muslim community. The inevitable tension between the new diversity and the common norms that glue together a decent society remains unresolved.
The multiculturalism that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s—saying “you can come here and be yourself”—provided a soft landing for many newcomers, but was too one-sided and has now outlived its usefulness, as even most minorities recognise.
According to a 2012 poll for British Future, a majority of us want the children of immigrants to combine the culture of their parents with that of Britain, though more than a third say that people should prioritise British culture. Only 2 per cent support the prioritising of the parental culture, rising to just 5 per cent among minorities themselves.
So how is the new England progressing and how quickly or slowly are different groups adjusting? It is one of the most important questions of our times and one that hundreds of British academics pore over each day. They have some of the best data about ethnic outcomes in the world, derived mainly from the Office of National Statistics’s census, which has been asking about ethnicity since 1991. The latest collection of essays to emerge from these endeavours— Ethnic Identity and Inequalities in Britain, edited by Stephen Jivraj and Ludi Simpson—struggles to do justice to this epic tale.
Praise where it is due. The book is based on the excellent briefing papers on the ethnic dimensions of the 2011 census from the Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity at Manchester University. But what was interesting in 2011, for example the finding that 12 per cent of households (of more than one person) had people of more than one ethnicity in them, is now old hat. (And how many are single parent families?)
Indeed one wonders who this collection is for. The other interested academics, public officials, think tankers and journalists will already be familiar with the uncontroversial essays in the first half of the book on the growth of the minority population. The second half is a series of glass half empty accounts of where some minorities lag in housing, health, education and so on.
For all its piles of data, the collection underlines the absence of agreement on what progress for Britain’s minorities actually means and how one should measure integration. The latter has some objective dimensions such as speaking English or having friends and partners across ethnicities. But there is also a large subjective dimension relating to feelings of belonging and having a stake in the wider society.
Aside from one essay on “Who Feels British?”, this collection is not interested in the subjective or philosophical aspects of the debate. Are people (majorities and minorities alike) justified in wanting to live among their “own”? Is assimilation a good thing or a bad thing? Some degree of minority clustering is normal. But how much separation is compatible with an open, mixed society? With the partial exception of a fascinating essay on how people change their ethnicity over time—broadly, it seems, moving towards white British—the collection has little to say on these big questions.
The essays do, nonetheless, reflect the very strong views of the “Manchester” school of researchers which can be summarised thus: there is no need to worry about segregation in Britain because it is minimal and declining, but there is significant continuing ethnic disadvantage—measured as any deviation from the average—which is down to systematic discrimination. So, confusingly, the white majority are absolved from ethnically motivated “white flight” but are held responsible for the poor health, housing and employment prospects of some minorities.
In the real world, barriers to integration are broadly of three kinds: factors such as poor education, limited grasp of English and ignorance of cultural norms which generally fade with time; resistance to integration from the minority itself; resistance to integration from the majority.
"One gets little sense of minority agency from the essays here and only a grudging acknowledgement of the successful upward mobility of several minority groups"
And integration (or segregation) is not something that just happens to minorities. Different groups bring different cultural strategies to the process. Ceri Peach, a leading academic in the field, has described an “Irish” strategy which is one of assimilation and a “Jewish” strategy which is about combining upward mobility with strong retention of cultural traditions; successful South Asians have emulated the Jewish strategy.
Yet one gets little sense of minority agency from the essays here and only a grudging acknowledgement of the successful upward mobility of several minority groups. Moreover, there is no recognition of the impact that culture can have on group outcomes. It is not a coincidence that most children of east African Asian parents get professional jobs while many children of Kashmiri Pakistani parents are taxi-drivers or stay-at-home mothers. Manchester school researchers would reduce this to class difference and different starting points but that is only part of the story.
Most of the contributors to this book—and indeed most of the leftish academics who dominate this field—see themselves in a tradition of anti-racist scholar activists, like Jim Rose and John Rex. Old warriors like Ludi Simpson have continued their honourable work of drawing the attention of an often indifferent world to statistics on racial inequality, in order to thereby reduce it.
That is fine in principle so long as the advocacy is not overshadowing the scholarship. One essay where it clearly does so is Gemma Catney’s on residential segregation.
She points out that residential segregation is decreasing as minorities grow and spill out of their original areas of settlement. When Bangladeshis move from Tower Hamlets to Redbridge, they mix more with other minorities and so segregation declines. But there is a large caveat to this found in the work of Eric Kaufmann.
He points out that when white people leave diverse areas they move to whiter areas than minorities leaving the same areas. So although segregation in general thereby decreases, there is no convergence between visible minorities as a whole and the white British majority. Kaufmann’s ward analysis of the 2011 census has found that 41 per cent of visible minorities in England and Wales now live in wards where the white British are in a minority, up from just 25 per cent in 2001.
This is an important point and one that has a knock-on effect on school segregation. (The integrationhub.net website at Demos has just published data showing that 60 per cent of year one ethnic minority children in England go to majority-minority schools, rising to 90 per cent in London.)
Yet Catney makes no mention of Kaufmann’s work nor of related work by Richard Harris or Ron Johnston, and the national debate about segregation sparked by Trevor Phillips’s 2005 speech “Sleepwalking into Segregation?” is also ignored.
A combination of academic fastidiousness and political slant means that the most interesting stories about the “dynamics of diversity” are absent from this collection. What is happening with friendships across ethnic lines? Is there a special Muslim segregation issue? Are Pakistanis and Bangladeshis diverging, with the latter moving ahead thanks to fewer marriage partners from “back home” and improving education? Why are outcomes for many black African groups less good than 30 years ago? What is happening to ethnic minority glass ceilings in the professions and entry into the power elite?
"Too much of the thinking remains stuck in the 1980s"A mechanistic anti-racism that tends to lump together all non-white groups as equal victims of discrimination has little to say about these questions. An “us and them” approach also fails to grasp how discrimination need not be willed—an ethnic majority, by definition, dominates the assets and human networks of a country and opening up to outsiders, especially at elite level, takes time both for minorities and for white people from lower social classes. The fact that nearly 30 per cent of private school pupils are from an ethnic minority is a sign that ethnic equality is moving faster than social class equality.
In a liberal society there are limits on what politics can do to combat segregation. Britain has never had an official integration policy or minister. The state has intervened to prevent discrimination but otherwise policy has been one of benign neglect. Prompted in part by Islamic extremism, the Tories would like to do more but find it hard to put flesh on the bones; ironically, the anti-integration Manchester radicals end up providing excuses for Tory inaction.
And integration may have become harder in recent years even as public opinion has become more “integrationist”: the greater liberalism and individualism of British society means there is less discrimination but also fewer landmarks of shared allegiance to rally around. The scale of recent immigration has increased minority concentration in some areas and greater choice in schools and other services makes it less likely that people will have shared experiences.
Nonetheless, many people, including white British people, say they would be happy to live in more mixed communities than they do, which is one justification for politics to nudge us closer together. Any effort to do that needs to be informed by clear thinking and reliable data. There is plenty of good data here but too much of the thinking remains stuck in the 1980s.
