Sleepwalking to segregation?

Two Manchester academics, Professor Ludi Simpson and Dr Nissa Finney of the University of Manchester published their book Sleepwalking to segregation? Challenging myths about race and migration on Thursday 22 January.

The book expounds their belief that race relations in Britain are under threat from a series of ill-informed myths. They say that by using previously unpublished evidence they can show that repeated falsehoods about immigration, integration and segregation are misguiding policy and promoting racial disharmony.

The title of the book is taken from a quote from Trevor Philips, head of the equalities watchdog, when he said that Britain was “sleepwalking” into racial and religious segregation.

Professor Simpson and Dr Finney say that after years of investigation they have found no evidence “whatsoever” for the existence of race ghettos in the UK and that, in fact, the opposite is true with increasing ethnic mixing.

Their review of evidence shows that 'white flight' is no greater than brown or black flight and that there is white movement into minority concentrations in Leicester, Bradford, Lambeth, Wolverhampton, Wycombe, Manchester and Merton.

They say that politicians have stigmatised the areas and their residents by linking social problems to segregated areas. They also provide evidence that areas with large populations of Muslims do not act as a “breeding ground for terrorism”.

“By propagating myths using bogus and alarmist interpretations of population change, individuals such as Trevor Phillips, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, Bishop of Rochester and Sir Andrew Green (chair of Migration Watch) are inadvertently promoting racial segregation,” says Professor Simpson.

“Misunderstanding breeds mistrust and division between ethnic and religious groups. This book is about dispelling those myths. The truth is that Britain's so-called ghettos are diverse areas both ethnically and socially where no one ethnic group dominates.”

Dr Finney added: “The only concentrations which resemble anything like ghettos are of white people. The average white person lives in an area which has more than 94 per cent white people in it.

“British Pakistanis, for example, live in areas which on average have 26 per cent Pakistani residents. In almost every city with a sizeable immigrant settlement area, children of immigrants have on balance moved away from those areas, not to them or between them. So it is wrong to argue there is retreat. Rather, we are witnessing dispersal.”

Some of the myths being challenged:

• The myth: Britain has too many immigrants
  The evidence: There are unexceptional immigration levels in Britain. Less than three per cent of the world’s migrants live in the UK compared to five per cent in Germany and 20 per cent in the USA. Migrants make up nine per cent of the population in the UK, the same as the average for Europe.
• The myth: Britain is becoming a country of ghettos
  The evidence: Thousands of wards have a majority white population. Only eight wards have a majority of a single minority ethnic group. These wards are in Leicester, Bradford, Pendle, Ealing and Tower Hamlets. The highest proportion for a single minority group is 74 per cent, the proportion of Indians in the population of the Latimer ward of Leicester. This does not meet the criteria of a ghetto.
• The myth: More segregation into friendship groups
  The evidence: When the chair of the Commission for Racial Equality claimed in 2005 that “alarmingly, we showed that young people from ethnic minorities were twice as likely to have a circle of pals exclusively from their own community as were older ethnic minority folk”, he was using a judicious compound of alarmist language and false claim to scientific rigour to create a striking message about friendship groups, unsupported by the evidence. For most minority young people, roughly half or more than half of their friends are White.
• The myth: Minorities want to live in segregated neighbourhoods
  The evidence: Housing aspirations of young people from white and minority ethnic groups are very similar: they all desire safe neighbourhoods with good environments, no anti-social behaviour and to be near family and friends. Focus groups across many districts show that minority young people want to live in mixed neighbourhoods.
• The myth: White flight and minority retreat
  The evidence: The movement out of minority neighbourhoods is non-racial: it is at similar rates for each minority ethnic group and the White group. Dispersal of this kind is evident for each ethnic group during the 1990s and the 2000s, and for districts, wards and street-level neighbourhoods. Indians are leaving Leicester, Caribbeans are leaving Lambeth, Bangladeshis are leaving Tower Hamlets and Pakistanis are leaving Bradford. These patterns have non-racial explanations. They represent aspirational movements reflecting responses to housing markets and lifestyle choices and well established trends of suburbanisation.

Certainly the recent study by Lucinda Platt (from Essex University's Institute of Social and Economic Research) which shows that nearly one in ten UK children live in a mixed race family seems to support their view. As last week saw the inauguration of America's first mixed race president, maybe this book is a timely dose of the truth for all the 'Little Englanders' and exploitative politicians peddling these myths.